Category Archives: Review

Play Review
A Chorus Line
Playhouse in the Park

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This is no more about an actual play than was my most recent Play Review post. That post ostensibly concerned Company, a musical with six Tony Awards and a cast of fourteen. The musical in this post’s title won ten Tonys and has a cast of twenty-six. That previous post was really about the production company. Both posts involved theaters I was entering for the first time, and the theater is what this post is really about.

I’ve attended many performances at Playhouse in the Park but I entered The Rouse Theater for the first time Tuesday because it is brand new. As the heart of a $50 million project, it replaces the aging Marx Theater with a fully ADA-accessible facility. Many improvements, such as dressing and rehearsal rooms, do not involve the performance space. Others, including a fly gallery and an area below the stage, do but are still out of the audience’s view. A luxury lounge and upper-level restrooms are among the things yet to be completed.

The picture at right shows the view from my seat in the very last row of the balcony. Not too shabby in my opinion. A Chorus Line is the first production in the new theater. Apparently, the official opening night is Thursday with performances on Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday being called previews. The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place on Monday which makes the whole sequence kind of confusing to me. I guess that’s show business.

ADDENDUM 15-Mar-2023: It will not surprise anyone when I acknowledge that attending a play and posting even a slim and shallow review of it the next morning is something of a challenge. The photo at left is one that I simply forgot I had. It was taken as I approached the Playhouse on Art Museum Drive and shows how the new theater is now a real presence beyond its hilltop plateau. I fully intended to somehow include a reference to last year’s Getting Springy in Cincy post but it became just another thing I forgot. Scroll to the bottom for a couple of pictures of the under-construction theater taken nearly a year ago and one from my last time inside the Marx Theater taken on the same day.

Play Review
Company
Loveland Stage Company

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Loveland’s got Talent! Rest assured that I’m not going to review the actual play. Company has been around since 1970 and won six Tony Awards after being nominated for fourteen. It is a collaboration between George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim did the words and music and he’s won eight Tonys himself. Nope. I’ll not be reviewing that. In fact, I’m not even reviewing this particular production nearly as much as I am praising the company behind it and severely chastising myself for missing out on something this cool for so long.

Loveland Stage Company is community theater. The community it belongs to is centered on a town of 13,000 or so. That’s not the entirety of their talent pool, of course. The area is well populated. Downtown Cincinnati is less than twenty miles from the theater. That 13,000 is clearly not an absolute limit but it does indicate that a limit does exist. Had I been the least bit familiar with Company before Sunday afternoon, I would probably have predicted a straining of the pool. There are fourteen parts. Fourteen speaking, singing, and dancing parts. In my mind, that seems like an awful lot of amateur talent to pull together from my neighborhood. It was — an awful lot of talent. It didn’t — strain the pool. All fourteen roles were filled with extremely capable actors plus extremely capable musicians filled the hidden nine-piece orchestra.

As I write this, I regret that I left my program behind. I often, but not always, do that at other theaters and I thought that was even more appropriate here than at those pro and semi-pro operations. The program contained interesting biographies of all the cast and orchestra members. I assumed that that information would be available online but it is not. An online “Prompter” does identify all cast members but there are no biographies. Orchestra members are not identified.

Maybe that’s just as well. With those biographies at hand, I would be tempted to focus on individuals and this was about as much of an ensemble performance as I’ve seen. Everyone on that stage held the spotlight at multiple points throughout the play and everyone delivered. This was probably a pretty good vehicle for a first look at LSC. It let me appreciate the entire operation and made it apparent that there is considerable talent in every piece of it. That impression started with the friendly and helpful ladies at the ticket counter and continued as I listened to the folks managing the lighting and the sound from a stage full of individually miced actors and all those musicians behind the screen. The set itself did a nice job of keeping focus in the right place while often having more than a dozen potential speakers in view.

My appreciation certainly extends to the two ladies at stage right who signed the entire performance. My impression is that every play mounted by LSC offers American Sign Language for at least one performance although I’m not entirely sure of that.

Loveland Stage Company was founded in 1979. I lived inside Loveland city limits from about 1981 to 1997. I visited the town frequently before I physically moved there and visit even more frequently now that I’ve moved a few miles away. I have driven by the LSC theater perhaps hundreds of times. I have seen many interesting titles displayed on that marquee. That I’d not previously been inside is both inexplicable and inexcusable. The performance I saw Sunday compares favorably with some I’ve seen in downtown Cincinnati. Walkable restaurants around LSC also compare favorably with those around the downtown theaters and the parking is cheaper. There’s some Shakespeare (Twelfth Night) coming up at LSC in a couple of months which I hope to catch. I’m also quite curious about what next season will bring.

Company continues through Match 19.

Book Review
Lost Treasures of Cincinnati
Amy E. Brownlee

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Amy E. Brownlee is a lifelong Cincinnatian. She naturally learned a lot about the city growing up here then used that knowledge and added much more during her ten years at Cincinnati Magazine. An awful lot of the treasures she writes about in Lost Treasures of Cincinnati were lost before she arrived but a rather frightening number have disappeared during her lifetime. Of course, an even larger number have disappeared during mine. Neither of us is responsible for that. I swear it’s coincidence pure and simple.

Lost Treasures of Cincinnati contains five major sections with several sub-sections in each. Most pages are split between two different lost treasures although more than a few treasures get a page all to themselves. Most descriptions are accompanied by images and these are usually of the actual treasure but there are exceptions to both. I believe that each treasure is described in a single paragraph although it is possible that an exception or two escaped me.

The book opens with “Food and Drink” in Section 1 then covers “Entertainment” and “Retail” in the next two sections. The smallest section, “Media”, is followed by the largest, “Community”. Definitions for those section titles are not particularly rigid and the size of the “Community” section probably indicates that it is the least rigid of all. It is where things like churches and breweries, of which Cincinnati had more than a few, appear.

Most, but not quite all, of the breweries mentioned in the book were gone before I got here. Likewise with restaurants and attractions which together comprise the biggest part of things that have disappeared during my lifetime. I caught one show, Hair, at the Shubert (“Entertainment”) before it was torn down. I also saw one movie at the Albee (“Entertainment”) but I don’t remember what it was. I had one meal each at The Gourmet Room and the Maisonette (“Food and Drink”) before they closed. There are quite a few places in this book where I ate one or more meals or watched one or more movies, plays, games, or concerts. Encountering each of them on these pages prompted memories that went way beyond the single paragraph of text. Reading about places that were already gone when I came to Cincinnati didn’t prompt any memories, of course, but it did make me appreciate just how many treasures have been lost.

I really enjoyed reading Lost Treasures of Cincinnati cover-to-cover front-to-back but as I did, two other ways of reading the book came to mind. With its fairly short standalone essays, it seems like a natural fit for that popular personal reading room with the porcelain furniture. Its use as a reference book also seems rather natural. I don’t mean an every-last-detail reference book to use in conducting deep-dive research but a great place to answer questions like “What was the name of that boat-shaped restaurant?” or “What happened to our NBA team?”. The full index will help the book play that role.

Lost Treasures of Cincinnati, Any E. Brownlee, Reedy Press (October 1, 2022), 6 x 9 inches, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1681063263
Available through Amazon.

Product Review
Route 66 Navigation
by Touch Media

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Those who have read some of my writings on various routing devices are probably aware of my frustration at almost all of these devices being concerned with reaching a point with absolutely no consideration for following a specific path to get there. It’s a sad situation that has only gotten worse. Garmin continues to make models that support this to some degree but they are pricy and, in my opinion, not exactly ideal. A company named River Pilot Tours once offered a turn-by-turn guide to Route 66 (reviewed here) that worked with certain Garmin models but gave it up when compatibility issues appeared with newer Garmin products. MAD Maps once offered a selection of guides that worked with those same Garmin products to provide turn-by-turn directions. When newer Garmin products caused problems, they were dropped and plans announced to replace them with guides for smartphones.

I was kind of excited when Touch Media announced this Route 66 Navigation app in early 2018. Combined with MAD Maps’ smartphone plans, it made me think that I might soon be able to use my phone for the sort of path following that most dedicated GPS receivers weren’t very good at. But I couldn’t check out Touch Media’s product myself since it required being on the route and MAD Maps products required waiting. Then the COVID-19 pandemic pushed aside most travel and any chance to test the Route 66 Navigation app. Maybe it also pushed aside MAD Maps app development. Something did. The MAD Maps website still mentions “apps for iPhone and Android platforms (Fall 2021)” but I can find no product listed in Google’s Play Store.

There were a couple of near misses and at least one false start but I finally got to give Touch Media’s Route 66 Navigation a try during my 2022 Christmas MOP trip. A winter storm interfered a bit with my plans so I made my trial headed northeast rather than southwest as intended. That really didn’t matter since the app supports travel in either direction. I began with a drive from Tulsa, OK, to Carthage, MO. The app offers two alignments and I went with the recommended “A” alignment. This appears to be the more “mainstream” of the two. The app uses current position and selected direction to determine a list of cities from which to pick start and end points.

The route appears as a line on the map and it is never recalculated. That was my first real evidence that this product might be different from the rest. A circular green pointer tracks current position in real-time. The next driving instruction is displayed at the top of the screen along with its distance. Each instruction is announced vocally immediately after completing the one previous and at various points that follow. A final “Now turn left” or something similar is spoken with just enough time to complete the maneuver provided you are in the correct lane. These vocal instructions are quite important to me since I mostly travel alone. My phone or GPS receiver fills the role of navigator without arguing about turning back to photograph an old barn, complaining about me making the same wrong turn three times in a row, or decimating my snack supply.

There is a gap in the app’s audible offerings that I think is kind of serious. It has knowledge of somewhere around a thousand points of interest along the historic highway. A visual notification appears when one of them comes near. That’s useful if you’re actually watching the phone but is almost always missed if you’re watching something else like the road. A spoken name or other identifier would be wonderful but even a simple beep, which is what the River Pilot Tours Garmin app did, would be enough. In fact, I initially thought that the beep I heard occasionally might be a POI alert but was unable to associate it with actual attractions. I eventually learned that it is a speed limit alert than can be disabled.

Of course, that brief visual announcement is not the only way to learn of POIs. Markers for them are displayed on the map and there is a list organized by state. Details, such as those shown for Gay Parita, are accessed by clicking a marker or list entry and are available whether or not you are anywhere near Route 66. Navigating directly to a POI can be initiated from its detail page.

For me, how the navigation aspect of the app behaves when a traveler veers off of the route is arguably the most important question related to this product. Although veering off route is something I did many times (both intentionally and not), I somehow failed to grab a single screenshot of it. The short description is that it does pretty much what I think it should. For starters, it does not recalculate the main path. The line that represents Historic Route 66 remains in place. The app automatically calculates a path back to the nearest point on that line. This secondary path is constantly recalculated — as turns are missed and the nearest on-route point changes — until you are back on course. Excellent!

There is much to this product that I haven’t explored or even touched on. I don’t even know for certain that my biggest negative, the lack of audible POI alerts, isn’t solvable by some setting that I haven’t found. I do know that the answer to my biggest question is yes. Yes, Route 66 Navigation will keep you on course along Historic Route 66. It will do it in both directions and will let you choose between a recommended and alternative path for your travels. Of course, there are many more than two possible paths on Route 66 and it is really impossible for any guide to offer them all. Identifying every possible point of interest is also near impossible and I can’t say for sure that one or more haven’t been missed. But the version I have installed lists 1,154 so it couldn’t have left out very many. Each entry contains a photo, a description, the location, and contact information if appropriate. The Touch Media staff has done an impressive job in pulling all this information together and Route 66 authority Jim Hinckley has supplied much of the descriptive text. In another stick-with-the-experts move, the RSS feed from Ron Warnick’s Route 66 News is used for the app’s own news section.

The app can be downloaded free from Apple’s App Store or Google Play and many of its features accessed at no cost. However, access to its real reason for existing, real-time navigation, requires a paid subscription. Because I have an active subscription, I cannot currently see the in-app pricing but do know that I paid $30.09 for a one-year Android subscription. Online sources show varying rates but all are somewhere around $20/week or $40/year. The price has triggered some negative comments and the fact that it is a subscription has triggered even more. Some of those comments are from people who think that all things digital should be free because no steel, gold, or vinyl is physically transferred. Those can be completely ignored.

I’m no different than most folks in instinctively preferring a one-time purchase over a subscription but I also understand that the purchase model might not be the best for products subject to frequent changes from outside sources. Route 66 Navigation is clearly one of those products. Over time, businesses and roads open and close, and reflecting the real world is key to this app’s value. Although “subscription” is an accurate label, thinking of Route 66 Navigation’s period-based payments as “rent” might work better for some people. Many Route 66 travelers rent vehicles for the trip. Renting or hiring a guide is not terribly different.

Regarding the price, everyone has to evaluate that for themselves. For this solo traveler, having a reliable navigator tell me when and where to turn without criticizing my driving or raiding my cooler is nearly priceless. I personally think Route 66 Navigation is priced right. Now, if I only had a way to make my phone behave similarly for routes I’ve plotted myself, I could ditch my Garmin or at least get by with a cheaper one. 

Book Review
Cincinnati Curiosities
Greg Hand

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Greg Hand has been a man of letters — or at least a man of words — his entire adult life. He began as a newspaper reporter, moved up to editor, left to head up a university PR department, co-authored three books about the university while he was there, then retired. I was not even slightly aware of any of this as it was happening. I only became aware of Hand’s existence when I stumbled upon the blog he started post-retirement. His knowledge of local history and ability to dig up information to augment that knowledge was immediately apparent and I’ve been an ardent reader of that blog ever since that happy discovery. The blog’s name is Cincinnati Curiosities and it can be found here. That the blog would lead to a book by the same name seems pretty natural.

The book borrows more than its name from the blog. I recognize some of the book’s subjects from the blog and I suppose it’s possible that all have appeared there although I don’t believe that’s the case. Of course, there is a good chance that any topics appearing for the first time in the book will show up in the blog sometime in the future.

Cincinnati Curiosities (the book) begins with a definition of Cincinnati taken from Urban Dictionary. When I visited the source, I discovered that the definition was just one of more than forty that individuals have contributed. Most are simply excuses for hurling insults rife with misspellings and such but a few, including the one that Hand chose, make some attempt at being insightful. The Hand-picked quote begins, “A pleasantly bland and annoyingly conservative city…” Although there are some that disagree, I believe that’s a fair representation of the view that most non-residents (and many residents) have of Cincinnati. Hand goes so far as to state that, “We deserve this reputation.” Then, after agreeing that Cincinnati’s “bland” reputation is probably justified, he proceeds to show us that it wasn’t always so.

In fact, later in the book, Hand offers another very different capsulated view of the city. On December 12, 1890, he tells us, “The Palace Hotel had elephant steak on the menu because an elephant was executed by firing squad that morning at the Cincinnati Zoo. Hundreds of people watched. That pretty much summarizes Cincinnati in 1890.”

The book is not just some blog posts strung together. There are, in my opinion, two big differences between blog and book. One is simply the physical difference between holding a book and flipping through pages versus scrolling through items on a screen. The second is grouping. The book organizes the writings in groups so that a subject can be looked at from multiple angles or related stories can be read as a collection. The previous comment about the well-attended elephant shooting begins the chapter titled “The Sensational and the Senseless”. In addition to the tale of a pachyderm’s public demise, the chapter tells of the zoo’s annual Butcher’s Day, people leaping from bridges for profit, musclemen demonstrating feats of strength, and other assorted entertainments.

“The Sensational and the Senseless” is the fourth of ten chapters. Other chapters tell of monsters in the Ohio River (“The Old Weird Cincinnati”), Fanny Trollope’s visit during the “Porkoplis” period (“Tales From the Old City”), the possibility that striptease was invented in Cincinnati (“Freaks, Flesh, and Footlights”), and a large variety of other topics. The striptease claim is based on Millie De Leon’s orchestrated removal of several garters in 1901, and Hand cites the claim in suggesting that a Striptease Hall of Fame might be an “appropriate addition to our Over-the-Rhine neighborhood”. 

Hand’s usually light-hearted reports are often accompanied by contemporary illustrations. At left is a Pears Soap advertisement based on Lillie Langtry’s famous bath in Apollinaris water at Cincinnati’s Grand Hotel in 1883. It’s in the chapter titled “Nudity, Naughtness, and Negotiable Affection”, and if that doesn’t get you interested in the book I don’t know what will.

In addition to authoring this book and the aforementioned blog, Mr. Hand is a founder and mainstay of Stand-Up History which I reported on here. His stand-up presentations typically also fit in the Cincinnati Curiosities category. In a wonderful coincidence, the troupe is appearing at Muse Cafe on the same day that this review is being published. In a not-wonderful coincidence, I am committed to doing something else at the exact same time. Happily (for you, not me), my absence will mean more room for attendees. There is more info here.

Cincinnati Curiosities: Healing Powers of the Wamsley Madstone, Nocturnal Exploits of Old Man Dead, Mazeppa’s Naked Ride & More, Greg Hand, The History Press (November 14, 2022), 6 x 9 inches, 160 pages, ISBN 978-1467152822
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Red Dirt Girl
Katie Laur

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This was one of the most flat-out enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time. I have seen Katie perform many times, heard her talk on the radio several times, and even chatted with her personally a few times. I knew her as a talented musician and entertaining storyteller but I did not know her as a writer. Others, it seems, have been aware of Laur’s writing skills for some time. It’s my impression that nothing other than the foreword, an introduction, and Katie’s acknowledgments was written specifically for this book. In one of the book’s essays, Katie talks of selling her writing and says she sold everything she wrote. From that, I assume that each of the essays and stories that make up Red Dirt Girl has previously appeared in print somewhere. Where I don’t know and regret that where ever it was, it was outside my field of vision. That I am only now seeing the literary side of Katie is very much my loss. This gal can write.

She writes about growing up in Tennessee, Michigan, and Alabama and the family and music that was so important to her. She writes about the Cincinnati music scene, and many other scenes in the city too. She writes about life as a touring musician traveling by van to regional bluegrass festivals and national radio shows. She writes about staking out her own spot on radio with nearly three decades of Music From The Hills Of Home. And she writes about all of those things with insights that show she was never just singing or talking; she was also listening and watching.

Laur and I arrived in Cincinnati within a year or so of each other so I’m familiar with many of the people and places she writes about. I remember Caledonia, Mister Spoons, and Johnny Rosebud. I remember Aunt Maudie’s (where I almost certainly first saw Katie perform) and the still-thriving Arnold’s. But I remember these things as a customer or audience member while Katie remembers them as an insider. Her memories not only wake up some of my own but also augment them and maybe make me appreciate them even more.

She also writes about people and places I’ve had no personal contact with at all. In fact, that applies to most of the book’s subjects. While those writings don’t awaken any of my own memories, they are every bit as entertaining as those that do and more educational too.

Being a resident of southwest Ohio during the last third of the twentieth century certainly makes some of the subjects of the stories more familiar but I don’t know that it makes any of the stories better. Laur made her living as a musician so a goodly portion of the book’s content is music related but far from all of it. Bluegrass was her forte so many of the writings that are music related concern bluegrass musicians, venues, and festivals — but far from all of them. I’m fairly confident that reading this book will be flat-out enjoyable no matter where you live and even if you’re not a fan of bluegrass or any other sort of music. Of course, if you did spend some of the last four or five decades in or near Cincinnati and are a bluegrass musician or maybe even a bluegrass fan, you just might be in the book.

Red Dirt Girl: Essays and Stories, Katie Laur, Orange Frazer Press (2022), 6 x 9 inches, 309 pages, ISBN 978-1949248-593

Available direct from the publisher, Orange Fraser Press, and at local bookstores, Iris Book Cafe and Urban Eden.

Play Review
Every Christmas Story Ever Told
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company

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At just seventeen years of age, I don’t doubt that some will take issue with me calling this a tradition but that’s how I see it. Starting in 2006, the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company has mounted a production of Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) every year except COVID-ravaged 2020. CSC was not the first group to perform the play. That honor belongs to Cape May Stage in Cape May, NJ, which did the play in 2003. Apparently, there were no performances in 2004 then Cape May Stage and two other companies gave it life in 2005. Cape May Stage’s third and final production took place the same year as CSC’s first which means Cincinnati’s sixteen years of performances is the record.

I don’t know when I first became aware of it but it’s certainly been a while, and I long ago read enough about it to think it was something I would enjoy. Yet I somehow had not attended a single performance until this year. They clearly didn’t miss me. This very non-Shakespearean comedy has risen from its very humble beginnings in a downtown bar to become the most popular offering in CSC’s history.

That downtown bar was Arnold’s where the small stage in the courtyard normally might hold a musician or two. The most theatrical things I’ve ever seen there are Reds opening day readings of Casey at the Bat or Who’s On First. I am sure sorry that I missed that first performance and sorry I also missed the next fifteen years even though I don’t know where they took place. I do know, however, one of the actors that appeared in every one of them and this year’s production too. Justin McCombs has been in the cast from the beginning and with the same red Christmas sweater. Other 2022 cast members are Geoffrey Warren Barnes II, Colleen Dougherty, and Candice Handy.

Justin, Geoffrey, and Candice play characters named Justin, Geoffrey/Geoff, and Candice/Candy. Colleen plays Santa Clause who sometimes participates in the action center stage and at other times wisecracks from a stageside sleigh she slowly fills with empty beer — or maybe it’s hard seltzer — cans.

Following some opening remarks from Santa, Candy begins A Christmas Carol but Geoff and Austin aren’t having it. They’ve seen and performed the Charles Dickens story more than enough times and convince her to do every other Christmas story instead. She frequently attempts to return to the original plan with a somber “Marley was dead” but even more frequently participates in whatever story or stories are the focus of the moment.

As one online reviewer somewhat comically (IMO) complains, they don’t really tell EVERY Christmas story but they sure tell a bunch or at least little bits of them. And they sing bits of a bunch of Christmas carols and describe (none too accurately) a bunch of Christmas traditions from around the world. There’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and a ton of others and all are lovingly skewered. To deliver all those stories, Justin, Geoff, and Candy must each fill dozens of roles and they do so wonderfully. For the audience, identifying each character and story is a large part of the fun. Sometimes the roles are coordinated and sometimes things are something of a smash-up like when Clarence the guardian angel visits Ebenezer Scrouge. The script has obviously been updated over the years to include references to current events. This time around, Ye appears as a spokesperson for fruitcake and Santa admits to buying up all of the Taylor Swift tickets.

Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) runs through the end of the year (2024 link here) and can provide some real laughs during a time that can be really stressful to some. Of course, those laughs will only come if you don’t take yourself or your Christmas classics too seriously. I did not see an official age requirement but maybe there should be one. Adult topics and humor are sprinkled about along with the tinsel and fake snow.

Playscripts handles licensing for this play and many others. It is where I learned of that first production in Cape May and other details. Most of what I learned there was not at all surprising but one accidental discovery was. The website provides full production history and allows it to be filtered by state. I filtered it by Ohio in order to more easily check Cincinnati’s history and was surprised to see my high school alma mater on the list. The Drama Club of Ansonia High School, which even now has just over 200 students, performed the play in 2014.

Book Review
Omar
Craig O. Thompson

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This makes two consecutive book reviews that are seriously belated and that’s hardly their only connection. I wasn’t even aware of either the book or its author when I arrived at the 2022 Lincoln Highway Association conference but, John Jackson, co-author of that other book, was. More importantly, John was aware that Thompson was at the conference to get some insight into the days of named auto trails. He is working on a book based on the true story of a 1920s medical emergency that involved the Yellowstone Trail. John was also aware that I had recently traveled the Yellowstone Trail and he intended to get the two of us together at the conference. John wasn’t actually present when Thompson and I first met but, because of his earlier comments to both of us, no introduction was required when we found ourselves sitting at the same table for a presentation.

I know I’ve mentioned before that I do not read much fiction these days so it is unlikely I would have stumbled across Omar on my own. Thompson and I had several discussions about the Yellowstone Trail and early automobile travel in general, and that gave me the personal connection that made me want to start reading the book. The book itself made me not want to quit once I had started. It’s a page-turner of the first order.

By simplifying the plot to a ridiculous degree I can describe it as a race between terrorists and government agencies to reach a treasure. The treasure isn’t a simple stash of cash or gold bars but an exquisitely bound book that went down with the Titanic. Those elements alone bring bookbinding, deep sea exploration, and maritime law into the mix. Toss in an airport bombing, high-speed shoot-outs, kidnapping, and some professional rivalry and betrayal and there are enough plot threads to all but assure at least one is left dangling suspensefully every page or so.

And the bookbinding and sea exploring aspects are not dismissed with a few words of awe and wonder. They are covered with some serious discussion of craft, technology, and even a little chemistry.

I started this review with an admission of being late to the game but I’m not just a little late; I’m over twenty years late. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing is mentioned a few times in this book as an example of a major terrorist attack. It surely loomed large in Thompson’s mind as he constructed this novel in the latter half of the 1990s. On the day that Omar was published, August 1, 2001, people knew that terrorism on the scale Thompson describes was possible but not many thought it likely. Less than a month and a half later we knew better.

Omar Craig O. Thompson, StrataGem Press (August 1, 2001), 5.25 x 8.25 inches, 624 pages, ISBN 978-0967520711
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Trail of Trees
John and Joyce Jackson

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I have probably known John Jackson for nearly ten years. John was instrumental in establishing the Lincoln Highway association’s “Bernie Queneau Coast-To-Coast Lincoln Highway Recognition Award” in 2014, and I know we met while he was actively working on that. Maybe before. He has continued to be quite active in the LHA including serving presently as treasurer. Several standout articles written by him have appeared in the association’s official publication, The Forum.

I realize that by telling you all of this, I’m really spotlighting just how late I am to digging into Trail of Trees. The book had existed for at least a couple of years before I met John and the events it tells of happened a decade or more before that. I think I may have heard something about John and his wife Joyce planting some trees but I’m not certain even of that. l am certain that what I heard — if anything — did not reveal that “some trees” equaled 252 and the planting involved all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

This book is important because the project it documents is important. It started as something to occupy Joyce’s mind as she underwent chemotherapy. That’s pretty important, of course, but the project soon grew to involve her immediate and extended family and small groups of strangers in every corner of the country. Some of those strangers were involved ever so briefly and no deeper than their official positions required while others took wholeheartedly to their piece of the project and stayed in contact with the Jacksons far beyond the day of planting and the planning that preceded it.

In terms of time, I’ve little doubt that planning was the biggest part of the project. The concept is deceptively easy to describe: plant some trees at a place with a Jackson connection in every state. But just identifying those places was far from easy. Sure, many states have a city named Jackson and there are a couple of Jacksonvilles but others seem to contain not even a hint of Jackson. There Joyce had to get creative and tie in the names of their children for plantings at places with names like Christina River, Robertsville, and Stevens Village. The names Joyce and John also got pulled into the mix.

Of course, picking a location was just the beginning. They weren’t the only challenges facing the Jacksons but finding someone in the area to coordinate with, scheduling travel, and arranging for the actual trees to be planted were the biggest. They tried to arrange plantings in clusters to get the most out of long trips and, of course, they had to schedule those plantings around all their normal real-life requirements. It’s an impressive accomplishment.

The book contains no huge surprises in the normal sense. The Jacksons set out to plant trees in fifty states and they succeed. On the other hand, I was somewhat surprised at how much I enjoyed reading it. The plantings are covered in individual chapters in chronological sequence. In addition to details of the actual planting and the leadup to it, the chapters typically include background information on the town or area including its history. Sometimes reaching a site was as simple as driving there from their home but more often it involved flying and renting a car big enough to hold five, ten, or fifteen trees. In Alaska, the final leg of the trip was by boat. There’s a little travelogue in every chapter.

The original ten-year target — which was met — is an indication of the project’s size. Its complexity is hinted at by the schedule and travel challenges I’ve mentioned. There really isn’t a similarly simple indicator of its long-term impact but a sense of that is available to some of us by thinking of trees planted by previous generations of our own families. There are trees planted by my father and grandfather without ceremony that can stir up memories. Imagine the memories connected with 252 trees whose planting involved thousands of miles and hundreds of people. It is, for certain, a legacy.

Of all those trees, only five were known to have perished by the time this book was published. Embarrassingly, those were the trees in Ohio, my home state and the Jackson’s current residence. I checked with John after reading the book and learned that they managed to get the trees replaced after moving to Ohio. That’s great news but I’m still embarrassed.

Trail of Trees, John and Joyce Jackson, Printing Arts Press (October 2010), 8.5 x 11 inches, 261 pages, ISBN 978-0615397146
Available through Amazon.

Book Review
Square Photographs
Jim Grey

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In my unprofessional and biased opinion, this book represents what Jim Grey does best. I believe it is his fifth book. It is the fourth that I’ve reviewed. Although I enjoyed reading the collection of essays entitled “A Place to Start” when I sat down to write a review I just couldn’t figure out what to say. I did review Grey’s most recent offering, “Vinyl Village“, and deemed it a success in accomplishing its mission. That mission was to tell the story of a subdivision in pictures. I noted in that review what I thought was one of the biggest differences between “Vinyl Village” and the two earlier books, “Exceptional Ordinary” and “Textures of Ireland“. Each photograph in the first two books could be appreciated all by itself; few if any in “Vinyl Village” could stand alone. That’s not a bad thing and it’s not an accident. The goal was to tell a story in pictures and it makes sense that all the pictures are required to tell all of the story. It does, however, serve to explain why I like this and the first two books best. I said up front that my opinion is biased.

“Square Photographs” contains forty photographs that are capable of standing alone. All were taken with one of two 1960s Yashica twin-lens-reflex cameras in Grey’s collection. These are medium format cameras using 120 film to produce 60 mm by 60 mm negatives. I’m guessing that I don’t really have to explain where the book gets its name. Cameras that produce square images were once fairly common but are quite rare today. Smartphone cameras, the most common of all, typically record images with a 4:3 ratio.

The book is organized so that all photos are on the right-hand page and of a uniform size that essentially fills the square page. Text that varies from a couple of lines to several paragraphs is on the left. It might describe the picture, share some facts about the subject, or share something personal related to the image. The bottom line of text always identifies the camera and film that produced the image. Putting a squarish subject in the center of a photograph yields a pleasing image with a background balanced both vertically and horizontally. “Square Photographs” contains several such images.

Of course, not every subject is square or even symmetric. Composition techniques different than those used for rectangular photos can come into play. As Grey explains in the brief introduction, the 1:1 ratio is familiar to him from some of the cameras of his youth but for the rest of us, it might seem a little unusual.

The pictures are almost evenly split between color and B&W. The copy I have is printed using the highest quality paper and ink available from Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) and I think it looks great. However, an even higher quality version is available from MagCloud.

“Vinyl Village” was the first photo-centric book that Jim published through Amazon. I thought the quality more than sufficient for the task. Others, apparently, did not. I certainly appreciate the increased image quality of this printing and don’t doubt that the deluxe edition is worth the additional cost but sure don’t see any reason for what I sense are some feelings of guilt associated with “Vinyl Village”. In this book, where the photos are the product, the additional cost is justified. Not so, in my opinion, for B&W pictures illustrating a story.

I first heard of this project when it was still in the planning stages. In the time between then and its recent completion, I’ve realized that, despite the lack of cameras that produce them, square images aren’t as alien to us as I first thought. One example is Facebook’s profile pictures. Another is Instagram which initially supported only square photos. I understand that other form factors are now allowed but I still square my submissions — when I remember. The reason I started doing that was because some software would blindly chop out a square in the very center if I didn’t and that was rarely the best square to be had. I’m sure there are other examples.

I’m used to squaring rectangular pictures. For this blog, thumbnails are simply automatically created scaled-down replicas of the full-size rectangles but for the journal portion of the website, thumbnails are square. It’s something I’ve never mentioned and something I doubt anyone has noticed. If so, they’ve not mentioned it. For the first journal, I extracted odd portions of photos for thumbnails but that was tedious and not well received. I very quickly moved to 72×72 pixel squares which became 100×100 pixel squares by the fifth documented trip and there it remains. Occasionally I’ve thought of adopting automatically shrunken rectangles but the squares allow me to get more of them in a given screen area and producing them is good mental exercise.

The standard edition of “Square Photographs”, like the one I have, can be obtained through the Amazon link at the bottom of this article. Links to both the standard and deluxe editions as well as some additional information can be found here.

Square Photographs, Jim Grey, Midnight Star Press (June 12, 2022), 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 86 pages, ISBN 979-8835769872
Available through Amazon.