Pigeon Post: August 2008 Archives

The year is marked by many transitions; seasons pass from one to the next, holidays come and go, personal anniversaries are noted. There is one transition, the return to school (see First Day of School book list), which is different. It is only marked by a portion of the population and only for a portion of their lives and yet everyone has experienced it. If you have school age children, the planning and preparation for a new year of school is a big event. There are books to be ordered, school supplies to be laid in, class schedules to be reviewed, fears to be assuaged, sports and activities to be prepared for. If you don't have school age children, it is easy to be completely unaware of the event.

Having lived a somewhat peripatetic childhood starting at a new school every couple or three years on average and ranging across oil company schools in Venezuela and Libya, an Anglican Mission school in Nigeria, a state public school in the UK and in the US, an international school in Sweden, and boarding schools in the US and UK (all a consequence of the nomadic life of an oil family might I add, not a consequence of extreme delinquency) I think I can safely say that I have had a reasonably comprehensive view of the range of experiences attendant to returning to school.

But for all the variability in those experiences, at its core there are many similarities. Whether going to school for the very first time at all, or going to a different school or returning to a familiar place, there are two parts of the experience. First, there is the closing out of the summer holidays. This may be a sad or happy event depending on the child's summer experiences. For some, the summer can be a time of remoteness, separation from friends, constricted activities - a time to be endured; school starting again is a release. For others it is the very opposite. Summer is a time of release from the strictures of school, a time of fun, summer camp, out door activities, a period when time is allowed to drift away unplanned and unstructured: a Wind in the Willows time. For these children, the anticipation of returning to school is a melancholy thing.

From whatever frame of mind you approach the beginning of school, though, there are certain things that always happen when you return. Among these are trepidations about what you will find and experience (almost universal, of course, among first time students); new rooms, hallways and building to navigate; new people to meet and deal with; friends to catch-up with; news to impart and to absorb; that sense of a fresh start as you organize a locker or desk; old teachers and friends that are missed; new smells of labs, art rooms and cafeterias; sometimes new transportation routines (and the conquest of the bus jungle); new teachers and administrators to meet and figure out; etc.

One of the things we do so naturally as adults that we no longer think about it, is the winnowing out of extraneous sensory events. We have far more to do than we have time so we are always seeking to make as many things a habit and a routine as possible. By making it simple and repetitive, we keep from getting distracted, we stay focused and we accomplish more, faster. But what we gain in time and efficiency, we lose in sensory stimulus. We ignore things that are extraneous to the task at hand.

Children don't do that. They haven't yet learned to manage time and tasks, to parse things out into their optimally efficient components. They usually lack all sense of prioritization. Instead, they take in everything. The smell of the room is just as important to them as the layout. The colorful posters on the wall are just as important as the teacher's message on the blackboard. Who they sit next to is even more important than whether they can see or hear the teacher.

You can see this complete sensory absorption in a couple of ways. If you have kids, you are probably accustomed to the tension, excitement and energy of those first few days of their return to school as well as how well they sleep at night - the sleep of total exhaustion.

This total sensory alertness also shows up at odd times in your own life. I recently attended with one of my sons a weekend session at a high school in a neighboring county where the boy scouts were offering a series of classroom courses in various merit badges. I walked in to the building and immediately was sensorally transported back some thirty years to the Oil Company School in Tripoli, Libya. There was the same smell of freshly waxed floors and newly painted cinder block walls. The long echoing corridors with hundreds of lockers on either side. The glancing reflection of bright sunlight through open windows off of the polished floors. Somehow, that memory button was waiting to be triggered by just the right combination of senses. All these senses were freshly laid down in my youth and waiting these many years to surface again.

This sensory memory seems strong in many people. Other triggers I have heard people mention have been the smell of particular types of classroom craft glues, the smell of certain types of paint, the smell of the locker room in the gym, the smell and the particular echoing acoustics of the pool, the hush and the dry paper smell of a small library - all seem to make strong imprints on young fresh minds.

Returning to school from a summer at home is a bit like returning to the jungle from a respite in a zoo or nature preserve. You are moving away from a place where there are rules that are more or less consistently observed to a place where most anything goes. School, in this sense and apart from its education mission, is basically the boot camp for adult life. You meet and have to deal with people that have different ethics than yours, different manners, different ways of valuing things and of making decisions. Stated rules may or may not be relevant.

I remember these issues clearly: the kids that had no self-control, the bullies, the gossips, the cliques, the sycophants, the wall-flowers, the odd-balls, the rule breakers, the enablers, the kids that had an undeveloped sense of personal property, etc. I remember basically dealing with all that as every other kid did. No big deal. As an adult, listening to our kids relate behaviors observed among many of their peers, I am horrified. I can draw only two conclusions - either kids are far worse today than they used to be or my sense of what is appropriate behavior at that age level is much more refined than when I was that age. The first explanation is attractive but the decline of the current crop of children has been the lament from generation to generation back, three and four thousand years. Since we have simultaneously become more and more wealthy based on greater and greater levels of collaboration and cooperation I am forced to reject that kids are actually getting worse. So I guess it is just that I have become more and more of an old fogey and that these behaviors have been there all along and that kids are surprisingly resilient in learning how to deal with them.

I am not aware of many children's books that do a good job of capturing that encompassing sense of excitement and engagement of school starting again. Enid Blyton did it well with both of her boarding school series, Mallory Towers and the St. Clare series, but unfortunately those are not available here in the US. There are a massive number of workmanlike books to introduce a young child to idea of going to school, often of the X Goes to School variety, or of an anthropomorphized animal attending school or of a child that takes their pet dog (cat, elephant, snake, you pick) to school. All adequate, none particularly special. The following booklist includes some of the few that make the grade for good reading as well as many of the more respectable books based on a favorite character. Let us know your favorites.

Picture Books

Starting School by Janet Ahlberg Recommended

I Am Too Absolutely Small for School by Lauren Child Recommended

Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes Recommended

Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten by Joseph Slate and illustrated by Ashley Wolff Recommended

The Berenstain Bears Go to School by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested

The Berenstain Bears Go Back to School by Stan Berenstain and illustrated by Michael Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested

First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg and illustrated by Judith Dufour Love Suggested

Carl Goes to Daycare by Alexandra Day Suggested

My First Day at Nursery School by Becky Edwards and illustrated by Anthony Flintoft Suggested

Back to School, Mallory by Laurie B. Friedman and illustrated by Tamara Schmitz Suggested

I Am Not Going to School Today! by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Jan Ormerod Suggested

Owen by Kevin Henkes Suggested

Mrs. Watson Wants Your Teeth by Alison McGhee and illustrated by Harry Bliss Suggested

The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn and illustrated by Ruth E. Harper and Nancy M. Leak Suggested

Vera's First Day of School by Vera Rosenberry Suggested

Richard Scarry's Great Big Schoolhouse by Richard Scarry Suggested

Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the Last Day of Kindergarten by Joseph Slate and illustrated by Ashley Wolff Suggested

Little Cliff's First Day of School by Clifton L. Taulbert and illustrated by Earl B. Lewis Suggested

Emily's First 100 Days of School by Rosemary Wells Suggested

My Kindergarten by Rosemary Wells Suggested

Timothy Goes to School by Rosemary Wells Suggested

Yoko's World Of Kindness by Rosemary Wells and illustrated by John Nez and Jody Wheeler Suggested

Do Dinosaurs Go to School by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mark Teague Suggested

Independent Readers

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and illustrated by Lauren Child Recommendation

Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary Recommended

Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes Recommended

Teach Us Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish and Lynn Sweat Recommended

Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. (See Space Exploration booklist) For some, the early members of the Baby Boom, the emblems of the 1960's were Woodstock, Kent State, JFK's and MLK's assassinations. For others of us that were at the tail end of the baby boom, we were too young to know or ask "Where were you when you heard about Kennedy's assassination?" But we were old enough to see and observe and remember that thrilling culmination of the space program - Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."

For us, the late-comers to the decade, the voice of William Shatner as Captain Kirk along with Sputnik and Gemini and Apollo are the emblems of the decade. What was it that so riveted the nation? Of course, historians point out the implicit national challenge created by the Soviets putting Sputnik and then their dogs, Laika and Belka into space - a cold fish slapped in a complacent face. I think part of it was certainly that; a sense of collective national challenge. Part of it was the audacity of the challenge. Part of it was the scientific and engineering challenge. Big equipment, big blasts, lots of flame - what's not to like? Part of it was the excitement of the unknown and the potential of new frontiers. And a big part, I think, perhaps the biggest part, was just that ancient and visceral fascination with that unknown vista that sails above us each night. We try and tame it by watching and naming but it remains a cold, remote mystery; a perpetual challenge to our warm blood and our desire to know. We were a nation of Ulysses' from Tennyson's poem, wanting:

To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Many of these elements were captured in Kennedy's stirring speech in 1962 at Rice University in Houston, Texas in which he formulated the challenge, justified the effort and re-tasked the space program with a very specific objective. Forty-six years later, the sentiments and cadence of the speech still stirs our emotions.

"We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds."
". . . it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space."

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."

That was the positive side of a most turbulent decade. A promise and hope for a better future through effort and courage and science.

Sally recalls her mother and her physicist father rousting her and her two siblings out of bed in the small hours of the morning to watch the landing on the moon on July 20th, 1969. As she recollects it, there they all sat on the sofa in their pajamas, glassy-eyed and dutiful watching the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong. Even at that young age though, there was incipient over-familiarity. For her father, a scientist and former airman in World War II, the full dimensions of both the accomplishment and the promise of the landing were top of mind. For Sally the school child, though, there was a different perspective. "There for a couple of years we were constantly being pulled out of class, the whole school, to watch some rocket launch or another in the assembly hall. It was hard to get excited at one more space event at two o'clock in the morning." A quarter of the way around the world, I was in Libya. I remember seeing the landing but I don't think it can have been live. For one thing my recollection is seeing it in the afternoon and the times don't match. For another, the only TV transmission we received was from Wheelus Air Base, a few miles away and they only transmitted for a few hours in the afternoon and early evening; so it must have been just an extended news report I saw but that did not at all reduce the sense of momentousness and of both a mission being completed and a door being opened up.

In recent years, our family has had the opportunity to visit Huntsville, Alabama where much of the early space program gestated through the fifties. There is a fantastic space museum there as well as, and this is what brought us to Huntsville, a space camp for youngsters. We also have had the opportunity to visit Cape Kennedy, Florida and see the museums as well as the activities of the current space program there. It is still awe inspiring to see the scale of things. On the one hand, the scale of the prototypes and actual space capsules from the early Mercury and Gemini days was relatively small. We saw and were allowed to climb into some of these vehicles. They are not much bigger and a lot more cramped than a Volkswagen Beetle. On the other hand the Saturn V rocket that propels the capsule into space is immense. When standing next to a Saturn V rocket, you immediately get a sense of the magnitude of the effort and begin to comprehend the term macro-engineering. At Cape Kennedy, the kids were particularly taken with the two of those marvels of macro-engineering, the crawlers, Hans and Franz. These crawlers are the vehicles that carry the rockets and space shuttles out from their hangers to the launch sites at fractions of a mile an hour. They are relatively inconspicuous when you see them in some news broadcast because of the magnitude of everything around them. But when you see them on their own and stand next to them and realize that they are about the size of a several story office building on a city block, it suddenly comes into scale.

All of this excitement and challenge and promise and scale of effort and danger were captured in children-s books and stories through the sixties. Model rockets made in-doors were common childhood room decorations among friends. I recall a model of the space ship from the TV series Lost in Space being the first model I ever built and done with the assistance, remarkable patience and engineering precision of my father. Many children extended their activities beyond plastic models and built various forms of rocket or spacecraft in their backyards out of wood and boxes and such. Some went even further. There is a great book by Homer Hickam, October Sky, telling the tale of his and his friends' efforts to build functioning rockets in the small West Virginia coal town of his childhood and how those efforts led not only to various domestic explosions, the destruction of his mother's flower beds and other unanticipated catastrophes but also into a career in the space program. Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff (out-of-print) is another great recollection of the period.

Unfortunately we don't have anything really comparable for our children today. Genetics holds much of the excitement of the space program with regard to its potential but it is hard to get worked up over a race of the petri dishes. The space program does of course continue, but without the unambiguous commitment it once enjoyed; bogged down in justifying its continued existence by breeding flies in space, growing chemical crystals in zero gravity and conducting long term studies on space habitation in anticipation of a mission it is not clear we will undertake. On the other hand, there have been moments of triumph. The slow one of the actual existence of the International Space Station, built piece by piece; the still astonishing photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope, and the recent triumphs on Mars, that burial ground of so many initial sensors and remote roamers.

What are the good books for recapturing that fascination with space, the unbroached frontiers, new science, and the spirit of noble and courageous effort? Well perhaps the very best book is that of the sky at night. I know of no child who can lie beneath the stars on a warm summer night without watching and speculating on what is out there. And if they are lucky, hearing a friend or parent tell of the stories of the constellations and of our first baby-steps into the nearest neighborhoods of space. And, if they are really lucky, seeing the bright speck of a satellite wheeling its way across that celestial highway. And maybe, with their spirit and imagination ignited, they might hear

. . . the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.

The books we have highlighted below are a mixture of myth, history, fantasy, reference and art. We hope they are the material that will ignite an enthusiasm that lies dormant.

Picture Books

	Wait Till the Moon Is Full by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams Recommended
	Find the Constellations by H. A. Rey Recommended
	The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System by Joanna Cole Suggested

Independent Readers

	Freddy and the Space Ship by Walter R. Brooks and illustrated by Kurt Wiese Recommended
	Destination Moon by Herge Recommended
	Explorers on the Moon by Herge Recommended
	Exploring Our Solar System by Sally Ride and Tam O'Shaughnessy Recommended
	John Glenn by Michael Burgan and illustrated by Robert S. Brown Suggested
	A Child's Introduction to the Night Sky by Michael Driscoll and illustrated by Meredith Hamilton Suggested
	Neil Armstrong by Montrew Dunham and illustrated by Meryl Henderson Suggested
	The Jumbo Book of Space by Paulette Bourgeois and Cynthia Pratt Nicolson and illustrated by Bill Slavin Suggested
	How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space? by William R. Pogue Suggested
	Black Holes by Dana Meachen Rau Suggested

Young Adult

	2001 A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke Highly Recommended
	October Sky by Homer H. Hickam Highly Recommended
	The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and illustrated by Tom Kidd Highly Recommended
	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Recommended
	Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card Recommended
	Dune by Frank Herbert Recommended
	Foundation by Isaac Asimov Suggested
	Mercury by Ben Bova Suggested
	2010 by Arthur C. Clarke Suggested
	Contact by Carl Sagan Suggested
	The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells Suggested
	Entering Space by Robert Zubrin Suggested

The Middle East (Egypt to Iran, Arabia to Turkey) is an Ali Baba's cave crammed with story-telling jewels and treasures of all kinds. Peek in and you see gem-like glints and golden gleams of tales from hither and yon, from just yesterday and from the beginning of story-telling time. (See Folktales from the Middle East booklist.)

It is a biological truism that the place of a species' origins, if continually inhabited, has the greatest genetic variation. The Middle East is subject to the same law on a cultural plain. Being the location of the longest and most concentrated experience of sustained civilization and urban living, it also has the richest variety of cultural artifacts, particularly in its stories and literature. There are tales that reach right back to the dawn of recorded history and which have survived down to today. Being a cross-road between Africa, Europe and Asia, there are tales and echoes of tales from just about every major culture, tucked away somewhere.

While the news reports tend to give us the impression of the Middle East as uniformly ethnically Arab, linguistically Arabic speaking and religiously Muslim, the picture is much more kaleidoscopic than that. Many of the large countries have very heterogeneous populations. Across the region there is a wonderfully eclectic compilation of languages such as Arabic, Aramaic (Syriac), Hebrew, Turkish, Farsi, Assyrian, Coptic (religious), Kurdish, Dimli, Azeri, Kabardian, Gagauz, Armenian, English, and French; ethnic groups such as Arabs, Bedouin, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Turkmen, Assyrians, Persians, and Copts; and of course an incredibly rich panoply of religious traditions including Muslims (Shia, Sunni, Druze, Isma'ilite, and Alawite), Jews (Orthodox, Reformed, Conservative), Christians (Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Copt, Protestant), Baha'i, Druze, Yazdanism, and even the ancient Zoroastrianism.

This rich potpourri of peoples, languages and religions of course is often a source of tension but it is also a tremendous reservoir of literary and story-telling traditions. The primary bridge between folktales of the Middle East and European civilization has been the ancient collection of tales known as One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The tale is told in the form of a frame story; a story within a story. The Persian king Shahryar is stricken to discover that his beloved bride has been unfaithful to him. In a moment of blind rage, he has her executed. He resolves to never be betrayed in such a fashion again and his solution to this is to marry a new wife each day and for her to be executed the following morning.

The king's vizier has a beautiful and clever daughter, Scheherazade, who resolves to put an end to this needless squandering of lives and offers herself as a bride to the king. On the night of their wedding, Scheherazade entertains the king with a story but is unable to finish it. The king makes an exception to his rule and spares Scheherazade for an additional day in order to hear the end of the tale. As you might imagine, one story leads to another and one day leads to another for one thousand days and one day. At this point the king comes to the realization of both his love for Scheherazade and her goodness and cleverness.

The stories told by Scheherazade include tales that can be traced back to India (the Panchatantra and Jataka tales in particular), to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as Arabia and Yemen. The first collections of Arabian Night tales of which we are aware are from circa 800AD, not too long after the blossoming of Islam in the region. The versions we have handed down to us are a testament to the diversity and evolution of Islam. In the original Arabian Nights there are many very worldly stories and quite a number that are notably salacious and not likely to pass muster under certain Islamic strictures today.

The oldest manuscript extant is from the fourteenth century. One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is not unlike our own Mother Goose in that there is no single fixed collection against which subsequent versions can be compared. Rather, there are a core of stories generally common across most versions with a large number of additional stories added or subtracted depending on the transcriber.

Antoine Galland (a contemporary and friend of Charles Perrault, collector of European folktales including Cinderella) translated a fourteenth century Arabic manuscript version of the Arabian Nights in 1704 - the first publication in the West. Galland modified the original text by omitting some of the more erotic tales and all of the poetry. Regardless of its fidelity to the original, the first publication was a profound success with many writers and enlightenment figures reading the exotic tales of the Middle East. There were many take-offs of Galland's work. He followed up his first volume with a further eleven collections. Among the most notable tales that entered the European canon of stories through the works of Galland were Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp.

There is a mystery in these first collections. Among Galland's tales were a number that were not in the original Arabic manuscripts but which supposedly he heard from Hanna Diab, a Maronite monk from Aleppo. He might have heard them from Diab, and they might have been folktales in common parlance at the time but since there is no other written record of these tales before Galland recorded them, there is speculation that he actually just made up these stories. Among them are a couple of the most iconic in the whole collection - Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.

Another irony surrounding One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is that the very first printed version in Arabic was actually printed by the British East India Company in 1814 in Calcutta, India.

Beyond the incredibly rich collection of folktales in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, there are many other sources of folktales of a sort in the Middle East. As a child I was fascinated by all things Egyptological and it was at that time that I came across a two folktales, The Story of Sinuhe and The Story of Two Brothers, which were recorded on papyrus circa 2000BC and which continued in circulation for some thousand years. I was fascinated by the idea that a tale could be so old and have endured so long but then have fallen out of common parlance.

But many tales did not disappear. They just took on another form or became incorporated elsewhere. For example, among the stories recorded by the ancient Egyptians were a number that were variations of a tale of seven fat years and seven lean years, just as with the Biblical story of Joseph. There are also some collections of ancient Egyptian poetry that point to their having been antecedents to the Song of Solomon.

Of course there are a variety of creation stories and ancient myths and legends which extend beyond the normal definition of folktales. But Gilgamesh perhaps ought to be included as the oldest adventure story. Although it predates all of them by many centuries, Gilgamesh is something of a fusion between the Iliad, Beowulf, and the Authurian quests.

Selecting appropriate folktales from the Middle East presents a number of challenges. Many ethnic/religious groups claim variants of the same tale and want to present their version as the only legitimate rendition. There are of course the normal challenges of linguistic translation in which accuracy to the text often undermines the beauty of the story and vice versa where a beautiful rendition departs from the strict text. There is of course also the challenge of translating between cultures as well. And not just between cultures of today. As mentioned before, rendering the early versions of Arabian Nights into the modern Middle East would present huge challenges because of the behavior represented in the stories. The culture reflected in the Arabian Nights is as lascivious as any modern country in Europe and both are equally distant from the more Wahhabist strands of Islam in the Middle East today.

We have put together a list of books that principally draw upon various renditions of Arabian Nights (collections as well as stand alone tales) but include some religious tales, creation legends, ancient epics such as Gilgamesh, a few tales of notable figures from Arabian history (the equivalents of Charlemagne and the like), and a couple of fiction/fantasy stories that build upon some Middle Eastern folktale.

We have grouped the more complete versions of both Gilgamesh and Arabian Nights into the Young Adult level because of the more mature content.

I hope your children enjoy these magical stories and not only engage with them as a story but absorb them as part of understanding a fascinating corner of the world.

Picture Books

	How the Amazon Queen Fought the Prince of Egypt by Tamara Bower Recommended
	The Persian Cinderella by Shirley Climo and illustrated by Robert Florczak Recommended
	Gilgamesh the King by Ludmila Zeman Recommended
	Sindbad's Secret by Ludmila Zeman Recommended
	The Revenge of Ishtar by Ludmila Zeman Recommended
	The Last Quest of Gilgamesh by Ludmila Zeman Recommended
	The Egyptian Cinderella by Shirley Climo and illustrated by Ruth Helle Suggested
	Muhammad by Demi Suggested
	Clever Ali by Nancy Farmer and illustrated by Gail De Marcken Suggested
	The White Ram by Mordicai Gerstein Suggested
	The Golden Sandal by Rebecca Hickox and illustrated by Will Hillenbrand Suggested
	The Stone by Dianne Hofmeyr and illustrated by Jude Daly Suggested
	Aziz the Storyteller by VI Hughes and illustrated by Stefan Czernecki Suggested
	My Father's Shop by Satomi Ichikawa Suggested
	A Gift Of The Sands by Julia Johnson and illustrated by Emily Styles Suggested
	Goha the Wise Fool by Denys Johnson-Davies and illustrated by Hag Hamdy and Mohamed Fattoug Suggested
	Tunjur! Tunjur! Tunjur! by Margaret Read MacDonald and Ibrahim Muhawi and illustrated by Alik Arzoumanian Suggested
	The Hundredth Name by Shulamith Levey Oppenheim and illustrated by Michael Hays Suggested
	Aladdin And The Enchanted Lamp by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Sophy Williams Suggested
	The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor by James Riordan and illustrated by Shelley Fowles Suggested

Independent Readers

	1001 Arabian Nights by Geraldine McCaughrean and illustrated by Rosamund Fowler Recommended
	Genies, Meanies, and Magic Rings by Stephen Mitchell and illustrated by Tom Pohrt Recommended
	Traveling Man by James Rumford Recommended
	Saladin by Diane Stanley Recommended
	Arabian Nights Retold and illustrated by Earle Goodenow Recommended
	The Arabian Nights by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin and Nora A. Smith and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish Recommended
	Aladdin and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights Retold and illustrated by W. Heath Robinson Suggested
	The Children's Encyclopedia of Arabia by Mary Beardwood Suggested
	Seven Daughters & Seven Sons by Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy Suggested
	Aladdin and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights by N. J. Dawood and illustrated by William Harvey Suggested
	From The Land Of Sheba by Carolyn Han Suggested
	Tales of Juha by Salma Khadra Jayyusi Suggested
	Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies Suggested
	The Akhenaten Adventure by Philip Kerr Suggested
	Mosque by David MacAulay Suggested
	Abu Jmeel's Daughter and Other Stories by Jamal Sleem Nuweihed and Salma Khadra Jayyusi Suggested
	Rachel the Clever and Other Jewish Folktales by Josepha Sherman Suggested
	Watermelons, Walnuts and the Wisdom of Allah by Barbara K. Walker and illustrated by Harold Berson Suggested

Young Adult

	The Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton Recommended
	The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy Recommended
	Arabian Nights II by Husain Haddawy Recommended
	The Arabian Nights by Robert Irwin Recommended
	Gilgamesh by John Gardner Suggested
	Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell Suggested

It is easy in an affluent and safe society to become jaded and to take things for granted. But every now and then something will pull me up short and I will reflect on some of the day-to-day miracles that we don't even notice such as clean water, electricity or heating and air-conditioning. I will think back to family and history a hundred years and more ago, to what they experienced without any of these common miracles.

Another wondrous occurrence which we can often take for granted is that of flight (see Flying book list). It is easy in these days of delays from tightened security, full flights, and service-cutting airlines to think of flying as just a cross-country bus on wings. We are a long way away from the glamour and style of the earliest commercial flights in the 1920's and 1930's.

I have been flying all my life, since I was two months old. As a management consultant, I was accustomed to many dozens of flights in a year for a couple of decades. The thrill of flying should be thoroughly ground away for me. Yes, there are irritants and personal affronts and inconveniences. Crowded and dirty planes, rude behavior from fellow passengers (though not as much as you might expect given the experience and circumstances), delays and unpredictability; the list is long. And yet . . .

I almost always sit in aisle seats owing to my height, but every now and then I end up in the window seat. It is then that the sheer awe, wonder and enchantment of flying returns, slipping in unbidden and not to be ignored. Whatever reading or work I might have had planned gets set aside as I gaze out the window in sheer appreciation that I live at this time and have the privilege of watching the world gliding by 35,000 feet below me.

Part of the wonder stems from reflecting on historical comparisons. My grandmothers, now deceased, were born some one hundred and ten years ago. When they were born, there were, for all practical purposes, no cars. All travel was by foot, horse, wagon or train. I remember my paternal grandmother, born at the turn of the last century in the hard-scrabble environment of the Ozarks, telling me of one of the pleasures of her childhood. When she was a young child, every few weeks her father would saddle up the family mule and ride into town for mail and supplies. It was an all-day journey of a few miles from the farm to the small town, and if she had been good and asked nicely, she would occasionally be allowed to ride up behind him on that great white mule. That was her thrilling adventure. In barely three generations we have gone from a travelling horizon of a few miles to gliding over the earth seven miles up in the heavens. That is an almost unfathomable gulf.

Flying all around the US and around the world I have had many moments of sheer delight, awe and even terror. Clouds of startling beauty that seem so embracing when seen from above rather than below. The colors of a sunset on and through thick clouds. Rainbows in the heavens that never touch the earth. The unearthly colors of the aurora borealis seen over Greenland. The sheer absorbing beauty of flying over the wondrously varied terrain of the US: the tree covered miles and miles of the Appalachians, the silvery majesty of the Mississippi in low light, the improbable depth of the Grand Canyon even from such a great height. I can still remember the gripping sense of energy the first time I took off from La Guardia one night and we banked south of Manhattan so that we could see straight up the island, a man-made canyon of lights and magic.

Then there are the moments of terror that make flying, even after millions of miles, still something not to be taken for granted. Sometimes the terror is not from some present danger but from a sense of disconcertedness. I think the first time that this ever happened to me was sometime in the early sixties. I was probably not much more than six or eight years old. We were travelling from Africa back to the US for a summer visit with family. We hade been travelling for many, many hours on a journey of several legs. We were connecting through Chicago. I was at that point of physical and mental exhaustion caused by too many miles and too many time zones, where you drift in and out of sleep and are usually half-way in between.

We arrived in the vicinity of Chicago and, as was so common in those days, ran into congestion. Planes were stacked up for miles around waiting for clearance to land. We were put into a holding pattern some distance from Chicago, circling and circling. I drifted off to sleep. At some point I awoke and felt a thrill of something being unreal. We were circling in a very tight turn, the plane probably tilted at a 40 degree angle. I was in a window seat staring out and upwards into a blank blue sky with no object in sight for any sort of reference. In that peculiar state of half-consciousness there blossomed the terrifying thought that we were stuck here forever and ever, circling, staring into the blue, never to land. Silly - yes; but utterly terrifying in that instant.

There are also the moments of fear which are much more grounded in immediate cause and effect. If you seek thrills, try flying through the magnificent summer thunder storms across the South. The ones that are so big you can't fly over or around, just thread your way through them as best you can. Sometimes, with the right frame of mind, you can sit back and marvel at the awesome display of the power of nature with lightning snaking across a night sky, illuminating fragments of the looming cliffs of cloud in shades of pinks and dark rust. It is just as your plane muscles through this meteorological roller-coaster, lurching, dropping and soaring, that you turn to prayer and to attempted calming thoughts about probabilities and certainty in the construction of the plane; knowing as you do so that your heart and mind are not travelling the same path.

There are very occasional moments of sheer panic that are rational at one level and entirely groundless (so to speak) at another - rather like when you are sitting in a restaurant and just as you put a fork full of food into your mouth, it crosses your mind "I wonder how many mouths this fork has been in before." It has only happened to me perhaps a half dozen times over the years, if even that. We will be flying along at cruising altitude, some hours into a flight. Then from somewhere will come the thought - "There are only about six or twelve inches of material between me and the ground thirty-five thousand feet below." Like a bad song stuck in your head, this is the kind of thought that, once brought to the surface, is very hard to put aside.

You don't even have to ever rise off the ground in flight to be taken with the idea of flying and particularly of the beautiful engineering of flight. Years ago I attended a boarding school in East Anglia in Britain. We were half-way between two airbases, Mildenhall and Lakenheath (RAF facilities but with a primarily USAF presence) and the grounds of the school were a visual identifier for planes approaching either airbase to peel off to the left or to the right. In the spring and summer terms, there were frequently air-shows at the bases and it was thrilling to stand outside on a beautiful warm day watching old World War II planes come banking across the sky at a few thousand feet. Flying Fortresses of course but also Sterlings, Halifaxes, Lightnings, Mustangs, Spitfires, Hurricanes and all sorts of mechanical vestiges of the flying past. You couldn't help but be moved by their beauty and the thought of the stories they represented.

We have gathered together a grab-bag of stories related to flight; stories that will feed those already enthralled with the thought of flying and those merely anticipating it. Here are stories of some of the early pioneers and heroes such as the Wright brothers, Earhart, Lindberg and the other adventurers. There are the stirring stories of warriors in the air, struggling to conquer gravity, their equipment and each other. There are stories causing one to reflect on the nature of flight, mysteries involving planes, and the sheer adventure and romance of flight.

Let us know of your favorite books that convey the wonder of flying.

Picture Books

Stellaluna written and illustrated by Janell Cannon Highly Recommended

Bat Loves the Night written by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Sarah Fox-Davies Recommended

To Fly written by Wendie C. Old and illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker Recommended

A buddy of mine in Australia used to use a phrase to describe a sudden reversal of fortune - "From rooster to feather duster in no time flat." Such would seem to be the fate of the image of the cowboy (see booklist). Up through the sixties and even the seventies, there were cowboys, bad guys and Indians. They might have their flaws but you always rooted for the cowboys. Then the brand collapsed. Cowboys became not just flawed but dangerously flawed. They were violent, oppressive, misogynistic, sociopaths. When they weren't demeaning Native Americans, they were oppressing them or massacring them. In the past decade or so the pendulum has swung back a little bit but Roy Rogers will probably never sit so tall in the saddle again.

Do kids even play Cowboys and Indians on the playground anymore? The role of cowboys in a child's life has always been a decidedly mixed media affair. There are plenty of cowboy stories of course but that was always supplemented by comic books, radio shows, movies and TV programs - Hopalong Cassidy, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, The Big Valley, etc. In the early days of television, Westerns were a popular staple and through the seventies, there were as many as a couple of hundred series. The dust trail of cowboys reached far and wide. Even growing up overseas, the cowboy shows and movies made their mark. Cowboy and Indian playground games were a regular activity for me and my friends in far off England in the sixties. Of course you always wanted to be a Cowboy, but you "fought" just as fiercely as an Indian and with a certain cache - noble but doomed (though we did win sometimes).

These playground activities are why I am often skeptical of many of the criticisms aimed in recent times at children's stories from decades past that transgress some au courant faux sensibility around race or gender or ethnicity. There are strikingly few books that are blatantly malicious. The language can sometimes jar but mostly from differences in fashion rather than intention. The transgressions are almost always ones of subtle nuance or the concerns are about possibly harmful subtexts that might be dangerously absorbed by our children unbeknownst by us as parents or them as targets.

There are many criticisms that can leveled at Cowboys and Indian games: there are the stereotypes (I think of us racing around the field yodling our imagined fierce war cries, patting our open mouths with flattened hands); there is the cultivation of conflict; there are the demeaning insults traded. On the other hand, when you play Cowboys and Indians, each of you, at some time or another has to be the Indians, sometimes not at all reluctantly because there is something romantic and attractive about being the underdog.

Children are great for impassioned commitment to role playing. Taking on another persona, another identity, another allegiance, no matter how factually questionable or for how brief a period, is a mind expanding experience (and fun.) It is a mistake I think to take away those opportunities for building empathy because of an over-concern about niceties of expression or concerns about hidden subtexts. Kids might sometimes be devious but rarely are they subtle. We have all had the experience, I suspect, of going back and rereading something from our youth. Occasionally it is as magical as ever (or even more so). Not infrequently though, we find that the story was far more pedestrian in its style than we remember or has some portrayal far more forthright than we are accustomed to today. Yet that was not what we absorbed at the time. I think the dangers of subtexts and nuanced expression are far overblown and the harm from lack of engagement and empathy far greater than we should accept.

Cowboys exemplify one of the challenges that we as a reading community face, particularly in the realm of children's literature, when we let entertaining stories be held hostage to factual reality or when we wish to put authors in a straight-jacket of moral certitude and contemporary ethos (whatever the passing fancies might be). Usually as parents, we are looking for books that first and foremost, engage our children and help fuel a love of reading on their part. This usually means we are looking for a storyline that connects our children with the world - characters that they care about, places they are interested in, stories that spark their imagination. Next we often look for something that reinforces key values and beliefs that we seek to transmit to them - things like courage and curiosity and adventuring and perseverance and loyalty, etc.. We frequently also hope that they will pick up factual information from their stories such as some idea about history and geography and nature, etc. Finally, we usually are hoping that through their reading they will engage at some level with fundamental questions about making moral decisions, coming up with answers to situations which they have not yet faced - "What would I do if I were in the same situation?" By considering and answering situations through the world of reading, they are preparing themselves for the day when they face comparable situations in their real life.

That is a lot of freight to load on to a poor little forty or eighty page children's book. Often, a book that serves one goal (that it grips the child's imagination) may fail on another (liberties with factual representation). It is always a balancing act to find a book that meets the greater balance of objectives. There is not now nor has there ever been such a mythical book that can meet all those objectives simultaneously.

Every book reading experience is ultimately the product of the author (and illustrator) and the child's imagination. It is this second part which makes matching child to book so unpredictable. Regardless, of what we as parents want, and the quality of the book we think we have found, there is then the real issue: how is the book received by the child. That is in turn subject to an almost random assortment of factors. What kind of day have they had, are they tired, do they know enough to understand the concrete facts of the book, do they read well enough, is their vocabulary sufficiently broad, is it a subject in which they are interested, is it written in a style to which they are attracted, what are the circumstances under which they are reading the book? Children are highly variable amongst themselves and within themselves. The single span of a day can make all the difference in a particular child's response to a particular book.

Stories about cowboys, like those about dinosaurs or horses or cuddly animals, do have a broad appeal. The cowboy, free-living, independent, self-reliant, strong, and usually with a strong moral code, is an inherently attractive character to most children who are seeking to build their own autonomy. One of my boys has surprised me by becoming a reasonably avid reader of westerns. Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour et al, are nominally too old for him and yet that is what he has taken to along with other western classics, especially the wonderful Shane. I have read a couple with him and I see the attraction. The protagonist wrestling against fate and self to be a better man. The clarity of good versus evil. Big dollops of action. These are all grist for the mill. My concern about the age level for his reading is set aside by this recognition. He is at a time in his life where school work and band and sports and activities are stealing away more and more of his time. Almost any book that keeps alive the hunger and habit of reading is by definition a "good" book.

The heyday of the cowboy was relatively brief. The first large cattle drive was post-Civil War in 1866. The enclosure of the open range through the mass use of barbed wire effectively brought the original era to a close in the 1890's. The original cowboys were as heterogeneous a lot as could be imagined. Local pioneers, veterans from the Civil War, people moving west for new beginnings - all contributed to the ranks of cowboys. Along with whaling ships, the cowboys generated one of the first truly multicultural workplaces with people of Celtic, Mexican, African American, and Native American origin all making up an element of the mix of peoples pursuing the life of the cowboy.

The cowboy tradition is not restricted to Canada and the US (and in the US we sometimes overlook that there were cowboys not just in Texas but in Florida and California and everywhere in between.) There are the vaqueros of Mexico who in turn are in a linear descent from the medieval vaqueros of Spain. There are the gauchos of Brazil and Argentina. The Boers of South Africa. The drovers of Australia. All are people associated with the tending of and movement of cattle across wide open spaces, often in to new territories, blazing trails for others to follow. People who live under the stars, close to nature, far from civilization and who have to be completely self-reliant.

It is easy to over-romanticize the life of the cowboy. One of the most famous Australian poets was A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, who wrote a number of iconic poems of the Australian experience, including one about the life of the drover, "Clancy of the Overflow". But Paterson was a town person and wrote of the bush life and the life of the drover with somewhat rose tinted glasses. Wally Darling was a real drover who also wrote verse (in fact the volume of cowboy poetry is quite extraordinary) and offered his own less romantic parody of Paterson's poem, "A Drover's Life".

Waylon Jennings captured the stringency and challenge of the life of a cowboy in his famous song, Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys.

Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings,
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night.
Them that don't know him won't like him and them that do,
Sometimes won't know how to take him.
He ain't wrong, he's just different but his pride won't let him,
Do things to make you think he's right.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks.
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such.

I love that line - He ain't wrong, he's just different.

Despite their heyday being more than a century behind us, the cowboy life does live on and the idea of the cowboy burns even brighter. The phrases and the places and names and even just words all conjure magic - Dodge City, buckaroo, OK Corral, wrangler, lasso, giddy up, Mustang, round-up, stampede, Chisholm trail, bucking bronco, Stetson hats and Colt pistols, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Boot Hill - these all quicken the blood and flush the imagination.

Below is a collection of books that relate the history of the West and the cowboy, tell of some of the famous people of that time and some of the less well known. Here are their adventures. Let us know what books you might recommend related to cowboys.

Picture Books

	Cowboy Small written and illustrated by Lois Lenski Highly Recommended
	The Brave Cowboy written and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund Recommended
	Calico the Wonder Horse written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton Recommended
	Cowboy Night Before Christmas written and illustrated by James Rice Recommended
	Pappy's Handkerchief by Devin Scillian and illustrated by Chris Ellison Recommended
	Mailing May by Michael O. Tunnell and illustrated by Ted Rand Recommended (OK not quite about cowboys but a great story about living on the frontier)
	Bad Day at Riverbend written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg Recommended
	The Cowboy's Christmas written and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund Suggested
	Armadillo Rodeo written and illustrated by Jan Brett Suggested
	Little Old Big Beard and Big Young Little Beard by Remy Charlip and illustrated by Tamara Rettenmund Suggested
	Pecos Bill written and illustrated by Steven Kellogg Suggested
	Why Cowboys Sleep With Their Boots On by Laurie Lazzaro Knowlton and illustrated by James Rice Suggested
	Why Cowgirls Are Such Sweet Talkers by Laurie Lazzaro Knowlton and illustrated by James Rice Suggested
	Gift Horse by S. D. Nelson Suggested (Indian Lore)
	Cowboy Rodeo written and illustrated by James Rice Suggested
	Texas Night Before Christmas written and illustrated by James Rice Suggested
	B Is for Buckeroo by Louise Doak Whitney and Gleaves Whitney and illustrated by Susan Guy Suggested
	A Cowboy Christmas by Audrey Wood and illustrated by Robert Florczak Suggested

Independent Reader

	Pecos Bill by James Cloyd Bowman and illustrated by Laura Bannon Recommended
	The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erickson and illustrated by Gerald L. Holmes Recommended
	Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry & Wesley Dennis and illustrated by Wesley Dennis Recommended
	Smoky The Cowhorse by Will James Recommended
	Silver Canyon by Louis L'Amour Recommended
	Cowboy (DK Eyewitness series) by David H. Murdoch and illustrated by Geoff Brightling Recommended
	The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses by Andrew Barton Paterson Recommended
	Cowboy Country by Ann Herbert Scott and illustrated by Ted Lewin Recommended
	Geronimo by Joseph Bruchac Suggested
	In the Days of the Vaqueros by Russell Freedman Suggested
	The Life and Death of Crazy Horse by Russell Freedman and illustrated by Amos Bad Heart Bull Suggested
	Will Jame's Book of Cowboy Stories by Will James Suggested
	All in the Day's Riding by Will James Suggested
	Horses I've Known by Will James Suggested
	Crossfire Trail by Louis L'Amour Suggested
	The Rider of Lost Creek by Louis L'Amour Suggested
	Bull's-Eye by Sue Macy Suggested
	The Journal of Joshua Loper by Walter Dean Myers Suggested
	Tall Tales of the Wild West (And a Few Short Ones) by Eric Ode and illustrated by Ben Crane Suggested
	The Good, the Bad and the Goofy by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith Suggested

Young Adult

	Shane by Jack Schaefer Highly Recommended
	Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake Recommended
	The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark Recommended
	Angle of Repose by Wallace Earle Stegner Recommended
	These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner Recommended
	The Virginian by Owen Wister Recommended
	The Chisholm Trail by Ralph Compton Suggested
	The Shawnee Trail by Ralph Compton Suggested
	The Great Trek by Zane Grey Suggested
	The Good Old Boys by Elmer Kelton Suggested
	The Smiling Country by Elmer Kelton Suggested
	Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry Suggested