Axe Cop began as a webcomic in 2010, when 29-year old Ethan Nicolle seized on the idea of turning his 5-year old brother Malachai’s stories into comics.  The Nicolles’ protagonist, Axe Cop, was born of a small firefighter action figure who preferred, at Malachai’s direction, to attack bad guys wildly with his axe instead of fighting fires.  Axe Cop’s allies Uni-Baby (a baby with a unicorn’s horn whom Axe Cop hurls at enemies), Avocado Soldier (self-explanatory?), and Sock Ar Ang (a good guy with socks for arms that can be used as boomerang-like weapons) are depicted as superheroes conquering a host of even weirder villains in older brother Ethan’s polished style.  Between episodes, a Q & A with readers called “Ask Axe Cop” reveals even murkier corners of a little boy’s mind.  What kind of dinosaur might Axe Cop like to ride if such a thing were possible?   “I already have a T. Rex named Wexter.  He breathes fire and has a super-duper-fast bite.  I gave him cop glasses and machine gun arms.  He has a cop badge shaped like himself.  He lives in the parking lot.  I feed him bad guys.”

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, regularly featured his own two young sons, Will and Abe, in the bunny-eared world of his long running Life in Hell comic strip, and these strips were compiled and released in 2007 as Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe.  Will and Abe’s strips consist mainly of discussions documented by Groening, and bear such titles as Important Questions about Monsters (“Is Mothra a good moth or a bad moth?”), Will & Abe Discuss Leprechauns (“Why are leprechauns such dorks?”), and Hoogoo, The Nightmare Bird Who Has Spikes (“Once there was a little tiny bird, and he lived in a circus.  But then before they started the show, a bunch of mad scientists and karate robbers came to the circus to steal the bird . . . .”)

In hindsight, I’m a little perplexed as to just what exactly about Will (“I ate cat food”), Abe (“Jambooda!”), and Malachai (“Fire slicer became a vampire wizard ninja swordfish, and he had a whole bunch of swordfish throwing star bombs and a sword nose that he could take off and stab people with”) made me want to have children.  But I realize now that the magic of these books is their embrace of pure irrationality.  And maybe the surreal world-building fun of toddler life is the same as that to be found in the lives of their parents.  Chalk it up to sleep deprivation, but there is something almost intoxicating about the denial of rational thought and surrender to pure instinct required to survive as a parent.  As reflected in Axe Cop and the Will & Abe comic strips, the delirious state of young kids and their parents is at times almost indistinguishable from another great irrational human pursuit, that which comes after toddlers finally give up the bedtime fight, and our exhausted minds are free at last to dream.  At least for a few hours, in my own case, until a sudden and blood curdling request from my 2-year old son’s room for help wiping his nose shatters the night.  Oh wait . . . sorry.  There was room for a complaint right there, and I just couldn’t resist.

Since I was in the mood to read something by my old hero Chuck D., I decided let LibriVox bring the noise and sample the vocal stylings of their volunteers.  “Volunteers” (emphasis on the plural) being the key word, because, although most of them were pretty good readers, about 20 different people contributed the 45 chapters (each packaged online as an individual MP3 file) of the book.  As I said, they were all decent, and it’s hard to criticize anyone who contributes free content like this as a labor of love and gift to the literary masses.  But there were just too many voices for my taste, some with accents even more American than my own, and I struggled to switch gears with each chapter.

On the other hand (warning: shameless plug for the Lawrence Public Library ahead), a quick search of the library catalog yielded a free recording of A Tale of Two Cities in a downloadable format on the library’s OneClick Digital platform, and on CD , the former read by Simon Vance, an actor who has collected nearly every award out there for audiobook performances, and the latter a BBC dramatization featuring the work of Emmy and Screen Actors Guild honoree Charles Dance (of Gosford Park and Bleak House fame).

Simon Vance and Charles Dance are pretty hard to beat.  “Their names even rhyme,” I smugly told my LibriVox-loving friend, who, over the years, has become quite weary of my constantly reminding her how much better the free stuff at the library is compared to a lot of other free stuff out there, or, even more satisfying and smugly proclaimed, stuff out there you have to pay for.  As usual, she was in a forgiving mood, and waited a few days to respond to my complaint about the many-voiced Tale of Two Cities.  Turns out that, as an experienced user of LibriVox, she was aware that there are often multiple versions of a work available on the site, and while some feature more than one reader, many do not.  In fact, she gently informed me, there is another recording of A Tale of Two Cities I would have found if I had spent a bit more time (i.e. a few more seconds) looking around.  And this version is performed by one person who has a British accent and shows some real acting chops in his characterizations, always the funnest part of listening to a Dickens novel.

So here I stand, corrected, and the better for it.  Check out LibriVox if you are looking for an audio recording of a book in the public domain, interested in recording one yourself, or just plain curious.  But don’t forget the professionals available at your local public library.  To bring it back to Dickens, there really isn’t a best or worst between them, and this noisy authority, at least, insists on no superlative degree of comparison.

Apparently he was right.  Much to my own surprise, as an adult I find myself drawn to the subject, which led me recently to a documentary in the library’s DVD collection called Garbo: The Spy.  Released in 2009, Garbo documents one of the unknown heroes of the war, a Spaniard named Juan Pujol Garcia.  Garcia, born into an upper middle class Barcelona family, bumbled into his war service by volunteering to be a spy for both sides, with no particular training or skills.  He did, however, have an aptitude for deception.  After being assigned by the Germans to gather top secret information in England, he gained their trust by providing them with “intelligence” dug out of newspapers and other information readily available in the public library in Lisbon, Portugal, the city where he lived on the sly and fabricated a network of fictitious subagents.  Eventually, Garcia convinced the British that he wished to serve the Allied cause as a true double agent.  His British handlers assigned him the codename “Garbo”—in honor of his ability to pull off one of the greatest acting jobs they had seen—and used him as a conduit to feed the Germans bogus information throughout the rest of the war.

Garbo’s greatest accomplishment was to lend credibility to an elaborate deception plan carried out on the Germans prior to the D-Day landings at Normandy.  While they could not hide the massive invasion force that landed on June 6, 1944, the Allies hoped to present this attack to the Nazis as a diversionary action leading up to a larger invasion at the Pas de Calais region, where Hitler and other top brass had expected it for years.  To bolster this German assumption, a giant force of phony men and materiel (much of it literally constructed out of balsa wood and cardboard) was sloppily “concealed” in England preparing for a second invasion, and German intelligence had only as far to look for verification than the reports of their star agent on the ground: Garbo.  During the post-war years, Nazi documents revealed that this deception saved countless lives by freezing German forces at Calais, and preventing a major counterattack at Normandy.  One of the film’s most powerful moments is revealed in footage of Garbo himself, as an elderly man, strolling the beaches and memorials at Normandy, pondering his own impact on the fateful Allied invasion as he is thanked by other D-Day veterans.

As unusual as the spy story at its heart is the cinematic style of Garbo: The Spy.  It’s about as different from my dad’s grainy old interview shows as can be, with a moody, modern soundtrack, interspersed archival footage, and referential clips from older, well-known spy and World War II movies.  A frequent reference is the 1959 classic Our Man in Havana, in which Alec Guinness, decades before his Obi Wan years, portrays Graham Greene’s  accidental hero James Wormold, a character with an elaborate fake spy network said to be based loosely on Garbo’s.  I also spotted clips of two of Dad’s old favorites: the scene from George C. Scott’s 1970 Patton  in which Old Blood and Guts, as the Allies’ most high profile general, receives his assignment to head up the dummy invasion force; and The Longest Day, based on Cornelius Ryan’s classic account which, until Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan  was the last word on D-Day in print or on film.  And just to throw it in on principal, no discussion of World War II dramas and documentaries would be complete without reference to Band of Brothers, HBO’s 11-hour epic, and the groundbreaking 1974 British documentary The World at War , godfather to the Ken Burns-style documentary television series so common today.  For any interested in learning more about Garbo specifically, a recent book by Ben MacIntyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies chronicles Garcia’s exploits in detail, along with those of several other double agents involved in Allied deception plans.  MacIntyre’s previous book, Operation Mincemeat, is also not to be missed by anyone interested in World War II chicanery, as it details a bizarre stunt in which bogus invasion plans were planted on a dead body by the British in order to divert the Germans from the real Allied plan to invade Sicily in 1943. – Dan Coleman, Collection Development

In many ways, the book is as unusual as the museum.  Published in 1951, The Daughter of Time chronicles another crime solved by mystery author Tey’s stock detective, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant.  However, this particular case—the murders of the Princes in the Tower and their attribution to Richard III—occurred hundreds of years earlier, and due to the fact that Inspector Grant is bedridden with a broken leg, most of the book’s action consists of historical research.  It’s a page-turner, however, and I recommend it to anyone whose interest in Richard III was piqued by his recent rediscovery.  It is also an insightful meditation on how history can be spun by victors and becomes mythologized over time.  But what I most like about The Daughter of Time, and what I think it accomplishes better than any other book I know, is the way it depicts just how much fun historical research can be.

And since I went and got that librariany, why not throw in a bunch of links to Richard III-related materials here at the Library?  Kicking it off with the most influential and oft-quoted, William Shakespeare’s play is available in print, and as unabridged audio and video performances.  We have three movie adaptations of the play: a silent featuring Frederick Warde, Laurence Olivier’s classic 1955 portrayal, and Ian McKellen’s 1995 reimagining of the play during the World War II era.  For those with a taste for more hard evidence, Alison Weir’s The Princes in the Tower  is considered a readable and solid overview, as is Charles Ross’ biography of the prime suspect, although Tey’s Inspector Grant may have taken issue with him.  And now that new evidence has come to light in the discovery and verification of Richard III’s remains, keep an eye on the catalog in the coming years to see what new verdicts may come in.  - Dan Coleman, Collection Development

I hesitate to give away too much of the plot, but the action of the book centers around Cullen Witter and his younger brother, Gabriel—a thoughtful pair staring down a future stuck in the dead end town of Lily, Arkansas.   Reporters and sightseers descend upon Lily when the extinct Lazarus Woodpecker is spotted in the bayous outside of town, and Cullen and his crew are chagrined to see how their community is transformed by the attention:  what used to be the “Number 3” at the town fast food restaurant becomes the Lazarus Burger, and Cullen’s own hairdresser mom invents the Woodpecker haircut, a combination of Mohawk and red hair dye designed to match the markings of the famous bird.  Meanwhile, another story, revealed in alternating chapters, chronicles the experiences of a young man on a missionary trip to Ethiopia and his subsequent obsession with the Book of Enoch, an obscure ancient text detailing the Archangel Gabriel’s mission from God to eradicate renegade angels on Earth in the days just prior to Noah and the Flood.  As the novel progresses, these narrative threads intertwine in increasingly mysterious and suspenseful ways, leading to a reading experience that, if you’re like me, accelerates on the force of sheer curiosity the further you get into the tale.

The book is also a must-read for any who may have seen and enjoyed the 2009 documentary Ghost Bird, which recounts the real-life “rediscovery” of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker near Brinkley, Arkansas.  The movie is in turn a must-see for any who enjoyed Where Things Come Back, as the similarities between the film and book—even down to the Lazarus haircut—are striking, and viewing Ghost Bird is at times tantamount to watching brief interviews with residents of the fictional Lily, Arkansas.  Additionally, fans of Sufjan Stevens will find much of interest in the book, as his music is referred to throughout, and provides a kind of thematic reflection of the personality of one of his biggest fans, the book’s protagonist, Gabriel Witter. – Dan Coleman, Collection Development

In Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, filmmaker Constance Marks reveals the man behind Elmo.  My notions of who this may have been were fuzzy at best (ha!), but Kevin Clash was definitely not what I had in mind.  As a child growing up in Turners Station, a working class African American neighborhood near Baltimore, Clash was discovered one day to have crafted a nearly ready-for-prime-time muppet out of his father’s winter coat on the sly, after which neither he, nor his parents, shied away from his destiny as a master puppeteer.  The film chronicles Clash’s mother personally seeking out the guidance of Kermit Love, whose legendary felt and foam creations became Jim Henson’s most famous characters, and depicts a teenage Clash remaining true to his passion for puppetry in the face of jibes from perplexed classmates.  Interestingly, the movie explains that the Elmo of today exists only due to Clash’s rescuing him from the Sesame Street slush pile; Clash recreated the character of Elmo (replacing a raspy, tough guy voice with his now famous falsetto) after he was discarded by another, uninspired puppeteer.  Clash attributes Elmo’s unprecedented fame to the visualization he uses to guide the puppet, remarking that Elmo’s character is animated as an expression of one simple idea: love.  As the movie concludes, Clash comes full circle, mentoring a new young prodigy who has sought out the world famous puppeteer for guidance.

Benjamin Wagner’s 2010 documentary Mister Rogers and Me describes the life-changing experience of briefly living next door to America’s most famous neighbor himself, children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers.  Wagner was a twenty-something MTV producer when he came to stay for several weeks at his mother’s Nantucket residence and discovered Mr. Rogers, a long-time resident of the island, living in a nearby beach house.  As they became acquainted, Rogers passed on a message to Wagner and told him to share it with the world: “Deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”  Wagner’s film attempts to illustrate how Rogers lived this maxim, telling the story of his life and work, often through interviews with those upon whose lives he had a great impact, such as journalists Tim Russert, Susan Stamberg, and Tim Madigan, and Dr. Susan Linn, founder of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

One preconceived notion I had about both movies turns out to be true:  it’s impossible to learn what makes Elmo and Mr. Rogers tick without a serious infestation of warm fuzzies, even for viewers who bring, as I did, a measure of typical adult cynicism.  But you can always call the exterminator in the morning.  The beauty of Being Elmo and Mister Rogers and Me lies in their power to recapture the guileless appreciation we once had for these two American icons of childhood.  It is a testament to the documentary form that both filmmakers chose to forego the inherent cuteness of their subjects to reveal them plainly in movies made about adults, for adults. -  Dan Coleman, Collection Development

Much of Weschler’s book recounts his struggle to understand the museum after stumbling in one afternoon and departing in a state of profound amusement and confusion.  When attempts to authenticate exhibits devolve into a compulsive chase of his own fact checking tail, Weschler concedes a point Wilson’s museum seems to suggest, that the rational worldview of the 20^th century erodes our capacity to experience the marvelous, one of the richest aspects of being human.  Along the way, Wechsler provides a captivating history of museums, focusing on the “wonder cabinets” of Renaissance Europe, collections developed in a time when generalists displayed as many curiosities as they could obtain, and great works of art and nature were exhibited together.

But Weschler’s book is best when he allows David Wilson to tell his own story.  Wilson describes a life-altering “mandate” he received as a young man in a sort of mystical experience, and although he hesitates to reveal many details, we are given to understand that the Museum of Jurassic Technology is an expression of this vision.  Since Wilson quit his day job in the advertising industry to devote his life to running the museum on a shoestring budget, it has existed against all odds, rescued time and again by seemingly miraculous coincidences and windfalls.  Wilson views his vocation as a service to provide, through the museum, “an environment in which people can change.”  Weschler’s is one life changed by the museum, and the author offers a useful comparison in pointing out the sense of wonder experienced by Europeans of the Early Renaissance period as curiosities began arriving by the boatload from the newly “discovered” Americas, after which they were gathered into the legendary wonder cabinets of the era, where they would foster a new way to understand the world. – Dan Coleman, Collection Development

A poet who also reported for the New Yorker and is better known as a translator of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, Reid presents Ounce, Dice, Trice as a collection of words “to amuse and amaze” children.  In a brief introduction, he advises that the words in the book be read aloud for their sounds and shapes, and encourages kids to begin their own collections of curious and astonishing words.  Reid’s collection is organized in lists, comprised of 5-10 words each, some of which can be found in dictionaries, others of his own creation.  Some examples: Heavy Words (blunderbuss, mugwump, befuddled), Words for Times of Day to Be Used Where There Are No Clocks (daypeep, dewfall, owlcry), Names for Houses and Places (Smidgin’s Nob, Windygates, The Bobbins).  The book concludes with a series of what Reid calls word garlands—series of words which begin and end with the same word, but take readers through chains of linked definitions.  In this way some of my personal favorites are revealed: dimity (“the time of day when daylight dims”), gnurr (“the substance which collects after periods of time in the bottom of pockets or in the cuffs of trousers”), and gongoozler (“an idle person who is always stopping in the street and staring at a curious object”).  Another favorite section lists unusual collective nouns, the best of which appear to have been invented by Reid: “a scribbitch of papers,” “a gundulum of garbage cans,” “a tribulation of children.” 

Ounce, Dice, Trice is a great pick for any budding wordsmith in your life—I know I would have loved it during the recurring phases of fascination with strange words and secret languages I experienced in the latter years of grade school—but it’s also a fun way to pass a half hour of any adult life, if only to bring back the wonder of words we learn to take for granted as we grow used to reading and hearing so many, page after page, year after year, until we are forced finally to invoke firkydoodle for some much needed mumbudget. – Dan Coleman, Collection Development

I recently picked up the library’s copy of Nadelberg’s first Mortified  collection, and found it to be one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in some time—a true laugh-out-loud experience.  Among the high points for me were the rhymes of Pumpmaster and Smooth Boyz, contributed by the adult version of the Pumpmaster himself, who now freely admits that he has never seen Queens, and was a broke, 6-foot tall, 120 pound 14-year old when he rapped: “Straight up off the mean streets of Queens/I’m a big time, big huge rapping machine/My words flow like an Elizabethan sonnet/And all that money?/My name is on it.”  Another amusing entry is a piece of Duran Duran fan fiction whose obsessed narrator amazingly meets Duran Duran in a hospital waiting room just moments after she has learned her parents have perished (coincidentally, John Taylor’s father has suffered a mild heart attack in the same town).  Because each member of Duran Duran likes her so much, she is immediately invited to live with the band, and, after a torrid affair with Simon Le Bon, accepts a marriage proposal from John Taylor (now hospitalized himself after being struck by a car).  Additional wince worthy writing samples abound: poetic odes to the 1988 Olympics and Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, multiple drafts of love letters never sent, diary entries plumbing the depths, even a diatribe written by an erstwhile member of a Future Farmers of America cotton judging team.

While a few contributors skirt some pretty dark territory, the tone of the book somehow manages to remain lighthearted and sympathetic.  Nadelberg comments in his introduction that “there is something sadly heroic about each of these entries,” and that “most of the appeal is simply because we desperately want these kids to come out okay.”  Each piece includes a healthy bit of perspective in the form of adult commentary by its author, and a section at the end of the book provides reassuring biographical blurbs.  I also found the form of the book refreshing; not only was it hilarious, but the short length of each entry makes the book a perfect palette cleanser, or just something to pick up at times when one’s brain might not be ready for anything much heavier.  In fact, I found the very nature of the writing almost impossible to continue reading for more than 15-20 minutes at a time.  After all, it’s pretty much impossible not to be ready to move on to something else after reading a 5-page homage to Joey McIntyre.  - Dan C., Collection Development

Greene, who worked for the British Secret Service in Sierra Leone during WWII, endeavored with The Human Factor to depict the life of an MI6 agent as he knew it, “free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service.”  The novel does just that, as we see its protagonist, the middle-aged Maurice Castle, commute from a bedroom community each day into London, where he pushes papers in an African section of MI6.The professional loneliness of a spy is palpable in Maurice’s life—unable to speak about his work to friends, family, or even his wife, a career change for someone in his situation would be next to impossible.  As in many of Greene’s tales, divided loyalties—in this case between family and profession and country—form the thematic heart of the story, for we soon discover that Maurice is a double agent, and has been leaking secrets to the Russians for years, motivated by gratitude for help his family received a decade earlier.  While posted to South Africa early in his career, he fell in love with a black South African woman who eventually became his wife, but not before a tense period in which he was expelled from the country for violating its race laws, and his pregnant wife avoided a harsh imprisonment only through the assistance of one of the veryCommunists Maurice had been monitoring.As events unfold, Maurice must decide what to do when his superiorsmistakenly trace the leak to his subordinate, who better fits the profile of a double agent, and whose life the top brass deems expendable.  Then, given the opportunity to leak new information Maurice feels could help millions of people like his wife, who remain in South Africa suffering under apartheid, he must make another torturous choice that could cost him his own life.

A devout Catholic who struggled to steer the dubious work of espionage with a moral compass, William Colby, who worked for the CIA from its creation and served as the agency’s director from 1973 to 1976, could have stepped right out of Graham Greene novel.  The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby is a documentary homage to Colby by his son Carl, whose audio narration of the film describes his own unusual childhood in Italy and South Vietnam, where he played in the homes of U.S.- supported Presidents Alcide De Gasperi and Ngo Dinh Diem, while his father orchestrated the fight against Communism in those countries.  Carl Colby highlights the striking division between family and career in the life of his father, who, while a fixture at the dinner table and Sunday morning Mass, revealed very little to his family about his work, much of which is disclosed in the film’s archival footage and interviews with contemporaries such as Brent Scowcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bob Woodward.  As the camera closes on William Colby’s inscrutable face time and again, we learn of his disappointment with Diem’s murder and Vietnam’s descent into war, and his subsequent leadership of the Phoenix Program, a bloody anti-insurgency effort.  By the time Watergate had ravaged what was left of the public’s toleration of secrecy, Colby was called to testify before Congress, where he boldly revealed many of the CIA’s darkest secrets of the previous decades in an effort to preserve the very existence of the agency.The film paints a portrait of a truly “tortured soul” (as several interviewees describe Colby in summarizing his life), whose struggle to balance secrecy and transparency in his professional and family life transformed him into an enigma whom, in the end, “nobody knew.”

Now that I think about it, being a spy is a bit more difficult than being a librarian.  For that matter, both Maurice Castle and William Colby would have made very good librarians: the closest thing Castle has to a kindred spirit in the Human Factor is an antiquarian bookseller, and Colby amazingly dresses the part of a stereotypical librarian of his era in almost every image of him we see, donning spectacles, a suit, and tie even as he is photographed helping train South Vietnamese counter-insurgents in the field.  Had they been librarians, Castle and Colby as characters admittedly wouldn’t have been quite as intriguing, but I think it’s safe to suppose that eachwould have been much happier. - Dan C, Collection Development