Cranford / Cousin Phillis (Penguin Classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)(This is a book review about `Cranford' and `Cousin Phillis' of the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Peter Keating.)
[CRANFORD] Elizabeth Gaskell's `Cranford' is very different from her more serious `Mary Barton' and `North and South,' both written with socially conscious messages. In fact, its basic tone is comedy (or tragicomedy) set against the background of the changing local community of Cranford, or `Our Society' which is, as the narrator says, "in possession of the Amazons."
The main characters are all elderly ladies. You meet kind-hearted and timid Miss Matty with her domineering sister Deborah, the most memorable characters in this town. Narrated by one Mary Smith, we are introduced to the small world of Cranford, where smallest things can be pleasure or trouble such as `conjuror' Signor Brunoni amazing the ladies in the town's Assembly Room, or some rumor about `robbery' and even `ghosts' that scare them in `Darkness-Lane.' There is Lady Glenmire, who comes to Cranford, and shocks the community by marrying a doctor (and becoming `Mrs. Hoggins'). With these episodes, Elizabeth Gaskell deftly describes the sisterhood among the gossipy ladies with deep sense of sympathy, and the events are described with her sure-handed touch, which provides funny moments and occasional pathos.
Some part may not be interesting today. Captain Brown and Miss Jenkyns have an argument about the merit of novel reading, and while Captain praises Dickens' `Pickwick Papers,' Miss Jenkyns insists on the superiority of Samuel Johnson This is not only an in-joke (`Cranford' first appeared as eight-part serial in Dickens' Household Words first in 1851), it also reflects that these ladies in Cranford stick to their strict social codes that are clearly getting too old outside the community. The scene itself is humorous, and behind the humor you can find the author's keen eye for details.
But the book can be enjoyed without such historical knowledge, and there are many touching scenes concerning Miss Matty's life. As `Cranford' is written without concrete planning, the entire work looks very episodic. Actually it is episodic (and that's why one major character suddenly disappear at Chapter 2), and it should be read as such, like a series of sketches or short stories.
[COUSIN PHILLIS] `Cousin Phillis' is first published as four-part serial in 1863, and is about a fleeting love affair in a rural community, where the titular daughter of a `minister' (and self-help type of farmer) lives quietly. This is what we call a `novella' and its tone is sadder than `Cranford' but still is written with well-observed descriptions of the characters and the community that we know would undergo drastic change sooner or later.
THE PENGUIN edition by PETER KEATING contains Appendix A: `The Last Generation in England' and Appendix B: `The Cage at Cranford' both by Gaskell. The first one would throw light on the background of Cranford, and the second one (a sequel written about 10 years after the original) is an enjoyable (if not outstanding) short story.
`Cranford' is a delightful book that reminded me of E.F. Benson's equally delightful Mapp and Lucia books. Teachers may not use these books as text in the English literature courses in university, but the fact remains that these books are as priceless as any other Victorian novels.

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"Cranford" depicts the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of a small village - their petty snobberies and appetite for gossip, and their loyal support for each other in times of need. The village is dominated by women, from the kindly spinster Miss Matty, living in genteel poverty with her redoubtable sister, to Lady Glenmire, who shocks everyone by marrying the doctor. When men do appear, such as 'modern' Captain Brown or Matty's suitor from the past, they bring disruption and excitement to the everyday life of Cranford. This volume includes the novella "Cousin Phillis", which depicts a fleeting love affair in a rural community at a time when old values are being supplanted by the new. Both works are exquisitely observed tragicomedies of human nature, told with great delicacy and affection.

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On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home) Review

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(More customer reviews)Antarctica hardly ever shows up in our national consciousness, and when it does it's usually in odd ways. Ten years ago, it was the science of Antarctica --- the hole in the ozone layer --- that was making news. Five years ago, more or less, it was the rediscovery of a bit of Antarctic history that was making news, with all sorts of books and movies on Sir Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition, and the leadership lessons to be learned therein. This year, it's Antarctic biology that's taking center stage, with March of the Penguins delighting movie audiences across the globe.
March of the Penguins was a hit in part because it wasn't just about the savagery of the frozen continent, or the mating cycle of the emperor penguin, or the threat of attacks from vultures and sea lions. It was about love. Love is not something you think about much in the Antarctic context. The Antarctica of the mind is populated by brave, brawny, persevering explorers wrapped in mukluks; the occasional research scientist in horned-rimmed, fogged-up glasses; and maybe a sled dog. There's no room for love there. It's too darn cold, for one thing.
ON THE ICE by Gretchen Legler is about finding love in Antarctica --- outside of the emperor penguin context, mind you. Legler got one of those government grants you hear about sometimes on late-night TV. In this case, it was a National Science Foundation grant that allowed her to write about Antarctica and publish this book. The idea was supposed to be, according to the apparently not-so-strict guidelines, a journalistic look at Antarctic science and scientists.
But love got in the way. There's a chapter, about halfway through, in which Legler is trying diligently to write about the problems of refrigeration in Antarctica, which apparently involves keeping food and supplies well above ambient temperature rather than the reverse. We'll never know. Legler felt that she couldn't be an objective journalist in Antarctica, that she couldn't write about "facts and lives other than her own." But then enters Ruth, a woman she has a crush on, who entreats her to take a look at a formation of "nacreous" clouds that are in some way indescribably beautiful.
Legler and Ruth fall in love, and the manuscript careens from there into meditations on lesbian love and the glories of nature, and quotes from Walt Whitman wrapped around the whole thing like a big dingy ribbon. Even when she tries to steel herself to write about science or even the scientific personalities, she veers into the transcendental and the vague. One short chapter, "The Ice King," starts out as a profile of the man who runs McMurdo station, then migrates into Henry David Thoreau territory, and ends as an essay about how global communication is making it harder to experience what might be called a unique Antarctic way of life.
What ON THE ICE really ends up being about is the culture of Antarctica. The best parts of the book are those that illuminate how people cope with the isolation and the cold. Legler tells us about the "toast chart" showing exactly how people coming to the end of an Antarctic idyll feel --- the more burnt the toast, the more stressed out the researcher. "Skua Central" is the local flea market where items get passed around from hand to hand. And Legler illustrates the occasional --- or more than occasional --- heartbreak and loneliness that spurs people on to the bottom of the world.
Given how little Antarctica shows up in the collective unconsciousness, it's unfortunate that ON THE ICE doesn't meet up to the expectations that the National Science Foundation must have had when it funded Legler's expedition to McMurdo --- that it doesn't say more about what all these people are doing down there, and why it's important. It isn't that book because it was interrupted and changed by love; anyone who loves knows that love changes things, that it pops up where you would least expect it, that it spins and disorients things. ON THE ICE has its shortcomings, but they're shortcomings born of love, and therefore should be given the widest latitude for pardoning. --- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.

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Atlas of Aesthetic Breast Surgery Review

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(More customer reviews)I got this book for a dear friend after I learned about Dr. Hammond's SPAIR technique on his [...] website. This is helpful, from a standpoint of not being a surgeon, to learn about the methods and new procedures in breast reduction.

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Traitors & True Poles: Narrating A Polish-American Identity, 1880-1939 (Polish and Polish American Studies) Review

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(More customer reviews)"If America holds a collective portrait of the Polish immigrant landing at Ellis Island, exhausted, bewildered, clutching bundles and children, surrounded by queerly lettered trunks, what, in the popular imagination, do those trunks contain? The featherbed, embroidered linens, a treasured family photograph . . . a fistful of village soil . . . . Rarely, however, do we imagine a book among the carefully packed belongings . . . " (p. 15).
Popular stereotypes may envisage the Polish immigrant of the late 19th/early 20th century as an illiterate peasant who provided only brawn to the American Industrial Revolution. But the emigracja za chlebem also had a voracious appetite for reading. Karen Majewski, associate professor of Polish & East Central European Studies at Michigan's St. Mary's College, documents a lost page in immigrant history: the large book publishing industry that grew up in Polonian centers to serve the first and second generations of Polish immigrants.
The demand for books was great, evidenced by the number of titles that appeared. Writing their history is itself a challenge, because much of the primary source material has disappeared. Being in Polish, the books often didn't catch the attention of American libraries. Since book publishing was a sideline of the Polonian newspaper publishers, they kept costs down by printing on acidic paper that crumbled over time. Few of these books were sent to deposit collections like the Library of Congress. Few were copyrighted: some even couldn't be, because-as today-Polish "entrepreneurs" had no qualms about pirating books published elsewhere, calculating that an author in the old country was unlikely to fight for his intellectual property rights in Wisconsin.
Majewski devotes her book to a special niche of those writings: fiction published by Polonian authors for the Polonian market. She examines four different genres: crime and detective novels, sagas about immigration, short stories and novels containing social critiques, and romances. She also devotes an epilogue to Polish-language novels being published today by writers like Zofia Mierzyñska, recounting the lives and experiences of today's economic immigrants who overstay tourist visas and disappear into the underground economy.
The author advances a provocative thesis: that Polonian fiction was often a metaphor for intra-community debates about what it meant to be Polish in America. The emigracja za chlebem had come to America from a Poland that did not appear on anybody's maps. In many ways, the most open and public debate about Polish identity occurred not in Austrian-, Russian-, or Prussian-dominated Poland but in the "fourth partition," American Polonia. Majewski argues that many of the images of family, love, marriage, betrayal, and usurpation were also extended metaphors for what was taking place on the political level in Poland. As later under communism, Poles learned how to communicate effectively through a "'conspiracy of understanding'" invoking certain words, symbols, and associations. It was not mere coincidence that Pope John Paul II often spoke about the virtue of solidarity after the suppression of SolidarnoϾ. Majewski argues that the same phenomenon was operative in that early Polonian fiction.
Majewski's recovered a fascinating and forgotten page of American Polonian history. While not minimizing its scholarly value, it reads well and can be of benefit to general readers interested in matters Polish. Highly recommended.

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