Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the May 21, 2015 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.
Most weekdays, I wake up to local, national and international news on the radio, specifically NPR. It doesn’t take long to get an assessment of the state of the world if it’s changed overnight. I don’t get a morning newspaper anymore. To be honest, I get most of my news from logging onto my tablet or phone. From there, social media, blogs, posts and alerts update me throughout the day. The occasional times I am unplugged or out of range, it only takes an instant to figure out the state of things when I tune back in.
This past week, I was bedridden for days on end. It was really couch-ridden, to be exact. It’s not always easy for me to slow down but a nasty virus knocked the socks off of me. Too foggy-headed to read or to knit, and too exhausted to channel surf, I spent most of my time staring at CNN between naps and occasional trips to the kitchen for more fluids and tissue. I may not have overdosed on my medications, but I certainly found myself saturated with the week’s events, a curious mixture of too much information and not quite enough.
The big news last week included the NFL’s punishment of Tom Brady, a tragic train derailment outside of Philadelphia, another heartbreaking earthquake in Nepal, and the announcement of the sentence for a Marathon Bomber. It was a week filled with breaking news, special reports, plenty of commentary, and an abundance of New England passion and opinion.
Earthquakes and natural disasters seem to be raining down upon us across the world. The earthquake in Nepal followed another in the same month – unthinkable tragedy with the total loss of over 8,500 lives. While the earthquakes in Nepal occurred inland on the Indian Plate, there has been much more happening in the past decade along the Pacific Rim – a curvaceous line rising north from the Tonga Trench well below the equator and following the lines of Australia and Asia, eventually moving northward across the Aleutian Trench to the coastline of the western Unites States and South America to the tip of Chile. “Ring of Fire, an Encyclopedia of the Pacific Rim’s Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes” by Bethany Rinard Hinga was just published in March 2015. Movement of the tectonic plates and descriptions of the Rinard Hinga’s geologic history of the region are included with illustrations.
Both the Marathon Bombing trial and the Amtrak train derailment evoked feelings of close calls for so many of us. How many of us have spent time at streets of the Boston Marathon – whether along the route or on Boylston Street? Certainly all of us closely followed the events in Boston, Watertown and surrounding towns during the lockdown two years ago. Most of it was in disbelief. This was either happening in neighborhoods we knew, or it was unfolding only miles from our very own town of Norwood. Masha Gessen’s recent addition to the growing literature of the Boston Marathon Bombing is a study of the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. Gessen recounts the early lives of the Tsarnaevs in “The Brothers: The Road to An American Tragedy.” Gessen, herself a Russian-American, is a journalist who understands the complications of immigration and what she describes as both assimilation and alienation inherent in the process of claiming ownership of the American Dream. In this case, it was that Dream gone horribly wrong. Now that the death sentence has been handed down to the only brother to stand trial, Gessen’s book may give some insight about the younger Dzhokhar to Boston area readers.
When news of the train derailment of the Northeast Regional spread last week, that same eeriness of familiarity swept over those of us who have ridden those rails. The realization that we were not on that train we may have traveled on in the past, but that other innocents like us were, hits a little too close to home. The “derailment”, so to speak, of our bridges, rails, and highways have been debated for decades as tax dollars fail to stretch to all of our social, military and infrastructure needs. The “U.S. National Debate Topic 2012-2013: Transportation Infrastructure” was edited by Tyler Weidler in 2012. Some of the essays in the book - Phillip Longman’s “The Case For Not-Quite-So-High-Speed Rail” and Jaime Rall’s “Fast, Faster, Fastest” - might be very enlightening.
Ask a roomful of Bostonians, particularly those of us all living within such close range to Foxboro their opinion of Deflategate and you’ll get an entire stadium of opinions. Some think it is an overblown witch hunt and others revel in the opinion that Tom Brady needs to be taken down a notch or two. Mainly it all seems to be friendly banter, though, and the past months of suspense and drama have us either shaking our heads in disbelief or shrugging our shoulders in impatience. Whatever. Let’s get over it. But could Brady’s days in football be nearly over?
James Holstein, Richard Jones and George Koonce have just published “Is There Life After Football?: Surviving the NFL” (2015). The authors were obviously not thinking of Tom Brady while they were writing this book. Whether Brady plays another winning year of football or not will most likely no take away from his spectacular career. This book focuses, instead, on the years ahead for NFL players who may have made some unspectacular investments or some poor health choices along the way. Psychologically, financially, and physically, the game affects all players. The authors concede that with plenty of support, players can find life – after football.
I spent nearly a week passively watching the events of the day change and churn. Of course, there are times when our brains need to turn off a little and absorb what it can. I’m just grateful for my health so that I can once again concentrate on the words on the pages of a book.
