44 Days and the Remaking of Iran

David Burnett

(National Geographic)

 Amazon

When you think about it, the legacy of the Iranian elections last year isn’t going to be anything that actually happened in Iran. The thing we’re all going to remember about that election is how profoundly it demonstrated the power of Twitter. One of the biggest selling points of Twitter at the time was that it was “the only way” to get information out of the country. We all got to participate, too: a Twitter location stating one was in Iran became akin to the latest fashion accessory. So, if you do get to read 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World, don’t be shocked when you learn that during the Iranian revolution, photographer David Burnett had to smuggle his film out of the country by going to the airport and searching for “pigeons” who might be willing to carry it to Paris where they handed it off to a correspondent. The photographs still made it out, but their journey required physical, not digital ingenuity.

44 Days is an annotated compilation of the photographs he took during that time. The book chronicles the last days of the Shah’s rule, the protests and bloodshed that followed and the return of Ayatollah Khomenini. The photographs are accompanied by Burnett’s journal-like descriptions of each experience. Essentially, it’s a compilation of his Twitter stream, except, there was no Twitter. He writes objectively about the political situation, the emotions of the crowd and his own investigative journey. Burnett also writes about the relationship of the press to the government, and to the protesters.

Of course, Burnett’s book chronicles the events leading up the real crisis, the capturing of American hostages for 44 days. He shows us what Iran was before it became the sort of place that would cut off email in 2009, and his notes as a journalist reflect the painstaking devolution of democracy. While his photographs are certainly not to be missed, one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is watching the new government piece itself together from the perspective of a journalist. At certain points, the press was restrained. Burnett notes that he had to tell everyone that he was Canadian, because as an American, he says he was treated as though he personally had put the Shah in power.

But at other times, the government gave instructions to accommodate foreign press. He tells a story about passing film to a fellow photographer across a crowd of protesters; after the roll Burnett threw to his colleague failed to go to the distance, it was caught handed over from person to person until it reached the other journalists. That attitude shifted when the Ayatollah came to power, but Burnett was able to secure a private shoot with the religious leader by suggesting that in large crowds, he appeared too much like Hitler and was going to garner distaste from the rest of the world. In a private shoot, he argued, he could show the man’s softer side. Burnett’s journalistic maneuvers are certainly quite different then the ones employed to get information out via Twitter. While his experiences seem more real and more vivid, it is valuable to note what the change in freedom of speech says about the changes in Iran. Burnett’s account carries us across the River Styx; he captures, in words and images, the experience of Iran as it crossed the threshold from old to new.

—Rachel Balik

Woe Is I

Patricia O'Connor

(Riverhead)

 Amazon

As a professional writer and English major, I had always wanted to believe that Woe Is I was a book miles below my reading level. I am not, after all, a grammarphobe. I like words. I always answer “I’m well,” instead of “I’m good.” I know the difference between you’re and your. And best of all, I almost always have a professional editor on call to catch whatever mistakes I might make. But when I learned that Patricia O’Connor had produced a third edition of the famous book, I got an intuitive feeling that it was time for me to finally read it. In my heart of hearts, I know my grammar isn’t perfect. Furthermore, editors don’t always catch mistakes. I recalled a piece I’d written in which my editor and I both missed my wildly incorrect usage of the word, “incidences” instead of “incidents.” Although it had slipped by us, it was caught by a reader who was angry enough to find my personal blog and write a comment calling me a “dunce.’

If I had read O’Connor’s book before that day, I would have known better. I also would have been able to make a case for the modern meaning of decimate (it no longer means killing off ten percent, but it definitely doesn’t mean “wipe out completely”). I would have been able to inform my editor that it is permissible to have “myriad” or “a myriad” questions about grammar. I would have spent less time agonizing about hyphens and never would have complained that was I was “chomping at the bit.” (Apparently it’s “champing at the bit.”)

In truth, the book is as suitable for lovers of language as it is for those who fear commas. O’Connor inadvertently teaches a great deal about how to write elegant, economical, and clear sentences. Reading the book felt like sharpening a knife; I thought I knew how to write, when in fact my brain was a bit dull in many areas. It occured to me that this book is even more important for writers than it is for average people. Underneath O’Connor’s cutesy, down-to-earth explanations, clarifications, and references to movies is a tribute to the art of the the English language. Much of what O’Connor knows is so specific that we could get away without doing it correctly, but the real revelation is how truly effective language can be when we stick to the rules. (Or break them. O’Connor also tells when we should ignore convention in favor of coherency.)

Her book is testament to the living, breathing nature of language. Not only does she relay important information about how words should be used, she reports on how language is used. It is an important reference for any writer to at least have on file, if not to read from cover-to-cover. It is the sort of book that can be read one chapter at a time for inspiration and insight. But for those who are seeking a comprehensive grammar education, the book is easily digestible and littered with pop culture examples that will appeal to real grammarphobes. Apparently, Paris Hilton is as ubiquitous as pronoun misuse.

—Rachel Balik

The Gargoyle

Andrew Davidson

(Doubleday)

 Amazon

The Gargoyle is a brutal story about a man terribly disfigured in a car crash, burned to an almost unrecognizable crisp following an alcohol and cocaine binge. Incongruously, it’s also about timeless love.

The nameless narrator may have been burned beyond recognition, but Maryanne Engel knows him. They’ve never met before, at least that he can remember, but she finds him in his recovery room and helps nurse him back to health through endless skin grafting, morphine doses, and physical therapy.

Maryanne is many things—an artist, a sculptor, a storyteller, a fantastic cook, and a tattooed schizophrenic. As Maryanne helps the narrator overcome his inclinations toward suicide and substance abuse, she gradually fills him in on their past romances. Davidson’s story mixes violence in the present with destruction in the past, conveying the intense connection that Maryanne feels about the man she perceives as her soulmate.

At times jarring, at times hopeless, at times saturated with a sense of inevitability, Maryanne’s stories are captivating and the narrator finds himself thoroughly dependent on her. Until, inevitably, the tables are turned and the narrator finds he must take care of Maryanne, trying everything he can think of to pull her out of her own spiral toward self-destruction. Davidson’s debut novel is a riveting page-turner. I’m hoping he’s hard at work on something equally fascinating.

—Lara Killian

Last week, Randall Stross wrote an article in the New York Times called “Will Books Be Napsterized?”. Stross reports as more readers opt for e-books over print or audio versions, the usual slew of piracy web sites that traffics in free music downloads is making it possible to download e-books for free. In other words: more grim news for the already beaten-down publishing industry. Book sales have been plummeting for the past two years anyway; the article reports a 13% decrease in 2008 and a 15.5% decrease in July 2009. Of course sales were down in every industry in 2009, but everyone knows that the book industry has troubles of its own.

The business model has never been particularly cost effective, with publishers footing the bill for printing, shipping copies off to booksellers and hoping for the best. E-books are certainly a more viable model in terms of overhead costs, but if the piracy of e-books takes off, the publishing industry is in big trouble. And of course, that’s not really an “if”. The piracy of e-books will take off, and it’s inevitable that books are headed down the path of CDS: towards the graveyard.

—Rachel Balik

Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World

Stephen Dodson & Robert Vanderplank

(Perigee)

 Amazon

It has been an irrepressible activity since the dawn of man: to heap insults on enemies, rivals, neighbors, and even friends.

Despite the ubiquitousness of expressions of disgust and frustration, just because one may be well versed in Anglo-Saxon cursing doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to call out a Russian or an Italian while traveling through this increasingly multicultural world. Not only do authors Dodson and Vanderplank want to give you the tools you’ll need to understand that Swede when he invokes the devil, but also the understanding of where many colloquial put-downs come from.

Dodson, creator of the LanguageHat.com blog, and Vanderplank have gathered an admirable representation of the wide variety of Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World. In his introduction, Vanderplank notes that:

For me, insults and curses are the “dark” side of manners and customs and all the more interesting for that, as they may inform us about what lies beneath the social codes, what verbal games men and women play with each other.

The quest to bring obscure insults to English-readers starts in the ancient world, where many Roman insults have to do with sex, and Greek ones with drunkenness. Some of the insults culled from modern vocabularies may be quite familiar; for example readers in the US may have heard someone on the playground tell someone else they’ve been ‘beaten with the ugly stick.’ The Brits have many ways to refer to someone as an idiot, too many to list in this collection, but a favorite Britist insult of mine is ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ to describe a woman who uses clothes and makeup to try to hide her age.

In my experience, calling someone a mama’s boy is usually an insult meaning that he has been coddled and isn’t able to take care of himself. In Italy, sons are traditionally quite close to their mothers and this insult bears no weight—so instead they have figlio di papá, meaning daddy’s boy, implying that the person has left his father behind as he moves up in the world. ‘Scum of soya paste’ wouldn’t have meant much when thrown around at my elementary school, but in Japan misokakku is a popular children’s curse to describe someone annoying.

Translating the ‘Untranslatable’ presents a challenge even for Vanderplank, the Directory of the Oxford University Language Center, so the contextual notes are key to making this guide worth flipping through. Whether you’re looking for an unusual way to taunt your older siblings, or you’re something of an armchair linguist, you’ll find something unique and possibly useful within the pages of Uglier.

—Lara Killian

The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life

Piero Ferrucci

(Penguin; US: Oct 2007)

 Amazon

If you were lucky enough to wander into McNally Jackson Books in New York City on 30 September, employees from the Tarcher imprint at Penguin handed you a dollar attached to a postcard with information about the book The Power of Kindness by psychologist Piero Ferrucci. They explained to recipients that in these dark economic times, they didn’t just want to sell The Power of Kindness, they wanted to demonstrate it as well.

“It’s a real dollar, don’t throw it out,” advised a Tarcher employee as she handed me my free money. I happily accepted it, but couldn’t help blurting out, “I’m sorry, but from a marketing perspective, can you explain to me how this is actually a valid way for you to be spending your budget?”

She explained the plan: $1000 spread over five Manhattan bookstores. They expected that they could reach a lot more people that way than if they used the same amount of money to pay for a small ad in a trade publication. “It’s a kind of grassroots movement,” she concluded. Grassroots seems to be the way of the world right now, from fund-raising house parties to nomadic yoga studios to clothing swaps. What that means to me is that the rest of the world is following in the footsteps of the Internet.

Blogs have long offered promotions for readers, and writing on the Web is transmitted through direct sharing, either person to person, or within social networks. Essentially, The Power of Kindness is using a marketing strategy that adheres to the principles of the semantic Web; thus, it suggests a glimmer of hope for the publishing industry. People have argued that print is dying because people don’t want to pay for reading material anymore, but suddenly, today, while clutching my dollar, it dawned on me. It’s not about money, it’s about the power of kindness.

People read what’s on the Internet because it’s targeted at them, and that kind of specificity makes them feel special. When you send me an article you think I’d love, that’s kindness. When you comment on my blog, that’s kindness. When the Daily Kos delivers the stories I care about based on an implicit understanding of my politics, that’s kindness. If print industries can offer the same kindness to audiences that the Web does, they will thrive again.

Of course, not coincidentally, that is exactly the mission of Ferrucci’s book: to show that if we employ his eight principles of kindness, we’ll ultimately thrive ourselves. Times are bleak, not just for the print industry but for many others affected by the global recession. With an introduction from the Dalai Lama, the book shows us how we can take the kindness we receive at the beginning and ends of our lives and make it continuous and global. When we do so, we’ll be happier.

If print industries can follow Tarcher’s example and be a little kinder and a little less desperate to preserve the past and their own superiority, they may very well find that there is space for them to grow in the 21st century.

—Rachel Balik