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Staff Recommendations

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The Bennett Martin Public Library downtown maintains an ongoing “Staff Recommendations” display – Staff from throughout the library system are encouraged to submit book, audio, CD and DVD/video recommendations for items to be placed onto this display. Items on the display have bookmarks inserted, giving brief descriptions about the item’s appeal factors, and listing similar books, audios or videos that the reader might also enjoy.

This page on BookGuide is used to highlight some of the items that have appeared on our Staff Recommendations displays in the past, including our staff members’ descriptions of the books, plus links to any “official Web sites” for the books, authors or series, if they exist*. Items on both the display and on this webpage may be recent releases, or older titles that deserve another look. Hotlinks on titles or formats (downloadable audio, book-on-CD, Large Print) connect to the appropriate entry in our on-line catalog, so that you may check on the availability of the item.

INDEXES TO PAST STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS: BY TITLE | BY REVIEWER
TV SERIES/SPECIALS ON DVD | AGATHA CHRISTIE | LGBTQ+ | STAR TREK | STAR WARS

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March 2024 Recommendations

Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop
by Tilman Baumgartel (Music 780.07 Bau)

It’s hard to imagine modern music without the concept of “looping.” The concept got its name from the original physical method of its execution, which consisted of taking a piece of magnetic audio tape with something recorded on it, cutting a length of the tape holding a segment of sound one wants to use, and then splicing the end of the tape back to its beginning, creating a physical “loop” of tape. Some tape loops were very long before coming back around to repeat again at the beginning, while others were fairly short, creating repetition that was obvious to listeners. As technology evolved, the name for such repeating parts has changed, but the underlying concepts of a “sample,” “beat,” or “sequence” are used for similar musical means as a “loop.” And they are everywhere in modern music, from pop to hip-hop to electronic music to contemporary classical ideas. While there have been books that touch on the significance of these repetitive practices in music, Tilman Baumgartel, a German media theory professor, has written what might be the first full-length book to focus on the loop itself. It’s called Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

In his introductory chapter, Baumgartel makes an analogy between audio loops and simple computer programming loops: on his Commodore 64 computer in the early 1980s, the first BASIC script he learned to code was a simple program that would cause “Hello” to repeat on the screen. He extends the analogy to the various bits of looped material that we all encounter in our daily lives now, from looped hold messages when making calls, to repeated commercials in public spaces. Various combinations of audio, video, and text are provided to us on repeat from every form of media. From a philosophical standpoint, the connection between loops and technology is foundational—our machines have often been made to take the pressure of mentally or physically exhausting repetitive tasks off of human beings, after all. It would be possible to write a book tracing the philosophical implications of evolving technology and the effects of looping/repetition on the thinking of the general populace, kind of an extension of the avenues explored by authors like Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman. But this is not that book. Instead, Baumgartel states that, “It is about music and art forms that are shaped and characterized by repetition because they are produced using the machines of modern media, the computers.”

This is a delicate distinction to make, but I can understand the necessity of it for the sake of a book-length argument. Baumgartel acknowledges that repetition is of course a common component of all kinds of art and music throughout history, but the focus here will be on more modern forms of technology that make repetition a kind of automatic process, where a machine such as a computer is used for easy repetitions. And there has to be an “artistic” use of the repetition, so more novel forms of repetition like the Zoetrope of the 1800s aren’t included, while others like cinematic film and audio tape are. Broadly speaking, the author discusses major 20th Century movements in music and art through a lens of how they were impacted by concepts of looping/repetition.

What do we find here, then? There are some fascinating connections made among looping-related artists in several disciplines that I had not considered before. Baumgartel looks at artists in the fields of film, music, and visual art, and in particular, I think he does a great job addressing the cinematic use of looping. One of the earliest examples of a looped piece of art was the Edison film “The Kiss,” a mere 20 seconds of footage that was played repeatedly for laughs starting in 1896. The repetition of the moment seemed comical to audiences because of its short, mechanical nature. This concept was leveraged again much later in the 20th century by pop artists like Peter Roehr and Andy Warhol, who used various forms of short, repeated gestures on film, both made by themselves and from commercial sources, to comment on consumer culture and human nature. Roehr was also known as a minimalist artist, whose simple, repetitive blocks of colors and shapes have a certain looping quality that resonated with his video and audio montage techniques.

Where music is concerned, the book is broadly divided into two chronological parts. In the first part, manipulation of tape loops isn’t for the sake of emphasizing repetition: instead, it was a way to create new kinds of sounds through speeding up or slowing down tape, playing it backwards, or splicing different sections together outside of the chronological timeline in which they were created. The nature of sounds could be altered as well: for example, cutting off the initial articulation of piano notes makes them sound like something more akin to the synthesizers that were developed decades after composers like Pierre Schaeffer laid the foundations for musique concrete, electroacoustic, and acousmatic music through careful tape manipulation. Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen took these ideas even further than Schaeffer, cutting bits of sound into tiny fragments of tape and reassembling them in a search for new sounds, or the essence of sound itself, perhaps hidden from us ordinarily by the strict progression of time in ordinary sound production. But in these musical examples, I start to find weaknesses with the author’s arguments as presented here. For example, I think there could be an interesting look at the difference between “looping” and “splicing” of tape in these early days, and following the evolution of the “splice” further toward the present day. The splice is easily as influential on contemporary arts as the loop, but in very different ways. In it, we find much of the chaotic mashups of musical styles that came later, some through manipulating recordings in the work of artists like John Oswald, and others literally playing live montages like John Zorn. The splice, with its inherent anti-chronological, ahistorical nature, is the perfect antecedent for the hyperlinked functionality of the internet, the defining technology of our time. Slapback tape echo, generated using playback and recording heads of varying distances, is also brought up as a form of repetition, popularized on many recordings starting in the 1950s, such as Elvis Presley’s early hits. While it was an influential sound at the time, and led to various forms of studio experimentation, I don’t think I would count it as tape manipulation or repetition in the spirit presented in the rest of the book.

The second part of the book tackles musical repetition, starting with the American Minimalism movement. Baumgartel focuses especially on the work of Terry Riley, whose early 1960s experiments with tape are among the first to harness the power of repetition through tape loops. But I’m not sure that I agree with the author’s analysis that Riley’s work with tape was fundamentally inspired by the technology itself: he asserts that “Terry Riley derived this compositional technique directly from the potentials of the tape loop.” Strictly speaking, his techniques with tape obviously came from working with tape and seeing what it could do, but the historical record shows that his deeper inspirations came from the technical tape-based work of his predecessors like John Cage and Richard Maxfield, the cut-up (splice) techniques of Brion Gysin, and repetition-based music from African and East Indian cultures. The author also asserts that, “Of all of the avant-garde composers, (Riley’s) work probably had the greatest influence on the pop music of his time,” a claim I’ve never seen elsewhere. One could find evidence to the contrary in most books about the post-WWII avant-garde, where Riley is mostly remembered for his non-tape pieces “In C” and “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” and Baumgartel somewhat contradicts the idea himself when he points out that much of Riley’s tape music was lost over time, and hardly any of it was ever released publicly until decades later. Even if Riley was first, and I don’t see evidence that he was except in a very narrow technical sense, he still wasn’t influential for this period of his work, and the folks who started hip-hop and techno music movements discovered ways to manipulate samples on their own, quite apart from whatever was happening in the avant-garde of the 60s. I wouldn’t call Riley the grandparent of the minimalism movement, anyway: he and his contemporaries were more influenced by various forms of world music and by the work of Erik Satie than the technology of their day.

Looped manipulation of spoken texts is addressed in several spots in the book, too, which is an area that hasn’t been discussed much before. The topic appears in somewhat oblique form, though. In the section on Peter Roehr, the “cut-up” techniques of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs are mentioned, though somewhat dismissively: “Text or tape snippets were randomly assembled, often with dismal results.” In fact, Burroughs was creating some of the earliest collage-based tape works by simply recording various sounds and readings, randomly moving the tape around via fast-forward and rewind, and recording over pre-existing parts. Random, yes, but it was an interesting technique for producing the audio equivalent of his paper cut-up processes. Burroughs also employed very slow movements of tape across playback heads to find unique, ghostly sounds, a process he called “inching,” which produced unusual sounds like those Stockhausen was after. I would assert that Burroughs’ techniques and philosophies in general exerted more influence on 60s culture than Riley, though they were approaching the issue from the different perspectives of the “splice” versus the “loop.” Then there is a chapter on the use of tape delays by novelist Ken Kesey during his tenure as the defacto leader of the Merry Pranksters, the pioneers of cultural psychedelia. A well-regarded novelist of the time, Kesey’s group were the first to “drop out,” to use Dr. Timothy Leary’s phrase from a few years later, traveling in a proto-psychedelically painted bus, and throwing “Acid Trip” parties around the West Coast. In the parlance of the time, Kesey and his cohorts used tape delays and microphone relay systems to blend the world around them with their own “rapping,” or extemporaneous poetry and speeches, which Kesey thought would lead to new multimedia forms of the novel in the future, and also aurally approximated the kinds of headspaces the group reached in their Acid Tests. Baumgartel makes an important connection between looping and early synthesizer technology in this section as well: Don Buchla, creator of the Buchla synthesizers on the West Coast roughly contemporaneous with the work of Bob Moog on the East Coast, developed the first sequencer for use with his synths, and a sequencer is very much a form of electronic looping, causing a synthesizer to repeat a pattern of sounds or actions.

Chapters toward the end focus on early iterations of looping/repetition in pop music, particularly the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and early days of disco music using sequencers, using Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” from 1977 as an example. While these are great examples, I am baffled by the lack of coverage of hip-hop or techno, which are contemporary musical styles that have exerted massive cultural impact that continues to the present. Hip-hop started around 1973, and was well under way using record loops, samples and sequences by the time disco got serious about it. Detroit techno, which laid the groundwork for 80s and 90s electronic dance music, started shortly after disco, with the first Cybotron and ANUMBEROFNAMES singles in 1981. If this book were to attempt to connect the history of looping more closely to the present, these are the genres that have had the most staying power, keeping these principles at the forefront of public consciousness for the last 50 years. And then there isn’t any mention of how guitarists have used loop pedal devices in a variety of genres since the 1980s, a tradition founded upon the long tape loops produced by Robert Fripp in the 70s for his “Frippertronics.” On the “theory” side of the book’s research, I was also surprised that there wasn’t any mention of the latest AI experiments with music, film and text: machine learning forms of AI, after all, are essentially treating large datasets as a master tape, from which smaller “loops” of information are curated.

In the end, I think this is an important book, and the topics it addresses are crucial for understanding how modern music has evolved. But I’m glad that it features the “towards” part of “towards a theory and history of the loop” in its subtitle, because I found it to be far from comprehensive in both theoretical and historical contexts. Hopefully simply raising these issues in a book-length discussion will lead to more in-depth writing about the subject, though. I can see another book’s worth of deeply relevant information that could be worked into this one.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Sampling Media by David Alderman and Laurel Westrup (eds.), Playing with Something that Runs by Mark J. Butler, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice by Robert Fink.)

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Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library


The Tree of Life: How a Holocaust Sapling Inspired the World
by Elisa Boxer (author) and Alianna Rozentsveig (illutrator) (j 940.531 Box)

This is an attractive little non-fiction historical book for youth readers, done in picture book format, written by Elisa Boxer with illustrations by Alianna Rozentsveig. It tells a story that begins during World War II in the Terezin concentration camp but which has repercussions through today.

Jewish teacher Irma Lauscher risked breaking protocols in the camp by asking one of the other prisoner workers to smuggle in a tree sapling, which she could use to give the children in the camp a project to occupy their time. That fellow worker managed to conceal a small maple tree sapling in his boot as he returned to the camp one evening. Irma and her illicit class of students planted the sapling and each child shared part of their meager daily allotment of water to help the small tree flourish.

The book details how the tree survived, and its seeds have been shared around the world, to create other trees that are offspring of the original — to show that even during the worst possible hardships, it is possible to keep something alive through love and concerted efforts.

This was a moving story, and one I’d never heard about before reading the book. It provides a marvelous introduction to children on a difficult subject. And the art is terrific. Strongly recommended.

( official Elisa Boxer web site ) | ( official Alianna Rozentsveig web site )

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines
by Ferruccio Busoni (Music 780.904 Art)

When one thinks of early 20th century art movements, perhaps “I should look in the music library” isn’t the first phrase that comes into your mind, but in fact these early art movements involved artists from all kinds of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, theater, and yes, music! And these early art movements — I’m thinking in particular of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism — laid the groundwork for much of the art of the 20th Century, and continue to influence modern art and music today. The first of these movements was Futurism, which is officially noted as starting in 1909 in Italy with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. The Futurists produced lots of manifestos, and many of them pertain specifically to music. I remember first coming across them in the early days of the public internet, around the mid-1990s, which seemed fitting considering the Futurists’ categorical embrace of evolving technology and the hustle and bustle of modern cities. And most of them pertaining to music have been gathered together in a book called The Art of Noise, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

To begin, let’s address this book’s subtitle, which is “Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines.” That’s a pretty provocative title to get someone to open a book, isn’t it? I think that it may be overstating the case that one will find in these essays, and to be fair, this is one of those books that isn’t itself particularly scholarly in nature: it’s basically reprinting those same translations of the manifestos that have floated around the internet since its early days, along with an introduction by Danielle Lombardi that first appeared in Art Forum magazine. Outside of Lombardi’s introduction, you won’t really find any analysis of these manifestos and writings here, just the source documents themselves. But Lombardi’s article is a good choice for introducing new readers to the ideas found in Futurism, particularly in music. And one of the first observations that she makes addresses the subtitle of this book: while Futurists are often remembered as being pro-technology, pro-industrial age, celebrating machines and war and the rejection of tradition, the writings of their first major musical figure, Ferruccio Busoni, take a more moderate position that embraces both new and old ideas. In reality, much of the music of the Futurists continued to use traditional musical principles, while attempting to add new ideas, and brainstorm new possibilities. In this sense, the Futurists aren’t really that different from any other generations, with new ideas continuing to supplement the old.

In part, this misunderstanding is related to the tumultuous history of Italy in the early part of the 20th Century. While the Futurists got their start in 1909 (and perhaps a little earlier, considering some of Busoni’s writings dating back to 1906), Italy eventually turned to fascism after WWI, at which point much of the Futurist movement was suppressed publicly, replaced with nationalistic art much like what happened in Germany at the same time. Some of the Futurists, such as founder Marinetti, became fascists themselves, finding that some aspects of early Futurism like an admiration of war and the notion of establishing a new national identity translated well enough to the new regime. But most of the music written by futurists was lost, and only the manifestos, which had circulated around Europe in earlier years, survive. Even the legendary “intonarumori,” or “noise machines,” invented by Futurist musician Luigi Russolo around 1910, only survive in photos.

So what shall we make of these manifestos? One thing to bear in mind is that manifestos are historically done in a provocative style—their authors are generally compelled to write them to shake things up, socially, politically, artistically, or all of the above. But before anything gets shaken, you have to have readers! So some of the bravado and bluster of these writings can be taken with a grain of salt—on some level, they are attempting to capture readers and stimulate discussions, a more difficult feat back in the days before the internet, television, or even radio. The beginning of Francesco Pratella’s 1910 “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians” is a great example of this: his opening, “I appeal to the young,” is kind of the radio DJ “shock jock” rhetoric of over 100 years ago. He goes on to discuss what he feels is a kind of traditionalist mediocrity in Italian music of the era, comparing Italy’s scene to composers from various other countries (whom he amusingly praises and criticizes simultaneously). Like many manifestos, he eventually reaches a list of demands, such as abandoning the universities and conservatories, ignoring the music press, stepping away from music competitions, and “the liberation of individual musical sensibility from all imitation or influence of the past, feeling and singing with the spirit open to the future, drawing inspiration and aesthetics from nature, through all the human and extra-human phenomena present in it.” Regarding the latter, I find this both inspirational and naïve: obviously most music and art over time have taken inspiration from nature and humankind, so it’s a little silly to act as though rejecting all previous traditions will somehow land one in a new place. But he has some other interesting and more specific ideas that continued to resonate over time, such as “the reign of the singer must end,” a notion that no doubt influenced some of the intense symphonic writing of the early 20th C. from many composers.

Just a year later, Pratella’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music” opens with a much softer and historically realistic observation, simply that “All innovators have logically been Futurists in relation to their time.” Indeed! There’s no such thing as a totally new haircut, for example. What follows are some specific musical areas of inquiry that are indeed very forward-thinking for their time, such as considering the “chromatic atonal mode” for composing, an idea that had just begun to be spread elsewhere with Schoenberg’s earliest 12-tone pieces dating around 1908. He goes on to suggest looking into microtones, divisions of the octave even smaller than half-steps. He proposes similar investigation into more complex deployment of rhythms in music, and tempos that shift frequently. Just a couple years later in 1912, he writes again with more detail regarding rhythmic variation in music with his article “The Destruction of Quadrature,” which proposes different ways of perceiving and notating rhythmic groups that can take into account simultaneously-occurring rhythmic pulses, polyrhythms that can shift like the internal rhythms of free verse.

Busoni and Pratella may have been the foundational musical thinkers in the Futurist movement, but the most famous is likely Luigi Russolo, for his intonarumori machines mentioned above, and his manifesto describing their necessity and use, which was called “The Art of Noises” and published in 1913. Starting around this point we get to my favorite parts of this book, which place the work of the Futurists in a more purely creative, out-of-the-box, sometimes even childlike light. “The Art of Noises” started life as a letter from Russolo to Pratella, proposing that a family of “noises” could be incorporated into music, reflecting both sounds from the natural world and new sounds emanating from the hustle and bustle of then-modern cities. Russolo came up with six “families” or groupings of noises that could be conceptualized in a manner similar to the sections within an orchestra, and composed for them using a variety of instrumentation including his new “noise machines.” Russolo sent his letter to Pratella in March of 1913, and by June of that year, Russolo wrote an article documenting a June 2 performance that featured these new machines and ideas. There were machines produced for a variety of noises: the “Roarer,” “Thunderer,” “Burster,” Bubbler,” and so on. As mentioned earlier, sadly these instruments were lost over time, but we still have a written score for “Awakening of a City,” one of Russolo’s pieces that would have used these machines, featuring its own unique kind of graphic notation. Even without hearing much of these instruments in action—only a tiny fragment of recorded sound from the original machines survived—the ideas behind these sounds have been influential throughout the last century. Works by contemporaries like Arthur Honegger were influenced by Futurist ideas, as well as post WWII composers like John Cage, and within pop music idioms, industrial music and noise music in particular have embraced the Art of Noises in many different ways. There’s even the pop band who took their name from this document!

The remainder of this book falls into an “appendix” section, though the material is still very much related. Busoni’s 1906 article “Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Sound Art” is another spirited investigation that looks at the fundamentals of sound and proposes various new ways to expand musical resources. Just a few years before Futurism became an official movement, Busoni was already considering the primal implications of music’s emotional impact, questioning if present-day instruments and notation systems were capable of expressing the full range of these potential emotions, and proposing several ways to expand the possibilities: He proposed a system of third-tones that could further parse the octave even more than half-steps. He proposed several new ways to conceptualize harmony, including largely abandoning it altogether. And he continued to try to link these ideas to tangible emotional expression, which strikes me as an interesting contrast to the fairly intellectual manner in which serialism in music ultimately developed over subsequent decades.

Bruno Corra’s article about “chromatic music” is here, too, and it’s a fascinating piece from 1912 that is truly looking at the “chroma,” or “color” relationships that one could potentially establish between music and color. It documents a two-year project attempting to find useful, consistent connections between color and pitch, or music and light, dividing colors across pitches, and different hues of colors in different octaves. Futurist painter Carlo Carra’s essay closes out the book on a related note: writing more from a visual artist’s perspective, he challenges the reader to consider “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells.”

All told, it feels like these writings, and those of the Dada movement that followed soon after, led the world to consider art from exciting new perspectives that many contemporary artists still engage with every day. Reading these pieces, and discovering some of the first times that these ideas were expressed during the beginnings of modernism, can be inspiring, and cause one to think about their own interactions with music, either as music makers or listeners, from new angles.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Music of Dada by Peter Dayan.)

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Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library


Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century
edited by Orson Scott Card (813.08 Car)

This collection, released in 2001, was overseen by author/editor Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), and in addition to an introductory essay to open the book, Card contributes a biographical essay about each of the included authors before their stories. My Lincoln science fiction club recently read and discussed it for our 200th monthly book discussion.

There are 27 stories included in this moderately hefty volume (the trade paperback was 432 pages). Authors included are: Isaac Asimov • Arthur C. Clarke • Robert A. Heinlein • Ursula K. Le Guin • Ray Bradbury • Frederik Pohl • Harlan Ellison • George Alec Effinger • Brian W. Aldiss • William Gibson & Michael Swanwick • Theodore Sturgeon • Larry Niven • Robert Silverberg • Harry Turtledove • James Blish • George R. R. Martin • James Patrick Kelly • Karen Joy Fowler • Lloyd Biggle, Jr. • Terry Bisson • Poul Anderson • John Kessel • R.A. Lafferty • C.J. Cherryh • Lisa Goldstein • Edmond Hamilton. I had read several of the included stories previously, as I’ve been a life-long fan of science fiction, however quite a few in this collection were new to me. There were a few “clunkers”, which haven’t really held up well in the decades since they were originally published — either with regards to scientific developments or lack of good representation of female, or non-caucasian characters.

The collection is divided into thirds, roughly, with the first third featuring “classic” or “Golden Age” stories, the second third is New Wave (late 1960s to late 1970s) and the final third focusing on the “modern era” (the 1980s and 1990s). Some of the stories are incredible stand-outs! Oddly enough, the collection has a melancholy tone to it — a majority of the stories have sad or depressing endings.

None-the-less, enough of these stories are excellent, and highly representative of the times they were written in, and I have no problem giving this book a recommendation as a good introduction to short science fiction of the 20th century.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the multi-volume Science Fiction Hall of Fame series, where the selections were made from a survey of writers, editors, publishers and fans — unlike the Masterpieces collection, where Orson Scott Card was the sole selector.)

( Wikipedia entry for Masterpieces anthology )

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


Death on the Nile
by Agatha Christie, audiobook narration by David Suchet (Compact Disc Christie – also available in Hoopla eAudiobook)

In the past couple of years, I made it a goal for myself to listen to all of the Hercule Poirot novels and short story collections by Agatha Christie, as audiobooks. The actor Hugh Fraser (who placed Captain Hastings in the long-running series of Poirot adaptations to television) narrates many of them, but for certain key titles, actor David Suchet (who played Poirot on television from 1989 to 2013) does the audio narration. That is the case with Death on the Nile.

Of all of Poirot’s famed cases, the two which are probably most recognizable to casual readers are Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Death on the Nile is a twisty tale, with a group of characters all trapped on a luxury excursion boat on a tour of Egypt’s Nile river. When a wealthy young American heiress is murdered (following various threats against her), and her newlywed husband is badly injured, fellow passenger Hercule Poirot is called upon to solve the case. The suspects and motives are plenty. One of Christie’s other recurring sleuths, Col. Race, is also present to partner with Poirot. And the exotic location is put to good use.

Suchet’s voice as Poirot very effectively pulls you into the story, but it is his deftness at creating distinctive vocal personalities for every other character in the story that is truly amazing. I know that Kenneth Branagh narrated a new audiobook version in conjunction with his recent movie version of the story, but Suchet really inhabits Poirot much more successfully than Branagh, and I highly recommend his version of Death on the Nile. It is truly one of the “crown jewels” of Christie’s works.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Suchet’s audiobook version of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. There have been multiple film/tv adaptations of this story, starring actors such as Peter Ustinov, David Suchet and Kenneth Branagh in the role of Poirot.)

( official Agatha Christie web site )

Read Kristen A.’s review of Death on the Nile in the February 2017 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Core Rulebooks: Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual
by various authors/editions (all 793.33 Dun)

The very first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) came out in primitive form in 1974. I first started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) with a small group of friends in 1981, using what is now known as 1st Edition rules — the first “core rulebooks” were released between 1977 and 1979. My group’s “campaign” world grew in size and complexity, and my group of players played together until around 2003, with new players joining and old players dropping out…until we all eventually drifted away from the game due to time constraints related to families and jobs. But even when we were still actively playing, we had decided not to embrace the 2nd (1989) and 3rd (2000) Editions of the core rule books.

Now, over 20 years later, the opportunity to lead a new group, comprised mainly of players who are new to the game, has lately had me refreshing my knowledge of the current rules and mechanics of how the game is played. Dungeons & Dragons is currently using 5th Edition rulebooks, and much has changed since the 1st Edition version of the game I played back in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the changes are aimed at streamlining gameplay and giving players more variety in the choices of characters they can create.

The three core rule books remain the same though — the Player’s Handbook gives new (and veteran) players the basics of what they need to know about creating original characters and how to play the game; the Dungeon Master’s Guide is designed for the person who is going to run the game, giving them far more information than the basic Players need, including more rule explanations, tables and charts, and suggestions on how to design a game campaign or an entire world. And the Monster Manual is an encyclopedia of all the creatures (mostly magical or imaginary) that the Players may encounter in their various adventures, with detailed backgrounds and statistics for how they behave and how helpful or dangerous they may be. Together, these three hardback volumes, in the hands of a dedicated DM (Dungeon Master) and a group of regular game players, are more than enough for an interested group to start their own game of D&D. But, there have been dozens of additional books put out by Wizards of the Coast since the 2014 release of the 5th Edition rules, offering new rules, new magic items, and new world-building backgrounds.

If you’re interested in starting to play Dungeons & Dragons, you’ll find the three core rule books to be essential reading. And check with the libraries — various branches offer opportunity for new and intermediate players to learn how to play the game, or to join a beginners group for some fun and imagination-challenging adventures.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to watch the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, released in 2023.)

( official Dungeons & Dragons web site )

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History
by Kristina R. Gaddy (Music 787.88 Gad)

The banjo might be the first truly American musical invention. Nowadays, we associate the banjo with country and bluegrass music, where it has continued to proliferate as an important component of those musical styles, but during its history, it’s been used for many kinds of music, and its development coincided with a lot of early American history, too. But it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact date and place of its invention: there are related instruments still in use today in many parts of Africa, though the American iterations of the instrument have their own unique design elements. Learning more about the banjo might help us to learn more about ourselves, too, and Kristina Gaddy’s new book, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History, reveals a lot about both musical developments in early America as well as social issues that have been part of the entire length of our history.

Gaddy approaches the subject of the banjo both as a musician and as an historian. Her background as a nonfiction long-form journalist is important to this book, as it digs deeper into the earliest formative days of the banjo than previous scholars have generally published so far — there is a lot of original research here that ultimately pieces together as clear a picture of the beginnings of the banjo as we’re likely to find. But she is a musician herself, and an enthusiast of the banjo. She plays fiddle, and she has even produced a CD of field recordings of banjo player Currance Hammonds. Her partner, Pete Ross, is a luthier who produces elaborate replicas of period banjos, including exacting replicas of some of the earliest known instruments. This fascinating combination of backgrounds keeps Gaddy’s writing about the banjo both thoroughly researched and very enthusiastic.

Grammy, Pulitzer and MacArthur-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens provides a short foreword to the book that aptly describes the current state of research into the earliest days of the banjo: “Anybody who studies the banjo knows they are walking into a swamp of unknown players, scraps of primary sources, dead ends, flashes of brilliant understanding and also of utter despair. How is something so integral to American culture so badly understood and so widely misrepresented?” She points out that ceremonial and spiritual aspects of the banjo’s creation haven’t been discussed before, though they are likely essential to the real history of the instrument.

Those scraps of primary sources take interesting forms in the earliest history of the banjo: Gaddy takes over the prelude of the book with a discussion of her and her partner Ross’ searches for new information about the banjo in pre-1820 visual art. For Ross, these early paintings can be important clues for his replicas of early banjos, and for Gaddy, finding some new art that “changed what we knew about the instrument’s origins” led to the deep research that ultimately produced this book. Her immediate observations, which the book delves into in great detail, were that the origin of the banjo might not be as all-American as generally accepted, and that the early banjo was a sacred instrument, rather than a secular musical invention as it’s often discussed.

Gaddy traces the earliest appearances of the banjo in print to 1688, in the writings of Hans Sloane, who served as doctor to the governor of Jamaica. While we’ve always known that the banjo was created by early African-American slaves, the history of the instrument — and of the slave trade — go back even earlier than America itself. Sloane wrote of “strum stumps” that he observed being played by enslaved Jamaicans at a festival in 1688, and his descriptions aptly match the distinctive characteristics of the banjo. In particular, his descriptions of instruments that are made “in imitation of lutes” with gourd bodies, flat fingerboards, and tuning pegs point to being early banjos rather than instruments like the gurmi or the akonting from West Africa, because the music made on them features a regular return to high notes. These notes would likely have come from shorter high-pitched strings added to the “strum stumps,” the precursor to the 5th string on a modern banjo. Sloane collected various curiosities throughout the world over the course of his life, and they were eventually donated to Great Britain where they became the beginning of the British Museum. His collection included at least two examples of “strum stumps” that survived into the early 20th Century, but they have unfortunately been lost. Sloane’s accounts are followed by a chapter on the observations of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, who observed similar instruments around 1694 that he described as a “sort of guitar” being used during a dance referred to as the calenda. Gaddy digs deeper into the nature of the calenda dance itself: while Western observers of the era thought of it as mere entertainment, it seems clear that the dance and its accompanying music have spiritual foundations reaching back to the slaves’ homelands in Africa. So the earliest accounts of the banjo seem to indicate that it was developed no so much in America the country, but in the islands of the early Americas.

But the story isn’t that simple. In reality, this research, and most of this book, is as much a survey of the history of slavery in the Americas as a story of the banjo. The banjo is fundamentally a product of slavery, an instrument that draws from its creators’ traditions, the practicalities of their new circumstances, and the natural result of cross-cultural exchanges that happen over time, like the Creole and Gullah languages or the Vodou, Santeria, or Obeah religious practices. To trace the bare threads of information left about the early development of the banjo, Gaddy takes us from the Caribbean to the New England states and back again many times. Her writing style is captivating: each chapter generally focuses on the writings of one European or American interacting with slaves, each of these somewhat unreliable narrators contributing their own sighting of a banjo-like instrument, usually as an aside while writing about their broader observations of dance and musical practices of the slaves in their area. Some of these narrators are priests, some public employees, some soldiers, and some slave-owners themselves. And in the midst of their writings, they mention instruments that all lead to the banjo: the Creole-bania, the banger, bonja, bangeo, banza, and so on. When one considers that the inner lives and traditions of slaves are either woefully misunderstood or barely acknowledged at all in many of these primary sources, we’re lucky to have any mentions of the banjo at all! We’re left with a complicated puzzle that will never point to a particular person, date or location, not unlike the stories of most victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

Research into the earliest days of the banjo takes up most of the book. Toward the end, we move into the beginnings of the modern banjo around the 1840s. The instruments we’d quickly recognize as banjos now, with drum head tops on wooden hoops, originated around this era, and these were generally the product of white musicians performing in blackface for white audiences at minstrel shows. The banjo had already started to represent Black musical culture through songs written by and for white audiences and distributed as sheet music since roughly the 1820s, but the minstrel shows spread an exaggerated (and often demeaning) interpretation of Black cultural arts around the country. The book doesn’t really get into the history of white musical styles that have subsequently adopted the banjo, but of course there are lots of resources for learning more about the strains of country, blues, folk and bluegrass music for which the banjo has become an iconic instrument. But it’s fair to say that although the styles we associate with banjo playing in the modern era are overwhelmingly created by and for white audiences, the instrument itself, and its early repertoire, are entirely the domain of slaves.

There is a final “coda” chapter that addresses the handful of Black contemporary artists who have re-engaged with the banjo. This is a relatively new musical movement that Gaddy traces through the early days of the internet, when the “Black Banjo Then and Now” forum transitioned into hosting the first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005. New generations of black artists are picking up the banjo, combining musical artistry with deep dives into the history of Black music in America. To the extent that the banjo represents the earliest strains of new music in the country, they’re revealing the history of both black music, and American music as a whole.

Gaddy has uncovered more of the hidden history of the banjo with this book than any authors before her, but more work remains to be done. Her extensive notes at the end of the book should serve as a great starting point for further research. More answers may turn out to be right in front of our eyes, just not viewed from the proper context of discovery yet, just like the image that was on display in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that Gaddy and Ross happened upon at the beginning of the book.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Lift Every Voice: The History of African-American Music by Burton W. Peretti, Black American Music: Past and Present by Hildred Roach.)

( official Kristina R. Gaddy web site )

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Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library


The Only One Left
by Riley Sager (Sager)

When the libraries’ Just Desserts mystery fiction discussion group used Riley Sager’s The Only One Left as our book for discussion at the February 2024 meeting, it was my first time reading anything by thriller writer Riley Sager (a pseudonym for Todd Ritter), despite the fact that he’s had a string of hit novels in the past several years.

The Only One Left is definitely a psychological suspense thriller, with numerous twists and turns to its plot. After being penalized for a lapse of judgement which led to the death of her last client, home healthcare worker Kit McDeere is offered a “take it or kiss your job goodbye” position providing round-the-clock aid to reclusive and paralyzed senior Lenora Hope in her decaying old mansion on the Maine coast. The catch? Lenora Hope was the young woman who was the only survivor when her family was all killed when she was 17 — the police (and most of the populace) believe she killed the rest of her clan but could never prove it. But the case remained so notorious that a sing-song schoolyard chant permeates the local culture:

At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope
Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life
“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead

Kit’s introduction to the household has her meeting a colorful cast of supporting players, but it is initial interactions with the enfeebled Lenora, mute and paralyzed except for limited use of one of her arms/hands, that sets a series of mysterious events in motion. After building up some mutual trust, Kit helps Lenora use a typewriter, and one of her first messages is “I want to tell you everything”. But can Kit believe what Lenora types out? And is there anyone else who’d rather not have Lenora sharing secrets, even after 50 years have passed?

I fond The Only One Left to be a suspenseful, engaging story, filled with intriguing characters. Unfortunately, both I and most of the other Just Desserts attendees at our discussion agreed that we found the ending disappointing. But the journey of getting to that ending was still worth the trip!

( official Riley Sager web site )

See the handout The Works of Riley Sager prepared for the libraries Just Desserts mystery fiction discussion group

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


Delish Insane Sweets
by Joanna Saltz (641.865 Sal)

By now everyone is sick to death of their healthy diets and it’s time to splurge on desserts!

Delish Insane Sweets is a collection of dessert recipes on the smaller size. Some recipes will make 13 cookies (Ultimate Snickerdoodles), some 18 (Earth Day Cookies), and some 24 (Owl Cupcakes — which are adorable looking, too).

The categories include Cookie Monsters, Cupcakes, Brownies, Bar Cookies, and Holiday Cookies.

Pick and choose a treat, and if you don’t like that recipe, the batch was small enough that you can give them all away to neighbors or coworkers and try something else without feeling like you wasted a ton of ingredients.

Use your own chocolate chip cookie recipe and use “31 Amazing Mix-Ins for Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough” to create a few new cookies using a few soft caramels for some, chopped cooked bacon for another, mini Oreos for others, along with 28 other suggestions.

This was a fun book to browse through and bake (Mint Chocolate Chip Brownies! Cheesecake-Stuffed Cupcakes!) and I have it on my To Buy List for my personal collection.

Best of all, there are photos of every single recipe.

( official Joanna Saltz page on the Delish web site )

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Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


hooplaThe Vampire Knitting Club series
by Nancy Warren (Hoopla Audiobooks only)

Lucy Swift has inherited her beloved grandmother’s knitting shop in Oxford, England. As a child she would travel from the US to spend her summers there as her parents are world-famous archaeologists and spent their time at various digs around the world. Now trying to get the shop in order, she learns that Grandma is now a vampire! And she lives in the basement with a group of vampires who come out at night to knit in her shop.

This is a fun, cozy mystery series set in contemporary England. You meet the other town folk as well who move in and out of the stories. The library offers all 14 books in this series (the latest came out in 2022), as well as the prequel short story and one short story written for a holiday anthology. In the first three books you are mostly introduced to the vamps who are from various time periods in England and there is a mystery in every book. The vampires range from a snarky teen who only wears black to a 500-year-old landed, educated gentleman to a former silent screen star. I thought the series especially picked up at book four. A member of the library’s Just Desserts mystery book group had suggested this series to the group so I gave this a try and thoroughly enjoy the characters and stories. Sarah Zimmerman is the narrator and does an excellent job of voicing each character.

The library offers this series only on Hoopla audio. I recommend you search for “vampire knitting club boxed set.” You’ll get three books per set and will be able to listen to the first nine books in the series while using only three of your four monthly Hoopla downloads. After that, search by title. There is also an off-shoot series, Vampire Knitting Club: Cornwall.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Aunt Dimity by Nancy Atherton.)

( official Nancy Warren web site )

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Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


Screening Room

formatdvdAnnika – Season 1
(DVD Annika)

Last month I reviewed Season Two of this wonderful detective series while waiting for Season One to come in. The first episode begins with the words “Call Me Annika” which brings to mind the opening words of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Each episode of the series begins with Detective Annika Strandhed talking about a classic work of literature and how it relates to the current case she is trying to solve. Each episode builds on the previous one with Annika confiding to the audience her worries and fears regarding the relationships in her life. Set in beautiful Scotland, we get to enjoy breathtaking views of the sea, lochs and rivers that Annika and her team work in as the Marine Homicide Unit of Scotland’s police force. Be sure to watch season one before starting season two — episode six is especially good in terms of dramatic tension and a major plot development in the final scene. I highly recommend this series.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Shetland, or Prime Suspect.)

(Also available in traditional print format.)

( Internet Movie Database entry for this series )

See Kim J’s review of season two of Annika in the February 2024 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

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Recommended by Kim J.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


formatdvdEndeavour series
(DVD Endeavour)

From my first review of Endeavour when it started nine seasons ago: Endeavour follows the early years of policeman-in-training Endeavour Morse as he learns the ins and outs of police work with Investigator Fred Thursday in 1960s Oxford, England. As a fan of the Inspector Morse series with veteran actor John Thaw, I was curious to see how this series would hold up as a “prequel.”

Now the final season is over, I decided to go back and watch all of the seasons again from the beginning. One of the things that I liked most about this series is the superb writing and the attention to detail, tying together elements from the original Inspector Morse series and from the books by Colin Dexter. Endeavour Morse, always known as “Morse” to everyone, is a young Oxford-educated young man with a fondness for doing crosswords and solving mysteries, which is why he decided to try his hand at detective work. His knowledge of classical music, opera, Latin, and the classics gives him an edge over the other street-smarts cops that he works with in his division. The acting in this series is superb, with excellent acting by Roger Allam as Chief Inspector Fred Thursday, Anton Lesser as Superintendent Reginald Bright, James Bradshaw as Dr. Max DeBryn and of course, Sean Evans as Morse. One of the things that I would like to recommend is in the bonus features in Series Nine: a documentary about the making of this series and its previous series, Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis. Do watch all of the bonus features as you will learn much more about the making of these marvelous productions. I have to admit that I am sad that this is done now, but the producers did a wonderful job of bringing the stories together..

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the original series, Inspector Morse.)

(Also available: many of the Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter.)

( Internet Movie Database entry for this series )

See Kim J.’s original review of Endeavour, in the November 2014 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

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Recommended by Kim J.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


formatdvdThe Frighteners
written and directed by Peter Jackson (DVD Frighteners)

In January, I was invited to go to the Filmstreams theater in downtown Omaha to serve on a discussion panel following a showing of Peter Jackson’s 1995 film The Frighteners. Why me? Because I’m the Lincoln City Libraries’ resident “expert” on the Charles Starkweather murder spree case from 1958/1959, and in the movie The Frighteners, Charlie Starkweather’s killing spree is mentioned several times — he serves as an inspiration for the “big bad” in the film.

I was pleased to see that the Lincoln City Libraries do still have The Frighteners in our DVD collection. In the film, Michael J. Fox is Frank Bannister, a man who can see the spirits of the deceased, but who uses this ability to con gullible people. He has partnered with three ghosts to “haunt” houses, after which Frank swoops in to offer his expensive services to de-ghost those properties. But multiple mysterious deaths by heart attack in Fairhaven. When one his latest ghostbusting clients has a chilling number appear engraved in his forehead (which only Frank can see), and then he turns up to be the next victim of a mysterious death, Frank ends up working with the man’s widow (played by Trini Alvarado) to figure out what’s going on in his town (and clear his own name as a suspect). It turns out that the ghost of a serial killer from the 1960s has managed to come back and is adding to his body count.

Some great performances, some spectacular special effects, a little humor, a little scare — this one’s got it all. Fox gives a great performance in his last feature film role before his Parkinson’s symptoms made it impossible for him to work. And the Nebraska connection is really played up, even though the film (made in New Zealand) is supposed to be set in the Eastern U.S. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the schlock horror Jackson had been known for, before being given the opportunity to direct this — and he soon went on to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy!

( Internet Movie Database entry for this film )

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


formatdvdOppenheimer
(DVD Oppenheimer)

Oppenheimer is one of the front runners for Oscars on March 10th, leading all other films with 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.) and Best Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), plus numerous technical nominations.

At 3 full hours, Oppenheimer requires a commitment in its audience, but it ultimately pays off. The first third of the film is relatively slow going, but tension and pace gradually increase, set to Ludwig Goransson’s nerve-wracking score. This is part biography of Oppenheimer the man, and part historical recreation of one of the most pivotal eras in U.S. and World history.

The performances in this film are outstanding, especially Cillian Murphy’s haunting take as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. I particularly enjoyed Tom Conti as Albert Einstein in a couple of short but critical scenes. The production design, costume design, editing, cinematography (particularly around Los Alamos and the bomb testing site) are all top notch.

Though I was a bit bored by the first third of the film, and ended up breaking it up into two viewings, I’m glad I returned to it, because by the end of this movie I was so impressed that I ended up buying the DVD for my personal collection.

Oppenheimer was part of a unique cultural phenomenon in the summer of 2023. It opened the same day as Barbie, and many filmgoers called that pairing Barbenheimer — challenging each other to watch both landmark movies the same day or weekend. Both films were smash successes, and now find themselves up against each other in multiple Oscar categories (Barbie earned 8 nominations). Personally, I preferred Barbie, but that’s just my own taste. I certainly recognize that Oppenheimer is an exceptionally well-made film…and I strongly recommend it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it — especially those interested in world history.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert J. Sawyer.)

( Internet Movie Database entry for this film )

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Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service


last updated March 2024
* Please Note: The presence of a link on this site does not constitute an endorsement by Lincoln City Libraries.

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