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The Hot Blast<\/em> was published from 1883 through 1919, at which time its name became, alas, the Star<\/em>. For thirty-five years, however, the residents of Anniston got their morning brain burn the honest way: hot off the press.<\/p>\n More heat coming your way from the best history book I read this semester, Scorcha!: Skins, Suedes, and Style from the Streets, 1967-<\/em>1975<\/a>. The title, I assume, refers to Errol Dunkley\u2019s 1968 single, \u201cThe Scorcher,\u201d a rocksteady<\/a> masterpiece released in Britain on Trojan Records<\/a>. Much of the book is about the influence of West Indian, especially Jamaican, immigrant communities on British youth culture, with this influence coming primarily through music\u2014ska<\/a>, reggae, and rocksteady. Here’s a sample from Dunkley’s recording:<\/p>\n [Audio recording removed for accessibility. Recording was an excerpt from \u201cThe Scorcher\u201d by Errol Dunkley, \u21171968 Amalgamated Records, from The Scorcher \/ Do Right Tonight<\/em>]<\/p>\n There are many books on British youth subcultures of this period, and, it must be said, most are better written and better designed than Scorcha!<\/em>\u2014see for example Ben Sherman: 50 Years of British Style Culture<\/em>. After reading Scorcha!<\/em>, however, I couldn\u2019t help but feel these other books astonishingly superficial, the tidiness of the writing and the design perhaps reflecting an intellectual fastidiousness in the authors, a reluctance to stray far from Carnaby Street<\/a>, where the young bought much of their clothing. Scorcha!<\/em> certainly covers the shops, but it also gets into the discos, the streets, and the football terraces where all this clobber<\/a> was actually worn. The book manages to capture that experience because it is part oral history and part scrapbook, which might account for the lack of polish on the prose: Scorcha!<\/em> is without doubt a messy book, and sometimes difficult to follow. However, I came away with a better understanding of post-war British youth subcultures, which previously had largely been confined to the almost-textbook categorizations (Teds, mods, rockers, skins, and punks) that you get from movies like Quadrophenia<\/em> and songs like \u201cSuedehead.\u201d This book would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in music, fashion, or just a bit of bovver<\/a>.<\/p>\n Index, a History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age<\/em><\/a> by Dennis Duncan. This was one of those books that a reader will sometimes describe as \u201ca joy\u201d; I certainly found it to be. Duncan is a gifted writer, and accomplishes the difficult task of writing a book that will appeal to the specialist and the generalist alike. I wanted the book to be longer, but really the book is just as long as it should be\u2014those of us craving hundreds more pages on this subject are probably few in number and, alas, must yield to the majority. I also might have preferred more of the History and less of the Bookish Adventure: because the book is not long, every droll example occupies precious space: the mad index to Pale Fire<\/em><\/a> is of course an index, and therefore part of its history; by that standard, however, Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/em><\/a> might command an entire chapter in the history of public health! Index, a History of The<\/em> can also get a wee-bit Whiggish, a tendency I\u2019ve noticed in other histories of information technologies, possibly a reaction against the Johnny-can\u2019t-read crowd: these historians want to show that, no no no, the Internet represents continuity, not disruption, and that its impact on our reading is simply another development in a long series of changes inevitably greeted with panic by teachers and librarians and others tasked with shepherding society\u2019s vulnerable youth along the path to wisdom. Duncan argues that the World Wide Web practically fulfills the index\u2019s destiny! And, technically, he is correct, but he might here be guilty of mixing apples and oranges: the inverted files<\/a> structuring online information retrieval systems fulfill the historical development of the concordance<\/a>, not the subject index, the two technologies being related, but certainly not identical. I question how many users of the Internet even realize they are interacting with an index at all, and one of the book\u2019s achievements is in making us see that we are. Even so, few readers will spend more than a moment contemplating the invisible index behind Google\u2019s invitingly serene search box, especially since we are never permitted to view Google\u2019s index, and anyway isn\u2019t its invisibility part of its attraction: how many people would choose to heft a concordance onto their desks if they didn\u2019t have to? These objections of mine are all, however, silly little quibbles, and should be taken more as evidence of how much I enjoyed the book, how engaging I found it, than actual flaws. Duncan wears his learning lightly, and makes a very companionable guide, a stark contrast to others working on the history of information technologies.<\/p>\n How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind<\/em><\/a> by Clancy Martin. Self-help and do-it-yourself guides are two of the oldest book genres. The earliest known \u201cHow to\u201d book that explicitly promised as much to its readers was published in 1595: How to Chuse, Ride, Traine, and Diet, both Hunting-Horses and Running Horses<\/em><\/a>. Clancy Martin has taken the \u201cHow to\u201d genre and come up with a title that, for sheer cleverness, almost any writer would kill for. It is, however, a strange title for so serious a book, you almost wonder if it didn\u2019t come from the publisher, perhaps one of those precocious editorial assistants on-the-make. Whatever the title\u2019s origin, it’s undoubtedly brilliant, but a complete mismatch for the book it\u2019s tasked with headlining, since How Not to Kill Yourself<\/em> is really a memoir, and a grave one at that. Martin teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri<\/a>, which seems apt given that so much philosophy falls within the \u201chow to\u201d tradition: how to lead a good life, how to govern people, how to make effective arguments, and so forth. Clancy draws on this academic background to enrich his book with philosophy, literature, psychology, and religion.1<\/sup><\/strong> It\u2019s his raw self-disclosure, however, that sears the reader. I felt awed by the courage it must have taken to write this book. He mercilessly dissects himself, exposing vulnerabilities that many would find difficult to share with a therapist: the demons of addiction, the multiple attempts at jumping headlong into death, the degradations of the psychiatric ward, the unbearable pain of feeling like a failed father and husband. Many readers will surely recognize themselves in the ferocity with which he anatomizes his life, the shame and self-hatred smothering his will to live like a father drowning the puppies he had told his children not to bring home. And most defeating of all, perhaps, is the unpredictable recrudescence of suicidal obsessions, which Martin effectively renders by mixing the steadiness of his philosophical perspective with the sudden, punishing intensity of the personal. How Not to Kill Yourself<\/em> is a harrowing but ultimately hopeful book.<\/p>\n Everyday Newspaper Titles (Zzzzzz) Do not waste your time counting sheep; if you\u2019re having trouble settling in for your long winter\u2019s nap, you might find newspaper titles as sedating as Seconal: the \u201cGazette,\u201d the \u201cTimes,\u201d the \u201cExaminer,\u201d the \u201cPost,\u201d the \u201cTribune,\u201d the \u201cSun,\u201d the \u201cStar,\u201d the \u201cJournal,\u201d the \u201cNews\u201d… and then the hyphenated titles, formed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[190,192,185,30,189,61,186,191,187,188],"class_list":["post-7550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpnl","tag-african-diaspora","tag-book-history","tag-history-books","tag-immigration","tag-indexes","tag-philosophy","tag-philosophy-books","tag-postcolonialism","tag-reggae","tag-suicide"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7550"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8263,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550\/revisions\/8263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}HPNL\u2019s Winter Warmth Gift Guide<\/h2>\n
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\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tNotes<\/h2>\n
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