Poetry Alive!®

At 4:00, Tuesday, April 1, 2008, the touring troupe of Poetry Alive!® will again bring their performance skill to our library. The performance is a fun one and might jump-start an interest in poetry in any of the adults and children who attend.

This is what they have to say about themselves:

WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT POETRY ALIVE?

We are a Poetry Company. Using the rich heritage of the bardic tradition of long ago, we bring high-intensity poetry performances into the classroom. The Poetry Alive! actors have memorized hundreds of poems—from the classics to the popular to the contemporary.

Those poems, presented in engaging and memorable ways, become the connection to enhanced reading and writing skills. In short, we bring poetry to life, by engaging students to the learning process. Poetry Alive! has become the reading, writing and performing connection.

Be there or be square.

A single, famous book each

Help me out here. Offer up the names of authors who are known for a single work that became famous and who never published another book. Several come to mind.

• Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, but nothing else that was published. According to Ron Charles there were 50 million copies published. According to Wikipedia Sewell wrote Black Beauty in the last years of her life while confined as an invalid. She died five months after publication, but long enough to see the book succeed.

• To Kill A Mockingbird was Harper Lee's only novel. She is rumored to have a couple of other things written but not published. The film staring Gregory Peck and adapted by Horton Foote, is a perennial favorite and an Oscar winner for Peck. I use this book as the 'starter' for book discussion groups as it seems easy for most people to relate to and to talk about. The story resonates for nearly everyone for some reason. Lee is also known as the research assistant to Truman Capote during the time he wrote In Cold Blood although he did not credit her for that.

• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell has sales of about 28 million copies and is the only novel published by Mitchell in her lifetime. The book won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for literature and won a record number of Oscars.

Do you know of any other entries in this odd category?

The Fifth In A Series of Mysteries

Bill Powell, writing in Time's The China Blog, recommends Red Mandarin Dress and compares Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen to Martin Cruz Smith's Arkday Renko stories.

Red Mandarin Dress, An Inspector Chen Novel by Qiu Xiaolong is now on the shelves. It is the fifth book featuring Inspector Chen and set in 1990's Shanghai. The series progression has been:

• Death of a Red Heroine (2000)
• A Loyal Character Dancer* (2002)
• When Red is Black (2004)
• A Case of Two Cities (2006)
• Red Mandarin Dress* (2007)

* Owned by Independence Public Library

Being Chinese and having been born in China, Qiu Xiaolong has the chops to pull back the curtain and reveal to us the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and show us the society that has resulted. Although he now lives and writes in St. Louis, the author was born and raised in Shanghai. As Powell points out in The China Blog, Qiu is writing in English which is his second language.

The Wall Street Journal named his first book, Death of a Red Heroine (2000) one of the five best political novels of all time. Their listing was as follows:

1. The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876)
2. Shelley's Heart by Charles McCarry(1995)
3. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (2000)
4. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941)
5. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

This list is not of my making and is going to force me to take up some dusty books to see what I have missed. At any rate, they have put this newcomer in heady company with his first outing. The novel was also picked as an Edgar Winner for a first novel.

I apologize for letting this one slip by me until now. I for one, look forward to a new (to me) author. We will see about picking up the three that we do not own at this time.

This interview features Qiu Xiaolong talking about Red Mandarin Dress: