Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John. Crown. 2004.

Reviewed by David Van Kleeck, Staff

Thank goodness college football season is just around the corner! Maybe you have to have been raised in the South, like me, to understand that sentiment. It’s a land of passions. Sweet tea, BBQ, Baptist churches, tailgating, and college football.

Warren St. John’s book gives the reader a wide ranging insight into some of these passions. For an entire season he joined the legions of University of Alabama fans that travel by RV to all home and away Tide games. He knows where of he speaks and he knows how to put it down on paper. Growing up a Bama fan in Birmingham, where Bear Bryant was and still is considered a god; he later went to Columbia University and now writes for the New York Times. With just the right blend of storytelling and analysis, he shows us what it’s like inside the hearts and minds of many typical Southeastern Conference football fans.

The whole RV subculture that surrounds college football is a fantastic bit of the American way of life. In Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer St. John skillfully illuminates the Crimson Tide version of it. Sure, some of these folks are rednecks. Sure, some of them seem to have plenty of disposable income. Enough in fact, to afford RVs that are nicer than my house; maybe yours too! And, no doubt, some of them have a psychological condition that a team of doctors couldn’t decode, but it sure is fun to read about them.

If you’re a college football fan, you’ll feel right at home with this book. If you aren’t, then you’ll get a delightful glimpse into the wonderful world these folks live in.

Spoiler alert: The title comes from a cheer Alabama fans chant near the end of games when they’re winning - great fun!

Here’s a link to St. John’s Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer website: http://www.rammerjammeryellowhammer.com/

the post-birthday world

the post-birthday world. Lionel Shriver. Harper Collins. 2008

Reviewed by Cris Wilson

What would you choose? Passion and risk, with a handsome London East-End Snooker champion or security and domesticity, with a rumpled American think-tank intellectual? This relationship pageturner gives both options a go for Irina Galina. In one chapter she stays with popcorn-in-front-of-the-telly, Lawrence, and in the next chapter she goes on tour with Ramsey the snooker player, staying in 5 star hotels, eating scallops in saffron cream, and drinking till morning.

Irina is a children's book illustrator and it looks like she's going to throw her career away as she goes on tour for over a year with Ramsey. The reader is not sure Irina should choose to stay with Lawrence either. Why is he going to Russia for a month without her? Life does not always let us keep the cake in the post-birthday world. This is my pick for a summer beach read.

Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. Paul Collins. Bloomsbury House. New York. 2004

Reviewed by Dorothy Coakley, Patron




I fly back and forth from Port Townsend to San Francisco about once a month. Sometimes I pick up a book from the PT library for the journey. If I forget, I get one from a vendor at SEATAC. All of the books are short enough to be read on one flight but interesting enough to take away the tedium of travel.

Paul Collins is an articulate author, researcher and reviewer who happens to have an autistic son named Morgan. The child can read, spell, and do arithmetic, but lives in a world of his own. Unable to answer to his own name, Morgan is a riddle to his own parents and to those around him.

As Morgan's dad struggles to communicate with the boy, he also researches autism in general. His studies include "Peter the Wild Boy, (an early autistic savant), Temple Grandin, the autistic animal researcher, and a visit to the Autism Center at the University of Washington which was "funded by an unnamed Microsoft executive."

Paul Collins has given us a journey into the joys and stresses of parenthood, the meaning of "normal behavior"and a new understanding of the nature of autism. All of this is a short, lively book that can be read on a two hour journey. Put it into your flight bag.

Dorothy Coakley (Port Townsend/Berkeley)