Summer of Shadows: Jonathan Knight Reading & Book Signing - June 8, 7 p.m.

Columbus author Jonathan Knight will read from his book, Summer of Shadows: A Murder, A Pennant Race, and the Twilight of the Best Location in the Nation, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8.

In Summer of Shadows, Knight highlights a fascinating period in Cleveland, Ohio's history. He recounts the summer of 1954, when the city was gripped by two drastic events: the Cleveland Indians' relentless pursuit of a championship, and the infamous murder of the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard.

That summer, the Indians embarked on one of the finest seasons in baseball history, winning a record one hundred eleven games and toppling the New York Yankees in a heated pennant race. Yet the Indians' glory proved short-lived. Defeated in the World Series by Willie Mays and the New York Giants, the franchise spiraled into a four-decade tailspin.

Meanwhile, in nearby Bay Village, the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard was beaten to death in her own bed on the Fourth of July. The finger of suspicion pointed to her unfaithful husband, particularly when he told of a wild struggle with the real killer. Amid a media frenzy, Sheppard was convicted and then freed a decade later. His story prompted the television series The Fugitive.

According to Knight, these parallel tragedies dragged Cleveland from its lofty standing as one of the most influential cities in America to one of the most jeered and long-suffering.

Knight has published six books on Cleveland sports history, including Classic Tribe: The 50 Greatest Games in Cleveland Indians History. A former sportswriter, he manages communications at Franklin University and lives with his family in Columbus.

A Worker Bee Reviews The Tiger's Wife

Mystery, quest, folktale, poetry. Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife is a novel of superb scope and nuance, told in rich, lyrical prose.

Natalia, a young pediatrician forestalled in mourning her grandfather's death by its strange circumstances, seeks out the story of his final days in a Balkan country still reeling from years of conflict. Traveling to an orphanage in Brejevina with her best friend, Zora, in order to administer innoculations, Natalia meditates on the two folkloric stories entrenched in her grandfather's life: the Tiger's Wife and the Deathless Man. In the present, Natalia's own story takes her to places as deeply embedded in superstition as the characters peopling her grandfather's chimerical tales. Ultimately, Natalia's quest, and her historical research into her grandfather's life and the stories that shaped it, all coalesce to comprise The Tiger's Wife--a truly multi-layered, polysemous achievement.

An added boon to the novel's succulent prose is its perfect yoking to the story's folkloric structure. Obreht's transitions, from Natalia's narrative to her grandfather's twin sagas, are both seamless and stunning. Yet her language, magical though it may be, refrains from turning syrupy; though the novel progresses via shifting narratives--requiring a kind of virtuosic balance--Obreht remains in complete, flawless control of its movement and its imagery.

Tea Obreht is a young author--The Tiger's Wife is her debut novel--born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia. But her age, rather than limiting her wisdom, seems to work as but another strength of the novel. I found her ability to render the war in Yugoslavia digestible absolutely striking. She directly addresses the conflict so infrequently that when it is centralized, the effect is both childlike and trenchant: "The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that formerly represented their respective parts of the whole" (161). Obreht ponders, too, the very nature of conflict: "When your fight has purpose--to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent--it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling--when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored . . . there is nothing but hate" (283). Far from oversimplifying, Obreht's handling of the war through Natalia's account is one of the book's greatest strengths, both on a literary and a human level.

My only quibble with the novel is its occasionally wayward literary experimentation--i.e., a sudden shift to second person, an odd temporal leap, or a penchant for backstory extending even to objects, such as the blacksmith's musket. But it may certainly be argued that these techniques are germane to the novel's content. Also, either the experimental variety lessened as the book progressed . . . or, I was simply too charmed to notice it anymore.

In essence, this is a true delight for the literary reader. Peruse The Tiger's Wife and bask in Obreht's lush descriptions, her folklore on the cusp of magical realism, and remember its sequence of stories as one recalls a vivid dream: green, lush, and strange.

Summer Reading Advisory: My parting bit of advice is to read The Tiger's Wife slowly--it is to be savored--and remember the opinion of the people of Brejevina: " . . . [If] you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly" (98). This book catalogues a murky passage of time, perfect for summer languor. Find a patch of sunshine and sip its words like nectar.

-Emily

Event Cancelled tonight --- Meet the Jacksons! Tuesday 5/17 @ 6:30pm Author of Trail of Trees

Due to a Family Emergency tonight's event has been cancelled.

Meet Joyce & John Jackson---Cancelled
And hear about their 10-year, tree-planting odyssey across America.

While recovering from breast cancer in 1987 Joyce Jackson had an idea to keep her mind off her illness. She wanted to combine her love of trees, travel, and desire to create a living legacy. The Trail of Trees project led her and her husband, John, across America planting trees in every state. Their journey took them to every city named Jackson in all fifty states. Their book recounts their journey, gives some history of all the Jackson cities they encountered and the wonderful people they met along the way.

OWU Modern Foreign Language House Reading

Where else can you hear spoken French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew on a Wednesday afternoon?  Why, Beehive Books, of course!  Thanks to the OWU Modern Foreign Language House for their 2nd Foreign Language Poetry Reading held yesterday at Beehive Books.  Here is a video clip of OWU Professor Don Lateiner reading part of an ode by Horace in Latin http://vimeo.com/22972071

Check again with us next fall or spring for more!  Last semester Chinese, Urdu, and Jamaican Creole were also represented. 

Faith on the Margins---Tuesday 4/12 @ 7pm at Beehive Books

Spiritual But Not Religious
There are pros and cons to being “spiritual but not religious.”

Please join Linda Mercadante, PH.D. who will speak on the subject.  She has conducted more than 85 in-depth interviews with people across the country about their spiritual beliefs and has engaged in hundreds of informal conversations for an upcoming book on the topic.

The presentation will be followed by an open discussion.

Sponsored by ACT OUT Delaware and the Delaware Gay Straight Christian Alliance.

See http://www.actoutdel.org/ or http://www.dgsca.org/ for more information.

Review of "Room" by Beehive Staff Member Chris Echesabal

Let me first start by saying how difficult it is for me to not steal any of the review blurbs of Room from its back cover. This book has left me completely speechless. When I finished it this afternoon I gently closed the book, laid it in front of me and stared blankly forward for several minutes. If you happened to have been sitting across the table from me at this point and had said to me, “So, Chris, how was it?” I would’ve responded thusly: I would have blinked furiously for awhile, trying to regain my focus on reality, before giving up and just smiling weakly at you. And I mean all that as the greatest possible compliment. Room is a thoroughly amazing piece of fiction. It is the kind of can’t-put-down book that very rarely comes out and, indeed, I read Room almost entirely over two long stretches of non-stop reading last night and this morning.


Room introduces the character of Jack, a precocious and innocent five year old boy who knows only the eleven foot square Room where he was born and where he and his Ma continue to live. Though “live” might not be an accurate word for it. You see Ma was abducted seven years ago when she was only nineteen and has been held in this prison ever since where she faces isolation, deprivation, and almost nightly abuse from her captor, the disturbing and mysterious character known only as “Old Nick”. Together Jack and Ma, however, manage to create some kind of semblance of a life. The scenes between Jack and his mother are among the most emotionally moving of perhaps anything I’ve ever read.

In a relatively short space, Room portrays the intangible love and devotion of a mother and son imprisoned together, the harrowing and heart-pounding intensity of their escape, and (spoiler alert) the impossibility of their return to a normal life that Jack has never known before. Author Emma Donoghue does this with grace and skill. Every scene, every line of dialogue, every bit of 5 year old narration seems perfectly crafted to fill the reader with dread, glee, despair, hope, and any number of other indescribable emotions as she takes them through a wholly unique adventure that, like Room itself, seems at turns both claustrophobic and freeing.

In short, you NEED to read this book.

Weds 3/30 @ 630pm at Beehive Books: Claire's Run Across Ethiopia

March is Women's History month and we invite you to hear living history from someone in our community. Claire Everhart will speak about her recent experience of running 250 miles in 11 days accross Ethiopia with a team of 9 others who raised $200,000 to build 3 schools. Claire is a recent OWU graduate and an intern at Global Village Collection.

"The hardest part of 'Run Across Ethiopia' was not actually the running. Yes, 250 miles in 11 days was not easy, but with running there is a clear goal and a clear way to achieve that goal; one foot in front of the other, again, and again ... and again. Yet poverty, its causes, and solutions are much more complicated. Witnessing the poverty in Ethiopia made the running seem easy"--Claire Everhart

Throughout the run, the team visited the villages where schools are now under construction. Once finished, the 3 schools will serve over 1200 students that before this, did not have access to an education. Go to http://www.onthegroundglobal.org/ to find out more about the impact of "Run Across Ethiopia".

Join Beehive Books in welcoming Claire and celebrating her effort!