CONSTITUTION AND CITIZENSHIP DAY

Constitution and Citizenship Day was established in 2004 to commemorate the signing of the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787.

Looking for ways to observe this 223-year-old event?  We suggest you stop by the Bullis Room and let us show you these books from the collection:

The Constitution of the United States, its sources and its application, by Thomas James Norton. The World Publishing Co.  of Cleveland and New York published this book in 1941.

The Story of the Constitution of the United States, by Francis Newton Thorpe. Chautauqua Press published this book in 1891 and included it in their literary and scientific circle in 1891 and 1892.

Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, by Felix Frankfurter. This book was published by Harvard University Press in 1938 and contains essays that cover the major controversies that came before the Supreme Court during the thirty years of Mr. Holmes' judgeship.

And if you'd like to read about a really old constitution, ask to see the Bullis Room's copy of Aristotle on the Athenian Constitution (translated with Aristotle introduction and notes by F.G. Kenyon),  2nd edition, published in London by G. Bell and Sons in 1912.

So please stop by...and take a look at these awesome books.

THE HASH KNIFE OUTFIT by Zane Grey

"Mert Bartels won the honors in our Bullis Book Review Contest's over-18 category. His review is reprinted below for your reading enjoyment.

"Jed Stone, a low end cattle rustler and leader of the 20 year outfit in the untamed, wild area in the Tonto Basin and Mongollon rim country of Arizona, exemplifies the many characteristics of how the westerner lived up to the Code of the West. Like many Jed Stone, due to circumstances early in his life, was forced onto the wrong side of the law. Good men as well as bad men exhibited these virtues: loyalty, courage, hard workers, untalkative and protector of women and children, well for the most part. Stone's dilemma is whether he continues to manhandle the Outfit or to alter his ways to leave outlawry.

"Zane Grey also weaves into the novel the Traft family Diamond Ranch with its array of mostly young cowhands who face the natural elements, mean cows, low-down rustlers, dishonest gamblers, and two young women of opposite upbringing. Uncle Jim Traft has nephew Jim, who is a year new to the West, ramrod the Diamond. Jim's ill-health, purpled-eyed sister, Gloriana with an Eastern education and ways, appears suddenly from Missouri with a past that she wants unrevealed. Her bad experience with a gambler named Darnell spelled past family troubles and future ones too as Darnell has tracked her west. Meanwhile, young Jim has not only fallen for a low country girl named Molly Dunn from the Cibeque Valley, but he plans to marry her despite Gloriana's objections. The problems begin between Gloriana and Molly because apparently it's easier for ten men in a bunkhouse to get along than two women in one ranch house. Gloriana convinces Molly that she is unfit to marry her  brother since she has only back woods upbringing, thus Molly moves to town to work and get away from moonstruck Jim.

"An unusually enjoyable part of the story is how simple cowhands compete to spruce themselves up for the Thanksgiving dance in town and outdoing one another at Christmas time. Grey is a master of dialog to convey their joshing each other and their fawning all over the ladies from the ranch as well as the Flag town girls. No modern day writer can equal his use of western talk and character mood. He too vividly describes rock-faced canyons, hues of the forestry and amber colored  brooks, plus wildlife sounds.

"Besides attending to the Diamond ranch young Jim finds he is given land in Yellow Jacket country by his uncle. Jim sees this as an opportunity to build an adjacent ranch and pine-pole log house for his bride-to-be Molly. As Jim and cowhands build the ranch house some Diamond cattle are stolen. Something disruptive happens to Uncle Jim. From this point the bad element seems to control the action.

"The western genre extended by Grey herein evolves into the traditional battle between good and bad elements. Croak Malloy, vicious weasel-faced gunman, Sonora, a Mexican with no ethics, and Madden both gunhand and cook comprise some of the bad element. Malloy in every back-handed attempt tries to lead the rustlers away from Jed Stone to become the Hash Knife's leader. When will the inevitable confrontation between these two occur as we learn more of their inward code and beliefs brings us closer to the end? Malloy who is loyal only to himself joins forces with Bambridge, a dishonest cattle buyer, the cheating gambler Darnell and other rustlers to remove 5000 head of Diamond stock. What is to become of the Hash Knife Outfit as the potential for leadership may change?

The next question becomes what the Diamond hands and young Jim will do to thwart the rustlers. Who will rescue the kidnapped Gloriana and Molly from the outlaw cabin? Also, will Gloriana evolve into a tough, resilient western woman? Only the reader knows."

REVIEW OF THE NOVEL MADAME BOVARY

Here is Danielle Stoner's winning book review, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did.

"The 1857 novel Madame Bovary by novelist Gustave Flaubert is truly a masterpiece in its own right. Unlike other novels of its time, Bovary touches on issues that are as relevant now as they were in nineteenth-century France; items such as dreams, infidelity, debt, suicide, and unrequited love constitute the makeup of this novel that is considered a classic of American and European literature.

"The novel centers around Emma (Roualt) Bovary, a bookish woman who holds dear her dreams of romantic love, and Charles Bovary, the smitten, mediocre doctor that falls for her. Emma falls for Charles soon after Charles sets her father's broken leg; to Emma, Charles is the ideal man, and they are soon wed. However, Emma is soon bored with Charles's superficiality and the mundane life she now leads as Madame Bovary.  Charles does not realize that his adoration is one-sided, and remains oblivious to Emma's disinterest throughout the novel. When Emma falls ill with what appears to be anxiety or depression, the Bovarys move to Yonville, a small village in the countryside. It is here where Emma falls in love first with Rodolphe, a wealthy landlord, followed by Leon, a young law student.  Emma's boredom with married life becomes a flurry of frantically concealed love affairs, sprouted from the romanticisms she had read about as a child and a young adult. To deal with her issues, Emma turns to compulsive buying, a trend with which many women can empathize today, but her problems come to an end abruptly and tragically.

"I found this novel to be quite intriguing for a novel of its time. In my experience, most novels from the nineteenth century seem to skirt over issues that were deemed "unseemly" or otherwise controversial. Bovary, however, approaches these topics at full force, describing in great detail the makeup of Emma's relationships with both Rodolphe and Leon. As a true romantic, myself, I liked the premise, even though I disagree with Emma's principles as a whole. I enjoyed the fact that Emma was seemingly able to find true love, or at least what appeared to her to be true love, even though she made the wrong choice in marrying Charles in the first place. Although I disagree with Emma's practices of adultery and abandonment of her child, I sympathize with her dilemma and I admire her will to achieve her dream of true love, no matter what it took to get her there. The novel is masterfully written, painting pictures of the French countryside so vivid that it seemed I was there inside the novel with characters smelling the fresh breeze and listening to the wind whistle through the trees. To me, that was one of the best parts of the novel; the descriptions of the scenery were absolutely lovely. Although the book has a tragic ending, I enjoyed the work as a whole. Overall, I like literature that deals with real issues, and Bovary did just that. Flaubert, although he received harsh criticism for his approach, did an excellent job making the reader aware of the prevalence of these issues in society, and showed them in a way that made the reader empathize with the characters' points of view. It is hard not to sympathize with Emma when Rodolphe abandons her, or grieve with Charles during any of the times where he experienced the death of a loved one. I feel that reading this novel has expanded my knowledge of classic literature, while helping me further understand the motives behind certain people's actions.  I would recommend this novel to anyone looking for a change in pace, anyone interested in classic literature that is still relevant today, or anyone yearning to take a stroll in the French countryside."

AND THE WINNERS ARE...(trumpet sounds)

DANIELLE STONER (18 and under category)

and

MERT BARTELS (over 18 category)

CONGRATULATIONS, MERT & DANIELLE

Mert reviewed Zane Grey's The Hash Knife Outfit.  Danielle's review was on Gustave Flaubert's  Madame Bovary.  Both of these reviews will be included in our postings for the next two weeks.  Be sure to visit this blog and read the reviews of these two classic books.

BOOK REVIEW WINNERS

We will announce the winning contestants from the two categories - "Over 18 years old" and "18 and under" - next Friday, August 27, and post the names on this blog.

We hope that all contestants enjoyed reading and reviewing their book choices. We volunteers had fun choosing the list of books to be included, and we also enjoyed reading (or in come cases, reading again) all of the books that were reviewed. 

So be sure to check our post next week, to see who wrote the winning reviews. (And no, we won't reveal the names ahead of time!)

DEADLINE REMINDER

TO ENTRANTS IN OUR BULLIS BOOK REVIEW CONTEST:

Completed essays must be submitted today.  Be sure to get yours to us--by dropping it off at the MPL front desk or emailing us at bullisgroup@yahoo.com.

We're looking forward to reading each one of them--and choosing a winner from each age category.

QUINN-DEX, REVISITED

Seven months ago our post described a small brown mailing box containing the Quinn-Dex (see January 14, 2010) and its mailing label bearing Nettie Bullis's name. This box was brought to the Bullis Room by a local resident who found it while going through possessions left to her by a relative.  We are grateful to this relative for adding it to our collection.

However, the Quinn-Dex raised a lot of questions: Did Nettie Bullis take Dr. Quinn's correspondence course? And if so, where did she practice? (We have no record of the Bullis family owning a piano or organ.) Did she visit the Conservatory or perhaps study on the Boston campus? We still have no answers to any of these questions, but we do have something just as exciting...a high level of interest in the inventor of the Quinn-Dex.

A great deal of information has been relayed to us about Dr. Marcus Quinn. (Thanks to everyone who responded!) Some of this information came from family, but the bulk of it was shared with us by Donna L. Halper (author, media historian, radio consultant, and currently Asst. Professor of Communication, Lesley University, Cambridge MA). Here are excerpts from Professor Halper's email to us:

"Marcus Lucius Quinn was born in Ireland in 1862. He and his family came to America in 1870 and seem to have emigrated to the midwest first, as we find him in the 1910 census living in Chicago.  Around the turn of the century, he married a woman named Clara (living relatives tell me her full name was Clara Minetta Thomas and she was from Wisconsin originally); they had four kids, all boys.  In 1910, Mr Quinn identified on the census as a "music teacher" but at some point, he seems to have opened his own studio.  How I came to be interested in him is as a result of his career in music during the 1910s-- at some point, he met the man I've been doing my own research about-- Theodore Lyman Shaw.  Mr. Shaw came from the distinguished family, the one that gave the world Robert Gould Shaw....

"Anyway, Theo became friendly with Marcus Lucius Quinn in Chicago in the 1910s, although how they met remains a mystery that I wish I could solve.  When Theo returned to greater Boston circa 1918 (according to his alumni notes, given to Harvard University), Marcus Lucius Quinn moved here too.  Theo could afford a fancy home on the Needham/Wellesley line, but Marcus and his family moved to Waban, a suburb of Newton.  The two men remained friends and associates.  Marcus Lucius (still identified on the 1920 census as a "music teacher")had begun offering private lessons in the early 1890s, according to copy from ads he placed in magazines, and he seemed to do fairly well with it, establishing correspondence courses to help people learn to play the piano.  Somehow, he had the money to place LARGE ads for his services -- his living relatives believe some of this money came from his wife's side of the family.  But wherever the money came from, the ads ran in some of the best-known publication of that time, during the period from the turn of the century to the 1920s-- the ads appeared in such places as McClure's, Leslie's, and what was then a literary magazine-- Cosmopolitan.  Mr. Quinn appears to have been a very good self-promoter, who claimed he studied with Franz Liszt in Europe and he also claimed to have a Doctorate degree in Music....Whether or not Marcus Lucius Quinn really was the toast of Europe, his correspondence courses seemed to do well for him, and he was able to open the Marcus Lucius Quinn Conservatory of Music here in greater Boston.  In the early 1920s, he located it at 598 Columbia Road in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, not far from the beautiful new Strand Theater (which had opened in 1918).  This would have made good sense, as movie theaters back then also gave live performances between films, so his students might have found a ready-made venue to demonstrate their skills."

We greatly appreciate Professor Halper taking the time to share this information with us. As with all new information, however, more questions are raised. Did Nettie Bullis see Dr. Quinn's ad in an issue of McClure's? or Cosmopolitan? Did she order it herself, or was it a gift from a friend or relative? If you have the answers to any of our questions, please let us hear from you.