Book Shelf > Reviews

A Monkey Among Us
by Dave Horowitz
HarperFestival, 2004, $14.99

Nursery rhymes have been handed down through the ages not only for their instructional value, but also for the sometimes mysterious, often lunatic imagery they evoke and for the sheer joy they bring to the lips of those who recite them. (Think of that all-time favorite rhyming children’s book, Goodnight, Moon.) However, very few contemporary rhymes devised for the pleasure of kids and their parents can compete with the likes of “Hey, Diddle Diddle”—unless it’s a children’s rhyme written by an adult who can remain, like a child, completely entranced by sounds and rhythm.

Enter A Monkey Among Us, the debut children’s book by Dave Horowitz, a professional drummer, Rhode Island School of Design-trained graphic artist, and rock climbing instructor. “The book really started off with the language itself, with rhyming as nonsense, with a line that sounded good—’A monkey among us’—and me rhyming continually off that,” Horowitz said recently, speaking on the phone from his home in Rosendale. Each spread in this delightfully illustrated book for children aged three to six contains a single line of text replete with vowels and the sort of consonantal juxtapositions that make reading aloud to small children pure pleasure for both reader and listener. To wit: “A monkey./A monkey among us./A monkey among a fungus./A monkey, humongous.”

Horowitz’s illustrations manage to be at once whimsical and unusually graphic, with lots of black and brown used amid colors that are reminiscent of the 1950s (love those vivid tertiary shades of yellow, orange, pink, green, purple), with cut-out shapes that recall the look of old-fashioned kindergarten classroom felt boards. For the look of the book, Horowitz says, “I was kind of taking in everything I like, stealing from everywhere—the bowler hat from Magritte, spanning various recent periods of art.” What he’s come up with is a book that’s very cool looking and that should appeal as much to kids lucky enough to be raised at least partially on nonsense as to parents old enough to appreciate a quasi-retro design.

Horowitz completed A Monkey Among Us when he was between gigs and jobs, using whatever he could afford to buy from the local supermarket—like cheap construction paper—as his design material. With two other children’s books already in the works—the next one, on drumming, is due out in May 2005—it will be interesting indeed to see what he comes up with next.

—Susan Piperato

Rehearsing with Gods
Photos by Ronald T. Simon
Text by Marc Estrin
Chelsea Green, 2004, $35

The arts are political, whether they like it or not,” Peter Schumann has written, and nowhere have the arts and political activism fused so dramatically and so profoundly as in Schumann’s Bread & Puppet Theater. Since 1963, its rent-strike parades, antiwar pageants, and annual (until recently) Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover, Vermont, have been indelibly impressed upon America’s psyche. It is simply not possible to imagine a major peace demonstration without the somber, eloquent presence of Bread & Puppet’s bloated capitalists, mournful mothers, and silently marching mementos mori. Nor should the company’s tonic influence on contemporary theater, from Arm-of-the-Sea to the Broadway blockbusters of Julie Taymor, be understated.

Rehearsing with Gods is the first book about Bread & Puppet to be written by company insiders. Canadian photographer Ronald T. Simon has been documenting Schumann and his troupe for more than two decades; Mark Estrin, a writer, cellist, and activist, is a self-described “geezer puppeteer” who was touring Europe with the company on little more than bread, garlic, and onions in the early ’70s. Their book, as Simon notes, “is not meant to be an objective document…but an interpretive one.” To that end, they have selected eight archetypal themes—Death, Fiend, Beast, Human, World, Gift, Bread, and Hope—to serve as kindling for Estrin’s poetic essays and motley umbrellas for Simon’s photographs. The latter are as intimate as you would expect, given the photographer’s proximity to the performers, and as stately, haunting, elegiac, and joyful as the burning effigies, mute beasts, white-clad dancers, headless giants, and related marvels and mysteries they depict.

At a moment when those in power are decidedly more grotesque than rough-hewn puppets of papier-mâché, Rehearsing with Gods’is a crucial reminder that a community of artists can make a difference. The utopian, grandly anarchic vision of Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet Theater—which insists, among other things, upon art being food, and being available to everybody, cheap—is more necessary now than ever to our survival, both materially and spiritually. “Does Bread & Puppet give me hope?” Estrin asks. “Yes,” he answers, uncorking a rhapsody of affirmations: “Hope that the best things in life will not be things…hope that there is still an alternative to There Is No Alternative…hope that neither bread nor puppets can ever be defeated.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

Take Them At Their Words
Bruce J. Miller w/ Dana Maio (Eds.)
Academy Chicago, 2004, $15.95

Here is a book that literally speaks for itself. In Take Them At Their Words: Shocking, Amusing, and Baffling Quotations from the GOP and Their Friends, 1994-2004, Bruce Miller and Dana Maio have collected, verbatim, right-wing pronouncements from the past 10 years that are often laugh-out-loud funny, but that ultimately shock more than they amuse. It is no surprise that right-wing talk shows are big business (the top five radio station owners, who control 45 powerful 50,000-watt or larger radio stations, broadcast 310 hours of nationally syndicated right-wing programming but only five hours of countervailing talk) or that pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and Ann Coulter engage in propagandistic, vilifying blather. But what is most chilling about Take Them at Their Words is the fact that right-wing hate speech is not restricted to fringe elements.

Here’s Rep. Bob Dornan (r-ca), commenting on his re-election campaign in 1996: “Every lesbian spear-chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated.” Or, here’s a September, 2001, comment from Rep. John Cooksey (r-la) on racial profiling: “If I see someone [who] comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper around his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.” Or Immigration Judge Thomas Raguno, speaking to a Ugandan woman seeking political asylum in the us in 2003: “Jane, come here. Me, Tarzan!”

These quotes thinly scratch the surface of Take Them at Their Words. The book contains what are destined to become classics of modern hate speech, like Randall Terry’s exhortation to his followers in the pro-life group Operation Rescue: “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.” Or Ann Coulter’s: “Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do.”

What’s saddest about a brilliant compendium like this, however, is that as it documents the jingoism, homophobia, obfuscation, outright lies, and empty patriotism of right-wing pundits and politicians—a necessary cataloguing—it also graphs the shrinking space of civil discourse in this country. One is left wondering how all this shrillness came to pass, and if there is still room for debate in place of demonization. —Brian K. Mahoney

The Other Face: Experiencing the Mask
Wendy Klein & Brent Robison (Eds.)
Bliss Plot, 2003, $8

Who are you really? There’s the workaday you, the person who emerges in the company of family, the person your friends know, and the person behind your eyelids during half-awake musings, to name but a few. The question is deep and important enough to be included throughout the curriculum of this grand academy we call life, from 101—the adolescent navel-gazing phase—on down through the changing roles and adventures we experience as we age.

Some might say it’s not a required course, mind you. Brutal dictators and serial killers, for example, probably consider the whole issue to be beneath their notice. Other folks adopt the party line of one form of fundamentalism or another and cloak themselves in it to the extent that they’d probably argue to their last breath that it is who they are and all they are, and reject any suggestion that self-examination might be a worthwhile pursuit.

For the rest of us, there’s much food for thought in this slender little volume, which unites the perspectives of a diverse group of intelligent voices on the subject of the masks we wear in this life. How is it that we wear them? What’s achieved thereby? Are we ever truly unmasked? Klein, whose lifework is mask-making, admits in the introduction that she doesn’t pretend to have final answers to these questions, and neither do the contributors—which is part of what makes The Other Face so resonant. The reader is subtly invited to look within and to ponder the issues of persona with the help of sources ranging from scholarly essays to extremely succinct poetry, Kahlil Gibran to Nietzsche and Aesop’s Fables.
Some of what is included you may have read before; for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s gripping “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.” Juxtaposed, however, with Camille Paglia and Carl Jung, even the familiar selections take on fresh dimensions. From Klein’s foreword, we gather that compiling this volume has taken her on a voyage of discovery—even the maker of masks is continuing to learn about what it is they really mean to us. It’s a voyage into the mysteries of identity well worth taking, and the company’s good.

—Anne Pyburn

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
by Twyla Tharp
Simon & Schuster, 2003, $25

Oh, those successful artists, the seemingly blessed souls who make the outpouring of creative works look effortless and easy.
How do they do it? Is it luck, genetics, trust funds? Those may be helpful, says Twyla Tharp (yes, the choreographer) in her new book The Creative Habit, but her answer to the question is none of the above. Instead, she says, it’s the simple, self-directed act of ribe tuchus—putting your rear in the chair—that will bring works of heart and spirit into the world.

This is good news to all the under-funded, first-artist-in-the-family, not-feeling-lucky-yet creatives out there—or maybe it’s not. The inner struggle for personal mastery can be far more difficult than any external challenge. And Tharp’s 40-year career in the extremely demanding world of dance gives her a decided edge in this department.

But Tharp’s lifelong self-discipline hasn’t absolved her from her own wrestlings with the muse. She’s gone into the dark cave, too—and returned determined to share the jewels she found with the rest of us. This self-confessed “cheerleader for the creative urge” shares them beautifully: her prose is incisive, her examples are crystalline, and the exercises she includes with most chapters are genuinely helpful. Think The Artist’s Way on steroids.

You must, she maintains, become habitually creative. And to do that, you must first know important things about yourself: what you need around you to create, what you don’t, your rituals, your “creative dna.”

Tharp cuts straight to the push/pulling heart of creative tumult. Nothing is missed in her gaze, not creative highs nor unavoidable lows. She’s been there, sweated that, and what she offers here are practical methods gleaned from her life and those of other artists to successfully thwart the demons of doubt, procrastination, and lassitude.
Mine your memory, she says. Package your time. Learn the difference between a rut and a groove. Some of her methods may work for you and some may not, but ultimately her focus is to encourage development of your own effective work habits—“the nuts and bolts of dreaming.”

Twyla Tharp will not spare your illusions about creativity. “In creative endeavors, luck is a skill,” she says, and “limits are a secret blessing, bounty can be a curse.” But in exchange for them, she’ll give you the tools to fashion the kind of creative life that can actually make your dreams into realities.

—Susan Krawitz

The Vegetarian Family Cookbook
by Nava Atlas
Broadway Books, 2004, $17.95

Thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappe revolutionized the cookbook industry with Diet for a Small Planet, a political tract that advocates vegetarianism and offers hundreds of meat-free recipes. In The Vegetarian Family Cookbook, Nava Atlas reformulates that approach to fit the fast-paced age of corporate agribusiness and gmos (genetically modified organisms) and angles it toward “busy cooks” looking for ways to make healthy and ethical dietary choices.
Atlas is the author and illustrator of eight previous vegetarian cookbooks, and her latest release boasts a beautiful, reader-friendly layout with nearly three hundred recipes (replete with vegan and “picky eater” variations) for quick meals, snacks, and baked goods.

The book’s introduction cites a study showing “that vegetarians live an average 7 to 15 years longer than their meat-eating counterparts.” Trotting out the now-familiar fact that it takes 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat versus 390 gallons for one pound of beef, Atlas stresses that practicing vegetarianism aids in the preservation of water quality, cropland topsoil, and fossil fuels. Likewise, vegetarians and vegans show compassion for animals, avoid chemical carcinogens, and help protect farm workers and small family farms (650,000 of which have folded in the United States during the past decade).

The Vegetarian Family Cookbook is divided into 10 chapters, each focused on a meal or food group, such as “Healthy Snacks and Fruity Treats” and “Tofu and Seitan.” Individual recipes (nearly all of which involve four preparation steps or less) appear one per page, accompanied by a color-coded sidebar that lists ingredients as well as supplemental information, including calorie, fat, protein, and fiber contents for both dairy and vegan options. Certain dishes include additional how-to categories, either for embellishing flavors, building meals, or accommodating youngsters’ hard-to-please palates. Along with quick main-dish dinners, such as pasta salad with southwestern flavors or classic vegetarian chili, cooks will find recipes for a more leisurely, weekend pace, including seitan “meat and potatoes” stew as well as mixed mushrooms stroganoff.

With obesity (affecting 65 percent of the adult population) poised to surpass tobacco as the leading cause of death in the us, and with the use of pesticides and other poisons in food production on the rise, those seeking longevity and well-being would do well to clear space in their hectic schedules to make the simple, healthy meals that Atlas recommends.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz