Movie Week: Book Trailer for "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft



False Colors by Alex Beecroft

Movie Week: Book Trrailer for "The Memoirs of Cleopatra" by Margaret George

 The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel  by Margaret George

Hilarious Hour with Nan Hawthorne on Cocktail Hour

Listen to an hour of hilarious and oopinionated conversation with nan Hawthorne on Episode 20 of Cocktail Hour!

"Movie Week" returns tomorrow.

Movie Week: Book Trailer fo "The Confessions of Catherine de Medici" by CW Gortner

The Confessions of Catherine de Medici by CW Gortner 

Photos From the HNS Conference in San Diego

 

We all chow down.

 

Nan snagging some celebrity autographs at the book signing.,
Diana Gabaldon and Margaret George. 

The historical costume pageant.



Jim and nan on an excurssion on the SS Californian.

Ghosts On Facebook

f you check in to Facebook these days, you might have a haunted feeling!

The originators of Ghostletters, a collaborative writing group where members write as fictional or historical characters, have taken their clever creation to the level of social networking.  Not that there weren't plenty of historical characters and not a few fictional ones on Facebook already.  Many of you reading this have "friended" Edward II of England, Melisande d'Outremer, Hugh le Despenser, James "The Black" Douglas and Harold Godwinson.  And let's not forget Crispin Guest!

The new Ghostletters on Facebook simply takes the impersonations one more step.  These impersonations, more like Edward II abouve than Crispin Guest who speaks in the persona of his author, are in addition to Facebook members real communications.  For instance, rather than sharing the doings of his anonymous author, Chauncey the Bottle Imp uses his own vernacular to converse with other Ghostletters impersonators.

This all just started, but you can go to the Ghostletters community page on Facebook.  Read what Friar Jak, a walrus, a street kid from 10th century Winchester, a black and silver cat, a lady of medieval England, a young woman disguised as a Union soldier, and several others have to say for themselves.  You can respond to their status updates, chat with them, send them messages, poke them, and even invite them to play games with you.  That is, your own persona. your own historical or fictional character.

To do this in persona you will have to have a separate account for each character.. unless you just make sure you always indicate who is doing the talking.  I, for example, set up Stigand of Wintonceaster (stiganowintonceaster on Facebook) the 10th century street kid who will tell you about his dog Brothor and ask you for food.  I set up a free Yahoo mail account for Stigand, then registered on Facebook.  He set out to find people to friend.  I manage him, other characters and my own Facebook by opening more than one browser window at al time, signed in for each.

Sometime soon I will collect some of these fascinating characters' conversations and share them here.

Have fun!

Diary of a Part-Time Ghost, by Vered Ehsani

Diary of a Part-Time Ghost


Vered Ehsani

A young adult time travel and fantasy novel, the historical content involves the Boston Tea Party of 1773.  It is in first person, a story told in a quirky way by a fifteen-year-old boy named Ashish.  One of the unique things about this story is that it is told by an Indian American boy, not your run of the mill teen protagonist.  The author has written Ash as a typical high schooler, just wanting to fit in and stay awake during monotonous history lectures.

Ash's life takes a dramatic turn when his aunt drops a birthday gift  off for him, a strange old history book with a leather cover.  The boy's life has been getting strange already, with disembodied voices and nighttime apparitions.  His aunt's cryptic admonitions that "What you focus on you will become" and "Don't let him touch you, the book of The Veil" offer him no clues about what his mission will soon be.  In history class he happens to open the book to a strangely compelling painting of a poor 18th century English family.  He touches it and finds himself there, though as invisible as if he was a ghost.  Back at home, tortured by three sisters, he nevertheless finds himself back through the literary looking glass for his first clear sight of The Veil between our world and another.  He has an erstwhile guide there who frequently decamps, leaving him on his own.  He also soon encounters the "him" of "don't let him touch you", a tall rangy yellow eyed fellow who is the epitome of all the darkest urges.  This fellow, plus the shadows of negative emotion that reach out at his bidding, are constant threats for Ash, not only in his own real world but also in the past where he struggles to help a girl, his ancestor, and her brother stay clear of the monster.

The joke-cracking teen boy took me a little while to warm up to, but once he started his trips to 1773 he started to make sense.  I think of all his traits, Ash's quickly learning how staying neutral for safety's sake in the life he has lived so far was most admirable and heartening.  He constantly carps on himself for acting before thinking or saying impulsive things, but it seems natural for him to do so.  The females in the story are stronger than they would be in many young adult novels, and for the most part the author gets his history right.  Those small inn accuracies I did notice, like the sofa in the living room of the 1773 Boston house, can be explained as Ash's interpretation.

The only trouble is that the book ends without tying up some loose ends.  Some of that seems part of the author's plan for sequels, but not all.  For instance, Ash only gets the book his mother confiscated back because he promises to type up his sister Shanti's history paper.. and that never happens.   That just does not feel like something important enough that it can wait for the sequel.

All in all, however, I found the story charming and inventive, and halfway through it I realized that two boys I know, Daniel and Samuel Ahn, would love this book.  The author provided me with a digital copy so I could read it with a text to speech program, but I have already sent for a paperback edition to give to my young neighbors.

Lizzie Johnson - Texas Schoolteacher

Lizzie Johnson

Texiana – A Woman’s Place

By Celia Hayes, author of Daughter of Texas & The Adelsverein Trilogy


I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in at any time.

Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. No place there for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating. I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving - didn’t find it a little bit of a relief, to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline. Curiously, the very first American female law officer was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming… in 1869. When it came right down to it, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage in Cheyenne quite as violently as it did in Westminster, or arouse a backlash anywhere near as vicious; curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.

But someone like Lizzie Johnson could have had the life and career that she did, nowhere else. She was born in Missouri in 1840, and came to Texas with her parents six years later. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Johnson was a schoolteacher and devout Presbyterian, who brought his growing family to Texas. Eventually he set up a boarding school in Hayes County, south of Austin and some distance from San Marcos, which drew pupils from the area – and astonishingly, a fair number from other Southern states. Lizzie’s father, known as the Professor had originally intended it to be a boys school but so many girls applied that it morphed into a coeducational secondary school. The school prospered, and Lizzie (along with her brothers and sisters) taught classes – including bookkeeping. Lizzie turned out to be particularly gifted at mathematics.
This talent would have an unexpected bearing on her later career, which began to blossom in the decade following the Civil War. She taught school in a couple of small towns near Austin before opening her own primary school there in 1873; in a two story house on property she had purchased in her own name. She did more than teach school, though: complaining of boredom with the same old teaching routine and social affairs in letters to her brother, she had begun to write popular fiction under various pen names for the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper… and she also did bookkeeping. Her brother John had kept the books for the Day brothers, who had extensive ranching interests in Hays County, and were old neighbors of the Johnson family. There were seven Day brothers; inevitably they were known as the “Weeks”. John never entirely recovered from battlefield injuries incurred during his service as a soldier, and when he died, Lizzie took over in his stead. Her father had kept a small herd of cattle to supplement his income from the school, and Lizzie was now in possession of an income of her own, which she could invest in whatever she chose.
And she chose to invest in real estate, and in cattle, about which she became startlingly knowledgeable, for a maiden lady schoolteacher. By the time she opened her own school; she had registered her own brand, owned land and cattle, and was sending substantial herds north to the Kansas railheads. Her life seems astonishingly modern, the farthest thing imaginable from the repressed and constrained fictional women in contemporary novels by serious writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. She worked at what pleased and rewarded her, and no one – not her father or other male relative had anything to say about her household, her income, and her considerable business interests. Well, her surviving brothers - all younger – might have had a lot to say, but apparently little enthusiasm for attempting any means of control over a formidable woman like Lizzie.

I think of her as the anti-Lily Bart. Another astonishingly modern touch – she married well beyond the age that a woman was expected to have committed in matrimony, and it was not for lack of serious suitors. For Lizzie was – to judge from contemporary formal daguerreotype portraits of her, in which the length of film exposure made any facial expression except the kind you could hold for some length of time out of the question – a rather attractive woman. Victorian standards of beauty differed considerably from the modern one, admittedly; they favored round-faced blondes, and Lizzie was dark-haired and looked rather like a 19th century Demi Moore. She was no frump, either, but dressed elegantly and in the latest fashion. She was courted assiduously over several years by one of the Day brothers and a number of other prosperous men, every one of whom knew her as a woman of property… and moreover, exactly how she came by it. Brains, beauty and business sense apparently had considerable allure.

At the age of 39, this frontier Kate married her Petruchio. He was a handsome and raffish widower with several children, named Hezekiah Williams. Although a retired Baptist preacher, and a moderately unsuccessful rancher, he was also a bit of a gambler and drinker. Sensibly, Lizzie married him with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement in place. She would control her own property acquired before the marriage, as well as anything she acquired in her own name after it.

It seems that Lizzie Johnson Williams chose as well in her marriage as she did everything else, for they maintained a devoted and happily competitive relationship, both in business and in their personal life for thirty-five years. They went up the cattle trail to the northern railheads three times, Lizzie and Hezekiah each with a separate herd; it is thought that Lizzie was the only woman rancher who trailed cattle that she herself owned wholly, in the post-war cattle boom. When she died in 1924, ten years after Hezekiah, her neighbors were astonished to find out that she owned property worth a quarter of a million dollars. She had lived in a modest, not to mention miserly style since the death of her husband. She did not marry into money, or inherit through her family; every dollar of her estate she had earned herself, by teaching, writing and bookkeeping, and parlaying those earnings into land and cattle investments, using her own best judgement. A thuroughly
modern woman, a hundred years before such women were more the norm.

Celia Hayes is the author of five historical novels set on the 19th Century American frontier. Her latest, Daughter of Texas, is the story of a woman's life in early Texas. The sequel, Deep in the Heart, will be published in December, 2011.  See her Author Page on Amazon.com.

How Green Is My Kindle?

I recently saw print books referred to as "dead tree books". Clearly the person was making the point that every book made of paper uses wood pulp, while an ebook theoretically uses none. Even though I am a monumental fan of my Kindle ebook reader, I had to respond that dead or not, those trees could be replaced. They are a renewable resource. The plastic used to make a Kindle or similar device is primarily a petroleum product, and petroleum is not renewable. When we use it all up, it will be gone. That got me thinking about the complex issue of what natural resources go into the creation of print and ebooks. It's not an easy thing to put together, least of all if you, like me, have little in the way of science education, but I will do my best.

This is meant as an objective analysis. As I say, I have my own reasons to love a Kindle.. it reads aloud to me, which I need. As soon as paper books start reading themselves aloud to me, I'll be back. In the meantime, I am just curious about the claim of environmental impact one way or the other.

Print books use lot more than just trees. Petroleum is a big component of their manufacture and transportation just like plastic products. Besides the petroleum used in cover art and manufacture and inks, the plants that produce the books use petroleum products. More than any other aspect of the publishing industry, transportation of books from the printing plant to distribution centers to stores uses vast amounts of petroleum.

How does this compare to, say, a Kindle 3 ereader? My Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces by far most of which is plastic. One source I found said that a plastic bottle is made from the amount of petroleum that would fill it a third of the way. The bottle itself, and in this case I am talking about a 16 ounce bottle in terms of volume it holds, uses about 13 grams of plastic. So that adds up to 13 grams of plastic being made out of a little over 5 ounces of petroleum. That's just less than 142 grams of petroleum. So if I understand this correctly, it takes ten times as much petroleum to make plastic.

So the Kindle sitting on my desk required at least 80 ounces of petroleum. It probably takes much more. Then there is the manufacture, the transportation, and the energy used to make it but also to power it. It is a low user of electricity so we can probably skip that per unit in the calculations.

Where the carbon footprint gets really tiny in terms of print book to Kindle ereader is in the area of the books themselves. Ebooks are not made of anything other than energy and a minuscule of that to boot. A Kindle can hold dozens and dozens of books. So it would be unfair to do a comparison of 1 print book to 1 ereader. You would have to compare literally hundreds of books, magazines and newspapers, not to mention documents, to a single publication made of paper.

Another aspect of print books versus ebooks is the fact that physical books must be shipped. Ebooks do not.

So, bearing in mind my calculations boil down to more of a conceptual equation than a technically accurate one, the 80 ounces of petroleum used in my Kindle is to be compared with hundreds of books, only one of which (like the Kindle) of which ever makes it out of the door of the printing plant.

Now, like I said, since I have to read with my ears, there is no comparison for me of print and ebook. Print books are wonderful.. I have hundreds of them. But they may as well not be there, since I cannot make use of a single one. No, not even picture books. But that rather colossal issue aside, I think the carbon footprint of an ebook is worth having more than one book to read.

Now.. calm down... I know there are libraries and all that. This was an intellectual exercise, and if anyone can offer more exact data, I hope you will share it. My own bottom line is choice. And that we all have.

The issues I raise above are far from the only issues of importance.  As Jim just pointed out, ebooks require a vast infrastructure even to exist.  But it's not cut and dried.  And it may ultimately be comparing apples and oranges.

So what do you think?