by Bill Peak
First printed in the Star-Democrat on August 5, 2012. Our thanks to Bill and the Star-Democrat for allowing us to reprint his submission.

OK, I’ll admit it, sometimes an uncontrollable urge comes over me to put on a funny hat, grab a pair of binoculars, and go out and look for Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers and Short-Billed Marsh Wrens.  That’s right, I’m a bird-watcher.  I’ve tried the twelve-step program, I’ve tried the patch, but so far nothing’s been found to replace the pleasure I take in looking at birds.

And it’s not just their beauty that appeals to me.  True, the sure knowledge that the trees around us hide Scarlet Tanagers and Indigo Buntings can make it hard for me to stay at my desk, but I also delight in the life histories of these animals.  I well remember, for instance, the time I watched the travails of a dove who had built her nest on an exposed limb near our deck.  After she’d laid her eggs, it turned cold and then it began to rain.  For three days and three nights the rain fell, yet that poor bedraggled creature never once abandoned her clutch.  Hobbes might label such a life (as he did ours) “nasty, brutish, and short,” but that dove taught me something about perseverance, and the simple dignity accruing to those that care without counting the cost.

And now along comes One Maryland One Book to give me another reason to think about the small lives lived so humbly all around us.  One Maryland One Book is the program of the Maryland Humanities Council in which people all across the state read the same book at the same time.  This year’s selection, The Cellist of Sarajevo tells the story of three unrelated people who find themselves trapped in the title city during the Serbian siege of 1992.  To varying degrees each is touched by the story of a fourth character, a professional cellist who, in defiance of the snipers killing civilians all around him, goes every day at the same time to the same place in plain view of the heights from which those snipers operate and plays Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor.

Author Steven Galloway has taken the true story of Bosnian cellist Vedran Smailovi? and turned it into a modern morality tale, at once both intense thriller and exquisite work of art.  The story’s drama derives in no small part from the fact that each of its characters lives with the sure knowledge that the air around them can—and very likely soon will—fill with bullets.  Death is everywhere, and they watch for it with a vigilance that makes their lives seem in some ways more alive, more acute, than our own.

• Click here to view a calendar of One Maryland One Book events, programs, and discussions in your area.

If you want to know what this look likes in real life, watch a bird-feeder.  Birds live in a world where the slightest movement—a quivering leaf, a sailing shadow—can signal doom.  Like Sarajevans at a street market, when birds gather at a feeder they must keep one eye on the sky for harriers, another on the bushes for cats, and a third on the ground for snakes.  Their lives, however small, are lived big: all senses on high alert.  Similarly, the people of Sarajevo.  I have read and enjoyed every One Maryland One Book, but The Cellist of Sarajevo is far and away the best of the lot.  Please, if you get a chance, check out one of the library’s 87 copies, read it, and then sign up for one of the book discussions I’ll be hosting in September.  I look forward to hearing what you think.

Bill Peak writes a monthly article for the Star-Democrat about working at the Talbot County Free Library. Photo:  Bill Peak getting ready to go bird watching

Bill Peak writes a monthly article for the Star-Democrat about working at the Talbot County Free Library. Thank you, Bill, for allowing us to reprint this in our OMOB blog—and for your thoughts about our One Maryland One Book Selection.

An Indian Visits the Talbot County Free Library, by Bill Peak
Printed in the Star-Democrat, August 14, 2011

It’s become an annual event in my life. Every year the Maryland Humanities Council selects their One Maryland One Book (the book people all across the state will read more or less at the same time), and every year I worry that the work selected—inevitably a book written for adults—will have little appeal for teens and pre-teens, an age-group we very much want to interest in reading. So what did I think when I learned that this year, for the first time in the history of the program, they’d chosen a work of teen fiction? I worried that our adult patrons wouldn’t read it. (Note to Maryland Humanities Council: “Library guys aren’t easy to please.”)

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not only was the work written for teens, it was written and drawn for teens. That’s right, throughout Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” there are hand-drawn cartoons. Now you have to understand, when it comes to baseball and literature I am a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Baseball should be played only on living, breathing, sun-drenched grass, and literature should enter our minds only through the medium of living, breathing, meaning-drenched words. There are things a cartoonist can do with his pencil that a writer can’t do with hers … and vice versa. For a writer to resort to cartooning to make his point strikes me as an admission of defeat: I am not a good enough writer to communicate this with words, so I am going to draw you a picture instead.

But one of the hats I wear at the Talbot County Free Library reads “One Maryland One Book Coordinator,” which means that, however reluctantly, I had to check out a copy of Alexie’s book and read it.

And I have to admit, I couldn’t put it down. Told from the point of view of a young Indian boy who, at the beginning of his freshman year, makes the momentous, politically incorrect decision to attend a white high school “off the rez,” the book is an exploration of all the cross-currents of self-hate and reverse discrimination that can sometimes afflict today’s under classes. A story that one might reasonably expect to be very sad turns out (thanks to the great cockeyed wit of its teenaged narrator) to be not only funny but, occasionally, laugh-out-loud funny as well. It also manages to stay true to the experience of adolescent males the world over … which is code for: “Some people may find some of the material in this book morally objectionable.” But, then again, I suspect some people may find adolescent males in toto morally objectionable.

Oh, and about those cartoons. They end up being a lot of fun too, extending and enhancing the story Sherman Alexie has to tell in the same way that Sidney Paget’s original illustrations extended and enhanced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s. So stop by the Talbot County Free Library when you get a chance and check out a copy of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” then sign up for one of the book discussions I’ll be hosting on September 22 and 26. Who knows, we may all find our opinion improved of the sometimes clownish, sometimes glorious, adolescent male.