Q2 2014 Book List Update

See earlier posts for more books recommended by members of my book club and other friends. Click on the name of a book for a summary and/or comments.

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, Andrew Sean Greer
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert Gates
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Under the Wide and Starry Sky, Nancy Horan
Frog Music, Emma Donoghue
You Should Have Known, Jean Hanff Korelitz
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials, Marilynne K Roach
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Francine Prose
Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon
Where The Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, Wallace Stegner
The History of Love: A Novel, Nicole Krauss

Vikings

In idle (or tired) moments on these mostly once-a-year trips that we take, I sometimes wonder why we do this.  Though we never start with any Educational Goals, we are always surprised by things that stay with us, and this time the presence of the Vikings in the British Isles is one of those things.  In the British Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and again yesterday in the Archeological section of the National Museum in Dublin, we saw some pretty amazing artefacts (UK/Ireland spelling) from the hundreds of years during which the raiders from Scandinavia were here.

Among the zillion exhibits in the British Museum, one stunning collection came from a Viking ship that was buried in about the seventh century, in a place northeast of London called Sutton Hoo.  The artisans of that time had amazing metal-working skills, if the decorations on these horns is any indication:

And try this ceremonial helmet (admittedly a replica, but the real thing is equally intricate, just not shiny):

Here in Dublin, hoping to avoid the predicted rain, we visited the large Archeological section of the National Museum, which was very conveniently located around the corner from our hotel.  (Another sunny day surprised us.)  We saw yet more stories of the Viking presence in the 7th to 9th centuries.  Though they started their incursions into Ireland mostly to raid monasteries and then go home, after a while they started spending the winter here, and built up established communities, including Dublin.  (I guess winter in Dublin is kinder than winter somewhere in Norway; no plan to test that.)  Again, metal-working was well represented in the exhibits, as in this brooch to keep your winter cape around your frozen shoulders:

And here's a cute little model ship, with cute little oars and everything . . made of hammered gold:

We also learned that the forces loyal to Brian Boru, Irish king, may have won the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, but they did not succeed in kicking Sitric and his Vikings out of Ireland (contrary to what every Irish schoolkid has been taught).  For one thing, Brian died, while Sitric survived and continued to contribute to Viking/Irish society.  By that time, the two cultures had mingled and intermarried, and were no longer distinct.  Apparently the legend of Brian Boru is getting some revisionist attention these days; he did not throw a cherry tree across the River Liffey.

Sunny in Dublin

We've had rain on and off during our stays in London and Edinburgh, and it was good to have a mostly sunny day in Dublin on Thursday.  So first, a few sights that any rain-conscious tourist would appreciate:

Blue sky!

A pub with flowers!

I don't know . . . decorative footprints set into the pavement.

Wait a minute.  Why is the lovely lady on the O'Connell monument holding a snake that seems ready to chomp on her forearm?

OK, there was more purpose to the day than just enjoying the sun.  Trinity College of Dublin was founded in 1592, before there were any universities in London (though St. Andrews in Scotland had Trinity beat by 182 years). We had a fine 30-minute tour led by a PhD student, who was both informative and amusing.  (I encouraged him to come to Alcatraz so that I could return the favor.). Here's the bell tower, which graces one of the large squares of the college:

Our tour ended at the old library, whose most famous possession is The Book of Kells, a stunningly illuminated medieval book of the four gospels.  Not surprisingly, no photography is allowed in that part of the library, so you'll have to look it up to see how beautiful it is, not to mention how much work it took to copy the text and create all those tiny elaborate illustrations.  But one entire floor of the library is a single 200 foot-long room with some huge number of volumes on its high high high shelves:

and busts of Important Scholars among the old volumes:

Finally, on a walk on the north side of the River Liffey, we came to the Garden of Remembrance, which commemorates all the strife between the English and Irish.  The sculpture, above a long reflecting pool, shows swans or geese rising up, with people falling and straining against the violence:

We've had a very interesting week of Scottish and now Irish history, and my simple conclusion is that the American colonies were very fortunate to get shuck of the English as early as they did.  Of course I knew that invasions, suppression, and revolts happened over the centuries in the British Isles, but actually Being Here makes that knowledge a lot more immediate and painful.

We ended the day in St.Patrick's Cathedral, with the Evensong service.  Choirs singing in church affect me strongly, so I look for these opportunities, and I never knew until today that Leonard Bernstein wrote at least one Anthem for Anglican choir and organ.  (It was not reminiscent of West Side Story.)  Thanks to the Guinness family, the church was significantly restored in the 19th century, and a large park was created beside it:

Yet Another Fabulous Museum

Our third full day in Edinburgh was miraculously free of rain, despite all the locals' warnings that Saturday's sunshine would quickly disappear.  OK, it wasn't bright and sunny today, but after a fair amount of rain in London, just staying dry was a pleasure.

On Sunday we toured Edinburgh Castle, which was well worth the time, but today we went to the National Museum of Scotland, and the Castle loses its blog spot in comparison.  The Museum is very large and very contemporary in its layout, signage, and interactivity.  If you have any interest at all in Scottish history, you can't cover it in one day.  And the history is hardly everything there is to see -- there's also science and mechanics and biology and Egyptology and Pacific Island culture and much more that we didn't even touch.

The building itself consists of a thoroughly renovated old gallery, illustrated by this:

. . . except that there are at least three similar huge gallery rooms, so full of exhibits (some of them reaching up to the third level) that my photos are unreadably full of stuff.  In one room there's a 20-foot high steam engine, a couple of rockets, an old propeller plane hanging from the ceiling, a train engine, and Jackie Stewart's Formula One race car.  Plus a bunch of hands-on exhibits for kids to try out, a bit like the Exploratorium.

I always like juxtapositions showing Land Of Old And New.  Here's what I assume is clever renovation -- retaining the steam radiators at the base of the slender columns -- against a component of a particle accelerator in the background:

I asked Dan to stand beside the sperm whale jaw to be sure that the scale was clear:

But wait; there's more.  The other side of the Museum is a very new modern stone building whose content (I think) is all about The Kingdom of the Scots, from distant prehistory to modern times.  Partly because of some great exhibits at the British Museum, we wanted to start at the beginning with ancient ancient Scotland.  One striking exhibit showed jewelry and other personal accoutrements dating back to 3000 BC, with the artifacts mounted on contemporary sculptures like this:

This represents a tiny part of the Museum's information on Very Early Times, and I had to skip many centuries ahead to learn more about Mary Queen of Scots.  Though she reigned as Queen for only six years before she was forced to abdicate in favor of her son, she had a big influence in bringing the arts, philosophy, and science of the Renaissance to Scotland.  As you may know, her cousin Elizabeth did not protect her from her enemies when Mary fled to England in 1567, and finally had her condemned as a traitor and executed twenty years later.  [Memo to self: learn more about all that intrigue.]

Nerd Alert

Not much later, a mathematician named John Napier (who also defined logarithms, which I can barely spell) produced a tool to make multiplication and division easier.  It's called "Napier's Bones," and I was excited to realize that it uses a method that we now teach in the Sanchez School third grade, where I learned it a few years ago.  The "bones" are ivory rods that you align to show you multiplication tables, and you use the diagonals to get partial products, then add to get the total.  (I can teach you if you're interested.

According to Wikipedia, Napier modeled the bones after an Arabic process of "lattice multiplication," which is what today's math text calls it.  Hah!  My third-graders are using a very old method, made more popular by John Napier in 1617!