Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing

Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing *2011 YALSA Award Winner*
by Ann Angel
published by Amulet/Abrams

Publisher's description:
Forty years after her death, Janis Joplin remains among the most compelling and influential figures in rock-and-roll history. Her story—told here with depth and sensitivity by author Ann Angel—is one of a girl who struggled against rules and limitations, yet worked diligently to improve as a singer. It’s the story of an outrageous rebel who wanted to be loved, and of a wild woman who wrote long, loving letters to her mom. And finally, it’s the story of one of the most iconic female musicians in American history, who died at twenty-seven. Janis Joplin includes more than sixty photographs, and an assortment of anecdotes from Janis’s friends and band mates. This thoroughly researched and well-illustrated biography is a must-have for all young artists, music lovers, and pop-culture enthusiasts.

My comments:
This book was a labor of love. It began as a short piece that Angel was encouraged to expand. She worked on it for years, conducting email interviews with Joplin's friend and bandmate Sam Andrew (who wrote the introduction), Joplin's former road manager John Byrne Cooke and her friend and publicist Myra Friedman. Angel even forged her own friendship with Friedman.

The eye-popping design is a delight. The colors and patterns adroning the pages reflect the psychedelic look of the album art incuded as illustrations. There are also many photos of Joplin, some filling an entire page, that show her both in her awkward youth and as the performer that she transformed herself into. This a fun book to browse through.

Angel does a really good job of describing Joplin’s persona and the impact her persona had on people, but what I felt was missing was in-depth analysis of her music. There is discussion of a few song lyrics, but it seemed a little too shallow to me. I would also have liked to hear more thoughts from fans and musicians who were influenced by Joplin. I thought that the view of 1950s culture presented was a little simplistic, but I liked how Angel shows Joplin as a misfit who struggled with her self image -- something that teens can identify with.

The bibliography is a bit difficult to navigate, because personal emails, articles, books, and albums are all lumped together without any obvious indication to show which is which. Divisional headings would have been helpful. The well-documented source notes, however, are very insightful, because they include the full sources and helpful things such as links.

Your comments?

YALSA's Nonfiction & Morris Chat

I mentioned YALSA's upcoming chat on the Morris & Nonfiction shortlists last week, and now one detail has changed. The chat has been moved from ALA to Adobe Connect. This means that ANYONE can join in, not just YALSA members.

That chat is set to take place today (Wednesday, Dec. 8) at 8pm Eastern Time (7pm Central Time). The link to access the chat is: http://connectpro87048468.na5.acrobat.com/r91683191/

The shortlists for both the Nonfiction and Morris awards are available on the YALSA website.

Mock YALSA Voting Results / YALSA Official Shortlist Announced

I just came from the mock discussion and vote for the YALSA nonfiction award. It was held at National-Louis University's Center for Teaching Through Children's Books. I sat in a room with 9 other lovely librarians and discussed the nonfiction titles that I had picked (somewhat subjectively) as being among the best of the year. The titles we discussed are:

Borrowed Names by Jeannine Atkins
Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot by Sy Montgomery
Sir Charlie: Chaplin, the Funniest Man in the World by Sid Fleischman
They Called Themselves the KKK by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie by Tanya Lee Stone
Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing by Ann Angel

There was a lot of great discussion on the books, as well as related topics including how to categorize poetry, whether "appeal" could be considered to fit within the definition of "presentation" and how much white space is too much white space. In regards to poetry, someone made the point that a majority of poetry could be considered nonfiction, because it is intended to present Truth (with a capital T). After the discussion, a vote was taken. The War to End All Wars and They Called Themselves the KKK were tied at 3 votes apiece, with Sir Charlie and Kakapo Rescue also garnering votes. A runoff vote between the top two vote-getters resulted in a win for They Called Themselves the KKK with 6 votes.

So, congrats to Susan Campbell Bartoletti for They Called Themselves the KKK! There is no prize associated with this mock award, other than perhaps it will inspire a librarian somewhere to put the book on display, or it to hand it to a teen and say, "Try this book, it's really good!" Which really should be the point of having these awards, right?

The five official finalists were also announced by YALSA earlier this week. Here is the OFFICIAL list:

Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing by Ann Angel

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement by Rick Bowers

The Dark Game: True Spy Stories by Paul Janeczko

Every Bone Tells a Story: Hominin Discoveries, Deductions, and Debates by Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw

I'm not at all surprised to see They Called Themselves the K.K.K. on the list. I've read two of the other finalists. I thought that Spies of Mississippi was really good, but it didn't stand out for me like several books did. I enjoyed Janis Joplin (more extensive comments are coming soon) and I love the design.

The Dark Game also has a definite cool factor. I haven't even had a chance to see it since it arrived at the library, as it's been checked out the entire time. Every Bone Tells a Story is probably the biggest surprise, simply because it's been off my radar. I'm going to have to get a hold of it, now.

The official winner will be announced during the MidWinter meeting of ALA in San Diego.

Your Comments?

YALSA Shortlist Chat

An online chat to discuss the YALSA Nonfiction finalists was just announced on the yalsa-bk listserv. It will take place next Wednesday (Dec. 8) and is limited to YALSA members. Here is the message sent by Stephanie Kuenn, communications specialist with YALSA:

Join YALSA for our free monthly e-chat on Wednesday December 8 from 8-9pm EST to discuss the recently announced Morris and Nonfiction finalists. Did one of your favorite books get nominated? Were you surprised by any of the choices? Join us in ALA Connect for this lively conversation, moderated by Rob Bittner.

Chat participation is limited to YALSA members. YALSA members should go to http://connect.ala.org/yalsa and use their login for the ALA website, www.ala.org. If you've lost your password, you can recover it through the ALA website.

Once logged in, head to the YALSA area (it's http://connect.ala.org/yalsa or you can navigate there within Connect by choosing "YALSA" from under "My ALA Groups") and then click "Chats."

The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton

The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton
by Connie Nordheilm Wooldridge
184 pages
published by Clarion Books

Publisher's description:
Edith Wharton, author of Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and other acclaimed novels, was born into a wealthy family. Beginning in childhood, Edith found ways to escape from society's and her family's expectations and follow an unconventional, creative path. Unhappily married and eventually divorced, she surrounded herself with male friends. She spent much of her life in Paris and was recognized by the French government for her generosity and hard work during World War I. Her literary and personal life, her witty and incisive correspondence, her fondness for automobiles and small dogs--all are detailed in this warm and sparkling account of a woman well ahead of her time.

My comments:
I must confess that (having never been required to read any of Edith Wharton's books as a student and not being inclined to pick them up on my own) I knew almost nothing about her before picking up this biography. I thought that maybe the "brave escape" the title referred to might mean that Wharton would abandon the life of wealth and privilege she was born into to live as a pennliess writer, and at first I was a little disappointed that she merely gave up the stuffy old-money social circle of her parents while managing to hold on to the wealth and privilege.

Eventually I came to see that rejecting her parents' ideals and aspirations is nothing to sniff at, though. Her actions are ones that any independent or rebellious teen can admire. Wharton also had the courage to pursue a career as a writer at a time when it was not respectable for a woman to write. By winning a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, she made the writing profession a respectable one for women to pursue.

I found Wooldridge's writing to be clear and engaging. It's clear that she respects Wharton, imperfections and all. The many photographs of her and her beloved bachelor friends and dogs are interesting, and well-captioned. There's nothing fancy about the design of the book, but the paper is high quality, the fonts look nice, and it's just the right size (not too big, not too small).

The book is well-researched, drawing from university archives, Wharton's body of work, and other biographies. The back end materials include source notes, a bibliography, a list of Wharton's works, and an index. I found the index to be very helpful whenever I needed to refresh myself on one of Wharton's many bachelor friends. The abbreviations used in the source notes confused me at first. It seems like there should have been an easier way to keep the length of the note citations manageable without resorting to two pages of abbreviations. The arrangement works well enough, but is a bit clunky.

I think the highest praise I can give The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton is that I'm actually interested, for the first time in my life, in reading Wharton for myself.

Under A Red Sky

Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania
by Haya Leah Molnar
320 pages
Farrar Straus Giroux

Publisher's description:

Eva Zimmermann is eight years old, and she has just discovered she is Jewish. Such is the life of an only child living in postwar Bucharest, a city that is changing in ever more frightening ways. Eva’s family, full of eccentric and opinionated adults, will do absolutely anything to keep her safe—even if it means hiding her identity from her. With razor-sharp depictions of her animated relatives, Haya Leah Molnar’s memoir of her childhood captures with touching precocity the very adult realities of living behind the iron curtain.

My comments:

Aside from poetry, memoirs may be the most slippery of the nonfiction genres. James Frey's embellished truths and outright lies may have been relatively easy to sniff out in modern America, but who's to know how much of Eva Zimmerman/Haya Leah Molnar's childhood in 1950s Romania is true? She is upfront about the challenges in piecing a book together from her memories in her author's note at the beginning of the book. "The story is filtered through my memory," she writes, and also, "this is not a journalist's rendition of historical events but my personal story about growing up." Some names have been changed to protect people's privacy, and some conversations have been re-imagined, but the "essence" is true.

Her candor is evident throughout her story, which has no clear villains and few hugely dramatic events. Instead, she relies on the color provided by her family members (she grows up as the only child in a house filled with adults) and the quietly dramatic revelations that unfold over time. If there is a villain in the story, then it is the unseen, uncaring government bureaucracy which looms as a constant threat to her family's well-being.

The trials of Eva's childhoods include many that most anyone can identify with, like trying to fit in at school when you are different, getting along with family members who can be affectionate but rude, frustration at not understanding religion or your parents and worrying when your parents are unemployed. Others, like not being allowed to leave the country and not being allowed to take your possessions when you are allowed to leave, may tap in to the imaginations of those who read to experience circumstances far removed from their own.

Eva's father was a filmmaker and photographer, and several of his family photographs appear in a section towards the back of the book, strengthening her account. She doesn't just include them as window-dressing, but ingeniously incorporates them fully into her memories, telling the stories of how the photographs came to be so that when I saw the pictures, I said, for instance, "Aha! That is how she looked on her first day or school!"

I felt that the story ended a little too abruptly with the family's arrival in Israel. There are photographs of Eva's parents' vacation in their first car, and a self-portrait of her father as they immigrate to America. However, I was disappointed to find that the stories behind these photographs are not included in the book. Perhaps a second volume that covers her life in Israel and America is in the works? It's one that I would find worth reading.

Your comments?

Discussion & Mock Vote: December 2

Everybody is invited to a YA nonfiction book discussion on Thursday, December 2. It will be held at the Center for Teaching Through Children's Books of National-Louis University in Skokie, IL.

Address:
5202 Old Orchard Road, Suite 300
Skokie, Illinois 60077
Phone: 224.233.2288

Click here for a map.

The event is scheduled for 4:00-6:00pm. From 4:00-4:30 will be time to introduce ourselves, grab some refreshments and get settled. The discussion will take place 4:30-6:00, with a mock vote at the end.

I've made up a short "recommended" reading list for the discussion:

Borrowed Names by Jeannine Atkins
Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot by Sy Montgomery
Sir Charlie: Chaplin, the Funniest Man in the World by Sid Fleischman
They Called Themselves the KKK by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie by Tanya Lee Stone
Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing by Ann Angel

Everyone who attends is also encouraged to bring their own favorites to discuss. All nonfiction published for young adults between November 2009 and October 31 of this year is eligible for the award. One very interesting title that seems to have just missed this deadline is Sugar Changed the World by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos - I believe it will be eligible next year.

Please spread the word! If you are unable to attend, but want to participate, then please post comments here. I will share all of your comments during the face-to-face discussion on December 2.