Books & Ideas
Paul Karasik takes cartoons seriously. Take a gag cartoon from the vault of Ernie Bushmiller’s much-loved Nancy strip, for instance. The three-panel cartoon is not so much read by Mr. Karasik as absorbed.
In researching The Chappy Ferry Book, author Tom Dunlop asked his fellow Islanders what they thought was the most spectacular thing to hit the boat in its 200 years of operation
“I’ve gotten some good answers: a whale, a meteorite,” Mr. Dunlop said in an interview this week. “To a man and to a woman they stop and stare at me when I say, ‘No, an airplane hit it.’”
On Tuesday, May 22, Jim Thomas takes the helm of the Vineyard Haven Libraries’ Civil War Series. Mr. Thomas’ specialty is slave songs and the underground railroad and he has given musical presentations on spirituals in Germany, Africa, Brazil, Sweden, Austria, and America, not to mention Martha’s Vineyard. He has also served as a soloist with the Paul Hill Chorale and Washington Singers at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and founded the American Red Cross Chorus and has served as its director since 1976.
Margaret Howe Freydberg of Chilmark was 104 in March and celebrated this month with the publication of her 11th book, Cruachan: The Battle Cry of Scottish Chieftains. It is a long short story, originally written many years ago, after her first and only visit to Scotland in the 1950s. Recently, she discovered her old writings while exploring a trunk. Reading over the manuscript, written so long ago as to be the product of a comparatively young woman, she realized the work called for a revision. And so, she emphasizes, the book is not just some old jottings found in a trunk.
It is 128 years since the worst maritime disaster in these waters, yet the story of the sinking of the City of Columbus, one half mile off Aquinnah, gains new life by the release of a book by Thomas Dresser.
Shipwrecks and the events that surround them never seem far from the public eye. Last month, there was observance of the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. And in January, there was the sinking of the 952-foot cruise ship Costa Concordia, a story that is still unfolding.
Alida O’Loughlin is the featured artist this month for the Vineyard Haven Library’s Art of the Stacks program.
Ms. O’Loughlin is a photographer who went public with her calling late in life; she showed her work for the first time when she was over 70 years old. Since then she has made up for lost time and in 2003 won first prize for professional photography in both the landscape and seascape categories at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair.