Barracoon, The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston on sale May 8, 2018  A newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.  In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis.  Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history.  Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.  In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship.  Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life.  During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.  https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062748201/barracoon

On May 2, 2018 Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced that E. Annie Proulx, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Shipping News” and the short story “Brokeback Mountain,” will receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival on Sept. 1.  Hayden selected Proulx as this year’s winner based on the recommendation of a jury of previous winners, distinguished authors and prominent literary critics from around the world.  The prize ceremony will take place during the National Book Festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.  One of the Library of Congress’ most prestigious awards, the annual Prize for American Fiction honors an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination.  The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something new about the American experience.  Proulx’s other honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Her O. Henry Prize-winning story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film.  Her most recent novel is “Barkskins.”  For more information on the prize, including previous winners, visit loc.gov/about/awards-and-honors/fiction-prize/.  https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-18-059/library-of-congress-prize-for-american-fiction-to-be-awarded-to-e-annie-proulx/2018-05-02/

Cover All the Bases at These Eight Historic Baseball Sites by Nicholas Som   Take away the blue-and-red signs divulging its identity, and you’d walk right past The Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum without suspecting it to be the childhood home of one of baseball’s most enduring icons.  The brick Baltimore rowhouse and three adjacent rowhouses faced demolition in the 1960s, but Hirsh Goldberg, a Babe Ruth fan and the press secretary for the mayor of Baltimore, led the way to transform them into a space honoring the former New York Yankees legend.  The site opened in 1974.  Quaint Bosse Field in Evansville, Indiana, serves as the home field of the Frontier League’s Evansville Otters.  Constructed in 1915, Bosse has hosted more than a century’s worth of baseball games.  Scenes from the 1992 film A League of Their Own were filmed there, and five eventual Baseball Hall of Famers, including Bert Blyleven and Warren Spahn, called it their home field while playing in the minor leagues.  Hank Aaron grew up in the Mobile, Alabama, neighborhood of Toulminville, but the Hank Aaron Childhood Home and Museum now sits in the shadow of the minor league Mobile BayBears’ home park.  That’s because the city, which owns the house, and the team, which operates it as a museum, lifted the 30-ton structure and hauled it 6 miles south to its current location.  Catch a BayBears game at Hank Aaron Stadium, then head right next door to learn more about the fabled slugger’s life.  The concrete, Art Deco–style Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, completed in 1932, is thought to be the last surviving regular home field of a Negro League team in the Mid-Atlantic.  The National Trust named Hinchliffe a National Treasure in 2012 in response to vandalism and neglect since its closure in 1996.  In April of 2014, several hundred volunteers from the Trust’s HOPE Crew program helped repaint its interior walls.  Rehab work on the exterior walls and cast concrete signs began in September of 2017, and has been further boosted by a recent $500,000 grant from the National Park Service.  Two of the stadium’s original ticket booths are also being restored, thanks to a $300,000 grant from American Express.  After 120,000 Japanese-Americans and U.S. residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps by the federal government in the discriminatory aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, baseball and softball became a refuge for many of the imprisoned.  One of the camps, Minidoka in Jerome County, Idaho, had at least 12 diamonds, all built by the prisoners themselves.  The games played there served as unifying diversions, and Minidoka’s semi-professional baseball team even competed in Idaho’s state championship.  While the original fields are gone, the nonprofit Friends of Minidoka worked with National Park Service staff to reconstruct one of them at the Minidoka National Historic Site in 2016.  Of all the sports museums in the country, few are more revered than the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and for good reason.  With a collection of baseball cards, artifacts, and memorabilia unmatched by any in the world, this storied 1939 building is a must-visit for every baseball fan.  Highlights include the jersey presented to Jackie Robinson when the Los Angeles Dodgers retired his number and two copies of the T206 Honus Wagner card, the most valuable baseball card in the world.  The only company that still assembles baseball gloves in the United States, Nokona Athletic Goods Company in Nocona, Texas, has handcrafted gloves for more than 80 years.  It started in 1926 as a leather goods manufacturer.) The company’s original factory burned in a 2006 fire, but Nokona turned out its first post-fire glove only 51 days later. Tour the current location—an old boot factory two hours north of Dallas—and get a behind-the-scenes look at how baseball gloves are produced.  You might expect the oldest extant professional baseball park in the country to have a higher profile, but Rickwood Field, built back in 1910 in Birmingham, Alabama, remains a little-known gem.  While Rickwood ceased operating as a full-time stadium in 1987, the minor league Birmingham Barons (who shared use of the park with the Negro League's Birmingham Black Barons) return to the park every year to play a regulation game known as the Rickwood Classic, donning period uniforms that help transport spectators to the past.  The park is currently undergoing structural repairs, which are scheduled to be completed in time for this year's Classic in early May.  See pictures at https://savingplaces.org/stories/cover-all-the-bases-at-these-eight-historic-baseball-sites#.WunpGaQvyUk

Author and illustrator Alice Provensen, who, with her late husband Martin Provensen illustrated more than 40 books and won a Caldecott Medal and Caldecott Honor before starting a solo career, died on April 23, 2018 at the age of 99.  Alice Twitchell Provensen was born on August 14, 1918 in Chicago, to parents who were consistently supportive of her interest in art.  From a young age, Provensen enjoyed reading and was fascinated by airplanes and airshows—a passion she would later discover was shared by her husband as he was growing up, also in Chicago.  Provensen won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but then transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles, where she studied for a year before moving to New York City to train at the Art Students League.  Among some of the Provensen’s best known works are the illustrations for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Inexperienced Travelers by Nancy Willard (Harcourt, 1981), for which Willard won the 1982 Newbery Medal and the Provensens won a 1982 Caldecott Honor, and The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot (Viking, 1983), the title that won them the 1984 Caldecott Medal.  Shannon Maughan  https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/76747-obituary-alice-provensen.html

                                             

Turks have reacted with undisguised glee to what many have described as an official--and certainly long overdue--confession from Stockholm that Sweden’s signature national dish is, in fact, Turkish.  

“Those famous Swedish meatballs you get in Ikea are actually Turkish, admits Swedish government,” tweeted TRT World, Turkey’s publicly funded international television news channel.  “Swedish meatballs are actually based on a recipe King Charles XII brought home from Turkey in the early 18th century,” the Swedish account revealed abruptly and for no immediately apparent reason.  “Let’s stick to the facts!”  Once known as “the Lion of the North” and “Swedish Meteor” for his early military prowess, Charles, who acceded to the throne in 1697 at the age of 15, had bitten off rather more than he could chew by taking on Russia, and spent the following six years in exile in and around present-day Turkey.  Having acquired a taste for the local cuisine, he returned to Sweden in 1714 with the recipe not just for köfte, the spiced lamb and beef meatballs that in time became the Swedish staple köttbullar, but also for the popular stuffed cabbage dish now known in Sweden as kåldolmar.  Charles, who died in 1718, is also considered responsible for importing and popularising the Turkish habit of drinking coffee, which became so widespread in Sweden in the later 18th century that King Gustav III briefly banned it.  In Turkey’s meatball capital, Inegöl, this week, a local chef, İbrahim Veysel, told the Dogan news agency it was an honour that the Turkish dish should have become “an example to different cuisines all over the world”.  Others were less happy. Serdar Çam, president of the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, complained that Ikea, which sells 2m meatballs a day in its in-store restaurants, should not be selling the dish as though it were Swedish.  And one forlorn--though presumably tongue-in-cheek--Swede lamented that the news had robbed life of its meaning.  “My whole life,” he tweeted, “has been a lie.”  Jon Henley  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/03/my-whole-life-has-been-a-lie-sweden-admits-meatballs-are-turkish

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1883  May 4, 2018