Chasing Ray

An Innocent Man

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:56:57 -0800

1. A devastating and important account of a definitely innocent man executed in Texas. This is the reason why I struggle with the death penalty - because our justice system just is not good enough to handle it. (I cheered when Ted Bundy was put to death in Florida and I will never doubt that he deserved it but we make too many mistakes to justify those moments.) From The Atlantic:

Reading through the manuscript last weekend, jarred by what I was seeing, I began to jot down a list of things that went terribly wrong in the DeLuna case -- issues of fact, of evidence, of testimony, of motives, of incompetence, of indifference, of fraud, of morality, of integrity, of constitutionality -- that should have been raised and answered long before DeLuna was convicted, much less executed, back in the 1980s. I stopped when I got to 10.

2. Vogue looks at the HBO series on obesity in America:

No matter how expansive the scope, the documentary tugs hardest when showing interviews with those who suffer from obesity, who list their vitals with a crestfallen countenance that never gets easier to watch. "Food can be my best friend," explains a nearly 300-pound 28-year-old named Vivia, as her eyes well. "It can be my boyfriend, at the moment; a trip to the beach."

3. For the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring's publication, David Brinkley writes in Audubon about JFK and Rachel Carson:

When Silent Spring was at last published in book form on September 27, 1962, the chemical industry went ballistic. Kennedy instantly became Public Enemy No. 1 for propping up Silent Spring as worthy of serious attention. The National Agricultural Chemicals Association rushed its propaganda booklet "Fact and Fancy" into print. The nub of the counterattack was that Mr. Fancy (a.k.a. Kennedy) was an East Coast elite who yachted frivolously around Cape Cod, his treasured national seashore, while allowing DDT manufacturers to be unjustly vilified. The association warned that factory shutdowns would mean thousands of lost jobs. When Kennedy awarded Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey--a Food and Drug Administration scientist--a public service gold medal for discovering that thalidomide (a sedative frequently prescribed to pregnant women) caused deformities in babies, the pharmaceutical industry likewise felt blindsided. "It is all of a piece," Carson told The New York Post, "thalidomide and pesticides--they represent our willingness to rush ahead and use something new without knowing what the results are going to be."

We need another Rachel Carson about climate change, and we need her now.

4. I bought the new issue of Vanity Fair because Marilyn Monroe is on the cover. The story inside portrays her as so smart and yet so frustrated by what she can not control that it made me wince. The pictures are amazing - as they always are of Marilyn. She should have lived; she really deserved so much more than she got. Wasn't she just amazing? Wow.

Catalogging Chronicle Books

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:41:52 -0800

Fall titles from Chronicle that caught my eye:

Sketchtravel by Gerald Guerlais and Daisuke Tsutsumi - Passed between 72 artists over five years and 35,000 miles the sketchbook showcases the creativity of artists of all kinds from around the world. Talk about inspiration - this one should take readers in all sorts of unique directions. (192 full color illustrations throughout)

The Where, the Why and How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science by Jenny Volvovsky, Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe - A collection of essays by scientists and accompanying illustrations by all kinds of artists who interpret those essays in their own way. I have no idea what is inside this book but any original take on science is going to get my attention and I hope it works as a crossover for teens (how could it not?).

Sky High by Germano Zullo, Illustrated by Albertine - A picture book (ages 8 & up) about two competing neighbors who add to their houses in outlandish fashion in a race to see whose home is tallest. It made me laugh and laughing is good.

Unusual Creatures by Michael Hearst - What we have here are life forms that stretch the limits of truth but they are out there (the blobfish!) and page after page you will learn all about them. Plus more awesome illustrations, diagrams, and more. Lemony Snicket wrote the introduction and that, of course, makes me very happy.

[One of the contributor's shots from Sketchtravel - see more about how this one came to be here.]

When you hear "Alcatraz" do you think of pelicans?

Wed, 09 May 2012 21:03:55 -0800

I have just finished Winged Wonders by Peter Watkins & Jonathan Stockland and find myself deeply impressed by how the authors managed to pack so much information about their subject into such a compact, perfectly sized package. There are chapters here on sixteen different birds (from owls to ravens to wrens) and along with a look at state birds, bird illustrators and birdsong the whole book is just barely 200 pages. It is the perfect title for those with curiosity but not a lot of time (the chapters lend themselves to easy bathroom reading) but I'll be recommending it in my June column as an excellent teen read for budding ornithologists (along with a new bird watching guide from HMH).

There are a ton (a ton!!) of references in Winged Wonders (if you are writing any sort of book that requires such information you must grab a copy as a resource) and I kept flagging certain passages merely for my own amusement. There are numerous examples of saints and birds, the whole history of doves = good while pigeons = bad (even though they are the same) and the long perception of eagles as symbols of greatness and nobility (Shelly, Arabian Nights and Zeus all name-dropped in only two paragraphs on that bird). But here was something that truly blew me away:

Thus the great Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala, as he charted the great sweep of the bay of San Francisco [in 1775], discovers that dangerous rock and, on behalf of his avian deliverers, named it La Isla de los Alcatraces ('The island of the Pelicans'). Many years later the name was shortened to 'Alcatraz' or just 'The Rock,' the most notorious prison in the United States.

de Ayala's ship was spared from colliding with The Rock in a deep fog when a flock of pelicans suddenly "explodes from beneath the very bows of the ship". The ship was swung away from the birds, avoided the rock and everyone lived. But who thinks pelicans when they think of Alcatraz? Fascinating, isn't it?

There is also Charlemagne's mother as Mother Goose, the peacock as a symbol of immortality, the origin of the "Lady's Hawk" (which made me want to watch the movie immediately) (oh how I love that movie!!!) and, well, I could go on and on. Wonderfully smart writing and I think a true companion for literary-minded bird watching aficionados.

It wasn't easy being an explorer's wife

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:27:52 -0800

1. New issue of Bookslut is up including my review of POLAR WIVES and my new column (#81!!) which is all about domestic dysfunction and basically, the tragedy of not getting to choose your family. (Not all tragic really; some definite humor in there as well, promise.)

2. Emailed three reviews to Booklist over the weekend which ends a remarkable run of eight (I think) books read/reviewed for them in the past six weeks. As these books covered everything from post-Katrina New Orleans to a Latina author's memoir to dog training it's really all quite head spinning. Sometimes I can't believe I really have professional gigs reading such remarkably different books.

3. Yesterday we planted flowers. It was a good day.

4. I have finally (!!!!) nailed down my columns for June and July. It's odd to be noting the new May column when I know I need to write the entire June column in the next week or so. (I want it done!) Most of the books are read and include birds, taking pictures and making art. I need to gather them all in one place so I can see if they really make as much sense on the table as they do in my head. (I wish this whole process sounded more impressive then it does but I swear, the column thing truly does get bashed into shape some months.)

5. I have two books read for July already, and I'm in the middle of a few others. I'm also reading books that have nothing to do with July's column which is probably not the best use of my time but it happens. (It actually happens a lot.)

6. Here are books I am currently reading for potential review in my column: So Shelly by Ty Roth, The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller (there is for sure a column on books set in schools in my future), Small Damages by Beth Kephart, Winged Wonders by Watkins & Stockland (for June column), At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson (July column maybe), The Book of Blood & Shadow by Robin Wasserman (July column), The Artist's Eye (and the two books in the "Learning to See" series) by Peter Jenny (June column), Ghost Wave by Chris Dixon (June column maybe) and Ichiro by Ryan Inzana (July column maybe).

7. That list is insane and don't I know it.

8. I'm also reading Inukshuk by Gregory Spatz (it's about a lost Arctic explorer - did you think I could resist this?) and Shipwrecked by Jon Wells (about Seattle Mariners' baseball because it is so awful). (The Mariners are awful not the book about the Mariners!)

9. And for personal books, I am reading The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac. This is his first book, written about growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts (he fictionalized it, but it's Lowell).

10. Kerouac is, by the way, the greatest French Canadian writer to ever come out of New England. The fact that few people seem to think of him as a French Canadian mill town author is very very sad for French Canadians everywhere but especially those of us with ties to New England.

11. I write tiny things, I plot many things, I hope for more writerly things. Summer is coming and today I have an appointment at the gym; I hope I'm still smiling when I get home. :)

This cover is a stunner, don't you think?

On cod and bees (and those who love them)

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:10:14 -0800

1. Found this short piece in Nat Geo Traveler about a Newfoundlander turning to her island's history and culture to save the economy and was immediately impressed. Here's a bit:

I'm very concerned for Fogo and many other places suffering a flattening of culture, the loss of a sense of self. It happens when you're ripped away from home, from the natural world, and from your ancestors: people from Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, working out west as economic refugees in Alberta. As this happens, a little bit of us dies. I hope to help us remain shorefast on our rock. A shorefast is a tether that joins a cod trap to the shore and a metaphor for communities realizing the importance of holding on to physical place and tradition.

They are saving their small piece of the world which is, I think, one of the best things you can do for places you love and for yourself as well.

2. Amanda Palmer is exposing the music world to a new creative paradigm. Lots to think about here but it should be stressed that she has put years into building a trusting relationship with her fans - this kind of support doesn't show up overnight. (I am a fan and supporter.) I can't help but wonder about small presses and the "Amanda Palmer" example though. Could crowd sourcing be a way to bring more literature (overlooked by major pubs) to the masses? What a wonderful thought.

3. Are you reading The Contextual Life blog? I adore it and if you're thinking about some interesting new titles in pb then check out the latest entry. This is the first I've heard of Nom de Plum by Carmela Cluraru a book I now must read.

4. Kij Johnson finally (FINALLY) has a story collection coming out. It's from the fabulous Small Beer Press (of course!) and I'm thrilled to pieces to have an advanced copy. If you haven't read her short stories then you are really missing something. At the Mouth of the River of Bees includes all kinds of wonderful and I can't recommend Kij's stories enough. Just check out this cover - does it jump off the shelf or what?! More on this as I review it.....somewhere. I'll keep ya posted on that.

What would Hemingway do without a newspaper to work for?

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:34:31 -0800

1. In the midst of all that Story Siren plagiarism drama, this article on the impact of diminishing newspapers on writers over at The Millions is all the more timely. The proving grounds for writers are becoming fewer and fewer; we are becoming a nation of hobbyists who call ourselves writers.

2. Amanda Palmer took no prisoners on Kickstarter yesterday. (I happily supported this project to get a CD; love her music.) And don't forget Kate Milford's Kairos Mechanism novella, now 65% funded and still needing some backers. (I contributed to that one last week!)

3. Speaking of Kickstarter I might be putting together a project involving indy publishing, some great Alaska history lots of folks might not know about and, well, something that no one else is doing and a good friend and I think maybe we will. I'll keep you posted on how it develops.

4. I haven't mentioned it in a while but the Summer Blog Blast Tour will be happening in early June. More info to follow as we get closer but expect the usual suspects with a ton of interviews with many cool authors.

5. I am reading about ten books right now which is crazy, even for me. But the summer columns are eluding me and I've been picking things up and putting them down with ceaseless abandon. I think I'm going nonfiction for June - not a summer escapes column but more of a "get the heck outside" column. July will be adventurous reads and August....well August still eludes me. But I'm working on it.

6. I'm also outlining my next book and for those of you who were wondering it will be set in AK again, it will be nonfiction about flying again, and it will be quite different from MAP. The first fifty pages to my agent by early Sept and a ton of research to do this summer.

7. Also writing something totally different that is fiction and about missing family history and missing explorers and missing memoires and a wee bit girl detectivish. Nothing more on that as it is so different it would only startle everyone. Plus it's like a deer in the woods right now; I'm afraid if I talk about it much the story will disappear.

8. It won't be a teen book though.

9. AND MY OFFICE IS STILL A MESS. I'm so annoyed about this.

10. Three reviews going off to Booklist by the end of the week (New Orleans, dog behavior and philosophy), two reviews for future columns to write. This is manageable.

11. And finally, the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou SR High School in Washington DC ends tonight, at midnight PST. All ordering info is here. Please join in and help us make a difference!

Innocent Objects

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:06:57 -0800

Due this fall from Abrams, it has everything* I love about old cities, history, culture and how we remember the places we know best. I love heavily illustrated books - if I could live surrounded by coffee table books, I would be delighted to no end.

*It's nonfiction, it has many photographs - both current and vintage - and it's full of the sights and sounds of Istanbul. What's not to love?

Deconstructing a disappointing effort

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:19:26 -0800

Last Monday we unveiled the Powells wish list for the Guys Lit Wire book fair with great excitement. This was our fourth year of running a book fair for a struggling library in the US and we have always done astonishingly well. Between past efforts for incarcerated juveniles in LA County and schools on the Navajo and White River Apache reservations, plus last year at Ballou SR High School in Washington DC, supporters have purchased more than 2,100 books off our wish lists and had them sent to the respective schools. Last year at Ballou we busted all records with 800+ in the spring book fair and another 150+ in a smaller holiday fair in November.

You can understand how hopeful we were last week to do this wonderful project all over again.

As I explained in my post at Guys Lit Wire, we elected to stay with Ballou because this school is literally building a library from the ground up. Last year they had less than one book for each of their 1,200 students - only 63 in the fiction section. Through our efforts and others, they had two books for each student this spring. (The American Library Association standard is ELEVEN books for student in school libraries.) Ballou was suffering from donor fatigue however - most of their support has disappeared but their need remains the same. The library is an incredibly vital part of the school (chess club, manga club, poetry club and on and on meet there), and we want to help them make it the crown jewel it deserves to be.

We are all book lovers after all - how could we walk away when the job was not done?

So we put 525 books the list with the advisement of Ballou librarian Melissa Jackson and we started the book fair with great optimism. Our outreach this year was without parallel; I am not exaggerating when I say that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the book fair via blog mentions, facebook updates and countless tweets. I was frankly stunned by how much help we received in spreading the word. Folks started buying books immediately and it looked like we were set for yet another sellout.

And then everything just slowed down.

As of today we have sold 117 books off the wish list. We are in the middle of the second week and seeing number similar to the second day for the past book fairs. I have honestly no idea why this has happened. Some people have suggested we held the fair too close to tax day, but that has never been an issue in the past. Some have suggested the Powells wish list, which requires you to manually type in the school's address, is too complicated. As we have always gone through Powells and strongly support independent bookstores, we just don't see how to change that and hope it is not an issue this time.

Some have suggested that the economy is a factor but as we are economically in better shape now than at any point during the previous book fairs, that is a hard one to accept. Additionally, many of the books on the list are less than $10, even with shipping, so the cost of helping is really quite small. Some have gone so far to suggest library fatigue and honestly, that one is just too painful to imagine.

One former donor told me she did not contribute this time because she preferred we choose another library and not give more than once to Ballou. While I certainly respect her choice to not help us, this one really hurt. We want to stay with Ballou partly because so many others have walked away and left the work unfinished. We thought we were doing the best thing possible for the school and students by not quitting now and yet I can not help but think that if I had another school with a fresh compelling story it might have gotten more support. But honestly, who knows.

This is all, quite frankly, enormously frustrating.

In the end, we will never know why the response to the book fair this spring has been so flat. As an author who has been urged by one and all to participate in social media to increase my own book sales, I have to say I find it fascinating how so much online activity can result in such little concrete action. It is the easiest thing in the world to hit "retweet" but actually taking action is a whole lot tougher. Maybe we are just becoming a world of passive donors - we think by spreading the word we have done enough. That doesn't put books on the shelves however, and those real books in the real hands of kids in DC are what this whole project is all about.

The book fair continues through the weekend and we would certainly appreciate your suport. We will be back in the fall, still with Ballou, to try again. Maybe it will take many more small steps to reach out goal but we'll keep trying. Somebody, after all, has got to fill those damn shelves and if it's not us then who will it be? That's why we can't walk away; there's no one else behind us that is willing to do the work.

On a wing

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:28:51 -0800

My friend John Hitz was twenty-eight when he died, nearly twenty years ago, in a snow machine accident. I don't always tell people this when I show his picture because the part of his story I'm telling then is about flying out of Fairbanks up to Liberator Lake in a Cessna 206. I tell the part of his flying story that fits with the larger narrative of Alaska aviation I am sharing. I wrote a book, I put together a slide show, I talk to people about the "dangerous game of flying in Alaska". I show this picture of my friend John and the 206 he flew one beautiful winter afternoon and every time I show it, I miss John all over again.

But I rarely tell anyone that.

John was working as a co-pilot for a company called Brooks Airfuel when the picture was taken. They flew fuel in DC3s, DC4s and a DC6 to villages across Alaska. The planes were new during World War II but durable fifty years later in a way that few other aircraft are; they still fly all over the world. John used to talk about the switches and levers in the cockpit, the complexity of operating the huge radial engines. The job was dirty and the hours were long and in the cold it could be miserable but John enjoyed flying for Brooks just like he enjoyed flying at the Company which is when we met.

The flight to Liberator Lake was about a mine operation in need of fuel. The lake was the landing strip and the DC4 weighed 40,000 pounds empty. John was sent out in the 206 to test the ice and make sure it was strong enough to handle the big plane. He told this story to us later always aware of the absurdity of the flight, the danger, and its immense appeal. "Of course the ice was strong enough!" he always said. "Of course!" And the weather was good and the plane flew well and sitting on the wing, gassing up to go home, someone took his picture. We found it later, packing up his apartment for his parents. We made a dozen copies, one for each of us, so we would never forget him.

As if any of us could.

John's picture is at the end of my slide show, part of a group of pictures of friends on the job that I click through while reading from my book about why we all come north, why we ended up at the Company, why we stayed. I'm 43 now and when I tell these stories they are about who I was then, my distant wayward youth. But John is forever 28 and smiling back at me as only he could; as only he ever will.

Nine months before he died, John bought a brand new Nissan pickup, fire engine red; he called it Roy. When his parents came up from Nebraska to claim him, the truck posed a problem. Getting it out of Fairbanks in January was difficult and expensive. So in the days after we met in the worst possible circumstances, I bought John's truck from his parents. Through nearly fifteen years of marriage, through four dogs, a son and now a book, John's truck has been as constant as his photo. Last week my husband, who knew John before me and carries his own memories, told me it looks like the transmission might be shot*. This is long overdue; at twenty years old and with 130,000+ miles, John's truck is long past this sort of expensive repair. The rear bumper was damaged years ago when I was in Florida and the bed is rusted through in areas where John loaded his snow machine on the day he bought it. The truck is no longer shiny and new, yet I can not imagine my life without it. It's mine, but still it's his and together it's every moment we all had in Alaska.

John would have sold the truck long ago I'm sure, purchased something newer with room maybe for a family. He might even have lost the snapshot of Liberator Lake. Putting a small part of John's story in my book and keeping his picture in my slide show are, I know, quiet little acts of futility. I can not bring back my friend. Let me write that again so I believe it - I can not bring him back. John Hitz is gone on the Mitchell Expressway in Fairbanks, in a snowstorm, in a collision with a truck and a driver who never saw him. He's gone. I know this; he's gone.

But, here I am, like always, writing about him again.

When I show this slide and tell the Liberator Lake story everyone laughs. It is, in many ways, the quintessential Alaska flying story. John thus continues to be part of the larger tale I'm telling, about pilots and planes and the myths that often keep both in the air in the face of a harsh aviation environment. I do not always tell an audience John is gone and so together we can believe that he is up there still, north of the Brooks Range, looking for ice thick enough to bear a heavy load. We all live happily ever after that way and most importantly, the legend of John Hitz continues. Maybe more than any other reason that is why I wrote my book - so all of them would live forever. Or maybe it's just for a moment like this, where I have an excuse to talk about my friend John one more time.

If you knew him, you would write about him too.

*He was wrong! It wasn't the transmission but the clutch that needed work. He did the whole thing in an afternoon and for less than $100. Roy lives!

Because this is what I live for

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:40:16 -0800

We're still working hard on the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou High School in Washington DC. It's gotten off to a slow start this year and as we close in on 100 books bought, we are still only 20% through the list. If you have $10 to spare, there are many titles that could be bought for that reasonable amount (and even cover shipping). Please take a look at the GLW post and do what you can to help us get this library one step further to reaching the ALA standard of eleven books for each student. (There are currently two books for each student at Ballou.)

This book fair is a daunting task and a great challenge. We are in for the long haul with Ballou though and want to stay with them as long as they need us. This is a moment booklovers should live for - to change the world for some teens who are desperate for books and need our help to acquire them. Please step up to the plate with Guys Lit Wire; we'd love to have you join us on this project.

The Big Idea: Writing about real people & real events

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:30:33 -0800

Link: John Scalzi's Whatever Big Idea series

Telling stories about fictional characters is hard, but telling stories about real people can be even harder -- especially when those stories involve a dangerous job. Author Colleen Mondor confronted this fact head on with her memoir The Map of My Dead Pilots, about her time working for an airline in the wilds of Alaska. Mondor's here to talk about the balancing act telling true stories requires, and how she walked that line.

COLLEEN MONDOR:

If you ask for the short description of The Map of My Dead Pilots, I always say it is about Alaska and flying and how some of the job was crazy cold and all of it was just plain crazy. I can write for pages about what it was like to run operations for a bush commuter out of Fairbanks and how sled dogs truly are the worst cargo in the world and that being the low bidders on the Interior Alaska Dead Body Contract is just as disturbing as you can imagine.

At the "Company" we flew convicts and high school sports teams, live chicks and dead moose, thousands of pounds of dog food and on one particularly memorable day, a multi-tiered wedding cake. I can write about the history of the early pilots and how those larger than life men in open cockpit biplanes created an aviation environment spawning what the NTSB refers to as "bush pilot syndrome" which is still blamed for a large quantity of accidents in the state today.

I could talk and write about all of this but none of it includes the hard part of writing the book, or the issue I am still dealing with after its release.

Map deals with the incidents, accidents and day-to-day experiences of pilots I knew and worked with at a place I refer to as the "Company". It is specifically about several men who are still alive and well, some of them now flying corporately or in the major airlines in the Lower 48. When we worked together none of us thought I would one day end up writing about the job and there was no small amount of nervousness on their parts when I told them I was working on a book. Map has been a project over several years and I'm sure that along the way, as much as I said I was staying with it, they probably all thought it was something that would never leave my laptop let alone be read by other people.

When I announced I had signed a deal with Lyons Press, these pilots had to acknowledge that their lives were about to be shared in a way that gave them very little control. What I promised them was that their real names would not be attached to the book and the contemporary characters would all (with the exception of one brief mention that was approved) have aliases. This has proven to be a bit more complicated then I imagined, however, as family and mutual friends have asked for confirmation of their own suspicions (I've let the guys field those requests), but I've held to it. The real challenge though was never the pilots who came through just fine, but rather the ones who lost their careers and worse.

It is difficult enough to write about what your friends did when everything ended up all right, but to second guess wrong decisions knowing nothing was ever the same again, or to pore over NTSB accident reports that only reveal what happened and never consider why, brings a whole new level of seriousness to the narrative. The investigators are very good at determining where the flaps were set and the condition of the weather, but they never consider what a pilot was thinking in the air or what was happening on the ground before he ever took off. I chose to ask those questions, and thus had to acknowledge the answers I found.

In many respects Map is the final word on aircraft that crashed on the sea ice near Nome, off the end of the runway in Bethel, on an unknown mountainside near Kotzebue and worst of all, into the Yukon River. People will read Map and gain some understanding into what happened in these far flung locations, but they will never know how hard it was to tell those stories well, or not judge too harshly pilots whose final acts were unrecoverable mistakes.

This is when the telling the truth got very dicey but also most important.

In writing The Map of My Dead Pilots, I discovered the Big Idea was finding balance between wanting to protect those who could not, for whatever reason, speak up for themselves and also being as honest as possible about a job that often relied upon a certain level of dishonesty every day. (Flight loads are always exactly at legal weight, the weather is always flyable, the aircraft are always in perfect condition.) Part of why the belief persists that Alaska is a place where the rules do not apply is because so many stories about it have been mythologized for so long. (Look no further than any one of the reality tv programs set in the state for proof of that.)

In aviation the "glory stories" are particularly pervasive and I didn't want to contribute to that cycle - in fact I wanted to expose it. But I also didn't want to hurt the friends who were still impacted from accidents years before or the families of those who lost someone dear. It was a fine line to walk and one I continue to worry about. There are parents who will read my book and find out more than they perhaps want to know about their sons, both living and dead, and that is a responsibility I feel quite heavy on my heart. I didn't want to do anyone wrong, because even when the crashing was their own faults, no one deserved to be judged harshly by me or anyone else years later.

The final verdict is still out on just how well I accomplished this high wire act; I'm waiting to hear from some friends who are featured prominently throughout the book. I hope I did them proud, of course, but I also hope I have shown just how much the stories we tell each other still matter, and that they don't need false glory to make them any more powerful then they have always been.

Nonfiction for Curious Readers 2010

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:10:16 -0800

As always, I have spent the past few months combing the catalogs looking for nonfiction that will appeal to teens, even if they're not the intended audience. The end result is a collection of titles ranging from a picture book stunner on Jimi Hendrix (the images must be seen to be believed), to Edith Wharton as literary rock star, to the "notorious Benedict Arnold," whose story is a lot more complex then you might think. Most intriguing, though, is a relatively unknown British gentlemen who tested the rules of his local post office for decades. He is, simply, the coolest stamp collector ever -- even though he didn't really collect stamps at all, but rather used them for a lifetime of eccentric postal adventures. (He mailed himself!) John Tingey's The Englishman Who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects is exactly what I think of when I picture nonfiction that can get teens excited. Beautifully designed, and heavily illustrated by Princeton Architectural Press, this is a book that certain readers will find good as gold.

Tingey starts off Englishman with a bit of a philatelic treasure hunt, recalling an auction discovery of "strangely addressed postcards that travelled through the British post between 1898 and 1899." The author bought the cards, and promptly filed them away in his office until three years later when he noted a similar card on eBay. Then two years later he found more, and, too curious to resist any longer, embarked on the trail of W. Reginald Bray, a man who had way more fun with the postal system than any of us can imagine.

In the chapters that follow, Tingey provides biographical data on Bray, including an explanation of how he actually mailed himself and his bicycle. There's photographic proof, plus the receipt his father signed when the special "package" arrived. It is clear that Bray initially was on a lark to test the postal regulations by mailing odd things (a turnip, rabbit skull, embroidered envelopes), and then began addressing postcards in odd ways such as "any person in London" (not delivered), or "the Proprietor of the most remarkable hotel in the world on the road between Santa Cruz and San Jose, California" (it got to the Hotel de Redwood, which was built in live trees and stumps in the Santa Cruz Mountains). In every case he asked the cards be signed and returned to him, and thus slowly obtained one of the largest autograph collections in the world. The combination of celebrity (he sent cards to military commanders, politicians, movie stars, etc.) and mail art makes Bray's hobby both singular and charming. There is nothing else like it, and because of the inclusion of so many gorgeously photographed examples, Tingey's salute to this endlessly curious man will likely inspire everyone from amateur historians to artists. Personally, I plan to mail out some postcards of my own in tribute to Bray's example -- we'll see what I accomplish in the 21st century to compare to his efforts from one hundred years ago.

I will confess: of all the authors I thought might be compelling subjects for teen biographies, Edith Wharton never came close. But Connie Wooldridge's The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton is not only gorgeous to hold and peruse (the design is outstanding, from the textured dust jacket to the abundance of photographs), but the story is a true shocker. Remember the old adage "keeping up with the Joneses"? Well, Edith's family was the Joneses, and in the post-Civil War New York she was born into, doing what was expected was no easy thing. To wit:

It was becoming uncomfortably clear to Lucretia Jones that her daughter, Edith, was, in fact, different. Edith did love clothes. That was a relief. But Edith's other world of books and ideas was pulling her in a direction Lucretia found mysterious and unsettling. One of the fictional characters Edith later created would describe the "universe of thought" as an "enchanted region which, to those who have lingered, comes to have so much more colour and substance." Lucretia never "lingered" in that particular "enchanted region" and she certainly didn't think it was a good place for her daughter to be lingering.

What Edith needed to do was marry the right man, hopefully the right man with money. But that wasn't so easy for a bookish girl who gamely attended all the proper social functions, but still could not land the catch her mother wanted. Her first engagement failed for reasons never fully explained, but the story that ran in The Newport Daily News (that's Newport as in Rhode Island, home of the highest society of the time) didn't help Edith's reputation:

The only reason assigned for the breaking of the engagement hitherto existing between Henry Stevens and Miss Edith Jones is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress, and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr. Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault.

Zam and pow. That's the end of a glorious coming-out season, isn't it? Wooldridge goes on to describe Wharton's continued writing efforts and the moment when she met Walter Berry, the man who became, "in Edith's own words, â€˜the Love of my life'." She also met the man she would marry (sadly, not Walter Berry), and from there a whole lifetime of companionship, loyalty, literary acclaim and search for love (which always included Berry) followed. Reading about Wharton's life enriches the experience of reading her novels (especially The House of Mirth) tenfold. I can't imagine assigning her books without assigning Wooldridge's as well -- they should go hand in hand -- but even more so, Brave Escape should be mandatory reading for any bookish young woman who dreams of moving beyond her family's expectations in an unorthodox manner. As much as Janis Joplin's life (more on Port Arthur's favorite daughter below) is about getting out of Texas to sing her heart out, Edith Wharton's was about getting away from society's expectations to pour out her own on paper. She is far more fascinating than I ever gave her credit for (or, rather, than I was led to believe in classroom discussion). Wooldridge makes Wharton the kind of literary heroine that Louisa May Alcott or Emily Dickinson have exemplified for decades. What a truly revolutionary woman and fascinating book. Loved it, plain and simple.

Lincoln's Flying Spies falls into one of those "stuff you didn't know about the Civil War, and is wicked cool" categories that get so often overlooked in traditional retellings of the war. A zillion books have been written about Lincoln, and yet how many are there about Thaddeus Lowe and the Balloon Corps who constituted, quite frankly, the very first U.S. air force? (Historians can argue all they want. They were in the air. They gathered valuable intelligence. They got shot at. They were the first air force, period.) Gail Jarrow has created a real gem with this title -- she has an irresistibly interesting subject (hot air balloons in war!), lots of photographs and quotes from people who were there -- and all of it is a perfect example of not realizing the value of what you had when you had it. In other words, there's a reason why no one mentions the use of balloons at Gettysburg. In spite of providing a lot in information in prior battles, Union commanders decided not to fund their use anymore, and Thaddeus Lowe and his fellow aeronauts were pretty much done. And that's just so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.

As much as Lincoln's Flying Spies is about the use of hot air balloons by the North however (the Confederacy never was able to operate one successfully), it is also about Lowe, who was already a pioneering aeronaut when the war began. From the very beginning, he saw what balloons could do by viewing enemy encampments and troop movements from the air. Although tethered during their ascensions for safety, Lowe and his fellow aeronauts, along with the military officers who ascended with them, were able to determine if the Confederates were preparing attacks, retreating, changing positions or gathering forces. While communication with the ground during battles was difficult (Lowe tried to assemble telegraph lines so he could report on troop movements in real-time), there were still many officers, on both sides, who acknowledged the powerful impact the balloons had on the fighting. Jarrow explains all of this, and also places readers right in the heart of the battles -- a place that a lot of history buffs will especially enjoy. She provides enough about Lowe to make him fodder for many school biography assignments and another unsung American to emulate. Here's hoping this title finds its way into the hands of backyard inventors, would-be aviators and every kid plotting war games on the bedroom floor.

Steve Sheinkin has a killer tagline on the cover of his new book The Notorious Benedict Arnold. In this "true story of adventure, heroism and treachery," Arnold is described as "America's Original Action Hero." It might be difficult for the average elementary school graduate to believe that the man who tried to hand over West Point to the British could ever be anything other than the Revolutionary War's most infamous traitor -- and yet Sheinkin, who has authored several outstanding history books for younger teens, does an excellent job of humanizing Arnold and making him someone readers will understand. The author makes clear in fact that his heroics early in the war can not and should not be denied and there is a solid argument to be made from the evidence here that without Arnold, Washington would not have made it successfully through the first years of the war. This makes the fact that it is only in spite of Arnold that America eventually was victorious that much more difficult to accept. All of our history hinged on a few moments when Benedict Arnold led our troops into battle, and then later, when he did his best to destroy the American military.

Sheinkin keeps readers on the edge of their seats as he shows the many key moments Arnold was part of, and then the slow unraveling of his character, which led to his final fateful choice. He should have been a general lauded along with Washington, Ethan Allen, Nathaniel Greene and Lafayette, and by placing him with the great military leaders of the Revolution, Sheinkin more than proves his book's relevance. I found Arnold an incredibly compelling figure, and his tragic fall -- due largely to his own hubris, although certainly helped by the politics of a Congress terrified of strong military personalities, and a young wife enamored with financial success -- is truly sad to read about. In fact, there is much of The Notorious Benedict Arnold that is sad because you know it's going to end badly for the main character. The hook here is that Sheinkin manages to make you care about a story whose ending is common knowledge. It's his authorial gift to make history come alive and why I recommend all of his books to teens eager for what their teachers have no time to share. Especially consider Notorious for reluctant older teen readers, as this is not an author who talks down to his audience. All the smart kids should be reading Sheinkin before they pick up Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin; he's a true talent at knowing his audience as well (if not better) than he knows his subject.

Tanya Lee Stone deservedly received many kudos for her last book about women in the early days of the U.S. space program, Almost Astronauts. She's followed it with a unusual pop culture biography, The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll's History and Her Impact On Us. This heavily-illustrated title looks not only at the doll, but at the woman who invented her and the history of the Mattel toy company. In many ways, Stone has written one of the most accessible business books for MG and YA readers I've ever seen. Barbie is certainly the point, but she's not the only interesting thing here, and her story is about a lot more than blonde hair and high heels than most people realize.

You have to live under a rock not to be familiar with the Barbie name. It's odd how some things can so permeate our culture that even when people do not own an object, they still know what it is, and question what what it represents. Barbie has been dragged through the mud as "bad for young girls" due to her unattainable body dimensions; as racist, due to her Caucasian looks (it was 1980 before the first black Barbie appeared); and as sexist, due to more than a few dubious fashion statements (not to mention the infamous Teen Talk Barbie "Math class is tough" scandal of 1992). Stone includes all of that and more, while balancing the stories of those who found inspiration in Barbie, a long look at the many careers she was dressed for over the years (soldier, race car driver, veterinarian, astronaut!), and an irresistible section on Barbie fashion and Barbie as art. As she points out, Barbie was designed first and foremost as a fashion doll, a more durable alternative to popular paper dolls. She was never intended to be the face of American women in doll form or the unlikely inspiration to generations of American girls. After all, did anyone look to Chatty Cathy for career advice? Somehow, though, Barbie slipped into the public zeitgeist and now we're all stuck with her.

The Good, the Bad and the Barbie goes a long way towards deconstructing just how a toy is created, the atmosphere in which it can "take off," and the manner in which something becomes a phenomenon. You can hope for pop culture stardom, she points out, but you can't force it. What Stone does is show how it happened in this instance, and then everything else that has followed in fame's wake. (My personal favorite chapter was the one about all the ways Barbie has been stripped naked and parted out over the years. This makes me realize that my brother, who hung our cousin's headless Barbies from the curtain rods to torment her when she came home from school, really was perfectly normal. Big sigh of relief.) Adult aficionados are going to enjoy this book for all the nostalgia, and I certainly recommend it as an unorthodox gift for adults. But teens should look to it as an excellent example of studying our culture, consumer buying habits, and gender studies. There's a lot to learn from Stone's research, and a lot of enjoyment in store while turning these pages.

What are the odds that I would receive books on both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the same month? Ann Angel's Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing is written for young adults, and captures both the powerful spirit and wry tenderness of the great rock and blues icon. The temptation to make Joplin's life a cautionary tale for teens is enormous, but Angel, while clear that the singer fell victim to substance abuse she could not control, does not offer her life as something to fear. Joplin lived large, in a celebration of her powerful voice and a powerful love for family and friends. Her death is a tragedy, plain and simple, and the only lesson offered here is how sad it is that we didn't have her with us for many more decades of soul.

After a brief introduction from longtime bandmate Sam Andrews, Angel follows Joplin's life from her upbringing in the refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, to the fame she found with Big Brother and the Holding Company, the adulation at the Monterey Pop Festival, and her long struggles with alcohol and drugs (especially heroin). While all of this is fascinating (and well worthy of discussion), teens will likely identify most with Joplin's high school struggle to fit in with her classmates in a time that demanded conformity above all else. In the 1950s, Angel writes, "Being smart wasn't as important as behaving like a good, churchgoing American." Joplin found herself gravitating to the words of the new, explosive writers of the Beat Generation, and in spite of her membership in the Future Teachers of America, glee club, and school newspaper, she couldn't hide who she was. Soon enough, she was traveling with a group of guy friends to blues clubs and roadhouses, and trading in her proper Peter Pan collars for art and pondering the wide world beyond her company town. Clearly, Joplin was always destined for something more; it was her voice that decided her path, and her insatiable need for friendship that drove her on a search for fame that demanded artificial means to support it.

Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing is no celebrity biography, but rather a deep look into the life of a talented artist. Heavily illustrated with photographs, this is also the dream of what might have been. If only, if only, if only Janis had not needed her fans so much, then maybe she would have survived to continue singing for them. Here's hoping this title gets some teen readers to seek out her music -- an achievement that Angel would likely be thrilled to make happen.

Jimi Hendrix makes an excellent picture book subject in Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow by Gary Golio, with stunning illustrations by Javaka Steptoe. Wisely focusing on the rock legend's younger years, Jimi follows his childhood as he was raised by his single parent father, and hung out in Seattle with close friends who shared his love of music. The story of how he acquired his first guitar is here, as are the artists who inspired him early on. Mostly, though, Golio focuses on how Hendrix "saw" music, how sound dominated his life, and his lifelong embrace of music, which transformed him into a singular talent. The text is engaging and interesting, but the illustrations -- holy cow, the illustrations -- are incredible. Steptoe uses layers of colors to fill the pages, and then collages over them in a manner that makes not only images, but textures, leap off the page. Jimi is not only a story, but a work of art -- a perfect homage to its subject. All in all, this is a class act all the way, and would be appreciated by Jimi Hendrix fans of any age. (Teens and adults will surely appreciate it for the thing of beauty that it is.) And Golio includes not only a note on Hendrix's tragic early death (where he discusses that addiction can be prevented and treated), but also links to websites and other books on the musician. One of the more impressive gift books I've come across; Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow is truly great reading for fans of all ages.

Pieces of Katrina: The Rising Voices of UNO Press

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:25:42 -0800

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees, there have been many books published about New Orleans by a variety of publishers. In the city itself, however, the University of New Orleans Press found itself reborn in the wake of the flood, and has embraced a new future that encompasses not only an ongoing dedication to stories of the city, but a multitude of other topics as well. As managing editor Bill Lavender explained to me in a recent e-mail exchange: "UNO Press didn't actually exist in August of 2005; or rather it was at that time dormant, with no staff. Shortly thereafter, I proposed that we reawaken it and was able to get it started again. We didn't start it up for the specific purpose of publishing Katrina-related books, but the Katrina Narrative Project was ongoing and we decided early on that one of our first books would be Voices Rising, excerpted from these oral histories. Then a friend suggested we take a look at Jerry Ward's memoir, The Katrina Papers, and we found it irresistible."

Ward, a professor at Dillard University in the city, maintained a diary of the weeks and months after the storm hit that became The Katrina Papers. It includes his wide-ranging thoughts upon leaving his home, and then striving for a return to normalcy in such an altered environment. His record of loss illustrates how the totality of the destruction defies our own ability to understand it -- how it transcends loss of life and home to include loss of the future, loss of hopes and dreams and what might have been. As recounted in Papers, while clearing out the molding books and documents of his home he came to a particularly sad conclusion:

"It is strange. Emptiness fills you. It is strange. As you dump one load of the poetry chapbooks and poetry volumes from the wheelbarrow, two chapbooks fly to the sidewalk. They are works by Dudley Randall and Audre Lorde. You lovingly gather them up for deposit in a safe, dry place. There is a message here. The English language needs a new word: MISSAGE. The second message is this: For several years you had considered starting the Project on the History of Black Writing database by using your collective hard-to-find or totally limited self-published poetry books. The dream deferred is now your dream destroyed. Live with the emptiness."

In publishing books like Ward's and the products of the Katrina Narrative Project: Voices Rising and Voices Rising II, UNO Press stepped outside of the standard reportage boundaries and acknowledged the voices of those on the ground as more than sound bites on the evening news. Initiated in the months following Katrina, the Narrative Project involved UNO students and faculty members interviewing dozens of people across Louisiana and Mississippi in an effort to gather their stories in an oral history project. The immediacy of the events gives a rawness to these interviews that makes readers long for similar studies in the aftermath of other catastrophic disasters, such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, or the 1900 Galveston Flood. The Voices Rising volumes are real time history and carry a level of significance that future studies, suffering from emotional distance, will never be able to claim. Consider this passage from the recently released second volume:

I'm afraid of how quickly memories dissolve without touchstones. This is why my legs are black and blue from diving over a wet sofa to pick up a decorated heart encrusted in mud in my grandmother's floor. It's why I won't open any of the swollen photo albums on the floor of my temporary concrete apartment. I know they can no longer remind me of what my grandmother's uncles looked like or how beautiful her Aunt Prue was. Everyday I remember a picture of my great-grandmother. We called her Mimi. She lived until I was a teenager. In the photo, she is eighteen, looking over her shoulder at the photographer. Her black hair is piled on top of her head except for a few loose strands. It's the eyes I don't want to forget. They are enormous and brown. I always thought them incredibly sad. I close my eyes at night and imagine that photo and her sadness. It's as though she's looking at me, saying, "I know."

I'm getting on my knees now to pick through an album. I believe it's the one that contained this photo. Annabelle and Ruby are sniffing around the box. I sneeze; pieces of Katrina on the floor in front of me.

Can I touch it?

The first Voices Rising volume is currently the second best-selling title for the press, but only seven of their fifty books either currently in print or set to be released within the next year are Katrina-related. They have, however, as Lavender explains, "devoted a lot of effort toward these titles." This is due in no small part to both the city's ongoing post-Katrina struggle, but also the interest developed by visitors to New Orleans, who continue to be transfixed by what became a national disaster. Lavender is quick to point out however, that Katrina (and the levee failure) is not the only subject UNO Press is interested in. "We'll continue to publish on the subject," he explains, "but we'll also continue to publish other things. It's not the only thing on our agenda, certainly. We want to serve the local community, both academic and popular, but we don't want to focus too particularly on any one thing."

Part of that community focus includes the documentary book series, The Neighborhood Story Project. NSP works with neighborhood writers to "create portraits of place." Originally established in 2004 with the first series of books, UNO Press is now their publishing partner, and more titles were released earlier this year. They include four books by students who enrolled in the project at John McDonogh Senior High School and were taught everything from photography to interviewing techniques in a process which culminated in publication, and a series of celebratory book-release block parties across the city. In a manner similar to the Voices Rising titles, the NSP books record the lives of people easily overlooked by those who prefer a fast and easy version of the city. The 2010 series was written by students in the Calliope and St. Bernard Projects and the Seventh Ward, and includes a Honduran immigrant trying to learn as much about where she came from as where she lives now and a young man trying desperately to "find my light at the end of the tunnel." The authors write candidly about family members who deal drugs, are incarcerated, or, in one heartbreaking passage in Beyond the Bricks, die in acts of senseless violence. The books are poignant, startling, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. With dozens of black and white photographs and extras as varied as recipes and handwritten journal excerpts, From My Mother's House of Beauty; Aunt Alice vs. Bob Marley; Signed, the President; and Beyond the Bricks are brash statements from brave teenagers who have stepped up the plate and laid their hearts bare in an effort to find themselves. These are unique coming-of-age stories that, taken as a whole, show readers a side of New Orleans life that is a model for documentary study.

As much as the NSP titles are not about Katrina, however, the authors were all indelibly affected by the events of August 2005, and to one degree or another, write about in their books. What's interesting about the titles at UNO Press, though, is that there are those that are ostensibly not about Katrina, and yet the reader ends up drawn back to it anyway. Jonathan Traviesa's Portraits: Photographs in New Orleans 1998-2009 is a collection of black-and-white pictures of New Orleanians taken at their homes or studios. There is no hint of destruction to be found here, because the city is not the point -- Portraits is about the people. And yet seeing the faces of NOLA residents in such relaxed settings will likely lead readers to recall the many faces of frustration and despair from five years ago. Traviesa soundly refutes the statements made after the hurricane that New Orleans was not worth saving, or significant to the rest of the country. He shows us the part of the story we did not see back then, and in many ways brings Katrina full circle -- his photos were taken before and after the storm, and yet you cannot perceive a chronology while turning pages. Readers bring Katrina to this book, not the author or his subjects. Realizing this, we learn a little bit more about ourselves and the city and what we expect to find in its books. Essentially, the storm is ever with us. "I actually don't think it's going to fade away," says Bill Lavender, "even as the BP spill threatens to eclipse it in terms of scope. As many books as have already been published about the disaster, I think there are many more to come. There were lots of Zeitouns."

And there are a lot of portraits, which take us back simply because we are still halfway there already.

The press's current top seller, Dogs in My Life by John Tibule Mendes, is a hybrid of photo essay and memoir. Mendes's book includes a fascinating introduction about how his early twentieth-century photos were found, along with his own story about growing up in the city. Local readers are likely transfixed by the disarming photos which show photos of big and small moments in the city's history (from the 1927 flood and destruction of the Cotton Exchange to a variety of parades and candid city snapshots). It is another example of how the press is able to bridge the gap of past and present and create a collection of topical and compelling titles. As the spill drama continues, Lavender points out that the story of New Orleans and the people who write there will continue to evolve.

"I think Katrina galvanized the national imagination because of the extremes of suffering, generosity, and also venality and xenophobia that surfaced in it. The Nashville flood was a horrible thing, but it was over so quickly the vast diaspora that took place in NO did not really develop, and so there was no occasion for such literary photo ops as the Gretna police or Danziger bridge or Zeitoun. So I actually think it's a combination of the very real long-range effects of the event, plus the fact of New Orleans' literary nature.

"The larger story-- In my crystal ball I can see (darkly) Katrina and the BP spill together as the opening salvo of an age of increasingly serious and frequent environmental disasters. Maybe this age will finally shock us into being pragmatic stewards of the planet. Or so, given the alternative, one would hope."

Kids of Color and the New American Whitewashing

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:43:36 -0800

"Because I so rarely saw black characters in books when I was a child, I learned to relate to protagonists who didn't look like me -- but that doesn't mean I couldn't identify with their struggles, triumphs, etc. It did mean, however, that I started to erase aspects of myself when I read -- I couldn't consciously be black and read a lot of those books because then I'd realize there was no place for me in that imaginary realm. I didn't pretend to be white, I just didn't acknowledge my own erasure from the scenes that delighted me so much."- Zetta Elliott

"All throughout my childhood and teen years, I can honestly say that I did not read a single book with characters of colour. At least not one that stands out in my memoryâ€¦ Every book I read depicted white protagonists. Every movie and television show I watched (with the exception of Bollywood) portrayed whiteness in its myriad of expressions. I saw white children and teens being and doing just about everything. I grew up believing that to be South Asian in a world where you were either black or white meant being invisible." - Neesha Meminger

I have been trying for days to write an article about the lack of diversity in middle grade and young adult fiction and found myself confounded at every turn. This has been a very intense subject lately in the literary blogosphere, as readers have bounced from one discussion to another on issues of race, religion and ethnicity. From the meanderings at the School Library Journal Heavy Medal blog about the inclusion of a dark-skinned secondary character in Rebecca Stead's Newbery-winning When You Reach Me, to multiple discoveries of covers that depict light-skinned characters who are described as dark-skinned within the text, and the depressing realization of just how few titles were nominated for the Cybils with Kids of Color, race overshadowed even the ALA award announcements. The cover issue, a very visual representation of what is wrong in publishing, brought into question just how much control authors have over the presentation of their stories, and in particular continues to be a sore spot among many readers and writers. From author Kekla Magoon:

"Specifically regarding the cover controversy issue, the blogosphere conversation seems to have overlooked a key component to the issue: taking time to fully examine WHY the publishers whitewash the covers. From what I've read, all the time is spent talking about why they shouldn't. But why do they? Obviously: To Make Money. And someone, somewhere has convinced them that whitewashed books sell better."

The cover issue is only one aspect of a much larger problem: why it is acceptable to still believe (and use as a business model) the notion that Caucasian readers will not relate to Kids of Color in general titles? Is this an issue that originates with publishers, or does it lie with "gatekeepers" like librarians, large booksellers, and big-box stores? The widely perceived misconception has resulted in a pigeonholing of ethnic characters, and has provoked a backlash on the issue of book covers, as one author recently shared with me:

"I actually didn't want an African-American girl on the cover (in general I don't like photographs on covers; am much more drawn to iconic covers). However, (and wrongly so) the publisher thought that having an African-American girl on the cover would draw interest from librarians and booksellers looking for Black History Month titles... never mind that my book is not a traditional BHM title, as it's a contemporary novel where race is not a pivotal plot point."

Frustration on this issue reached a boiling point online with the second recent release from Bloomsbury of a title with a protagonist described as dark-skinned in the text, but depicted as white-skinned on the cover. This prompted one blogger to demand a boycott of the publisher, and numerous sites to consider their own lopsided coverage for titles with Caucasian protagonists. Do covers really work? For everyone who has stated they "never judge a book by the cover," there were many who could not recall the last book with a kid of color they had reviewed or ever read. While there was no small amount of navel-gazing over this issue (many bloggers saw it as a "teachable moment"), the inclination to change was palpable, and Susan of Color Online promptly created a Facebook page for Readers Against Whitewashing. She feels, however, that covers are only one significant part of the larger problem:

" When you grow up in an environment where you are always invisible, when everything associated with fun, good-looking and valued is white, you stop looking for yourself. Teens and children I know gravitate to what has been promoted to them -- white kids having the kind of adventures they want."

One side topic that came out of the cover controversy was the issue of author involvement. There have been dozens of public comments from authors commiserating over the difficulty they face when a publisher chooses a cover they do not feel best represents their story. Interestingly, however, when I began specifically asking authors who had Kids of Color on their covers how much input they were given in the cover process, I learned that there is no single answer for the author/cover designer relationship:

"I didn't like the first three covers... all three of them had either a photo of a black girl, or a black girl and her mother. I just didn't think they represented my character because of the way the models were dressed, etc. So I found a picture on a stock photo site, and I chose to use that one for my cover instead."

Also:

"The cover featured the character's hand reaching toward a few props. They sent me a prelim and I said, "That's great, but she's mixed." They said "Oh." And immediately altered the skin tone."

However, some publishers get it right from the beginning:

"I had no say on the cover. (I was just thrilled to be published.) Then one day I got the final cover in the mail. I was shocked. I had never seen a contemporary Asian American on a kids' book cover before, and a photograph, no less. I wasn't sure what I thought of it. It was so different. (This was in 2003.) Later I was told that it was a first."

And also:

"I just got the cover image for the new edition coming out this summer. While I'm sad to report that the models have suffered the same decapitation that seems to affect so many YA cover models these days, Misty is still clearly and happily non-Caucasian."

In a blog post from last year concerning the cover of her book Shine, Coconut Moon, Neesha Meminger pointed out how confused some designers can be when it comes to religion:

"â€¦the bigger battle for me was the one about accuracy. Having an image of a Hindu deity on a book about a Sikh family was not about opinion or interpretation. It was just wrong, as in it was inaccurate. And that would have been a misrepresentation of the contents of my novel. For that, I was willing to battle till the very end (luckily, I did not have to)."

Accuracy is a valid point, and it stretches far beyond skin color to an overall honesty about story itself, and how appealing that honesty itself can be to readers. Putnam editor Timothy Travaglini approached Sherry Smith's Flygirl with these thoughts in mind:

"Given [the] dominant narrative thread in Flygirl, about Ida Mae Jones' struggles with her own race and skin-color, and the effects on her and her family as she "passes" for white in an environment where blacks were not allowed; we particularly hoped, even, that this would be a strong hook, that this would be appealing to readers, whatever their individual race or background might be. As we designed the jacket, any discussion we had would have centered around whether or not we got the girl right, was she as accurate a representation of the heroine as possible."

This is not to negate the feelings, however, of those authors who contacted me with frustration over the fear that consumed them when faced with inaccurate covers after struggling so hard for honest content. The repercussions they faced for battling editors has not gone unnoticed:

"It's not a blameless, faceless other we're blaming. Somebody who decided to write a character of color is no more happy to see a white girl on her cover than anyone is. But our editors, our publishers, our marketing departments are the ones who decide to cover us that wayâ€¦.Please, as an author who fought to make sure the kids on her cover were not all white and now can't sell a second book because she's "difficult", believe me when I say we are fighting from the inside. And we are losing there, too."

Also:

"This industry runs very much with the knowledge that there are sixteen writers waiting to take your place, who are willing to shut up and be agreeable, so they openly treat writers with contempt. I had to continually throughout the copyediting process write notes and send mail when they would change my words regarding a character of color. For some reason, copyeditors have a serious problem with an African-American girl turning ashy when she pales. They really, really want her to turn white. They want her knuckles to turn white when she's scared. They insert stupid, coffee metaphors for skin color, and add words like kinky about the hair."

From the many conversations I had over the past month, the only thing that is clear when it comes to diversity and publishing is its utter and complete lack of consistency. An author might have no say in a cover, and the result will be a white model -- or, conversely, the author might end up with a photographic image that perfectly captures their ethnic protagonist. What is particularly confusing about the lack of consistency is that all too often the result is the "safer" choice, and not just because of the fear that the "wrong" choice could alienate potential readers. The "gatekeepers" also keep Kids of Color off the cover and their bookshelves:

"â€¦my bestselling novel, has an ambiguous looking teen on the cover. All the others were clearly brown characters, and some booksellers/librarians have told me off the record that this hindered their purchasing as they don't have a "community to support such books."

While I try to wrap my head around just what community would support "such books" (and what on Earth "such books" are), I found myself becoming increasingly disheartened by how silly this all is. The assumptions based on not expanding diversity insist that Caucasian readers will only read books that are only (or predominantly, or at least advertised as being) about Caucasians -- and further, that enticing Caucasians to spend money on books is more important than providing an accurate depiction of America's multicultural life. Further, the insistence that Kids of Color remain in a curriculum-based ghetto where they serve more as teaching tools then pleasure reading (Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains, for example, versus Varian Johnson's My Life as a Rhombus) might make some librarians think they are maintaining a diverse collection when they aren't. For children and teens, this is especially dispiriting -- the way they fit into the larger world, after all, is a big part of what "coming of age" is all about.

"Most of the books I read as a teen starred white characters. I'm hard pressed to think of more than a few "black" books I read. That didn't seem strange to me at the time, but in retrospect I wish I would have had more access to diverse books. I don't know if they were available to me and I simply didn't choose them, or if there were few at my disposal. Knowing what I do now, I suspect I wouldn't have looked for "black" books then. Unconsciously, I probably enjoyed that part of the fantasy as much as any character or storyline. A way to be white, in a place where everyone else was and I wasn't. I find that a sad thing to write, but I'm sure it plays into my desire to see more [kids of color] in books now, because it could have been a heartening experience to read about the struggles of young black girls, whether I was able to directly recognize myself in them or not." - Kekla Magoon

Beyond skin color, beyond ethnicity, there is also the ongoing issue of including GBLTQ characters in middle grade and young adult literature, something that has become more important as more and more teens become victims of brutal hate crimes, and the issue of gay marriage keeps sexual orientation and equal rights in the forefront of national conversation. For many GBLTQ authors and bloggers, promoting diversity is a deeply personal issue:

"The hardest part of being a teenager is being brave enough to be Real - but you've spent all these years watching movie after movie, and reading book after book, where what is possible and acceptable is all laid out for you... The Princess ends up with the Prince, cue the happily ever after. That's what everyone expects you to want, too. So when you're a guy who dreams of a Prince of your own (or a gal who dreams of a Princess) the power of a story with YOUR kind of happily ever after is inestimable. I want Teens today to have what I didn't. It's why I blog, and it's the driving reason why I became a writer."- Lee Wind

"While the number of YA books with prominent and positive GLBTQ characters has grown significantly over the past few years, there remained a definite need for Middle Grade books that include kids who are awakening to identities far different from their peers. At thirteen I knew I was gay, and every day I hear about children who come out at even younger ages." - Steve Berman

"When I think about a queer teen reading today's YA, the first thing I wonder about is the baseline level of expectations. Let's say I'm a girl who's just come out, at age thirteen, in a small Midwestern town. Do I even expect to be able to find someone I would recognize and/or empathize with between the covers of a book? Maybe -- and I think it's more likely now than it would have been a decade ago -- but I'm not sure. And it seems to me that it's necessary to encourage and reinforce among minority readers -- whatever the nature of that minority status -- what I can only think of as the right sort of entitlement: the belief that yes, you should be able to experience characters whose lives in some way reflect your ownâ€¦" - Sara Ryan

What's interesting about all this is that on the surface, few people are against diversity, and certainly almost no one in publishing is. Several authors noted that the more multicultural the editing staff, the more diverse the titles, and the higher the likelihood of a Kid of Color on a cover. But even if you only look at dollars, you can't ignore the fact that a lot of best sellers are about Kids of Color. Lisa Yee's Millicent Min, Girl Genius (with a photo of an Asian American girl on the cover) has sold 450,000 copies. Clearly, a lot of kids identify with that character, just as they identify with Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Mitali Perkins's Monsoon Summer, and Angela Johnson's The First Part Last. As author Tanita Davis puts it:

"I believe readers respond to a good story, period. While we're all looking for ourselves in the crowd in books, I don't think that our moment of synchronicity always has to center on race or even gender. More times than not, a character in a book resonates with a reader emotionally, I would think."

So why are we having this discussion? Why is School Library Journal running Amy Bowllan's highly successful Writers Against Racism blog? Why are there diversity reading challenges and reading lists and awards? Because as diverse as our society undeniably is, for one reason or another, the books we publish still are not. And then complicating the issue further, authors also have to consider that diversity can still serve as an unwelcome lightning rod:

"The cudgel of "diversity" can also end up discouraging actual diversity. Because it's the books that actually do feature different kinds of characters that end up being criticized by well-meaning types. If you write a book about a bunch of straight white people, no one's going to say "Oh, that asshole only writes about straight white people," because -- guess what -- most writers only write about straight white people. But as soon as you add a gay character or a black character or whatever, it opens you up to attack from people concerned with this notion of "representation" who think you're getting it all wrong and are going to jump all over you for all the stupidest reasons that have nothing to do with anything." - Bennett Madison

In the end, one should always rely on the numbers as author Zetta Elliot makes clear: "â€¦the Cooperative Children's Book Center keeps statistics on the kinds of books being published each year. That's how I know that less than 5% of the 5,000 books published each year are by or about people of colorâ€¦ But the issue isn't just with the number of books being published; it's also a question of quality and diversity within that small pool." And when one considers the size of that pool and then thinks about books that labor under the labels of "double diversity," you can see just how hard it is for some authors and readers:

"In 2009 there were dozens of white LGBTQ YA books. From the thirty I've read thus far, one was written by a Latino who used Latino characters, one by a black author whose characters are white, and one by an Asian author whose characters are also white. I can barely find MG lit with authentic Latino characters because most editors believe these stories will only garner a "niche" audience thus imagine finding a list of LGBTQ multicultural MG books?" - Mayra Lazara Dole

In the end, though, the subject of diversity is a simple one. It means that what we read should reflect how we live. In America we are, and have always been, a melting pot. Our culture is full of words and styles and habits that come from dozens of countries and societies. We do not question our desire for regional food or music, and yet there is still a perceived tripping point, a moment of hesitation, when it comes to what we read. While it makes no sense why this is so -- why Simon Pulse will easily publish Kris Reisz's Unleashed with an obviously mixed-race character on the cover, while Bloomsbury makes another choice for two of its titles, readers can't know. And yet the vast number of books that get the stories and covers right -- Charles R. Smith Jr.'s funny and poignant buddy novel, Chameleon from Candlewick; Sara Ryan's sweetly dramatic lesbian romance, Empress of the World from Penguin; and the impressive life and work of modern-day African American biologist Tyrone Hayes found in Pamela Turner's The Frog Scientist, another entry in the stellar Scientists in the Field series from HMCO -- all prove that good, honest, well-written books are what matter to readers, regardless of age. As Bennett Madison puts it: "Maybe Heather Has Two Mommies is helpful for a toddler in the same way a potty training book or a book about counting is helpful, but by the time we get to teenagers I don't think anyone is interested in mealy-mouthed pedantry. It's an embarrassment. Teenagers deserve real books, not condescending crap."

So buck up, blogosphere, and get serious about supporting authors and publishers who give middle grade and young adult readers those "real" books. It's been a long time coming, and we aren't there yet, but one thing I have learned in all this is that we are on our way -- and one way or another, change is going to come.

"I imagine that in many ways, young adult and children's literature is less flexible in these things than adult fiction. Young adult fiction is blessed -- or burdened -- with gatekeepers, people who are there to ensure that change doesn't happen too rapidly, to make sure that the children aren't compromised and that whatever family values and all are still in books. That's a powerful impetus, the desire to keep children safe, and to determine what they know and when. Safe, perhaps to some, means less exposure to potential negatives... like the lives and world of minorities."

"And when you write it out like that, it sounds just ludicrous, but you know, some of what we believe as human beings is fairly ludicrous, too. Prejudice is based in fear -- and fear of the unknown is a big player in this. We don't know each other, much, and it's easier to hide than to discover, as usual. It will take a really gutsy, risk-taking group of editors and publishing houses to make a change in the amount of diversity in children's literature. People are moving toward this, but it's in small numbers, and it's painfully slooooow." - Tanita Davis

Nonfiction Books for Curious Readers

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:39:59 -0800

When it comes to gift giving for the age-ten-and-up crowd, unless you have a teenage girl who is rabid for all things Twilight (and honestly probably owns all things Twilight), it can be tough for the aunts, uncles and grandparents (let alone parents) to figure out what to buy. While I love a novel as much as the next person, I think there is a wealth of exemplary nonfiction available for kids and teens that must be seen to be believed. If you have a curious reader there is no reason not to indulge their favorite subject this time of year. Buy a book that makes them think and lets them dream and then sit back and see what good things come to pass about the real world. (Because last time I checked, chasing sparkly vamps was not a way to make a living.)

First up is a doorstop of a title, Prehistoric Life: The Definitive History of Life on Earth from DK. With a wide group of contributors and a staggering number of full color illustrations and photographs, this 500-page monster is what all other coffee table books wish they could be. With timelines, fossils, healthy discussion of what we know for sure and what we think, mini-biographies of significant figures in the world of natural history and paleontology, plus more discussion on more dinosaurs then any Jurassic Park fan can stand, this is the book to beat when it comes to the subject. What's really nice is that the younger set (and we're talking down to dino lovers of the six- and seven-year-old variety) will love the pictures, while older readers will find the information to be equally dazzling. It is not a book that can be outgrown, however, so while it has a hefty price, it should be viewed as an investment. This is the book that all others can spin off from -- if you find a creature or person or period that interests you after reading Prehistoric Life, you can look deeper in that direction elsewhere. In the meantime, though, your interest will have been piqued by the gorgeous presentation here (from the cover to the endpapers, beauty is the standard) and readers will likely move on to places they never knew existed as they read about creatures they can barely imagine.

DK just keeps raising the bar when it comes to big books on nature and science and I remain deeply impressed by the hard work they do to get things both right and aesthetically pleasing. Science should be something we love, not dread (banish all memories of my seventh-grade earth science class, please) and Prehistoric Life is another way to celebrate a young person's interest in what came before.

Houghton Mifflin's Scientists in the Field series continues to be one of the first I recommend to middle school and teen readers, and their recent releases are no exception. From hurricane hunting to studying the impact of a widely used pesticide on frogs to the search for the elusive snow leopard, there is some thing for everyone in the 2009 titles. Anyone unsure of what to get their curious readers with an interest in general science need look no further than these heavily illustrated books and the series's impressive backlist for more ideas. For homeschoolers they are a no-brainer, and any library without them is sorely lacking, as far as I'm concerned.

Extreme Scientists: Exploring Nature's Mysteries from Perilous Places by Donna Jackson looks at three scientists engaged in unusual research. From tracking hurricanes in turbo-prop aircraft flown straight into the storm's eye to a caver looking for microbes in some of the most inaccessible places on earth to "skywalkers" studying the ecology of redwoods from the crowns of the old growth forest, Jackson provides three vastly different and unique viewpoints on what the job of a twenty-first century scientist can be. There is danger to be found for sure, but also an enormous amount of intelligence and care in every step these people take as they pursue answers to nature's questions. The title does not exaggerate; this is truly "extreme science," but it is also exciting on both an Indiana Jones and Charles Darwin scale. In this title, Jackson makes clear that scientists must bravely engage in the world but also carefully bring information back to assess and investigate in the lab.

Series founders Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop would certainly agree with Jackson as they took to the field in Mongolia to pursue the snow leopard with scientist Tom McCarthy and his team in Saving the Ghost of the Mountain. The snow leopard is one of the most elusive creatures on earth, capable of blending into the background of its mountainous home in a way that very nearly defies gravity, let alone the five senses. McCarthy's determination to not only better understand the snow leopard, but also save it, is the heartbeat of Montgomery's story, and combined with Bishop's glorious photographs of the landscape and people who live within it, readers gain a true measure of just how difficult a task he has embraced. More than just the snow leopard itself, however, Saving the Ghost of the Mountain is also about the people who live near the animal and their struggle to accept the predator even though it occasionally kills their livestock. This is as much a story about living with the snow leopard as it is about protecting it, something that is critical to successful wildlife conservation. Montgomery includes information on the Snow Leopard Trust and ways in which readers can support the animal through buying the crafts of those who live near it, and are now dedicated to keeping it alive in the wild.

Pamela Turner and photographer Andy Comins look much closer to home to tell the story of biologist Tyrone Hays in The Frog Scientist. Hays is involved in ongoing research into the effects of atrazine on frogs. Atrazine is the most commonly used pesticide in the United States, but Hays has discovered that exposure to atrazine causes "some of the male frogs to develop into bizarre half-male, half-female frogs." His careful development, both in the lab and the wild, of experiments researching diminishing frog populations is an example of science at its best. Turner shows the control Hays and his assistants exert over their experiments so there can be no questions when their results are determined. For this real-world example of textbook standards alone, The Frog Scientist would be a winner in my book, but the fact that Hays is African-American, and that Turner makes his personal story key to the book's narrative, raises it above similar titles in the field. His story is in fact just the latest example of the Scientists in the Field series showing diversity among the science ranks. In all three of these books, the work of both genders is celebrated, and the team tracking the snow leopard is peopled with a number drawn from the region, while Hays' laboratory is full of students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Teens will also appreciate that Hays and McCarthy have their children join them in their research and all are actively involved in their fathers' work. So regardless of gender, ethnicity or economic status, the Scientist in the Field titles will resonate with all readers. It's nonfiction writing (and photography) at its best, and incredibly inspirational to boot.

Bodies from the Ice: Melting Glaciers and the Recovery of the Past by James Deem is a combination of science and adventure that is hard to resist. Deem presents several reports here of bodies found in melting glaciers, from the famous, like mountaineer George Mallory, who might have been the first man to summit Mt. Everest, to the unbelievable, like two tourists who discovered the body of a man who lived 5,300 years ago. Deem shows these remarkable stories preserved in the ice and snow. Heavily illustrated with photographs and all kinds of neat forensic info, Bodies from the Ice combines a very cool and underreported subject with eye-catching illustrations. It's also pretty neat how Deem drops matter-of-fact bits into the text, such as when he explains that initially authorities weren't too excited about the Copper Age discovery of "Otzi" because they thought the tourists had found the body of long-missing music professor from 1938. Finding a body in a glacier is not such a startling thing for the locals -- although Otzi certainly rocked everyone's world.

There is a side bar on Louis Agassiz, the "father of glaciology" and an interesting historic report on women which discusses the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, around 1808 (she was on her way home from work and agreed to join some mountaineers on an adventure -- can you imagine?). There are the mummified remains of children sacrificed in the Andes during the 17th century, and of course, a detailed report on Mallory and his still missing companion, climber Andrew Irvine. Deem provides several consistently compelling examples of science in action and will certainly inspire any reader intrigued by mountaineering. He also discusses glacier preservation and provides graphic photos showing how far glaciers have receded in recent years. This is an unassuming title that will be a big hit with certain readers and is an obvious choice for any child over ten with a forensic bent.

Pamela Turner has another recent title out, Prowling the Seas: Exploring the Hidden World of Ocean Predators, which highlights the work of scientists involved in the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project. Split over four chapters, Turner shows how TOPP tracks leatherback turtles, bluefin tuna, white sharks and shearwaters, a small yet greatly traveled seabird. The object of TOPP is to understand where these ocean predators travel and what they eat in an effort to better understand and protect them. Along with photographs of the animals and scientists at work, Turner also includes maps showing where the specific wildlife traveled to. One particularly interesting story involves the great white whose tag came loose and washed up in a California tidal pool, where it was found by a five-year-old boy. His grandparents used the still visible contact information on its side to report the discovery and collect a $500 reward. The data was still good and what it showed about the shark's journey across the Pacific proved to be immensely valuable and also, quite frankly, downright cool.

Prowling the Seas includes web site info for TOPP so readers can see the paths of other animals they track and Turner also provides significant information about the declining populations of all the predators she covered. The bluefin have suffered the most dramatic declines due to overfishing but with the hard work of the TOPP crew perhaps they will come back before it's too late. It's something to think about and future environmentalists are going to enjoy very much seeing the active research that is going into saving some of the ocean's most threatened creatures.

History buffs will fall big time for all the drama in Martin Sandler's Secret Subway. This story has it all: a clear-eyed inventor with a dramatic idea, a greedy and controlling villain determined to stop him at all costs, and the city that never sleeps -- even in the mid-nineteenth century. Alfred Ely Beach, who is woefully unknown today, wanted to alleviate New York City's chronic congestion by building a subway system powered by pneumatic tubes. It was a clean and perfect solution to the problems found on the crowded city streets (just try to imagine how much horse manure was present in Manhattan in 1860 on a daily basis). Beach got as far as building a demonstration tunnel and elegant waiting station (including fountain, grand piano and chandelier) with a working subway car before his dream was destroyed partly through the political machinations of Boss Tweed, one of the most powerful and corrupt politicians in US history. Tweed's problem was that Beach was doing all this without paying him off first; he didn't bow down to Tweed and his cronies, and because of this, Beach and his invention had to be stopped. (If you wonder just how much of a jerk Tweed was, check out The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley and find out what he did to that poor man, and what ended up being buried in Central Park because of it.)

As Sandler recounts, it was not really Tweed but the financial panic of 1873 that brought an end to the subway project and Beach sadly did not live to see the construction of the city's subway system. The author recounts how it did eventually come about, however, and the part played in its development by the catastrophic Blizzard of 1888. (More than 400 people died and thousands were trapped as the streets and rail lines were covered in snow.) In the construction of the system, Beach's original line was discovered one last time, and Sandler includes photos of his original tunnel as it was seen in 1912. "Beach's subway car was still on the tracksâ€¦ the magnificent waiting room fountain still stood tall." Nothing was recovered, unfortunately, and the whole amazing experiment remains buried under city streets, waiting to be found again and hopefully, finally, celebrated.

With dozens of photographs to accompany the text, Secret Subway is candy for history buffs and fans of underground cities. Whether you long to know more about New York, or invent an underground world of your own on the page, Martin Sandler is the guide you want, and the author who has finally brought a bit of limelight back to the irrepressible Alfred Beach.

For Christmas my final year in high school, my grandmother gave me a dictionary which I still have (and use) today. Not to get all Rory Gilmore on you, but I find that certain fundamental reference books are still quality choices for kids, regardless of the overall awesomeness of the internet. While I can sort of understand bypassing dictionaries (actually I can't understand, not really) the acquisition of a decent atlas is really mandatory, and for my money if you're going to go for maps, then you could do a lot worse then steer yourself in the direction of National Geographic. Their new Student Atlas of the World (Third Edition) is a decent size to give you all the full-color maps you want without being the kind of backpack killer that intimidates as much as it informs. There are several useful spreads, like time zones, plate tectonics and environmental hot spots, but it is in the continental sections that the book really sings. There are physical, political, climate, precipitation, population, economics and elevation maps for continents and some countries. The state, province, country and capitols are easily found here along with natural hazards across the continents, and specific regions are highlighted (such as the Amazon Rain Forest). Lots of color is present on each page along with helpful charts covering tons of different subjects. From an adult perspective this has the whole package but none of that matters until you consider the number one issue for kids -- how easy is this book to understand? On that score, National Geographic clearly knows what they are doing and the Student Atlas of the World lives up to its name. For reports, research papers and test studying you couldn't ask for anything better. And beyond that, for the real fun of just figuring out where you are in the greater world, this is the book to reach for (and the perfect thing for grandmothers everywhere to wrap up for their aspiring explorers).

The final few pages of the Student Atlas of the World includes flags and statistics for all the independent countries recognized by the National Geographic Society in 2008. While this overview is very nice, if you have someone interested in a continental breakdown of the flags, with a nice dose of history and trivia thrown in, then Flags of the World by Sylvie Bednar is the choice of flag geeks everywhere (and of every age). The book's rectangular design lends itself well to its subject, and the full-color illustrations of the flags (along with country name and in most cases other basic stats) show up well on the pages. Bednar provides a lot of nice extra information as well, such as why Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua all have two blue stripes and one white one on their flags. (The reason dates back to the 19th century.) You can also see Libya's completely green flag (just one big old block of green), Tonga's red cross (not to be confused with The Red Cross) and the repetitive use of red, green and yellow on many African flags (for the record, Ethiopia was first).

Flags are rarely given the sort of attention they deserve, but in this nicely presented package, Flags of the World manages to put all the flags on equal footing and provide a ton of interesting stories about a lot of countries. Swaziland celebrates its warrior history with their flag, while Lebanon honors its bloody sacrifice for independence and the cedar tree which is revered by both Christian and Muslim religions with theirs. Countless stories of national heritage, religion and even creative competition are shared here. Again, this is an excellent resource for reports and research papers that also invites hours of personal study. Vexillologists everywhere, rejoice!

Finally, after reading Anastasia Suen's Wired, I was reminded yet again of how valuable nonfiction picture books truly are. This patiently written step-by-step overview of electricity's journey from dam to living room light switch is truly a brilliant book. Suen completely demystifies the process making it clear to even the least technologically inclined. There is a lot of new vocabulary here, but no word is casually used. Readers will easily understand atoms, electrons, generators, power plants and transformers. Suen makes sure you "get it" before she moves on. Paul Carrick's three dimensional illustrations help as well by providing inside views of critical points, literally following the text (and the electrical journey) each step of the way. It's so easy to understand what's going on here that I found myself getting excited about a book on electricity. (Something I honestly never would have believed was possible.) No bells and whistles or cute characters can be found in Wired, just straightforward solid science. It will work for readers of any age (and I mean that -- confused adults can learn a lot here), but for that specific child already intent on taking apart small appliances, it will be a treasure. As for homeschoolers, it's a no-brainer. If ever there was a book for a curious child, this is the one.

"A Flock of Books"

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:57:22 -0800

Over the past few years it seems bird books have been enjoying a prolonged moment in the limelight. I'm not talking about perennial favorites like field guides, but rather the long list of titles devoted to birdwatching, birdwatchers or living with birds. From Birding Babylon, Sergeant Jonathan Trouern-Trend's surprising memoir of birding while serving in Iraq, to the insanity of Luke Dempsey's A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See it All. (See also The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik and To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, A Son and A Lifelong Obsession by Dan Koeppel) clearly the story of people who look for birds has become as compelling, if not more so, than the animals themselves.

It is no surprise that there are a lot of nonfiction titles on birdwatching. It is after all an inexpensive, exceedingly healthy and endlessly fascinating hobby that certainly would see a resurgence in lean economic times. But birds appearing in fiction is less expected and yet birdish titles are everywhere on the literary shelves. Even though birds have little or nothing do with the novels themselves. In the past two years alone we find In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefield (featuring an ornithologist and bird artist), The Bird Catcher by Laura Jacobs (a hobbyist who is "as rare and special as the birds that fill the skies above her," and The Nightingales of Troy, a series of linked stories by Alice Fulton that doesn't seem to be about birds at all although they figure prominently on the cover. Brad Kessler's Birds in Fall is about an ornithologist grieving after her husband's death in a plane crash. It explores mythic themes and, as quoted in Booklist, asks "How is a story like a bird?" (Someone should contact Anne Lamont for the answer to that one -- see Bird by Bird for more info there.) Finally there is Lauren Groff's collection, Delicate Edible Birds whose title story is about a female war correspondent during WWII. In each of these books (and the so many others like them titled in a similar fashion), it is the idea of birds which conveys the author's meaning. Clearly we all react to birds in a basic and visceral manner and further, we want to read books that are in some slight or even metaphorical way about them.

In the broadest sense, Scott Weidensaul's Of A Feather takes readers through the entire history of American birding. While Audubon, Peterson and all the other expected great names are here, there are many other reasons why anyone interested in the subject should consider this a must-read. Weidensaul begins by addressing birds in Native American myth, acknowledging that birds figured predominantly in their history and traditional ornithology was alive and well long before Europeans arrived on American shores. He recounts Audobon's life with a lens turned deeply personal, revealing the many struggles suffered by the artist and his family, including bankruptcy, the deaths of children and the ever present worry over whether or not his dream (the future classic Birds of America) was worth it. From there he writes about dozens of other lesser-known scientists and hobbyists who all left their mark on the field from Elliott Coues who collected specimens across the west (and many numerous enemies in the course of a turbulent but fruitful career) to Martha Maxwell, a self taught taxidermist who revolutionized animal displays in spite of a career adversely affected by her gender. (She was also the first woman with a bird to bear her name, a subspecies of screech-owl she collected.)

Weidensaul recognizes that women quite famously contributed to the efforts to save birds (and end the dreadful fashion of using feathers in hats -- something they initiated). There is Florence Merriam, who he credits with writing, "in a sense the first field guide to American birds" and an entire chapter on "Angry Ladies" which features Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall who led an opposition to the use of feathers and skins by the millinery trade. He also writes about Rosalie Edge who founded Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the first refuge in the world for raptors. Weidensaul keeps the names and dates coming with the turn of each page but he balances every fact with an anecdote, making the book a sort of history that is both casual and direct -- and very readable. He also plays a bit with pop culture, recalling Miss Hathaway, the spinster bird watcher in the The Beverley Hillbillies and the struggle for coolness in a hobby that does not engender a Steve McQueen-like image. But more than all of that, he comes back to the necessity to keep conservation at the forefront of any birding endeavor -- more so than racing to fill the life list. He looks "beyond the list" in fact, to the current trend which hopefully will see the return of the full swath of American ornithology: "science, sport and conservation". Birding should never be simply about a tick mark on a list of names but rather "a celebration of the creature that makes it all possible -- the small, contained miracle that is a bird."

Esther Woolfson would certainly agree with Weidensaul's conclusions, and likely impress him with her dedication to birds. In Corvus: A Life With Birds she discusses another trend among bird books: a memoir of caring for birds that can not be released into the wild. Woolfson's case is a bit more unusual than most as the birds that are part of her life (and her Shirley Jackson-ish family) are corvids: rooks, crows, magpies and ravens. With a wealth of mythic lore to support their supposedly evil tendency (damn you Edgar Allen Poe!), the corvid is not the automatic choice for pet and Woolfson makes clear that they do not see themselves as such either. One comes to terms with a corvid -- agrees to share space with him -- but does not ever find him "cute". He's too smart for that, and far too independent.

What makes Woolfson's memoir such enjoyable reading (even for the non-bird-obsessed) is that she is funny and knows it's rather crazy to have a magpie, crow, starling or most significantly a rook named "Chicken," running about your house. But her affinity for birds is undeniable. After successfully building a dovecote in her backyard she found herself becoming the recipient of every ill or wounded wild bird her neighbors came across. Her family willingly embarked on this Durrell-ish adventure with her as the birds were brought in, nursed back to health and then enjoyed an often cage-free existence within the home. Woolfson shares all of the chaotic beauty of life lived this way (including the open-minded stance of one daughter who believes birds should never be caged) while also delving deeply in the rich literary and scientific history of corvids. The book is thus a unique blend of family humor and science, nature study and hilarity. Although I can not imagine having birds flying about my home with such abandon, Woolfson is happy to share hers with us providing the inside scoop on a bird many readers know but few truly understand. Teens in particular will enjoy this title and for Durrell fans it is an obvious must.

After reading about Rosalie Edge's work on Hawk Mountain, and reviewing Tim Gallagher's falconry book, I was quite intrigued to come across Rachel Dickinson's Falconer on the Edge. Dickinson is married to Gallagher, although, as she candidly admits, the notion of sharing a large portion of her life with raptors never crossed her mind. She reveals a few insights about marriage to the sport in this title but mostly she writes about Steve Chindgren, an extreme falconer whose life is framed around the sport. Although happily married and a proud father, Chindgren still leaves his home in Utah for months out of the year to travel to Wyoming with his birds and dogs to hunt. This is not a weekend adventure to him -- it is, to a large extent, everything. Dickinson is intrigued by such commitment and also the unique relationship between man and bird. Chindgren pushes himself, his dogs and his aging bird Jomo to continue the hunt even though all of them are slowing down. He wants Jomo to go out in a glorious moment -- doing what he loves best, just as he seems to long for the same ending as well. Dickinson can't be entirely sure what she is seeing as she watches Chindgren in action but she knows it is something far beyond the bounds of typical human/animal interaction. It seems simplistic to say the man and the bird are kindred spirits but they are bound beyond reason to each other and the compulsive, all-powerful need to hunt.

Anyone writing about falconry, and the relatively large subculture of participants it represents around the world, can not help but notice its deep connection to nature and the wild. Dickinson spends time in Wyoming with Chindgren and travels the oil fields to witness the impact of drilling on the sage grouse. There is an ongoing battle in the state to keep the bird off the endangered species list as that would affect drilling, which means affecting jobs. Falconers rely on sage grouse as primary prey for their birds. They walk a fine line between protecting birds that they need to thrive for their hunt. This dip into political waters should broaden the appeal of Falconer on the Edge to anyone intrigued by what goes on between levels of government that affect one animal's future in one small location on the planet. By peering so deeply into the life of this man and his sport, Dickinson finds herself studying the very nature of the American West. Chindgren himself is conflicted by what he finds while hunting with Jomo and the opinions of so many he encounters in Wyoming. "Anything they think threatens their livelihood they want to get rid of, and that's something that's passed on for generations and generations," he says. But Dickinson clearly wonders what remains of that West as she drives among the wells. And readers will ponder just what part of this new landscape is iconically western, especially if it is at the expense of an animal like the sage grouse that was here before anyone and anything else. All Chindgren wants to do is keep flying birds, and what space there is for them in the 21st century we can not know, nor can we understand just yet how important he and his birds might be to both our past and our future.

The mother of all birding books, the one for poring over and gaping at, is the rather titanic American Museum of Natural History Birds of North America. Yes, it's a doorstop and not one for throwing in the backpack while setting out on a hike. But if you want the pictures big and colorful, if you want to see birds in flight and at rest, from multiple angles, as adults and juveniles; if you want to really be able to consider all of your identification options, then this is the one for you. The authors provide descriptions that transcend color and size; from the Green Heron, "a small, solitary, and secretive bird of dense thicketed wetlands," to the Cory's Shearwater with its "slow, labored wing beats," care has been placed in the choice and rhythm of words. You do not just receive facts but beautifully written ones, along with a smattering of history, discussion of discoverers, description of voice and nesting habits and location maps. Could you find it all in a field guide or two (or perhaps several to cover all the information), well yes. But even if you could, wouldn't you still rather like it all in front of you, in all its glory, and so easy to enjoy? Yes, you must. As a treat, as an example of devotion, this unwieldy, oversized, heavier-than-heck Birds of North America is really not to be denied.

But of course, at the end of the day, the only truly indispensible birding book is the field guide and there are literally hundreds to choose from depending on region, type, information, presentation, etc. And yet finally, if you want to immerse yourself in the glory of birds, if you really want to see them on the printed page as something beautiful and elegant and in a few cases, oddly strange, then you must seek out Andrew Zuckerman's Bird. The follow-up to his equally dazzling Creature, this collection of photographs captures only the birds, absent their habitat, minus action, appearing almost like your great Aunt Gladys if Zuckerman could have persuaded them to gape at the camera with impatient expressions. It is a coffee table book which makes it sound like something to peruse while waiting for an overdue date, but it's really much more -- the best blend of craft and subject and something that brings home the message Scott Wiedensaul and all the other bird lovers have made here: this is a wondrous creature and we need to do what we can to save them. It might be trendy to put the word "bird" in a book title but the responsible thing to do -- the enlightened 21st century thing -- is to pony up your money and your time and save them. Because they are birds; and that is more than enough reason for anybody.

Curious Minds Part II

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:40:19 -0800

With the holidays coming and the most popular book for teens in America about a vampire and the most passive female character since Joanie blindly loved Chachi, I'd like to point prospective book buyers in the direction of numerous nonfiction titles that children and teenagers will enjoy. They may not carry the sense of impending doom that young love with the undead can suggest, but they will open any number of intellectual doors.

The new DK pop-up Cosmic opens with a bang -- literally. Vividly portraying the "big bang" explosion which created the universe, the first illustration leaps off the page as clear sound effects are heard. Giles Sparrow's text explains what the big bang was and how the early universe was formed but it is the combination of audio and visual effects (from paper engineer Richard Ferguson) that quickly engages the reader. From the opening spread the book describes space telescopes, the planets (with another startling and this time wider than double-fold 3D illustration), then the sun, other types of galaxies and spacecraft. The information is basic but solid and the overall design makes for a very pleasing introduction for young astronomers. This is a package that does the job it is supposed to -- it explains just enough to whet the intellectual appetite of readers while showing itself off in a way that can not be ignored. If the under-ten child in your life is asking about the moon and stars, then here is an easy way to get them started on a lifetime of stargazing.

The best all-round comprehensive astronomy titles for kids that I have seen is Dr. Mark Garlick's new Atlas of the Universe, part of the Simon and Schuster "Insiders" series of visual guides. Oversized, tremendously illustrated and designed in a direct but far-reaching manner, Garlick conveys a ton of significant information on the universe and our solar system. What really puts this one over the top though is the orderly manner in which it is organized. From a series of pages about the planets and sun (all in two-page spreads that include surface pictures, information about the probes that have reached them and other exploration details) to sections on stars, comets and black holes, the author touches on all the major areas of astronomical interest. There is history about explorers and astronomers, brief mentions of dozens of records (flattest planet in the solar system, most distant galaxy, etc.) and many notable numbers listed, such as the size of the largest known galaxy (6,000,000 light years across). Garlick does a good job of balancing pertinent information with the sort of cool facts that kids enjoy collecting. From a practicality standpoint he also has compiled a series of star charts for the northern and southern hemispheres along with a brief guide on how to use a star map. Altogether this is a supreme package for star gazers; wrap it with a telescope and you will have a fun and educational gift.

Ellen Jackson tackles some relatively unknown subjects with her title The Mysterious Universe: Supernovae, Dark Energy and Black Holes. Accompanied by dozens of Nic Bishop's photographs and illustrations, Mysterious Universe keeps a heavy subject highly readable by focusing on the work of one particular astronomer, Alex Filippenko. Drawn to supernovae as the source for the existence of life ("The carbon in our cells, the oxygen that we breathe, the calcium in our bones -- all were cooked up in the stars and expelled into space by these explosions"), Filippenko is a whirl of intellectual energy and curiosity. He also has a great capacity to inspire, which Jackson conveys in her text. By the second chapter, where she details how he received his first telescope at age fourteen and also blew off an eyebrow and some hair in an after school incident in the chemistry lab, Filippenko is clearly established as the coolest smart guy in the room. He thinks astronomy is an awesome thing and his excitement is contagious. Jackson picks up on that and consequently, Mysterious Universe manages to be a surprisingly exciting book.

Because of its narrower focus, Jackson's book will likely be best received by the twelve and up crowd; they will also appreciate Filippenko's life story more as it offers a pathway to their own future if they are space-inclined. The Mysterious Universe is a big ideas type of book that is manageable for preteen readers. High school students who are more serious about their futures will also find much of value here as they consider their own paths into the profession.

Jackson's title is another entry in the exceedingly well done Scientists in the Field series from Houghton Mifflin. Generally the titles focus on nature and the environment and there are several others that became recently available which will likely appeal to certain readers. Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes by Pamela Turner follows the work of specialized veterinarians in Rwanda and Uganda. These "Gorilla Doctors" are intricately involved in the lives of mountain gorillas, one of the world's most endangered species. Turner specifically writes about one orphaned animal, Fearless, who is raised by dedicated foster parents. Through all the grief and pain in the part of the world where he was born, Fearless is proof of the good work that people can do when they come together. The mountain gorillas are still living a very fragile existence and the work of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project and those who assist them is vital. Turner will likely stir interest in Africa and gorillas through Gorilla Doctors; dedicated animal lovers will eat this up with a spoon.

Sneed Collard has two unique books out in the series, The Prairie Builders: Reconstructing America's Lost Grasslands and Science Warriors: The Battle Against Invasive Species. The prairie book is really unusual; it follows the efforts of a group of scientists who set out to reconstruct a native tallgrass prairie in Iowa. From seeds to butterflies to bison this is an intricate look at climate, geography and nature at its most basic levels. After reading how hard it was to make 8,000 acres the way it used to be, readers will likely never drive down the highway blissfully ignorant of the fields around them ever again.

Science Warriors is an easy sell for the CSI obsessed crowd and one of the more dedicated career books for offbeat environmentalists that I've come across. By explaining the very real negative impact of multiple invasive species, from the brown tree snake to red imported fire ant to zebra mussels, Collard shows just how badly they can affect an environment. The scientists who work to stop them, using methods as varied as snake-sniffing dogs and ant murderous flies (this will be a favorite for the gross-out crowd) are an eclectic and talented bunch and their myriad of approaches to solving their problems is both surprising and, to no small degree, odd. There are jobs aplenty to consider in Science Warriors; it's the most unorthodox career manual I've found but absolutely gold for a kid who wants to save the world in a an imaginative way.

A trio of new biographies were recently released that will appeal hugely to teens with an interest in the more adventurous side of science and nature. Heavily illustrated with period photographs and art they each provide a wealth of historical knowledge in captivating narratives that might compel readers to conduct further research on their own. First up is Norman Finkelstein's Three Across which revisits the "Great Transatlantic Air Race of 1927" and includes not only the story of Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis but also Richard Byrd and his crew of three aboard the America and Charles Levine and Clarence Chamberlin who crossed the Atlantic on the Columbia. While Lindbergh rightfully earned is place in history, the others have largely been forgotten for their part in the New York to Paris air race.

In the opening chapter Finkelstein does an excellent job of describing the highly charged aviation atmosphere that led to the race (and the monetary prize that prompted it) and then moves on to each of the pilots and their aircraft. Levine, the financier, is drawn to the commercial prospects in the route, Lindbergh to the challenge and Byrd, already a highly acclaimed polar explorer, was compelled by scientific discovery and the hope of expanding men's horizons. While we know what happened to Lindbergh, Finkelstein manages to keep even his story new by showing pictures of his aircraft (he had no forward visibility at all!) and introducing the small factory where the Spirit of St Louis was designed and built. He shows the politics behind Levine's choice of pilot and the talent Chamberlin exhibited when the two of them flew far beyond their expected destination. Finally it is Byrd and his crew who truly take front and center as the book concludes and their late trip in a far larger and heavier aircraft ends up providing the most data on air travel, just as Byrd had hoped, even though it came at a nearly devastating price. (Remarking on his flight afterwards Byrd said, "I hope no other pilots have that experience. It is not a very pleasant one.") Tightly written and thrillingly told, Three Across is an introduction to some bonafide American heroes and a reminder of how risky flying used to be.

While I would easily agree that 19th century painter George Catlin is worthy of a biography that deserved placement on elementary school library shelves nationwide, I did not expect to be recommending a book about his life to general readers of all ages. But author Susanna Reich more than makes the case for Catlin as the sort of talented, complex and crazily determined American whose life story is not just to be studied but savored. The fact that her book, Painting the Wild Frontier, is illustrated with some of Catlin's glorious full color paintings as well as dozens of other artworks and photographs just makes it pretty to look at on top of being deeply informative. But mostly I found this book to be a good read because painter George Catlin lived a life that should be studied and he created a body of work that must be appreciated.

The theme of capturing the vanishing west, and specifically what Catlin saw as the dying Indian culture, runs through every page in Reich's book. It is clearly as important to her to explore why Catlin made his artistic choices as it is to detail them. The reader follows Catlin into the west and over to Europe as he pursues his goal to create and display a cohesive gallery of paintings and artifacts that illustrate the American Indian way of life. Fame and fortune are won and lost, and personal tragedies occur as Catlin remains doggedly focused on convincing Congress to buy his collection. Reich's takes care to point out where there are details lost and holes in Catlin's biography while still revealing much about the man, his gift and the times he lived in. For art minded young readers Painting the Wild Frontier will be extremely helpful; anyone with an interest in America's frontier history will be drawn into Catlin's quest and view his paintings as a stunning achievement.

While the name Robert Scott might be known to young readers, it is unlikely that they have read about some of the more successful aspects of his fateful 1909 journey to the South Pole. As he explains in the preface to his new book, Emperors of the Ice, author Richard Farr was particularly taken with the "Winter Journey" portion of that expedition. Later recounted by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his bestselling narrative The Worst Journey in the World, the trip to collect Emperor penguin eggs nearly killed "Cherry," Dr. Edward Wilson and Lt. Henry Bowers. As it turned out Wilson and Bowers did not survive the race to the Pole with Scott and it was only Cherry who was later able to provide the first person account of Scott's dedication to science. Unfortunately, Cherry's book is a bit of a "doorstop" as Farr puts it. A lot of readers might be intimidated by its size (almost 600 pages) or its age. This is most true for teen readers for whom the adventurous aspects of the book would otherwise be very appealing. So Farr wrote about the journey in an easier format. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs from the expedition, Emperors of the Ice is exactly the sort of book that readers eager for the unknown will adore.

One interesting choice Farr made was to write the book from Cherry's perspective. Relying primarily on Worst Journey for his text, Farr crafted a book that literally places the reader there with Cherry, Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers as they struggled against enormous odds (and nearly died) in pursuit of the hidden secrets of bird evolution. While science has proven that Wilson's thesis about the penguins was incorrect, the larger idea that birds and dinosaurs were related is true. But more amazingly, discovering that polar explorers actually risked their lives in pursuit of ornithological revelations is heartening in the best sort of way. They were brave and superhumanly determined and it was all for science. After so many books about winning it is wonderful to be reminded that Scott was in a race only because it was thrust upon him by circumstance; that his goal was always just to learn more. (Something that Richard Byrd and George Catlin would both understand.) Emperors of the Ice manages then to salute both men of adventure and intellect. There are action movies and video games and then there is what was accomplished at the bottom of the world nearly a century ago. This is thrilling writing and it will hopefully open up a whole world of polar literature to readers looking for something to believe in.

Finally, two different cookery books that are each quite appealing in their own way. From DK Books, Grow It Cook It is an excellent gardening title with simple recipes that will be well received by elementary schoolers. Heavily illustrated with color photographs, the pages take readers from planting to cooking in easy steps that should spur active interest in both. I thought it was very clever of the designers to show the plants in containers, keeping the book relevant to both urban and rural children. I also liked how clear the photos are for what the plants should look like, from how the seeds should be sown to the depiction of roots and leaves when the vegetables are ready to be harvested. While Grow It Cook It is the sort of book that will require adult assistance, the children should be able to accomplish much of this work on their own. In the end they will have planted pumpkins and made mini pumpkin pies, planted potatoes and made mashed potato fishcakes; planted carrots and made carrot and orange muffins. This is an introduction to healthy eating from the ground up and a perfect example of 21st century living.

Especially written with older kids and teens in mind, The River Cottage Family Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr is a more serious title and at over 400 pages, immensely thorough. This is a cookbook for life, full of recipes and information that will be referenced and used for years. Serious bakers will find much of use but there is everything here from jam to smoothies to spaghetti bologonese, banana bread, mussels a la mariniere and marshmallows -- from scratch. The recipes, while excellent, are almost secondary to the wealth of information on ingredients and the act of cooking. Questions about what flour is, why vegans do not eat dairy and how to grow tomatoes are all answered with long detailed explanations. This is a book that can be read and taught from and stands alone as a unique teaching accessory. (Homeschoolers should be buying this one in droves.) Full of color pictures and even some fun games and projects, The River Cottage Family Cookbook is a title that will grow with readers and likely go with them when they leave home. It's not a little kid book; it's a cookbook written with kids in mind. I think a lot of young cooks will enjoy the mature writing style and recipes (although there is plenty of kid-friendly food to be found here), and respond well to the writerly style which expects much from them. If you have a cook who has moved past the basics and shows no signs of slowing down then this cookbook is the one to keep them busy for quite some time to come.

Creating Myth: The Franklin Expedition

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:33:38 -0800

I first learned about Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin in a college course named "Polar Exploration and its Literature." I was struck then by how much of polar history was affected by this rather ordinary couple who seemed destined to largely unremarkable lives but found themselves, one dead and one alive, as the center of arctic exploration for decades. How this came to be, and how so much of it was due to the inability of the British government and people to relinquish faith in myths they needed to be true reveals much about the conflict between nature and myth in the midâ€“nineteenth century. Over 150 years later, the Franklin expedition still elicits endless mystery and sparks stories where the questions of why and how are asked again and again.

When John Franklin departed England in 1845 with 123 men and two ships he was just another in a line of British naval officers seeking the Northwest Passage. This was not his first journey to the north, but he had been out of the region for 16 years in a variety of bureaucratic jobs and was 59 years old. He was not the first choice for the mission but he was the only politically acceptable one. It didn't hurt that Lady Jane successfully petitioned everyone involved in the decision, as she was determined to obtain this assignment for her husband as a way to capture glory she felt he had long been denied. The expedition was sold to the British public as the greatest and most technologically modern effort to find the passage; it could not fail. The President of the Geographical Society, Roderick Murchison, spoke for many at the time when he said, "I have the fullest confidence that everything will be done for the promotion of science, and for the honor of the British name and navy, that human efforts can accomplish. The name Franklin alone is, indeed, a national guarantee."

Two years later the Erebus and Terror were long overdue and, for all intents and purposes, had simply vanished.

The north was seen as far more than a geographic destination long before the Franklin expedition. The Northwest Passage was always about being first, just as the North Pole itself would be in the following century. While everyone wanted to find an open water route for strictly commercial purposes, they wanted to be first for far more significant ones. "It would be somewhat mortifying," said John Barrow, when considering other countries, "if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the nineteenth century, which so happily commenced by Englishmen in the sixteenth." Barrow was Second Secretary of the Admiralty and from that perch he directed Arctic exploration. The passage had to exist because he believed it did (he also believed in the Open Polar Sea), and it would be found by the British navy because there was no one better to find it. This firm conviction the British navy had in its own superiority was awesome to behold and contributed a great deal to its almost complete lack of knowledge about the north. When accomplished British whaler William Scoresby first broached the subject of the passage with the Admiralty in 1810, he cautioned that conditions in the Arctic changed from one year to the next, thus making discovery of the passage difficult at best. He was rebuffed in his offers to lead an expedition, however, as he did not carry the appropriate upper class credentials and also because he refused to endorse the myth of the Open Polar Sea, something that was critical to British planning but that Scoresby knew from firsthand experience in the north could not possibly exist. Thus, valuable firsthand knowledge of the region was ignored for the dreams of those who relied upon the open sea story to make the passage more possible.

(Scoresby's reputation did not suffer from his antagonistic relationship with Barrow and indeed found literary immortality when fan Philip Pullman gave his name to the explorer Lee Scoresby in the His Dark Materials trilogy.)

The ironclad belief in the power of the British navy against all odds and in defiance of all reason died hard, on the rare occasion when it was allowed to die at all. As the years went by and the Franklin expedition did not return, Lady Jane galvanized public response and threw all of her collective power as dedicated wife and loyal British subject into spearheading a massive rescue effort to find him and his men, whom all were convinced must be alive. In this endeavor she was aided not only by Franklin's fellow explorers (many of whom had personal friends among his crew), but by the media as well. As Martin Sandler recounts in his comprehensive and highly readable history of the expedition, Resolute, "Newspapers became filled with accounts of past expeditions, of northern discoveries already made, of the ways in which the passageâ€“seekers were bringing greater glory to the nation than even the most honored military heroes, all wrapped around the burning question â€” where was Franklin?"

Over the next several years one of the greatest search efforts in maritime history unfolded. By modern calculations, the British government spent over 40 million dollars trying to find Franklin and ten ships and at least a dozen searchers were lost in the process. The Americans also launched numerous expeditions, one of which produced its own legendary explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, and another that spawned a tale both bizarre and tragic. Over the years, as explorers continued to crisscross the Arctic in search of clues to the mystery, Franklin was easily elevated to legendary status. John Franklin became the quintessential lost explorer and, as the years went by, his story became less that of a career bureaucrat who was grossly unprepared for his journey and more the story of the British navy itself. He was not a memorable man in real life and yet somehow, in failing so spectacularly, Franklin became greater than all the successful explorers who traveled before (and after) him. As Roald Amundsen later wrote, "What appealed to me most were the sufferings that John Franklin and his men had to endure. A strange ambition burned within me, to endure the same privations. . . .I decided to be an explorer." In death Franklin became a hero to thousands, as long as everyone ignored how preventable his tragedy was, and how many other men had to die in pursuit of his expedition's sad and ignoble truth.

Dan Simmons used the Franklin expedition for the collision of multiple northern myths in his recent thriller, The Terror. Opening in October 1847, after Franklin is now known to have already died, the book explores not only the complete breakdown of civility among the survivors, but throws in both a Yetiâ€“like killer picking them off one by one and a mysterious mute Inuit woman who not only seems to be possibly controlling the monster, but is a virgin who still manages to be sexually aggressive. Lest readers miss any of the allusions, in the text Simmons retells the story of Sedna, the Inuit Goddess of the Sea whose origin myth explains the creation of fish, seals, whales and other sea creatures and whose appeasement was necessary to ensure fair weather and good hunting. Sedna, a beautiful woman who suffered great pain and disfigurement through the callous treatment of her father, demanded that her subjects travel through great peril to pay homage to her. This was a lesson that seems to illustrate the entire search for the Northwest Passage and explains the suffering inherent in all such heroic journeys â€” but particularly those in the north.

There are two key points in the Franklin myth that Simmons specifically addresses in his book, however: the reliance on cannibalism to stay alive and the lingering questions surrounding the death of Francis Crozier, the captain of the Erebus and the officer who was known to assume overall command upon Franklin's death. The Inuit swore for years that a white stranger was seen near many of their villages, and British explorer Frederick Schwatka was convinced when he was told the stories that it was Crozier who apparently survived but chose not to be rescued. While no one could explain why he would do this â€” other than the inherent trauma from seeing so many men under his command die in horrible conditions â€” Simmons uses fiction to suggest that it is not the possibility of shame ("He will always be the captain who let all his men die") that prevents him from seeking civilization, it is for love. "He has to believe that his dreams â€” mere dreams â€” and that his love for this woman should make him surrender a lifetime of rationality to becomeâ€¦Become what? Someone and something else."

For Simmons, Crozier was the one given the chance to love the human incarnation of Sedna, and, because she offered him a combination of wildness (especially when it came to sex) and domesticity (a long held myth about native women), he chose to stay. This is what trumped Crozier's commitment to God and country, and even more significantly, his promise to the British navy.

It has long been believed by travelers to the north that a man can be reborn there with a greater sense of clarity and vision; he can see himself and the world in a way that embraces the wild as the true home for personal transformation. This belief is not so different from what many of the explorers actually acknowledged; American Elisha Kent Kane recorded in his journal while searching for Franklin that "An iceberg is one of God's own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man." But could a man like Francis Crozier, who so carefully recorded his location and intentions and assumption of command in a cairn left for rescuers, be expected to abandon his sense of duty out of a personal need for freedom? Could any officer in the British navy do this unless suffering from severe psychological trauma? Simmons cannot say but he does slyly offer up the possibility for why Crozier would want to abandon all aspects of his Englishness; he suggests that members of the crew were hunting and eating each other to stay alive.

Evidence of cannibalism in the expedition was first brought forward by John Rae, an explorer with the Hudson's Bay Company who was widely acknowledged to have a more intimate understanding of Inuit ways and language than any other British explorer. When he arrived in England in 1854 after a long march across much of northwestern Canada, he presented a report to the Admiralty that included numerous recent interactions with the Inuit, many of whom had in their possessions items from the Terror and Erebus. The Inuit told Rae of trading with a group of white men who were traveling south and pulling sledges and communicated that their ship had been lost. The Inuit also revealed the discovery of various graves and bodies found in tents. The further north Rae and his companions traveled in the region Franklin's men were suspected to frequent, the more artifacts he found, including a teaspoon with Crozier's initials, silver forks bearing the initials of the assistant surgeon from the Terror and a round silver plate inscribed "Sir John Franklin, K.C.B." among many other objects. While this news was sad and the relics only cemented his conclusions that there were no survivors, Rae's casual statements about cannibalism blew apart everything else in his report. In recounting the story from one Inuit hunter, Rae recorded:

From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative resource â€” cannibalism â€” as means of prolonging existence.

To say that Lady Jane was furious or the Admiralty shocked by this statement does not begin to describe their reactions. To protect her husband's reputation, Lady Jane immediately set about doing everything she could to discredit Rae and ruin his career. In this respect she enlisted none other than author Charles Dickens to make her case for a more acceptable explanation of what happened. As Sandler recounts, Dickens chose to write an article on the matter in the weekly journal Household Words:

Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin's gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves. . . .We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man â€” lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famineâ€“stricken, weak, frozen, helpless and dying â€” has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature."

So Englishmen = good, Inuit = bad

Although some in the Admiralty agreed with Rae, acknowledging that in severe circumstances no one could know what men would do to survive, in the end, even though he surveyed close to ten thousand miles of Arctic coastline and did it all for English honor, he was, as Sandler records, ". . .the only major nineteenthâ€“century British explorer never to receive a knighthood." Some truths are evidently best left unspoken.

Dan Simmons did not have a backlash to worry about, however, and planned acts of cannibalism serve as a major subplot in The Terror. In his scenario for what took place as the survivors tried to make their way south to the Great Fish River (which Crozier stated as their destination in his final note placed in that cairn on April 25, 1848), the group quickly degenerated into factions, one behind Crozier and the surviving officers and the other behind a group of seaman who were determined to survive whatever the cost. It is clear as the single group splits apart that one is hoping to take some weaker shipmates along, for food. This results in the following insanity:

He had shot Strickland to feed Seeley.
He had shot Dunn to feed Brown.
He had shot Gibson to feed Jerry.
He had shot Best to feed Smith.
He had shot Morfin to feed Orren. . .or perhaps it had been the other way
around.

Simmons weaves a new history for the doomed expedition in his novel, showing that many men, even Dickens' "flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English Navy," will fall to unimaginable levels of horror to survive. In his story it is not just cannibalism to survive though, but cannibalism as a way of life; it is murder first and meal afterwards.

One can almost certainly hear Lady Jane screaming with outrage from beyond the grave.

Simmons of course is writing a novel and his goal is to both entertain and occasionally terrify; something he does accomplish with aplomb. It is hard to read The Terror however if you recognize the officers and crew more as historic figures than characters for an author's vision of polar fright. The monsters Simmons portrays in his book were real men who died in agony and were mourned by family and friends who thought they were leaving simply for adventure, not catastrophe. Now in this 21st century novel they exist as caricatures of themselves; beasts who carved each other up in an insane gamble to just win more time even after giving up on any chance of rescue or escape. As to why the real survivors were never able to befriend the Inuit, who might have saved them, there is no clear answer (although Simmons has some thoughts on that score as well). The irony that men like John Rae or William Scoresby, men long deemed less deserving for exploration's glory by the Admiralty, could have saved them was likely not lost on at least the officers. They would have known by the end all that they should have learned before leaving England, and how vital so much of the knowledge was that their superiors had so casually dismissed.

Ultimately, the expedition likely failed for multiple reasons. After an extended period trapped on the ice, scurvy was most certainly a factor, as was lead poisoning caused by the tinned foods that were bought in bulk from the lowest contract bidder â€” a company that did not use the proven methods of sealing and protecting the food. (This was verified by modern testing of the bodies of three crew members who died and were carefully buried early on when Franklin was still alive and the expedition still viable.)

More significantly than those factors, however was Barrow's insistence that if their primary path south through Barrow Strait was closed due to ice, Franklin was to turn north for the Open Polar Sea. These instructions, based on finding safe waters that did not exist, confounded the rescue parties for years. The southern route was apparently not blocked when Franklin arrived, but in years after it was â€” and so the British consistently turned north, neglecting the wisdom of Scoresby yet again who knew that just because a route was blocked one season did not mean it was blocked the year before. His practical knowledge could not stand up against the infallibility of the Royal Navy or its officers, who were convinced that what they believed was always right. The public supported this belief until the end, always desperate for their military to be right; always determined for their government not to let them down.

Such habits die hard, even in modern times.

The brutal and senseless reality though is that somewhere on the ice, the officers and men of the Erebus and Terror died slowly and painfully for all that they were expected to know but were never taught. Truly, they never had a chance.

There is still the possibility that somewhere in the Arctic a cairn will be found with a last message from Crozier or a last diary from Franklin or one of the other officers that will explain how the situation degraded so badly. Even now this would not be unheard of; in 1871 a legible letter by William Barents was found â€” it had been written in 1595. Hope springs eternal among polar historians that someday Sir John Franklin will speak from the grave and explain what went wrong. It will likely not be nearly as sexy and exciting as Dan Simmons' interpretation, but riveting nonetheless. Franklin's story, as Sandler shows so well in Resolute, is that of the birth of legends and the death of myths; the final undeniable proof that in the Arctic it is those who live there that will always and only understand it.

Would that it didn't take so many dead Englishmen to learn that truth.

Searching the hearts of explorers

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:58:50 -0800

For his incisive history of the search for the Northwest Passage, author Martin Sandler latched onto a little known hook concerning the lost explorer John Franklin. Although Franklin's tragic expedition and the many mysteries surrounding it are relatively well known to polar history fans, the fate of the H.M.S. Resolute, one of the ships sent to rescue him, will likely come as a surprise. Sandler uses the discovery of the ghost ship as a jumping off point to discuss not only Franklin's possible motivations but a whole host of missions sent both before and after his death. Quite remarkably, the author manages to give a thorough and highly readable report on Arctic history in 270 pages (with detailed chapter notes!). It's a very impressive accomplishment and makes Resolute one of the best books you can find for armchair explorers.

Sandler begins with the 1855 discovery by an American whaling ship of the Resolute, which had broken free of the ice and set adrift a year after its crew was ordered to leave it behind. The ship ends up serving as a symbol of American and British loyalty, extending up to the present day after it was eventually broken apart and wood from its decks was used to construct a desk that was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes and later most famously used by President John Kennedy. President Clinton had it returned to the Oval Office and it remains there today. The Resolute is only one small part of the story here though, as Sandler jumps back more than thirty years to show when the hunt for the Northwest Passage began in earnest. He narrows his focus to the men engaged in that exploration, both those who raised funds and organized expeditions and more significantly, those who embarked on them. He writes:

"They were a special breed, these men who sought the passage. They wanted to be heroes and for the most part, they were. Driven by a noble obsession, they were willing to leave homes, wives and families behind for the credit of finding something new. Most had no choice. 'They cannot help it,' England's former Lord Chancellor, Lord Henry Brougham explained. 'It is in the blood.'"

Whatever their reasons, there was a long line of men willing to brave the elements in search of the fastest way to Asia. Whether it is more impressive that they did this while largely disdaining the methods of survival practiced for centuries by the people who actually lived in the Arctic is questionable, (at some point one wonders almost if being British means by definition being absurdly stubborn), but reading about their trials and tribulations is thrilling stuff. Sandler keeps the narrative moving but spends enough time with each major player to give the reader a solid picture of who they were and they differed from each other. Franklin, of course, becomes the most memorable as so many others became obsessed with him. His wife Lady Jane Franklin is also a gripping character in her own right and one wonders in the end just how much blood (American and British) she was willing to risk to find the bodies of her husband and her crew. She had plenty of volunteers to go looking for those graves though and in truth, as Sandler shows, there are still historians and scientists who wouldn't mind finding that last bit of evidence that would explain just what went wrong the doomed expedition.

As a picture of 19th century exploration, polar or otherwise, Resolute is hard to beat. The author is never bogged down in details or minutia and readers will be hard pressed not to be caught up in the ideals and conflicts of each of the expeditions. Sandler also provides a quick final chapter explaining what happened to all of the memorable personalities he covers in the book, something readers will appreciate. (I've often wondered why more historians don't do this--readers get caught up in the lives of all of the men and what to know how they lived after their moments of fame and fortune.) In the long list of polar titles I own, Resolute would easily be one of the first I would loan out to the curious reader. It's interesting, involving and smartly written. This is an author at the top of his game and one who knows how to make history come alive.

Simon Nasht brings scientist and explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins to life in is his biography, The Last Explorer. Wilkins has been woefully overlooked by most polar studies, largely because he did his great work in the twentieth century and was Australian, thus leaving him out of the fervent period of Northwest Passage voyages celebrated by authors like Sandler. The other thing about Wilkins is that he wasn't interested in breaking records or being first--this was no Robert Peary looking for a place to drop a flag. Wilkins wanted to find ways to better understand and research meteorology, a subject dear to his heart after growing up in drought-stricken and devastating conditions. His exploration was always and only for the purposes of science, which makes him a very unusual man in polar exploration history.

Even for readers completely unfamiliar with Wilkins's polar exploits, which included the first flights over the Arctic and Antarctic with Alaskan pilot Ben Eielson, Nasht's book will quickly become irresistible. Wilkins is a very compelling subject as he lived the kind of life that makes nonfiction read like the best of novels. As a young man he worked as a cameraman touring distant parts of the world to make newsreels for an exotic starved public (this was in 1911 and 1912, as the movie age was in its infancy). He traveled from Africa to Russia and ended up on Vihjalmur Stefansson's tragic polar expedition where he moved up from photographer to one of the lead positions in the group. This was his first taste of the north and it captivated him from the very beginning.

The timing was off for any sort of expedition of his own however, as Wilkins soon found himself at war along with most of the rest of the world, photographing the horrors of the Western Front. He was highly decorated for his actions in France and gained an enormous amount of respect from his fellow soldiers. Nasht's attention to these parts of his early life--all of which occurred before he found worldwide fame--is refreshing in an exploration biography. The temptation is often too great for biographers to resist focusing only on the discoveries and thus give only literary lip service to the periods before that. Wilkins was a complex man though, not just an explorer (exploration was part of his life--not his whole life), and Nasht is clearly interested in every part of who he was, which frankly makes this book that much more fascinating to read.

From the first flights over the Arctic to the first submarine voyage beneath it, Wilkins was fearless in all the ways his fellow explorers would deem necessary, but also determinedly focused on the scientific goals which were all too often discarded by his contemporaries. (Even Robert Scott's party who are to be lauded for carrying their precious rocks to the final moments still sacrificed all in a rush to be first to the South Pole. If they had focused on the scientific achievements to be found rather than the record, then tragedy might not have been forever linked to their names.) Make no mistake, Wilkins did some very dangerous things (even crazy when you consider that submarine trip) but the reward he sought was always tangible and significant; he wanted to better understand the weather and use that knowledge to change the world. That's a level of permanence no record can equal and Wilkins and the men who traveled with him knew that, and it was part of why all of them were so dedicated to their goals.

In a lot of ways I would consider Hubert Wilkins the classic twentieth century Renaissance man. He was clearly smart and brave and determined but also possessed the admirable ability to embrace chance and modernization as necessary to achieve his goals. (Airplanes instead of sled dogs!) It is tempting to say that he is such a fascinating subject that anyone could make a good book out of his life, but that would not be fair to the talents of Mr. Nasht. The amount of research he has done to pull this book together (with its photos, endnotes and thorough index) is impressive. Nasht must have lived and breathed the life of Hubert Wilkins for years to pull this off but even that is not what makes it such a page turner. This is a classic case of an extremely interesting subject meeting an interested and talented biographer who does his job well. Wilkins is a largely forgotten man but Nasht makes the best sort of case for why he should be studied on the same level as Scott, Shackleton, Peary and most certainly, Franklin. Armchair explorers take note; this is a gem of a book that should not be missed.

In The Coldest Crucible, author Michael Robinson has a very specific goal: to uncover just why and how Americans became so obsessed with Arctic exploration. By focusing on the period from Elisha Kent Kane's first voyage in 1850 until the controversy surrounding Peary's journey to the North Pole in 1909, Robinson reveals the shift in American thinking from scientific achievement to conquering the wilderness. It's a fascinating look at an aspect of exploration history that has largely been overlooked by others. Few northern historians have asked what larger issues of American culture might have been at work to change popular interest in northern exploration from an avid scientific curiosity about the people and landscape into a desire simply to go further faster than anyone else.

When did all this become about latitude over everything else?

In his introduction, Robinson explains that in the beginning science was important for explorers as scientists provided valuable connections with politicians and wealthy benefactors to the explorers. One could not happen without the other and together they achieved some great things for science. What the explorers might not have realized however was that by wrapping themselves in the mantle of great science they also achieved a level of credibility they would not obtained otherwise. It gave them, Robinson writes, "...credibility as men of character." This is most obvious in the heroic rise of Elisha Kent Kane, a man who did not achieve much in his two voyages to the Arctic yet was lauded with one of the biggest funerals in American history when he died a young man after a long illness. (In the 19th century only Abraham Lincoln's funeral was bigger.) Conversely, when Peary and his opponent Frederick Cook came to odds over who reached the Pole first, Cook won many earlier supporters with his courtly manner while Peary seemed like a crass opportunist. Neither one of them was able to call on the scientific community for support and in the end Cook was soundly discredited while Peary failed to ever receive the laudatory acknowledgement he craved. (And yet somehow both men are better known than Wilkins--go figure.)

The problem, of course, was that neither had taken appropriate scientific readings that would prove they actually reached the Pole. Although Peary has been credited with it, questions have lingered for nearly 100 years and his story is always told with Cook's; they are the two men who said they reached the Pole but had only their word to offer as proof.

Robinson looks into many other expeditions than Kane, Peary and Cook however. He delves into the voyages of Isaac Hayes, Charles Francis Hall (who is well covered in Resolute as well), Walter Wellman and Adolphus Greely. Hayes struggled to bridge the gap between science and the macho aesthetic by publishing a melodramatic book about his journey which did not win over fans or critics; it seemed he couldn't win no matter what he tried although that was probably due to the timing of his trip (during the Civil War) rather than anything else. Hall was killed by members of his crew which then went on to split up in horrible weather and later get separately rescued in the sort of sensational story that seems more likely to be fiction than truth. (Read Steve Heighton's Afterlands for an excellent novel about Hall's Polaris expedition.) Both men did have some modicum of success however--Hayes found supporters in the scientific community although the wider public was less than impressed while Hall appealed to the common man from the beginning and won many of them over. That didn't help when he died however and the disaster of his expedition overshadowed the fact that he had gotten further north to date than anyone else.

Robinson moves from one of these journeys to the next in his narrative, considering the men who led them, their motives and the motives of their sponsors. It's an interesting thesis he explores, a new way of looking at exploration history that will surprise longtime readers of northern studies most of all. What's really nice about The Coldest Crucible though is that readers do not have to know a lot about the explorers profiled within to understand the larger theme Robinson is considering. We all know about the frontier myth, about American ideals of strength and virility versus goals of scientific achievement. In many ways Arctic expeditions were simply the Space race of their day and just as we have struggled to classify men like Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepherd as men of science over men of adventure, so too did the Arctic explorers struggle to be who Americans wanted them to be. In the end it is their personal motivations that are the most clouded in Robinson's book; even he does not seem to know for sure why each of them went north (other than Peary, who was pretty obvious about it). Did they just want to be the first, the farthest, and thus the very best, or did they hope to enlighten us? Robinson doesn't know, and he doesn't know what Americans wanted more either. He just gives us all the facts of these journeys and leaves the rest for the reader to decide; which really is the way I like my history to be told.

The Coldest Crucible
By Michael Robinson
University of Chicago 2006
ISBN 0226721841
160 pages

Resolute
By Martin W. Sandler
Sterling 2007
ISBN 1-4027-4085-9
280 pages

The Last Explorer
By Simon Nasht
Arcade 2006
ISBN 1559708255
316 pages

Books for Curious Minds

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:49:19 -0800

I'm always bothered by the stress placed upon the proper literary books for young people. It seems in a rush to make children and teens read more (and a deep seeded fear of all NEA reports) many adults toss aside nonfiction for all but book reports and endeavor to focus their children's efforts on those all important (and long ago determined) classics.

Oh how I do hate the classics sometimes.

In an effort to strike a blow for the interests of children who love forming questions and finding answers (among other nonfiction sorts of things) I've found some well written titles that will produce delight and joy in all the right sorts of ways. They may not lead to a love of Austen and Fitzgerald, but they will make certain readers very happy. And that, when it comes to books and young people, is really the only point that ought to matter.

For younger dinosaur fans who have left preschool behind but are still fascinated by all things prehistoric, Nigel Marven's Dinosaurs is an excellent way to bridge the gap from picture books to encyclopedias. Marven, a naturalist who has made numerous wildlife specials for the BBC, stars in two of the best series out there on dinosaurs, Chased by Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park. (Both of these are available on DVD and I can't recommend them enough.) He has put together a solid oversized hardcover that is full of big colorful illustrations while also providing an easy to follow overview of dinosaurs and current discoveries. By the end readers will understand all sorts of things about the subject such as how dinosaur families are genetically separated, the new discoveries in the realm of feathered dinosaurs, and how many of the beasts hunted. There's a lot here on fossils and fossil hunters and small boxed entries on many of the pages introduce experts in the field who are on the cutting edge of dinosaur discoveries. For any child who one day hopes to become a paleontologist, learning about these people will prove the profession is both vibrant and significant and certainly build their interest.

Along with the brief but insightful entries are numerous different animals (flying reptiles, marine reptiles, Hadrosaurs, Titanosaurs, etc.) there are also discussions of dinosaur teeth and families and dinosaurs by region. At the end of each chapter the author also provides three short columns of links with books, web sites and collections around the world that are open to the public. There is also a very useful glossary that should answer any questions on terminology. Published by Kingfisher, Dinosaurs has high quality photography and an easy layout and is a delight for the dino-mad from beginning to end. This is where you should start with kindergarteners and early elementary schoolers who want more than easy readers on their favorite subject.

For the older kids, Dinosaurs by Dr. Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. is the most dynamic title on the subject that I have seen for this age group in awhile. Also packed full of gorgeous illustrations (by the very talented Luis V. Rey), Dinosaurs is much heavier on text and provides an enormous amount of detail on multiple dinosaur families. It is the very original extras that really put this one over the top however, as it also includes contributions by over thirty of the world's leading paleontologists. This means that readers will not only find a few paragraphs on dinosaur skeletons being put together in museums but will also be treated to Jason Poole, of the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, explaining just who fossil preparators are and how they do their jobs. "A fossil collection is like a library of fossils for scientists to learn from,â€� writes Poole, which provides a whole new image when thinking of the T-Rex in the Museum of Natural History.

In all of the best ways, Dinosaurs is a big general encyclopedia celebrating dozens of different creatures, including both the popularly known and obscure. There are also helpful charts comparing dinosaur age and discussions of how fast dinosaurs grow, how males and females can be told apart and just what daily life might have been like for them. There is even a most interesting contribution from Dr. Robert Bakker, a dinosaur detective, who along with his crew determines how dinosaurs died -- and what killed them -- hundreds of millions of years before. Bakker's explanation of his profession is just one more reason why this book is so compelling. His passionate interest brings long dead creatures alive and makes it easy to see just why some young dinosaur lovers never give up their passion. I'm certain after reading this book he and the other paleontologists involved will have many new fans. (I should also point out that at over 400 pages this is a worthy read for adults as well.)

For animal lovers, Houghton Mifflin's Scientists in the Field series had three excellent titles come out recently: Quest for the Tree Kangaroo by Sy Montgomery, Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kate Carson and The Whale Scientists by Fran Hodgkins. Each book focuses not only on a different type of animal, but a different type of studying animals. In Tree Kangaroo, Montgomery and photographer Nic Bishop (whose photos have accompanied several of the series' titles), follow scientist Lisa Dabek into the Cloud Forest of New Guinea to locate, study and track the elusive Matschie's tree kangaroo. The work Dabek and her associates are doing will help understand the animal better and increase its chances to survive. Tree Kangaroo is about conservation science in the bush and includes descriptions of hiking and camping in a remote location. There is also a great deal of the text (and photos) about the native peoples who live near the tree kangaroo and the ways in which they are contributing to its protection.

Emi and the Rhino Scientist focuses on the efforts of Terri Roth and her long term goal to breed the highly endangered Sumatran rhino in captivity. Working from the Cincinnati Zoo, Roth tries to decide the best way to introduce Emi to Ipuh, the resident male, and after they successfully mate Carson follows Roth's struggle to understand and prevent Emi's multiple miscarriages. Her calf Andalas was the first Sumatran rhino born in captivity in over 100 years and changed everything scientists know about the species. Accompanied by Tom Uhlman's engaging photos of the animals, Carson goes beyond Emi's experiences to also cover other types of rhinos and how they are faring in the wild and what is being done to save them worldwide.

Finally, Fran Hodgkins took a different tack in The Whale Scientists and looks at the big picture of whale strandings around the world and the many different people who are working to discover how to prevent this phenomena. She goes back to prehistoric times to discuss the mammal's evolution and also provides an excellent overview of whale hunting's history. The many different reasons behind why whales strand, from hearing damage, to confusion, illness and even group behavior (healthy whales do not want to leave an ill one behind) are all discussed along with specific examples of different strandings and what scientists learned from them. Whale Scientists is a interesting look at an ongoing tragedy in marine biology and the efforts to try and solve the mystery.

There are many other Scientists in the Field titles ranging from The Wildlife Detectives to Swimming with Hammerhead Sharks. (Next spring brings The Mysterious Universe!) With so many of today's kids captivated by Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, these books look to be an excellent way to expand their interests and show them even more ways they can learn about not only wild creatures, but the people who work with and research them. This is how future scientists are born after all -- by finding out just what it is that they want to do.

The animal world converges with other sciences in the title Cold Light: Creatures, Discoveries and Inventions That Glow by Anita Sitarski. This look at how some creatures make light and not heat introduces all sorts of unusual animals like dragonfish, anglerfish and cucujo beetles, as well as the much more familiar fireflies. Scientists are studying these bioluminescent creatures so they can learn how to make cold light useful in other ways. (Light sticks for example use chemiluminescence or cold light created by chemicals.) Sitarski uses humor and a "can you believe itâ€� attitude in writing on this relatively weighty subject and she not only makes it easy to understand but also makes readers want to understand. From a glowing chicken out of the freezer (covered in bioluminescent bacteria of course) to casual discussion of the historic and modern research on the subject, Sitarski makes readers just as interested as she is. For certain readers this will be a lot of fun to read and is likely one of the few books on the subject that middle grade readers are going to find. Give credit to the author and Boyds Mill Press for treating kids like the smart creatures they most certainly are. (Note that the book is liberally illustrated with photographs, especially of the creepy creatures.)

For the younger set who are animal crazy, David Schwartz and Yael Schy have teamed up with photographer Dwigh Kuhn on Where in the Wild?, a title that explores camouflaged creatures. With poems providing the initial spark, ("Grayish, greenish, blackish tree/The colors you see are the colors of meâ€�), Kuhn's photos fold out of each two-page spread revealing the obvious that is often impossible to detect otherwise. It's a trick of a title that will solicit more than a few surprises and leave an impression as to just how smart wild things can be. The authors also provide a solid description of each of the animals along with the picture which will answer questions about their specific habits and spark further discussion.

Switching gears, there are always several groaning shelves in your local bookstore with titles on how to write for the adult wanna-be. Although these have met with varying degrees of success in the market place, (Stephen King's On Writing still stands out as one of the best in my book), it doesn't matter how poorly written or ill experienced the authors are; there are always eager future novelists who will buy whatever pitiful advice is out there. (SARK has a new book out on writing, okay? Enough said.) For teen writers the pickings are a lot slimmer and so I was quite pleased to see David Bidini's For Those About to Write: How I Learned to Love Books and Why I Had to Write Them. Both an excellent source of information on terminology and publication process, For Those About to Write is also a memoir of Bidini's writing life from childhood to his current professional career. In short paragraphs he writes about teachers who helped him, early jobs, and sources of literary guidance. Along the way he also reflects on books he loves and offers intriguing tidbits about some well known authors. Consider the difficult childhood of Jeanette Winterson:

This acclaimed British novelist had deeply religious parents who forbade her from reading or writing literature, even though she was encouraged to compose sermons, which she was doing by the time she was eight. Young Jeanette was forced to hide books under clothes and do most of her reading behind a locked bathroom door (her parents only owned six books, two of them Bibles). She took to stashing books under her mattress -- she'd hidden seventy-seven of them -- and the plan worked quite well until her mother noticed that Jeanette's bed was slowly rising, at which point her mother tore the mattress apart and burned everything. This early demonization of literature probably fed Jeanette's sense of adolescent rebellion and resulted in a successful, well-regarded career.

This sort of information is imparted so quickly and casually that the narrative never slows or gets side-tracked. In other words, teens won't feel like they are suddenly reading the biographies of great authors instead of the book they want, which is about how to try and become a great author. Bidini makes no promises but he does explain what an agent is and how to get one, different ways to try to get published and offers up a look at one of his own pages after being severely edited. This is a book of solid, concrete information on the work of writing that also salutes books and book lovers along the way. I was delighted with For Those About to Write and highly recommend it for all would-be writers over the age of ten.

For art and history enthusiasts, Jan Mark has written a unusual history of museums with The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections. She begins with a cheeky scenario where she suggests someone walking into a museum with no idea why it exists. All the strange things they encounter seem to point to a collection of some sort but what does it all mean? From those first questions she travels back to the Greek muses and the first museum in Alexandria, Egypt. That is followed by a discussion of collectors of all kinds and the establishment of the second museum in history, which is still functioning, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

What you really have here, in this beautiful book, is the story of a lot of eccentric people and places. It is about individuals with a burning desire to know as much as they could about something or everything, and how that curiosity fueled the collecting of piles and piles of stuff that eventually ended up in museums. Mark writes about Peter the Great who was mad but determined, the Fifth Baron Pitt Rivers who was the first archaeologist, and Lord Elgin who took a whole lot of Greece back home with him to London (and now the Greeks would like it back, please). Hoaxes, marvels and oddities are mentioned just as the very nature of curiosity is celebrated. The Museum Book is really a unusually fun book about a usually academic subject and while Mark deserves a lot of credit for writing about what seems a staid subject in a fresh and modern way, illustrator Richard Holland deserves a boatload of credit for his fantastic accompanying illustrations. Adopting a "mixed media approach using print and collageâ€� he has created some wonderful images here. Every page is a designer's joy and art lovers will relish seeing what Holland has done to bring Mark's text alive. The combination of famous artwork, witty typography and backdrops ranging from a sepia tinged view of the Acropolis to a brilliant celestial sky, makes this book a dazzler from start to finish. I didn't want it to end and I dearly wish Mark was still with us so she and Holland could work together again on another book like this one. The Museum Book is ageless; get a copy for anyone who ever enjoyed a visit.

Finally, Stones, Bones and Stitches: Storytelling Through Inuit Art is an introduction to the art of the North, featuring works from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Several Inuit artists both past and present are featured along with full color photographs of some of their work (which ranges from carvings to fabric wall hangings). Curators Shelley Falconer and Shawna White provide personal histories on the artists which will particularly interest readers keen to know more about indigenous peoples. Quite frankly I've never seen such a beautifully put together book on art for young people before; this is an excellent resource for those looking to know more about the art history of indigenous peoples.

Stones, Bones and Stitches is a somewhat simplified version of an adult art book but it does not talk down to its audience; rather it lifts them up with its well written and illustrated passages on a most worthy subject. We could do better with more titles like this on all matter of North American artists; it is a rich way to learn about how people of all kinds can express themselves in beautiful and lasting ways.

Polar Wives by Kari Herbert

Mon, 07 May 2012 02:31:13 -0800

In grad school, one of my most memorable courses was "Polar Exploration and its Literature." Over the course of the semester we immersed ourselves in the words of Pierre Berton and Barry Lopez and a host of biographers who wrote of Peary, Scott, Shackleton, and others. What we did not read was much about the women who married those men, an oversight finally rectified by Kari Herbert's delightful collective biography Polar Wives: The Remarkable Women behind the World's Most Daring Explorers. In a period spanning Lady Jane Franklin's efforts to find her missing husband in the mid-nineteenth century to Herbert's own mother who traveled to Greenland with her exploring husband and infant daughter in 1970, this is a solid critical view of women who supported famous men and were affected in both positive and negative ways by their marriages.

Everyone you would expect can be found in Polar Wives: Kathleen Scott, Jo Peary, Eva Nansen, Emily Shackleton, and both Lady Jane and Franklin's first wife, Eleanor. Arranged in a thematic manner that introduces the women in separate chapters and then follows them through sections on love and marriage, the difficult days of separation, and finally as the standard bearers of their husbands' heroic exploits, the book provides plenty of material on each subject without getting bogged down in the minutiae of any particular life. I would argue that all of these women could easily support their own biographies, but Herbert is wisely writing for a general audience who might be new to her subjects, and she should get them with such compelling stories.

Consider Jo Peary, who, while attempting to reach her husband, spent a winter icebound in Greenland sharing quarters with his Inuit mistress and son (Aleqasina later bore him another son as well). The fact that Robert Edwin Peary took a naked picture of a reluctant young Aleqasina as part of his "ethnographical studies" of the Inuit just makes this whole episode that much more sordid. And the fact that Jo had lost her own infant daughter to illness while Robert was gone is just a further heartbreak. Frankly, I don't know why Jo stayed with him and readers might well wonder the same, as well as just how true Peary's claim was that he reached the Pole.

There is also Kathleen Scott, who was determined to find the man worthy of fathering her intended son and got just that with the most tragic explorer of all, Robert Falcon Scott. And Marie Herbert, who had a drive to carve out her own niche as an explorer. Herbert recounts the many jobs the women were forced to take on including everything from publicity to logistics to organizing and funding rescue operations. (Robert Peary was particularly needy in this regard.) There were also the situations unique to loving someone whose job was to go to the ends of the earth in a time when communication across the ocean was difficult. Consider Eva Nansen's struggle in 1895, three years after the last time anyone saw or heard from her husband who was attempting to reach the North Pole:

In many ways Eva had lost hope and faith. Enough time had passed for her to question her husband's motives for embarking on such a long and dangerous journey, and she began to doubt his love for her. Dwelling on such thoughts plunged her into a depression verging on the suicidal: "At any rate, I went round and thought out the easiest way of killing myself." Profoundly unhappy, she confessed to a friend that, as a result of such despair, the memory of her husband had all but disappeared.

Eva Nansen was a famous singer prior to marrying her husband, but after he did successfully return, upon reaching a farthest point north, their reunion did not bring peace. She chafed at the role of "long-suffering explorer's wife" and yet, like the others, she was powerless to keep him home. The explorers were either continuously trying to attain a self-imposed geographic goal or, having met it, felt compelled to surpass it and stay ahead of others. (Jane Franklin appears to be the only exception to this rule; in many ways her husband seems to have been content to remain in England, but she was determined he should achieve greatness one way or another. That his voyage ended in the greatest loss of life in polar history is thus all that much more interesting to study.)

The pressure for greatness was an ever-present part of all of these marriages, as was the weight of celebrity that often led to infidelity. Emily Shackleton gave an especially frank interview about this subject to an American newspaper in which she stated "...she did not believe in reading her children stories that ended with 'And they lived happily ever after.' Doing so might encourage a girl to think that marriage was the only option, and she added wistfully, 'How wrong that is.'"

I would be wrong to conclude from Polar Wives that any of these marriages were disasters, however, for Herbert is careful to present ample evidence of how much all of them felt enriched by their partnerships. But she does reveal how complicated it was to be an explorer's wife, shedding light on a little known aspect of life in the spotlight, and revealing far more than readers typically gain from exploration histories. To say that she merely balances the record with Polar Wives would be a gross understatement. Every story Herbert tells is fascinating for itself, and the book is compelling. With a nice selection of photos, an ample supply of larger-than-life characters, and settings like no other, this is a book that should easily stand the test of time and has earned its place on exploration history shelves everywhere.

Polar Wives: The Remarkable Women behind the World's Most Daring Explorers by Kari Herbert
Greystone Books
ISBN: 978-1926812625
368 pages

YA Column: We Can't Choose Our Families.....

Mon, 07 May 2012 02:29:41 -0800

I would be hard pressed to think of two characters more different than Luna in Stewart Lewis's You Have Seven Messages and Chris in Jason Skipper's Hustle. Both teens are trying to achieve some level of normalcy in lives torn apart by circumstance and must deal with issues of parental loss and lies as they look to the future. The fact that every time something goes wrong for Chris the reader quickly learns it will only get worse and that every time something goes well for Luna it will only get better, are plot issues that do, in both cases get tedious. But the teen characters are so strongly written and so damn appealing that in spite of plot points that will cause an eye roll or two (especially in Luna's case), the pages keep turning. Watching them work their ways through all of the family drama is well worth the literary ride.

Chris wants to be a guitar player and saves his money for an instrument and then strives to find time to practice, learn and perform in a band with his friends. His musical aspirations are severely hampered by his family life, however -- the occasional visits of his alcoholic grandfather, the needy selfishness of his alcoholic father and the poor choices of his mother who relies on men to save her and does not choose her romantic partnerships wisely. The family business is selling shrimp (except for a detour into bar ownership that goes as well as you expect) and Chris is out there every weekend and all summer doing his best to contribute to the family coffers. As he gets older he would prefer to make music (and have his own life) but his father relies more and more heavily upon Chris helping out. Even after his parents break up he continues to be guilted into getting the job done. Things don't get better when his mother finds a permanent someone else, because, of course, new guy starts out great then loses his job and becomes a controlling monster who delights in making Chris's life hard. In the end mom, of course, chooses the guy and Chris is bounced to dad and his girlfriend until things don't go well there and dad dies and he is bounced back to mom and finally -- finally -- he decides he has had enough and bolts for life on his own. You will cheer that decision, believe me, and also lament all the idiots everywhere who clearly need parenting classes before making the choice to reproduce.

Meanwhile, in Luna's world money is not an issue because her father is a great film director and her recently deceased mother was both a model and author. (The eye rolling can start now.) The death of her mother walking across a busy NYC street is the root of the book's conflict, as Luna discovers her mother's cell phone a year later with seven messages still remaining. Slowly (so incredibly slowly) she listens to the messages and follows up on their clues, discovering her parents did not have the marriage she thought, that both of them kept secrets, and her father is not telling her the truth about the day her mother died. Along the way she receives an impressive antique camera from her dad that helps her realize her dream to become a photographer. She uses the camera to take pictures of a famous model who befriends her and that, of course, leads to a show at a trendy gallery, representation from an arts agent, coverage in the New York Times, and a promised meeting with Annie Leibovitz. There is also a trip to Italy to visit her beloved uncle. Luna's world, as you can tell is very different from Chris's, and though the pattern of expect bad news for Chris and good news for Luna is unrelenting, the similarities between the characters can not be ignored. Both of them are very smart, both end up hurt by first romances, and both are stuck with parents who underestimate their strength. Chris and Luna are characters who force their parents to acknowledge they are not children and, in many ways, are far more capable then the adults around them. This makes them excellent choices for readers looking for teen empowerment titles and with their vastly divergent settings, class structures, and even genders. They make a solid set of bookends to any shelf collection of family dramas. Just be prepared for lots of beer in Hustle and lots of restaurant takeout in You Have Seven Messages (and also Dwight Yoakam in one world and Mrs. Dalloway in the other). The clichés might come fast and furious in these worlds but the kids are all right and hard to resist.

In the 1983 Twilight Zone movie, there was a remake of an episode from the original series, "It's a Good Life." The story focuses on a young boy with omnipotent powers who manipulates the world around him (and the people within it) at will. He creates a life as he wishes it and everyone, out of terror, is forced to live the roles he assigns them. (The remake included one horrifying scene of the boy's "sister" who had displeased him and had her mouth removed. Everyone who has seen it is getting the shivers right now just reading this.)

I was reminded of that episode when reading Nova Ren Suma's twist on the passive aggressive sibling relationship from hell, Imaginary Girls. This has to be one of the most polished and sincerely scary books I have read on family relationships ever, and yet for all its subtle paranormal elements, it carries such an element of realism that it can not be dismissed (we all have controlling family members, some of whom are a bit crazy). This is a book where someone matter-of-factly comes back from the dead, and yet that is the least disturbing plot point. Really. For all the strangeness and dark wonder of the dead girl who isn't dead (and no one but the protagonist, Chloe, seems to remember dying), it is the control that older sister Ruby exerts over Chloe and everyone else that truly reeks of horror. She just can't help it, Chloe thinks, Ruby's just so popular, she's just so magnetic, she's just naturally the center of attention. And then, as the dead girl wanders into her life and Ruby gives her trademark smile, Chloe begins to look at her sister with more cautious eyes. Maybe it's not everyone else liking Ruby so much, maybe it's Ruby making them like her, and maybe Ruby's just having a little fun with all that affection.

There is more, so much more, to Imaginary Girls than I can convey in this space. There is the swim at the reservoir and the town beneath that was flooded long ago, the mother who knows all because Ruby insists she carry the weight of that knowledge, and there is Chloe next to London, and London is dead, and Chloe is talking to her, but London doesn't know what happened, no one knows what happened, and then, in a flash, Chloe realizes nothing is right. And her big sister tells her she is just taking care of things, just making sure everything is okay. And Chloe thinks her sister loves her most of all, doesn't she? Her sister would never hurt her, would she?

Just hold on tight, channel your inner Shirley Jackson, and immerse yourself in one subtle and twisted sibling relationship, courtesy of Nova Ren Suma. Imaginary Girls is one original dark tale and a read I doubt I will forget.

On a lighter and certainly less murderous note, The Not-So-Great Depression by Amy Goldman Koss, published in 2010, remains very much a snapshot of our economic times. Freshman Jacki enjoys a comfortable life in California with her wealthy entertainment lawyer mother. There is a (very annoying) college student nanny to shuttle her and her little brother around, endless restaurant meals, and phantom employees who clean the house and tend the yard without ever being seen. Even though the parents are split up (her dad pursues a much more modest life as a baker and lives with his mother), everything in Jacki's world has a most self-satisfied air to it. Private school, no shortage of pocket money, plans for a $600 prom dress -- this is her reality. Then her mom loses her job (of course) and economics stops being just another boring school subject.

Koss approaches her story with a lot of humor, and it makes Jacki's story far more memorable than you would expect. As her older sister reels from the loss of not only the coveted dress but her ivy league collegiate dreams, the siblings cannot help noting their mother's struggles with the new reality. Forced to downsize into smaller digs, for example, she schedules a garage sale but then purchases clothing racks, a ticket dispenser, and cash box to make the sale "more successful." The mother tries to justify her purchases and Koss plays it for some much deserved laughs.

The Not-So-Great Depression is not a gritty exposé of hunger and homelessness, so the happy ending is no surprise. But it is likely a scenario recognizable to many readers as the economic crisis invaded all of our lives in ways big and small. Using the framework of a high school history class, Koss allows Jacki to work out the larger questions presented by her transitioning home life and also brings classmates into the conversation. What's nice about the deft touch the author uses is that while this could be a message book, it largely defies that pigeonhole. We had money to spend and spent it, and now we don't and have to be a lot smarter, is what Jacki learns. With the addition of a slightly crazy gym teacher, a very cute boy, a tart grandmother, and a group of likable friends, The Not So-Great-Depression succeeds at capturing a social moment. This is how it was, Koss tells her readers, and now this is how it's going to be.

Finally, Kevin C. Pyle has a very serious work with his new graphic novel, Take What You Can Carry. In narratives separated by decades, Pyle tells the stories of two teenage boys, one who was incarcerated in the Manzanar internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, and the other a thrill seeking suburban cliché found guilty of shoplifting in 1978. The older plot is distinguished by sepia tones and wordless storytelling while the more contemporary tale utilizes a pale blue palette and is full of vocal bombast and teen angst that nearly leaps off the page. During the war, pain and frustration is evident is in the smallest of gestures and expressions, while in the seventies there is bike riding and screaming and an aura of barely contained wildness. The convergence of the two storylines comes in the final pages, though careful readers will likely have made a guess about things far sooner than that. This is ultimately an understated and effective title that manages to convey a lot about history but even more about family.

Ken, who loses very nearly everything when his family is sent to Manzanar, sees himself shift away from the centuries old traditional relationship between children and parents when he is forced to navigate the unfamiliar rules of the camp. As Pyle explains in his afterword, it was often easier for the younger people to cope in the camps and obtain items necessary for the family. The group setting also forced a shift from traditions that resulted in teens striking out on their own in ways that were previously unheard of. For Kyle the decision to break rules is born out of peer pressure and boredom, a predictable desire to break free of the stifling suburban atmosphere he finds himself thrust into by his parents' recent move. Ken had no choice, Kyle had every choice, and yet even though so much separates them, in the end Pyle manages to show there is still a great deal to be shared by both boys, and even more so by the now adult Ken and the teen Kyle. It's a delicate story that Pyle gives his readers, one that demands some thought and care, and yet it is so familiar (running, hiding, even stealing) that Take What You Can Carry is easy to embrace. For those looking for a thoughtful read, this is the book to reach for -- not only for its serious words but the emotional depth of all of Pyle's wonderful artwork. Lovely, just lovely.

COOL READ: I fell hard for true stories about animals when I was very young (I have vague memories of an oversized book full of them that I used to pour over while lying on the living room floor) and was particularly delighted when I discovered James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small. Most current nonfiction about animals falls in the scary camp (true stories of feedlots or what I like to call "how to become a vegetarian for life in one quick read") and the cloying camp (I'm looking at you "dog I didn't need, want, choose, but managed to change my life in a positive way before dying" titles). Herriot didn't write that way and neither did the late great Gerald Durrell. By luck I recently received All My Dogs by Pushcart Press editor and publisher Bill Henderson, which is reminiscent of the dog stories I enjoyed in the past while including some frank discussion of finding your passion, your love, and your way in the world.

Illustrated with drawings of each dog by artist Leslie Moore, All My Dogs is exactly as the title describes; a story, in chronological order, beginning in childhood, of all the dogs Henderson has loved. Some were with him for only a brief period, some were actually "borrowed" from other owners and not completely his, and some were part of every moment in his life and the lives of his wife and daughter. But here's the thing, as silly and bold and sometimes incorrigible as all of these dogs were, each of them loved Henderson and he returned that affection wholeheartedly. He is a dog person and cannot imagine a life without canine companionship. So as he writes of navigating the waters as writer and publisher, pursuing a family life, moving from one home to the next, engaging in a near quixotic quest to build a tower (!) in Maine, and more than anything pondering how to live the best life possible, there is always a dog at his feet or by his side. Dogs have made his life richer by their company, and just as the best writings of Herriot and Durrell, All My Dogs is a love letter in return.

Writing the Garden & Queen Elizabeth in the Garden

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 02:37:23 -0800

Author Trea Martyn has rightfully received some positive attention for her unique royal biography, Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry and Spectacular Gardens. Martyn is a garden historian (which I think has now become one of my official dream jobs) and in her quest to uncover the gardens of the Elizabethan period also managed to peel back a fresh layer on the long competition between the man the Queen loved, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the man she most deeply respected, her chief political adviser William Cecil, Baron of Burghley. In their lifelong attempts at currying favor, both men sought to impress Elizabeth with grandiose gardens and entertainments. Along with many of her other courtiers they continuously upgraded their grounds, changed the displays and brought in everything from mock battles to fairy tale shows, dances and fireworks.

While gardening proliferated under Elizabeth's reign, Dudley and Cecil led the way and the sharp triangle formed by these three powerful people is a tale that Martyn mines for all it's worth while also delving deep into the most intricate aspects of their garden designs. The book manages to encompass aspects of love and deceit, joy and tragedy with a healthy dose of the expected court intrigue all while referencing letters and other historic documents that provide readers with intimate looks into how the two most celebrated gardens of their day were designed, maintained and altered. The lavishness is not to be believed and as both Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire and Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire are long gone, Martyn's work here is not only entertaining but informative. I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this book and as a writer I can only bow down to the artful way in which Martyn blended so much personal drama with landscape history in creating a truly divine piece of authorship.

For an overview of literally hundreds of gardens, readers need to look no further than Elizabeth Barlow Rogers' Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries. Garden historian Rogers co-curated an exhibition of the same name in 2011 with Harriet Shapiro, the New York Society Library's Head of Exhibitions. The Society library is actually the city's oldest library (dating to 1754!) and home to more than 300,000 titles. Rogers is a collector of rare books on landscape history and the depth and breadth of her knowledge on this subject is on full display in Writing the Garden. From names we know, (Vita Sackville-West, Edith Wharton, Katherine S. White) to those off the beaten path and lost to history and even some surprising contemporary names (foodie Michael Pollan), Rogers is brilliantly eclectic with every aspect of her gardening survey. From humor to philosophy to "warriors in the garden," this is a title with a little bit of everything and should serve not only as a pleasurable reading experience but a valuable resource for anyone interested in gardening history.

Rogers has organized her work by categories of her own making. This places Sackville-West in "Spouses in the Garden" with Harold Nicolson whereas White is found in "Correspondents in the Garden". There is a section on "Women in the Garden" (which includes Gertrude Jekyll) but also "Rhapsodists in the Garden" and "Nurserymen in the Garden" (my favorite section I think) and also sections for travelers, conversationalists, philosophers and teachers. These wide-ranging categories allow Rogers to be a bit freewheeling in her assessments, moving her subjects out of areas where you might expect them to reside and pairing them up with others across time and miles. This affords readers with the opportunity to learn about writers they may be unaware of when honing in on their favorites and will provide ample opportunity to fill lists for further reading and research. There is just such a wealth of information here that it should be a daunting work but Rogers writes about all of the gardeners (and their books) with such warmth and familiarity that Writing the Garden is actually extraordinarily inviting and a title that could serve as a valuable resource for many.

A word on the design aspects of both of these books: the authors have included illustrations throughout especially Rogers who has placed color plates and pictures when possible. The source lists are also impressive and not to be overlooked and proof positive of just how much work has gone into these titles. Writing the Garden in particular makes an excellent gift book and could be treated as such (Mother's and Father's Days are looming large). I also couldn't help but think of researchers and writers while reading, especially Queen Elizabeth in the Garden. Martyn has a long epilogue where she details how she sought out primary sources and turned to Italy to find the only surviving Elizabethan gardens (all sadly gone from England). Her recollection of the research process made me wish she had written a series of essays on the process as she truly went to great lengths (literally and figuratively) to uncover the story she tells here. Anyone writing their own book set during this period (or even a steampunk version of it) would profit from reading Martyn's book and likely never look at flowers in the same way.

Writing the Garden
By Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
David R. Godine 2011
ISBN 978-1-56792-440-4
280 pages

Queen Elizabeth in the Garden
By Trea Martyn
BlueBridge 2012
ISBN 978-1-93334-636-6
336 pages

Wild Unrest by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 02:33:00 -0800

In the annals of feminist literature Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an icon which is a good and bad thing. It marginalizes her to a certain degree, in that careless way that some potential readers will dismiss her as if feminism is a negative rather than positive thing. It also likely loses her some male readers who would certainly be just as transformed by reading "The Yellow Wall-Paper" as women can be, especially if they have ever been in a position of powerlessness. Gilman was, more than anything, a truly original American author and her fearless desire for independence is the stuff of novels. She should be famous--she should be taught in every high school literature class--and she is certainly worthy of the type of academic study she receives in Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz.

Wild Unrest draws heavily on Gilman's journals and letters and the diaries kept by her first husband, William Stetson. Horowitz also delves into the published works of psychiatrist S. Weir Mitchell, the man who authored the popular "rest cure" that was designed to treat women of "hysteria" which is part and parcel of what Gilman's most famous short story is all about. Horowitz firmly resists the urge to place her own conclusions above the evidence and rather than pursuing her own personal expectations relies upon the ample record she has collected to tell Gilman's story. This sets up a narrative where the reader learns of her subjects repeated intention for personal improvement (one 1884 entry in her journal reads "Begin a course of diet, by means of which, and other changes I trust to regain my old force and vigor") as she faced depression and disappointment. Horowitz shows how "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Gilman's many other works were most certainly born from years of struggle and part and parcel of a complex, alternately fulfilling and troubled life.

In many ways Wild Unrest is about all women who came of age in the late nineteenth century. Gilman longed to find satisfaction with a spouse through a conventional marriage of the day but found herself time and again disturbed and distraught by the reality of that life. She met with friends, subscribed to publications with discussions of equality and constantly sought answers to her endless questions. Sex was also a big part of what she read as her search for answers to a "woman's place" led her to consider the nature of physical relations that were not commonly discussed especially in her home. Horowitz provides ample proof that Gilman was physically attracted to her husband and indeed loved him but Walter Stetson wanted a traditional marriage and faced with losing him--and losing the promise of "happily ever after" she acquiesced to his proposal. They were married, they had a daughter, and then Charlotte fell completely apart. From Walter's journal, we learn a doctor friend explained the near invalid status of his wife was apparently due to feelings that "her whole usefulness and real life was crushed out by her marriage and the care of the baby". "Moral measures" were prescribed and while Dr. Knight sought gentle discussion, Walter feared that his wife's misery was due to her female reproductive system, a "uterine irritation". If only Charlotte could be cured of being a biological woman, then she would become a normal happy woman.

Wow.

Page by page, Horowitz follows Charlotte's condition, Walter's worries and the little family's attempt to attain the ideal of normalcy. She excerpts the author's work to show her burgeoning interest in what it meant to be a woman and how that definition was in a state of radical change. For a very long time Gilman clearly wanted to be what was expected of her even though fulfillment of that expectation very nearly drove her mad.

In 1887 Gilman finally entered Dr. Mitchell's care for the famous "rest cure" and spent a month far from home doing as little as possible as Mitchell prescribed. She could not write home as even that was too taxing. Rooted in her difficulties balancing the ideal of wife and motherhood with her own independent vision, the breakdown that precipitated Mitchell's care brought her to the most momentous period of her life. "The Yellow Wall-Paper" comes from Gilman's experiences in this period and yet as Horowitz shows, the record of her stay under Mitchell's care is extraordinarily thin. What is known is that she went to him likely in desperation and left initially feeling renewed and hopeful and with his support was determined to gain a level of physical fitness to best accommodate her womanly duties. Charlotte wrote years later however that Mitchell sent her home with instructions to rest, lead as untaxing a life as possible and "never touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as you live." Horowitz wonders if that was true or merely a recollection years later and long after "The Yellow Wall-Paper" had forever linked doctor and patient. Regardless of what was honest memory and "under a veil of distortion", Charlotte did not recover completely and by the summer after the cure she fell into a downward spiral that spelled the end of her marriage and the gentle beginning of a new life.

After taking readers through so many details of Charlotte's personal life, Horowitz devotes an entire chapter to the writing of "The Yellow Wall-Paper". With a divorce actively in process and Charlotte and her daughter living with the family of a dear friend, (who would later marry Walter presenting a situation where all involved managed to still act admirably for the sake of the child), the short story was clearly born from Charlotte's frustrations. She eventually found happiness with a man who embraced her nontraditional views and enjoyed a long and fruitful career as a public intellectual. But as anyone who has read "The Yellow Wall-Paper" knows, this particular short story is nothing short of brilliant and manages to tell in the starkest and simplest of terms how devastating societal ideals can be. Horowitz has done a truly admirable job of moving beyond the expectations of Charlotte's feminist iconhood and exploring who she really was, from the words of those who knew her best at her moments of greatest pain, her husband and herself. It's an elegant job of understated biography and goes a long way toward making a great American someone anyone, but especially women, can understand and embrace. Bravo.

Boltzman's Tomb by Bill Green

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:25:57 -0800

In Boltzmann's Tomb Bill Green has written one of those delightful science history titles that welcome the general reader while offering numerous insights into topics that most of us failed to learn in school. Green, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University, has areas of interest that range from Antarctica's lakes (he's been there nearly a dozen times on field research) to the philosophies of Camus to (in his youth) the launching of model rockets. He has spent his life asking questions, seeking answers, and finding his way through the discoveries of those who inspire him. In his essays he relates all he has learned along the way and can't hide the joy that learning has brought him.

The tomb of the title refers to Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whom Green discovered in a transformative college lecture. With his gravesite in Vienna as a goal, Green reminisces about the places and experiences that brought him there. He writes about a childhood interest in Scott Crossfield and Ray Bradbury and Popular Mechanics, which led to those model rocket experiments (they did not end well), as well as a meandering academic career that saw him venture in and out of colleges and majors until, crazily enough, he ended up doing chemistry research at McMurdo Station. No one, least of all Green, would have seen that coming, but in 1968 he headed south, and in the decades that followed continues to go back, culminating in a trip with his own college-age daughter recounted in the book's opening chapter.

Boltzmann's Tomb includes many Antarctica anecdotes, as well as stories found in cities and towns across the U.S. and Europe. Green namedrops numerous great men as he leads readers through his life, writing about Tycho Brae, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. But surprisingly for a science title there is also Camus and Saul Bellow, Alexander Pope, Italo Calvino, Henry Miller, and many other historians, authors, poets, and philosophers. His enthusiasm for all of them is impossible to resist as he leaps from physics to poetry in an instant and carries the readers along on these connections, making clear that science and literature live side by side. The reader is left dazzled and also wishing that both subjects could be taught this way much more often.

In the midst of all the great ideas and discoveries, it is unexpected to come across the book's most stirring passages, which concern Green's childhood in Pittsburgh. With evocative descriptions he brings the reader to an American city that has radically changed but once was our burning heart. He writes, "In Pittsburgh, fire was all around us. You had to drive only a few miles to the nearest mill, which lay just sought of the city on the river. At night, the mills made their own sky, filled with smoke clouds and redness, and the long slag heaps to the west cast a flickering glow on the horizon. At times, you might have been standing on the plains of Mars."

As the best lecturers do, Green shares stories that weave in and out of a central narrative and manage to impart an enormous amount of wisdom. Boltzmann's Tomb is a title that stirs curiosity, prompts original thinking, and suggests, through the author's own inquisitive nature, that there is so much more to know about the world we live in. Elegant, erudite, and supremely satisfying, it is the sort of book that gets all too easily lost in the shuffle but deserves a lot more readerly attention.

Boltzmann's Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green
Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN 978-1934137352
288 pages

YA Column: It's Like Our World, But Twisted a Little

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:23:03 -0800

Penguin's Firebird imprint reissues three outstanding novels from the great Diana Wynne Jones this month with Dogsbody, A Tale of Time City, and, one of my favorite books of all time, Fire and Hemlock. In this modern retelling of the ballads "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," Jones startles readers from the very first pages when new Oxford student Polly realizes that she has forgotten large swaths of her life. While she can recall experiences with friends and family, there are nagging gaps that only grow wider and more disturbing as she nudges her brain to recall what she is missing. Reaching back to her childhood and her parents' deteriorating marriage, Polly latches onto one person in particular who is absent from most of her memories. Finding out why she has forgotten Thomas Lynn and the sinister reasons behind her selective amnesia propels the narrative forward but there is so much more here than a little mystery. Fire and Hemlock is mythic fiction at its very best and a strong example of how the most captivating stories are often found in traditional sources.

Polly's relationship with Thomas Lynn begins when she mistakenly crashes a neighborhood funeral and continues from there through long fanciful letters (the story is set in the prehistoric period before email), occasional meetings, and the exchange of great books and music. They meet when Polly is only ten and desperate for adventure. In Mr. Lynn she finds an unlikely sympathetic listener who seems to have his own need to escape from the pressures of reality. (Polly soon realizes he has the ex-wife from hell.) The funeral also introduces Polly to Seb, a Draco Malfoy-esque boy who appears haunted by ulterior motives and his father, the terrifying Mr. Leroy. In the years that follow, Polly and Mr. Lynn find themselves making bizarre discoveries on their occasional afternoons together. They are pursued by unnatural beasts and monsters, save a great horse, are saved in turn by a car, befriend three stellar musicians, wander through a hardware store from the X Files and learn why you should never go on a carnival ride. (For more evidence of this, read Something Wicked This Way Comes and commit it to memory. Please.)

The dozen years age difference between Thomas and Polly is explained more than once in the story and although our twenty-first century suspicions might want to find something nefarious in that, Fire and Hemlock is a story about contemporary heroes and ancient tales that are rooted in medieval songs. As Polly uncovers the clues to her past (letters, pictures, and toy soldiers point her in the right directions), she must come to terms with how much of her life she has lived as the pawn in a game she never knew the rules for. The world is a more powerful and complicated place then she ever imagined and that reality is a shock, as it should be, and gets to the root of why mythic fiction is such an endlessly appealing genre. Fire and Hemlock, like the ballads that inspired it, is a book of richness and intensity, language and ideas, and wild, wild nights that invite readers to escape into a powerful fantasy that leaves much of modern paranormal fiction in the dust. I cannot thank Firebird enough for bringing it back. (Also be sure to check out the Firebird title Tam Lin by Pamela Dean for another outstanding take on that ballad.)

Elizabeth Hand continues to plumb the souls of creative teens in her new novel, Radiant Days. As she did so brilliantly with Shakespearean plays and complex family dynamics in Illyria, Hand now turns to art and poetry in a whirlwind look at the lives of two starving artists separated by time: Corcoran School of Art student Merle in 1978 and outlaw poet Arthur Rimbaud in 1870s France. Their separate passions for painting and words overwhelm every facet of their lives, sending Merle into a tailspin after a disastrous love affair and Rimbaud onto the road to Paris in search of intellectual freedom. The twist here is that on one spectacular night, when everything seems to go wrong, Merle and Rimbaud are brought together. The magic that happens is not their meeting however, but what it inspires each of them to do and how it fills them later with memories that become powerful purposes.

Both Merle and Rimbaud are fierce in their desire to live lives less ordinary. Rimbaud however, as fans of his writing are aware, was bolder in thought than most teens and insistent upon making a mark to the point of attaining literary immortality. The fictional Merle has enormous talent but struggles with the courage to embrace her art fully and suffers from a self-destructive streak that pulls her away from her studies and onto the streets. Merle wants so much but is not sure how to get it and feels weighed down by the more prosaic needs of food and shelter. The bitter end to her romance and the loss of her precious sketchbook is enough to push her over the edge. The second part of the book begins when she has very nearly hit bottom and that is when Rimbaud arrives in her life.

This collision of destinies involves the arrival of a third character in the plot, a musician who carries with him a hint of mythology that Hand artfully weaves through the brasher moments of Merle and Rimbaud's adventures. The theme of "one wild night" beats through the plot, a reminder that sometimes you have only one chance to choose the road not taken, and only one opportunity to be brave enough to grab the life you dream of. This is something Arthur Rimbaud was clearly born knowing and gifts to Merle in the hours they share.

While reading Radiant Days, it becomes clear that what elevates Hand's work above that of her peers and makes her one of the strongest writers for teens today is the gorgeousness of her language. Readers of her adult mysteries and sly fantasies will have learned to expect nothing less but for teens navigating a sea of interchangeable and forgettable paranormal titles, the images and emotions Hand conjures up will likely startle and shock. In the voice of Arthur she writes: "People want poetry to be a nursemaid. I want to be a murderer and a thief. Art should be... ugly, and hurt so you can feel it. That's what makes it powerful."

By showing Arthur Rimbaud as a modern day hero on par with the significance of Kurt Cobain, or Jack Kerouac before him, Hand shows that nothing is beyond her literary reach. Radiant Days is a most startling achievement.

With his latest novel, Matt Ruff shows yet again that he is a master of crafting intricate, complex plots that read as effortless dreams. The Mirage is a book that should not be able to exist -- it should just be too damn hard to pull off -- and yet in it Ruff gives readers a modern day thriller with real characters who pick everything apart, solve the mystery, and face a new day in the most satisfying ending I have read in, well, forever. Ruff is phenomenal, he is like no one else, and he should be at the top of the award and bestseller lists because he writes for everyone and he does it very well.

The Mirage is set in a world eerily like our own that is not a construct for the sake of fiction but has a real reason for existing. It's a world much like this one: same time, same technology, similar cultures -- with one glaring exception. In the first chapter we learn that the United Arab States was attacked on November 9, 2001 in Baghdad by Christian fundamentalists from the "World Christian Alliance, a North American white supremacist group based in the Rocky Mountain Independent Territories." The UAS retaliated with the War on Terror, which resulted in the capture of the city of Denver and ongoing fighting in the North American continent. A "Green Zone" has been established in Washington, DC from which the UAS continues to attack Alliance forces and the "Axis of Evil" (America, UK, and North Korea) has been informed that the UAS will not back down in its determination to bring peace to the world.

Yeah, things are a little bit different then you expect in Ruff's world.

The author provides necessary world-building background via Wikipedia-type entries between chapters. This allows Ruff to provide readers with thorough historical explanations while not having his characters get bogged down in forced extraneous conversations. It's brilliant and effectively answers questions as you read along. The story itself centers around three Arab Homeland Security agents who have been tasked with getting to the bottom of an odd puzzle. After the capture of a suicide bomber and routine search of his apartment they discover a copy of The New York Times dated September 12, 2001 that asserts the United States of America was attacked by Muslim fundamentalists and the Arab states are a "collection of third-world countries." The odd meme of an alternate world, or that everyone is living in a "mirage," has started to gather steam among fundamentalists in the American states and territories and is proving to be fodder for a growing number of suicide bombers. Mustafa, Samir, and Amal figure it's just mind games and Photoshop, but the more they investigate, the more they encounter powerful people who seem to have agendas of their own that include the mirage idea. These people include the gangster Saddam Hussein; the extremely powerful senator Osama bin Laden; and Americans, including the director of the Waco faction CIA (Christian Intelligence Agency) from Texas, David Koresh, his agent, Timothy McVeigh, and his enemy, the CIA director from Crawford, who is known by his nickname, "The Quail Hunter."

It would all be mindless and maybe even silly if Ruff was not deadly earnest about proving just how everything happened and why, and because of this The Mirage ends up being a very serious book with serious ideas. (And a lot of humorous moments too, of course.) There is talk of politics and culture, religion and love, science and magic. Not one word is wasted; every page builds on what came before it and the characters, even those you think you know so well, are permitted their moments of introspection. The agents, who are fictional "everymen," are the ones to be most admired, and as they slog through all the chaos that surrounds them, you can see Ruff easing into a suspension of disbelief that gradually becomes an embrace not only of his new reality but the aspects of our own that are so achingly similar. He does something with The Mirage that is compelling and elegant. Older teens who have only known the post-9/11 world should read it as an echo of earlier satires on war and politics but also for the great gripping story it provides. And anyone who looks at our world and wonders what we have gotten into will find The Mirage illuminating. I remain deeply impressed by what Matt Ruff has accomplished here and hope he receives all of the attention for it that he deserves. I am, in a word, amazed.

In a futuristic Earth putting together a new world government, Jackal Segura is the center of attention on her island nation in Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge. As the first baby born there when the new world coalition was forming, Jackal is a "Hope," one of the chosen few from each country who, in her case, will serve as an international representative for Ko Island. Jackal's life has been mapped out and planned by her parents and Ko itself, the corporation that runs the island and houses, and feeds and employs everyone on the only corporate nation on the planet. She is a project manager, dedicated to learning all that the company has to teach her so she can best represent Ko after attaining her Hope status -- a middle manager the whole world will look up to along with a host of other Hopes, some of whom may be nothing more than pageant queen wannabes. "Lots of artists dedicating their lives to furthering world peace through mixed media," one character notes sardonically. Jackal is serious, and dedicated, she understands that a Hope represents all of Ko and must always be on her best behavior. Unfortunately she is also very quietly losing her mind from the stress of her birthright and a recently revealed huge family secret, but none of that can matter because keeping it together is the job she was born to do. In a few short months, Jackal will be the best Hope she can be, but then, before it all happens as scheduled, there is a dreadful accident and Jackal's whole perfectly planned out life goes to hell.

Solitaire is science fiction that includes exploration of some serious virtual reality issues but more than anything is a novel about one person, one secret, and a job that just never stops making demands. Eskridge has done some great world-building, but the changes in her future are subtle rather than apocalyptic, which allows Jackal's dire situation to take center stage. This Earth is not really so different from our own, and anyone who has ever lived a cubicle life will recognize Ko's corporate culture. Once Jackal's life is upended, however, Eskridge allows her imagination to run wild in a penitentiary setting that has all the combined cynicism of Escape From New York with the violent paranoia of an Akritirian maximum security detention facility (that is the only Star Trek reference I'll make, promise). Jackal finds herself sentenced to an experiment designed to make her lose her mind. Her post-release survival means she has to figure out how to live with what happened to her (recidivism is a real bitch in this case), and somehow find a future that a onetime Hope could never have been prepared for.

Teen readers who are fond of the genre will embrace Solitaire with ease while fans of YA dystopian titles will find a character who possesses all the cool and quiet power of the best girl hero in a story that is light years beyond the standard fare. Jackal is no wimp or whiner, nor is she a born "chosen one." In every way that matters she is the product of the corporate culture (both personally and professionally) that embraced her from birth; she is certainly a twenty-first century construct we can all recognize. The struggles she goes through are always tempered with very personal loss, both as a result of the accident that finds her imprisoned and the distance from the love of her life who remains back on Ko. What rocks so much about Solitaire is that Eskridge has put as much time and attention into her character building as the plot and that means that while we marvel at the world she created, we also respond on a fundamental level with Jackal and the girl she loves who never stops loving her back. This book is a treasure; a true jewel for readers longing for big ideas and intimate story.

Finally, Delia Sherman riffs on Edward Eager's classic The Time Garden in her deeply affecting time travel and coming-of-age novel The Freedom Maze. Set in 1960 Louisiana and reaching back one hundred years to the same location during its antebellum peak, this should be a predictable, maybe even pedestrian message story. It has all the ingredients to teach readers that slavery is bad and bookish misunderstood girls are good, and yet Sherman turns a phrase so effectively and infuses this tale with so many memorable characters that even though you know an older wiser Sophie will eventually get back home, it quickly becomes a gripping page turner.

In the past, darkly tanned Sophie finds herself mistaken as a slave and quickly learns that slavery had no place for children. She has to grow up or surviving long enough to get back home is not going to be an option. She makes a lot of friends and enemies, she stands up for herself and discovers why some people do not have the luxury of doing that, and, more than anything, she figures out just who she is going to be. Most surprisingly (and a big departure from Eager), the time travel portion of The Freedom Maze quickly becomes the least significant aspect of the plot as the trials and travails of plantation life overwhelm not just Sophie but the reader as well. It would be trite to say she is transformed by her experience; it's far more important that Sophie is determined to change her life before the adventure begins. It is also significant that while she certainly grasps that slavery is disturbing and wrong, it is the way people lie to each other that affects her the most. A refusal to accept this simple cruelty that permeates society (and especially her family) from past to present is what lingers with Sophie and gives her the courage to return to 1960 a truly changed person. The miracle at work here is how Sherman accomplishes all this while not letting the story be about the message and thus giving a lessons to writers everywhere who look to the past as a potential setting.

Readers will love Sophie. She is ticked off at her parents for getting divorced, at her father for leaving and finding a new wife, at her mother for endlessly wishing Sophie could be the child she envisioned rather than the one she gave birth to, and everyone, everyone, for treating Sophie like a small child while nevertheless expecting her to cope with all the change as if she were an adult. If there is a god, divorced parents everywhere will take note of this revelation. Realistic, compelling, and not the slightest bit condescending, The Freedom Maze is all about changing your world. Well done, Ms. Sherman.

COOL READ: The death of Kage Baker in 2010 left a hole in the science fiction world and fans of her time traveling Company series, tales about immortals who travel into the past in search of items sought by Company officers to help mankind (or turn a buck) in the future, utterly bereft. For those looking for an excellent taste of Baker's short fiction, Subterranean Press has published The Best of Kage Baker, a 496-page collection that includes several outstanding Company stories and novellas as well as many others tales of note. The classics "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst," a Company novella set in Hollywood of the 1930s and "Son, Observe the Time," which takes place in the days leading up to the San Francisco earthquake, are both included and to be enjoyed not only for the way the characters immerse themselves in the periods but for the colorful way in which Baker recreates history and places the readers right in the midst of it. Other Company stories include "The Catch" and "Hanuman," both of which peer into the intricacies of the Company idea and the ways in which mistakes were made on the path to immortality.

Baker wrote outside the Company world as well however (as wonderful as it is) and in particular her story "What the Tyger Told Her" is a stunner. Set on a family estate, where an old "tyger" is kept caged as an entertainment, a young girl watches and with the big cat observes the family secrets unfold around her. Bit by bit she learns, and then, in a shocking few paragraphs, she takes retribution. It is not quite as disturbing as "All My Darling Daughters" by Connie Willis, but packs a similar wallop. Teens in particular will find this a powerful tale, especially as it focuses on a child who unleashes her own power. That personal boldness is actually a cornerstone of Baker's writing, from the decisions made by the Company operatives, to the twists and turns within Mr. Hearst's mansion to the tyger restlessly pacing in its cage. Baker knew that plots hinge on the smallest of moments and the unlikeliest of characters. The Subterranean Press collection is a reminder of all the amazing worlds she called home.

YA Column: Illustrated Books

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 03:51:54 -0800

One of my all time favorite groups of books is those with illustrations. Example number one is the recent Printz Honor title by Daniel Handler. Knowing Handler only for the Lemony Snicket books, one would approach his contemporary YA title of teen heartbreak with more than bit of skepticism in his heart. And yet, Why We Broke Up with powerful, prescient illustrations by Maira Kalman, is one of the most honest depictions of teenage life that I have come across. Handler has tapped into his inner high school self on a level that is impressive and created a protagonist in Min that readers will feel an instant rapport with.

The story plays out in a long letter, broken into brief chapters that address every object in the box of memorabilia that Min is returning to her ex-boyfriend Ed. The relationship was short, intense, and filled with all the drama that cross-clique dating can bring, which Handler exposes with care and precision. Why We Broke Up begins with the relationship already ended and Min carefully documenting in her letter why she is giving each item to Ed. Through these "souvenirs" she takes readers into every aspect of their couplehood, from the first long conversation, through dates big and small, meeting family members, altercations with an ex, and the most difficult moments when they mingle with each other's friends. Far from a typical teen romance, Handler instead looks at how much more there is to teen dating than simply the dating part. Min notes more than once how she wished the two of them could just have disappeared into some utopian ideal where nothing and no one else would exist. And yet as much as she dreams of this happily ever after land, she can't help recounting the times that she and Ed didn't quite mesh. It is those moments, which increased as the relationship continued, that finally became too much to bear. And so by the final pages when she details that last thing that broke them up, the reader will realize just as Min did, that they were headed there from the very beginning.

Why We Broke Up is a flashback that anyone could have, regardless of whether one is a jock or sort-of "arty." It is about all the ways you try to make a relationship work and yet just can't seem to do the right thing at the right moment, how you have to work all the time at trying to figure out what that right thing is. (There is an especially poignant moment when Min attends Ed's basketball game and struggles to care enough to pay attention, waving the pennant that marks her as a girlfriend, wondering why she is there and what she is supposed to do with the thing when it is over.) Page after page after page, Handler strips away at all the little lies we tell ourselves about who we are and who we can be; he makes clear that knowing who we are from the very beginning could save us so much time when it comes to life and love, and yet who can resist that sudden attraction, that curiosity for difference, for being loved? And that's the kicker, Min and Ed did love each other and did try, but it just couldn't work, just like we always knew.

As sublime as Handler's narrative is though, Kalman's illustrations give us the pennant and the map and coat and condom wrapper, and as the story progresses the pictures, which begin each chapter, cause readers to linger more and more. Now of course, we know what is coming, and so we pause for a moment to consider what the cookbook will tell us, or the umbrella...

I think illustrated books are a particularly good format for biography and graphic novels and add an essential element to the genre that makes them especially appealing to reluctant readers. Best Shot in the West: The Adventures of Nat Love is an example of a biography that excels with authors Patricia McKissack and Frederick McKissack, Jr., along with illustrator Randy DeBurke tackling a woefully overlooked American.

Nat Love was born into slavery in 1854 and became the most famous African American cowboy in the Old West. He knew Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, he rode the range from Texas to Dodge City, and crisscrossed Indian Territory involving himself more than once in gunfights. His horse-breaking ability was legendary and is a big part of the graphic novel. In many respects the McKissacks have written a L'Amour-esque western in Best Shot in the West, giving it all the frontier appeal and excitement of Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen's finest. The fact that Nat Love was a real man who overcome historical adversity to live an epic life just makes the book that much more appealing -- and perfect fodder for book report assignments.

Illustrator DeBurke, well known for Greg Neri's searing title Yummy: The Last Days of Southside Shorty, contributes evocative drawings on each page, washed in colors ranging from near black and white to startling reds and greens when the story warrants. This treatment lends the book a nostalgic feel that fits well with the way the story is framed, as if Nat Love is sharing his memoirs. (As explained in the author's note, Love did publish an autobiography, which the title is based on.) Overall Best Shot in the West is another example of what Chronicle Books does so well -- a beautifully designed title that impresses as both story and design.

In both Keshni Kashyap's Tina's Mouth and Faith Erin Hicks's Friends with Boys, the authors take a long look at high school life and use the graphic novel format to convey both humor and pathos. Tina's Mouth is subtitled "An Existential Comic Diary" and is framed around a class philosophy assignment where sophomore Tina writes letters to Jean Paul Sarte. The big question (the biggest question actually) is "who am I, really?" and Tina has a lot of thinking to do on the way to an answer.

Born in India, Tina lives with her parents and older sister who has a degree in architecture but has moved back home to "figure things out." Meanwhile, her older brother lives and works nearby and surfs Indian dating sites to find the perfect match. Tina is a pretty good student, a decent violin player, and a "bit of an intellectual." In her diary she explores what it is not to fit into any well defined clique (Handler's Min would certainly understand). There is also the horror of losing a best friend and the added difficulty of parents tied to one set of traditions when you are yearning for something else. Mostly though, Tina finds herself in classic teen situations and through crush, heartbreak, and high school horror, readers will nod along, smile, and also, because of the deep questions posited by this very engaging protagonist, have a few deep thoughts of their own. If it was easy to figure out who you are then we wouldn't have a widely accepted term like "midlife crisis"; anyone who thinks it's easy for teens clearly isn't appreciating the sort of challenges even a steady middle class kid like Tina is going through.

Friends with Boys adds a slight paranormal spin to the high school story as freshman Maggie, entering the classroom after years of homeschooling, not only has to navigate the strange new world of fitting in but is also haunted by a very sad ghost. The haunting is nothing new, but it seems more plaintive of late, and, frankly, Maggie has enough going on with making friends and dealing with three older brothers (all of whom are in high school as well). She wishes the dead lady would just tell her what she needs so they could go about resting her in peace. On top of all this is the fact that Maggie's mother left the family, her father is the rather busy chief of police and the kids who are her best prospect for friends are not exactly everyone's idea of most "suitable" (shaved heads, multiple piercings). Maggie perseveres, gets into an altercation with some bullies, steals something that she thinks will make the ghost happy, and finally -- finally -- tells her brothers what is going on. Everything works out because Maggie is very good at choosing friends, which really is what Friends with Boys is all about.

Hicks also contributes the illustrations in her title, using a big-eyed manga style that is reminiscent of Bryan Lee O'Malley with heavy shading on most of the panels. Tina's Mouth is illustrated in a more understated and elegant way by Mari Araki, which works well with the many sections of the book that are text heavy. In both cases you have illustration that matches the narrative quite effectively and complements the stories rather than competing with them. Tina's Mouth has a shot at sitting nicely in teen-adult crossover territory and I hope it does; the comparison to Persepolis is richly earned and certainly deserving.

For fantasy lovers, Nunzio DeFillipis and Christina Weir have a new graphic novel series in Avalon Chronicles. The first volume, Once in a Blue Moon, introduces teen protagonist Aeslin Finn and the strange set of circumstances that have her traveling between two realms, one of which that looks a lot like Camelot, except it includes a flying dragon who apparently has been waiting for Aeslin to show up.

Early on, readers learn that Aeslin's parents often read her stories from a book about a fantasy kingdom named Avalon. Her childhood was marred however by the tragic and somewhat mysterious death of her father which resulted in the end of all the storytelling. Flash forward and teen Aeslin is hanging out in school (with a uniform right out of Britney's "Oops I Did Again" video) and her mother is running for town mayor. There isn't much remarkable about her life which makes the discovery on the way home of a new store, a store Aeslin and her friend Meg are quite certain was not there at all yesterday, all the more strange. Of course they go in, of course the proprietor seems to be a cross between Santa Claus and Yoda, and of course Aeslin buys a book, the apparent sequel to her beloved Avalon Chronicles and heads home to read it. After a wistful few words are spoken Aeslin suddenly finds herself whisked away into the actual pages. Just like that, she's living a fairy tale.

The premise works because the authors have a sense of humor about it and both Meg and Aeslin perform exactly as you want them to in their respective situations. Meg grabs the book, leaves a cover story note for Aeslin's mother, and goes back to the store, which has, of course, disappeared. Meanwhile Aeslin has quickly figured out that everything looks exactly like the Avalon storybook, so there is no wasting time wailing about her situation. She knows where she is, she knows the story, so she has the good and bad guys figured out (which is disappointing since one very cute knight is apparently working for the bad guys), and she is impatient to get back home. Aeslin ends up stumbling upon the mystery store again and learning a thing or two about what is going on, but that doesn't help with her immediate and very complicated situation (the short-skirted school uniform kind of makes her stick out, and there are bandits, and she has to find the guy who wrote the book so she can get back, and there is a huge good-guys-versus-bad-guys struggle going on, and, well, she just might be the chosen one). It's really turning out to be a very difficult day for our girl, that's for sure.

The Avalon Chronicles could very easily be a tired retread or a weak Buffy imitation, but, man, it's just too much fun to snark about. Meg is a solid supporting character with actual valuable contributions to make, Aeslin is funny as hell, and there are plenty of moments in which she can shine as the plot unfolds. There were a few points where I had to roll my eyes (Ten hours on a horse in a short skirt and she's just fine when she gets to her destination? Come on!), but DeFeilippis and Weir throw enough humor our way to keep readers confident that none of this, even the more intense moments, is to be taken seriously. The point is having a good time and with this cast that is not a hard thing to accomplish. Visually, Emma Vieceli's style veers occasionally into manga (mouths gape open, the knight is appropriately star-worthy) but remains closer to Oni Press stalwart Blue Monday by the fabulous Chynna Clugston-Major than anything else. It works, and Vieceli's expressive faces make it clear the characters are visually as much in the joke as the writers intend them to be. The Avalon Chronicles are off to a solid start and promise to provide a lot of pleasure for teens (or tweens) looking for some romantic adventure in their comics.

Finally, author Jessica Anthony and designer Rodrigo Corral have teamed up for a new transmedia offering that includes the book Chopsticks, as well as an app and website. Transmedia is the new frontier in storytelling and Anthony and Corral are certainly making a noteworthy entry with this heavily illustrated title. It follows the story of teen piano prodigy Glory who is struggling to perform in the years after her mother's death. Pushed by her father into concerts in the great halls of Europe, she longs to be back home with her boyfriend Frank. Their desperation to be together is what pushes Glory to her breaking point.

The big plot twist centers on the fact that Glory is not well. There are clues to her increasingly high-strung personality and precipice from which she teeters. At first her father seems callous for insisting she perform, but later he becomes consumed with concern and she ends up in a "rest facility" for performers. It is in the final pages, after her breakdown, that Anthony and Corral deliver their wallop and the reader is compelled to go back over previous pages and reconsider all the book has offered.

Chopsticks does not tell a new story; the trope of fragile young woman driven to the breaking point has been part of the gothic genre forever. What the authors bring is the wealth of illustrations and the further possibilities found in the app and website. A lot of the book consists of single words or phrases on full color pages with photos, diary entries, chat excerpts, YouTube links (which are real), and ephemera like invitations, newspaper articles, or drawings made by the two characters. These are all clues to the relationship and Glory's past. But while it is all very interesting to look at, the one element that Chopsticks hinges on is character development. The book can be as mysterious as it wants to be, but if Glory is not a compelling character, then none of the rest will matter, and that is where I think the authors let down their audience.

Transmedia will work only if there is something to compel others to immerse themselves in the interactive world the authors have created. It's fun to look at close-ups of diaries and photo albums or watch videos, but we have to want to do it. Chopsticks needs readers to care deeply about Glory, but she remains largely a cipher because too little emphasis has been placed on the actual story. It would have served the authors better to have included many more diary entries or letters, something that would provide a deeper look into her mind and impending madness. The style they have chosen seems to be undercutting their audience; it assume readers will be more impressed with flash and color then actual reading. They have certainly created a novelty, but could have created something much more powerful and unforgettable. I give them points for trying something new in such a big way, but wish they had respected their audience enough to give the story equal billing. By the final page I did not care what happened to Glory Fleming next, and that's a shame because, really, I very much wanted to. I'll be watching to see what Anthony and Corral do next however, because I think they are close to creating something very exciting.

COOL READ: There has been a lot of talk about the demotion of Pluto in recent years (I still stand on the side declaring the planet was robbed) and it is no surprise to see National Geographic weighing in on the subject with a new book. 13 Planets: The Latest View of the Solar System by David Aguilar is not just about Pluto however (obviously). It also includes Ceres, in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, (originally considered the fifth planet when discovered in 1801), Haumea (in the Kuiper Belt and oddly shaped like a chicken egg), Makemake (named for the Easter Island god of fertility who is also chief god of the bird-man cult) and Eris, which are both so far out there that they make Pluto look close. These relatively unknown additions are all dwarf planets as Pluto is now classified but still interesting and also have moons of their own. Aguilar explores them with the same attention as the major planets, by providing the origins of their names, their locations, a few facts about their composition and orbits, and without fail some funky unexpected trivia. The artwork is stunning, including photos from Voyager 2 and some more fanciful paintings such as one of Triton's ice volcanoes erupting with Neptune in the background.

In terms of information 13 Planets is basic and the standard title you would expect in libraries and classrooms, but it is also beautiful and thus can be appreciated on a purely aesthetic level. The choices Aguilar has made here, to extend beyond the major planets and provide the dwarves equal attention, gives the book a unique direction. It's another one of those middle grade titles that will easily work for older teens who are reluctant readers but interested in astronomy. They won't be talked down to with this one and instead, will likely be downright inspired. (And certainly will be joining Team Pluto!)

YA Column: Lives Worth Knowing

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:13:33 -0800

Every time we talk about "coming of age" titles for teens there is a heavy emphasis on those books that show teenagers facing typical social situations such as peer pressure and bullying or family difficulties like poverty, abuse or divorce. All of this is well and good but none of those books shows teens how to live their lives. There are books that will show you how mean your friends can be but when it comes to figuring out what you want to do professionally with your life and how to accomplish that goal, well, you're better off choosing the job of vampire slayer (or lover) because there are a metric ton of titles to help you with that. What I wish I saw more of on the YA shelves was books about actual people, in the form of biography, memoir and historical fiction, that could provide readers with navigable pathways into the world. One of the best of these books I've recently come across in that vein is Michael Uslan's new The Boy Who Loved Batman.

Uslan is the producer of all the modern Batman movies, from Tim Burton's Michael Keaton, to the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. He started out as an average comic book loving kid from New Jersey (well, your average comic book loving kid who saved all his comics and funded law school by later selling some) who never wavered in his dream to return the Batman to his sinister roots and put him on the silver screen. What's great about The Boy Who Loved Batman is that he doesn't just tell what Uslan wanted to do but explains how he did it, every step of the way. This makes the book not only a fascinating peek into the comic book world but even more so a highly entertaining guide to professional success.

Uslan's love of Batman led him to teach the first college course on comic books (while he was himself enrolled at the University of Indiana), intern at DC Comics, and eventually go to Hollywood. Not only does he explain how he turned a hobby into a career, he shows how hard it was. As deeply personal as his story is, however, Uslan takes the time to discuss the history of the industry, the history of the Batman comic itself, and how fans turned what was once a dismissive aspect of childhood into the stuff of legend. (Just consider the moneymaking possibilities at Comic-Con.) But none of this would matter if Uslan was not such a likable author and if Chronicle Books had not done such an outstanding job with their design, with personal photographs, copies of letters, and a wealth of comic book illustrations. The Boy Who Loved Batman is a visual delight, and it does not matter if you are a comic book fan when it comes to Uslan's appeal. The Boy Who Loved Batman is fundamentally about how to make it in the world doing what you love. Every high school library should have this book and every business-minded teen should be reading it. Uslan made it, big time, and he provides a perfect example for others to follow.

For fans of historical subjects, and especially those whose dreams lead to exploration and adventure, Matt Phelan tackles three memorable individuals in his sublime graphic novel Around the World. In separate self-contained stories he recounts the exploits of late nineteenth century adventurers Thomas Stevens, who rode around the world on a bicycle; Nellie Bly, who traveled around the world in fewer than eighty days; and Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world alone. While they knew great fame in their day -- Bly, in particular, enjoyed near infamy for a while -- they have largely fallen off the reality TV-dominated radar of modern teens. Phelan shows his subjects' passion for travel to be deeply personal choices, which draws readers in from the outset. As Stevens pushes himself for something more than a dead-end life as a miner, Bly seeks the journalistic respect denied her as a woman, and Slocum struggles to survive the loss of his beloved, Phelan's art and words presents them as people to both admire and emulate. This is heroic literature at its best, executed with an understated panache that lets the subjects tell their tales. Although written for teens, Around the World has a wide range; I wouldn't hesitate to offer it to adults interested in Stevens, Bly, or especially Slocum. (The Slocum story is gorgeous and heartbreaking -- a classic tale of love and loss and facing the elements at their most basic and raw.)

Aviatrix Beryl Markham receives the historical fiction treatment as well in Michaela MacColl's middle-grade novel Promise the Night. (Markham's own memoir is titled West With the Night.) Rather than focus on her 1936 record-making trip as the first pilot to fly west across the Atlantic from England to North America, MacColl instead writes about Markham's adventures growing up in British East Africa (Kenya). Abandoned by her mother at an early age and largely left to run wild by her horse-breeder father, Beryl learned to excel in the outdoors as a hunter and tracker, the proto-definition of "spunky." MacColl covers many of her subject's more noteworthy exploits including a lion hunt, the near death of her dog to a leopard (the dog does not die!), a run-in with a truly horrific governess wannabe, and a year spent in boarding school in Nairobi that includes all sorts of hijinks with fellow students.

Beryl is stubborn, bold, and oftentimes tone deaf to the superior class distinction she enjoys as a wealthy white girl but she is also realistic in both her exemplary and less impressive moments. MacColl is not interested in making Beryl a perfect little girl; the real story is interesting enough without allowing idealism to cloud the narrative. To bolster the significance of her subject's story, the author also includes diary entries from Beryl's greatest flight to show how things eventually end up and the influence her African childhood had on her life. The long afterword further explains the differences between fact and fiction in the novel (showing how some of the more outrageous episodes were indeed true). Altogether it's a nice way to introduce a criminally overlooked heroine to today's readers and makes for excellent reading even if you have never heard of Beryl Markham. MacColl follows her previous novel based on Queen Victoria in fine fashion with Promise the Night; here's hoping this is a genre niche she is comfortable with continuing to explore.

Two recent books on baseball's past for lovers of language and the game: Stars in the Shadows: The Negro League All-Star Game of 1934 and Lineup for Yesterday feature not only excellent poems but also eye-catching illustrations. Stars in the Shadows by Charles R. Smith, Jr. (whose Twelve Rounds to Glory was a Coretta Scott King Honor book) is written as a nine-inning verse novel, telling the tale of the second Negro League all star game (Smith explains why he chose this game in an afterword). In the recognizable patter of a play-by-play announcer, Smith mimics the rhythms of the game in the voice of Lester Roberts broadcasting live for radio station WNLB in Chicago. Readers are even given the text of commercials that ran during the game to add to the period flare. Frank Morrison's oversized, sometimes exaggerated pencil drawings are dynamic, emotional, and a perfect fit to the text. This is about as good a pairing of author and illustrator as you will ever find.

Smith sings out the praises of the players who move in and out of a game that hinges on superior pitching, while Morrison vividly depicts the athleticism and buoyancy of the men on the field and those watching them. While the poems themselves focus on the game, there are several moments in the stands where Smith highlights the larger issue of the Negro Leagues itself, and the long segregation of America's game is felt by the fans. Smith shows (yet again) how poetry is the stuff of action. Though aimed at middle-grade, Stars in the Shadows is a no-brainer for any reader.

Lineup for Yesterday is a modern edition of the 1949 collection of Ogden Nash's alphabet poems celebrating the players of baseball's early years. Now with full color portraits by C.F. Payne and biographical notes on the stars by Nash's daughter, Linnell Nash Smith, Lineup for Yesterday is far from the standard A-B-C book. The poems are a short four lines, but they stray far from the expected even when about well known players. For example there is "C is for Cobb / Who grew spikes and not corn / And made all the basemen / Wish they weren't born" and "E is for Evers / His jaw in advance; / Never afraid / To Tinker with Chance." (For teens who sadly do not know of the legendary Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play, Smith takes care of explaining and repeating the famous rhyme about it in her accompanying note.)

Well aware that many of these players will be unknown to modern readers, Smith's notes are wisely placed throughout the text, providing instant gratification to those curious about Nash's subjects. In this way readers discover Christy Mathewson (who created the screwball pitch and led the Giants to the Series four times but died very young from exposure to poison gas in World War I), the absolutely unapproachable winning record of the real Cy Young (there's a reason he has an award named after him), and why a Honus Wagner card is worth so much money. Nash's poems prove to be as timeless as the men who inspired them and the book's entire design is aimed at appreciating the talents of those who played the game and their fans of whom Nash was unabashedly one (he offers himself up as "I is for the Incurable Fan"). What's interesting about Lineup for Yesterday is that although it has all the trappings of a standard picture book it's more if an illustrated biography of a sport's early years. I only wish Nash had written his way through the alphabet a few more times as he clearly enjoyed himself so much on this go-round.

Finally, the University of Chicago Press has reissued two poetry collections by British siblings Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon. Originally published in 1932, they were last released in 1953, and the contemporary versions of Kings and Queens and Heroes and Heroines both hold to their mid-century sensibility. These are historical poems (one for each monarch beginning with William I in 1066 and up to the current Queen Elizabeth II) that manage to not only give quick peeks at famous (or forgotten) people but also show how they were perceived decades ago, and useful for the multiple insights they provide. The fact that Rosalind Thornycroft's illustrations continue to beguile and the overall design retains a classic and vintage feel make these volumes books to both enjoy reading and possessing. (E-books won't measure up at all in this case.)

Kings and Queens follows a steady chronological order recounting infamous episodes for certain monarchs (the mysterious deaths of Richard III's nephews in the Tower of London, the beheading of Henry VIII's wives, Oliver Cromwell's suppression of everything fun), while also reaching for something memorable for those who were, well, less than memorable. ("William and Mary / They sat on one throne / You can't think of one / Of the couple alone.") Heroes and Heroines is a much more eclectic mix including everyone from Julius Caesar to George Washington and the explorer Lady Hester Stanhope. I was impressed by the number of women in this volume (Joan of Arc; Mary, Queen of Scots; Flora Macdonald; Emmeline Pankhurst; etc.), and there are also several non-Caucasians such as Saladin and Pocahontas, although the emphasis on the "yellow skin" of Timour the Tartar will certainly give readers pause. (It's puzzling why the Farjeons did not refer to him as "Tamerlane" as he is more commonly known, but they definitely nailed the bloodthirsty aspects of his nature.)

In both books the authors use a variety of poetic forms to tell their subjects' stories and thus while the emphasis is on biography, there is no small amount of poetic teaching that occurs here as well. Kings and Queens and Heroes and Heroines are timeless peeks into world history for many reasons, but the exuberant presentation cannot be discounted. For a dip into some great lives, you can't beat these two books, and kudos to the University of Chicago press for resurrecting them for American readers.

COOL READ: Glennette Tilley Turner does a wonderful job of presenting an overlooked aspect of American history with the heavily illustrated Fort Mose. The fort, located just north of St. Augustine, Florida, was the first free sanctioned colony in North America. Administered by the Spanish, and established in 1738, it was led by Francisco Menendez, an African-born escaped slave who was fluent in several languages and a superior militia leader. Turner has mined all sorts of historical accounts to tell his story, including formal correspondence between the colonial governor and the King of Spain concerning Menendez's contributions to the security of St. Augustine. The heart of the book is his unique slave experience, the story of a man who was captured in West Africa, owned in South Carolina, and fought for freedom all the way to Florida. Ultimately, Fort Mose was vacated in 1763 after Florida became British property via treaty and slavery was extended to the colony. Menendez and others departed for Cuba where they were beyond its reach, and it is there that he died around 1770. He led, most certainly, an extraordinary life, and the fact that he is absent from history books (even those in Florida as Turner points out in an afterword) is a bit of an academic crime. (I also grew up in Florida and we never learned a bit about Fort Mose itself either.)

Designed for casual reading with short chapters and numerous period illustrations, drawings, and photos, even of the present day Fort Mose site (sadly the fort is long gone), Fort Mose is a classic example of how to shine a light on forgotten history and bring it to the attention of contemporary readers. It belongs in every classroom focused on Florida history, Spanish American history, African American history and, quite frankly, in the hands of anyone who is eager to learn just what the term "freedom fighter" really means. Well done.

Osa and Martin: For the Love of Adventure by Kelly Enright

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:11:27 -0800

About twenty years ago, I had one of those moments in a used bookstore in my hometown that bibiophiles live for. It was a small, dusty (of course) store that was filled with towering piles of everything from Book of the Month Club titles to nineteenth-century encyclopedias. There were wire racks full of Harlequin romances and shelves of compact Shakespeare that were inscribed as Christmas gifts from the World War I era. There was only the most basic of shelving systems, and the proprietor, who was always camped out in a desk by the front door, could only provide the most general of directions. I poked around this store every few months, and one day discovered Osa and Martin Johnson.

The Johnsons were the definition of early twentieth century adventurers. Martin first left America crewing for Jack London on the Snark and dreamed of spending a lifetime visiting the more remote sections of the globe. As a couple, Osa and Martin became the preeminent adventure filmmakers between the 1910s and 1940s. They were with cannibals in the South Pacific, on safari in Africa, and feted by the scientific minds of the day. (Martin was even invited to join the Explorers Club; they did not invite their first female member until 1981.)

What I found in that bookstore was I Married Adventure, Osa's 1940 memoir of their travels published with a distinctive sepia-toned zebra-striped cover. It is filled with their accounts of shipping hundreds of pounds of equipment around the world, camping out in the jungle or the bush, meeting the locals, trying to communicate with the locals, getting scared to death by the locals, and facing down all manner of man and beast in the pursuit of moviemaking dreams. Osa clearly adored Martin, and while I Married Adventure is a great read, it left some details out (like why the Johnsons never had children). This is where Kelly Enright's excellent biography Osa and Martin: For the Love of Adventure nicely fills the gap.

With a liberal amount of photographs and a solid collection of sources, Enright opens with a thorough look at Martin's childhood and how he came to be with the Londons on the Snark. The relationship between the two couples and Osa's dramatic health problems -- which make her presence on the expeditions that much more extraordinary -- are detailed. Happily, even while dealing with famous names, Enright does not dwell on gossipy revelations, instead referencing lectures, news reports, diaries, and letters as she recounts the Johnsons' journeys and their dynamic presence at packed lecture halls. (Osa was also renowned for her fashion sense.) There are plenty of exciting moments to recall, as Osa shot more than one charging lion, as well as encounters with royalty and the wealthy. Enright also shows how the Johnsons evolved in the way they saw the wild places they encountered, first recording the strange and unusual, and then becoming true nature documenters determined to do what they could to preserve the natural world.

While I Married Adventure is a decidedly upbeat recollection, Enright is careful to consider the more difficult periods that Osa suffered as she left her family behind again and again to accompany Martin to remote locations and how she often longed for her female family and friends. Usually the only woman in camps of men, Osa would cook and clean to provide the best possible working environment for Martin, but she missed her mother in particular. While she was always a willing traveler with her husband, the excerpts from the sad letters home provide a valuable peek into Osa's heart and the difficulty of being part of an adventurous couple.

Tragically, the Johnsons' story does not have a happy ending. The couple was involved in an airline crash in California in 1937, and Martin did not survive. Terribly injured, Osa still managed to come forward and promote their latest movie a few months later, but as Enright recounts, she was never the same after losing her partner. She careened from one bad relationship to the next, and descended into depression and alcohol. This is the story Osa never told, ending I Married Adventure simply with a news report about the crash, and it is a striking one. I assume that Enright had difficulty finding information on Osa's final years, because this part of the book is where the narrative reads a bit thin. She mentions the seven books Osa wrote in the thirteen years between Martin's death and her own, but does not elaborate on their titles or subjects. But she is careful to make clear that Osa was not a "depressed alcoholic" in the end and rather just struggled with the loss of the man she was with from the time she was sixteen. In the end, Enright makes clear that Osa and Martin Johnson are two Americans who led wholly original lives and should be remembered for never once deigning to be ordinary.

Osa and Martin: For the Love of Adventure by Kelly Enright
Lyons Press
ISBN: 978-0762763603
240 pages

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:59:31 -0800

If you are looking for a mash-up between the Portland grunge scene, Red Dawn and the live-for-the-moment attitude of the Weimar Republic (as portrayed in Cabaret), then I have the book for you.Zazen by Vanessa Veselka is set in a parallel world which is remarkably similar to our own except this Portland-that-is-not-Portland is part of a nation suffering under the constant threat of war. Twenty-something Della suffers from pre-war malaise as she watches the nation lurch along on a path that no one seems to want and yet somehow can not be avoided (go figure). There are dark jokes and frustrations, idle bets about when the end will arrive and how and in the midst of it all everyone goes to work and shops and dances as if, well, it's 1999. (There is even a much discussed sex party that seems right out of Prince's party plan.) Della takes in all of this and the disconnect between business as usual and an inevitable harsh future leaves her poised on the edge of the madness. Her brother and his wife are expecting twins, her parents are hippies in their own little world and she might be having a decent relationship if she can rise to the occasion of falling in love but Della can not bear for life to go on as if everything is normal. As the pages turn, she falls to pieces and because Veselka is so good at writing this collapse, because her not-quite Portland is a dead ringer for our own and her almost-America is dangerously similar as well, readers will not be able to look away. This is a good thing though because the ride to the end is well worth every pain-filled moment. (I'll spare you now by saying it's an excellent, poignant and even hopeful ending-promise.)

Zazen is an ambitious novel; it seeks to comment not only on the dull foot-pounding inevitability of [most] war but also on the powerful manner in which humanity lets wars happen. In Della's world no one wants the war to come and yet they just can't imagine a way to stop it. In a diner right out of Alice with a surly boss, host of disenchanted employees and determined defiance against the "man," the protagonist waitresses, dates the cook and wanders in and out of conversations with customers on how the war will start. Long suffering from a trauma in her past, Della eyes everyone around her with a cold sensibility but tiny fractures continuously appear in her behavior until she breaks apart in a spectacular fashion and finds herself calling in fake bomb threats and even more disturbingly joining a cult of wannabe terrorists. Through each step she takes on the path to card-carrying militia member, Della manages to act so rational that you wonder if she is really having a breakdown and further, you can't help but admire her for at least doing something which is Veselka's point. Who's crazier after all, the ones who go insane or the rest of us who keep on going to the mall like it's just another day and more importantly, who do you want to be?

Ultimately, Della has a reckoning as the reader know she will but don't expect Veselka to let her or you off easily. Zazen is about the world turned on its ear and you have to buy a ticket on this ride all the way to the end, through every twist and turn along the way. It's consumer culture, it's the horrors of mass-produced religion (again), it's the disconnect between what is happening and how it came to be. You know that moment in the beginning of Red Dawn when the paratroopers arrive and no one knows what is going on but suddenly, with what seems like no warning, war rains down on the kids in the high school? Well Zazen is like that, a book about just another day and another and another and then, tick tick boom and we all fall down. Wow.