Pigeon Post http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/ A weekly essay on children's books relevant to topical issues en Copyright 2010 Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:55:30 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Stormy Weather
From the first practice of agriculture and then settled habitation some ten thousand years ago, the story of man has been the story of exerting greater control over our environment, slowly taming and constraining those factors that used to keep us in such a perilous state. Weapons and fire protected us from wildlife. Working stone and clay allowed us to store food against bad times. Brewing light beer freed us from the ravages of filthy water. There have been a thousand avenues of technology and social organization that have freed us from the indeterminable and the capricious. But the more free we are the more we are reminded that the unknown and unmanageable is still out there.

We may feel like we are in control but every now and then Mother Nature just womps us up side the head with a blizzard, tornado, hurricane, drought, or some other weather generated reminder of our insignificance in the scheme of things.

Growing up living around the world, I had plenty of opportunity to see first hand some dramatic aspects of weather starting from my very first years. In the early sixties, we were living in Venezuela and annually would fly back to the US for family vacation. Those trips are memorable for one's intimate engagement with the weather. This was in the days before routine jet flight, sophisticated on-board radar or even detailed weather forecasts. Nowadays it is by far the exception to have a trip inconvenienced by rough air. Before taking off, the pilot knows where the rough patches are going to be and routes around them or flies over. Back in the early sixties, chugging along on two or four props at much lower altitudes and with much less in terms of sensory gear, you used to routinely fly up onto a storm and basically just have to bulldoze your way through.

The rank fear as the plane is tossed about, everyone strapped in and holding on tight, remains a vivid memory. That long, closed tube of fuselage seems impossibly fragile in the grip of these winds. The occasional intercom announcements from the pilot were intended to reassure passengers. As a young child, what the pilot said was only partially comprehendible but whatever reassurance was intended in his words was belied by the tension and strain in his voice - elements of non-verbal communication to which a child was far more attuned.

In Nigeria we experienced the torrential downpours of the rainy season. Rains so hard that they seemed to flatten and subdue the land, drumming incessantly for hours at a time on the roof. Surely this is what Noah must have experienced.

In Libya, the quotidian aridity of the weather was magnified by periodic "ghiblies". These were sirocco winds off the desert bearing gritty sand and could enclose your world for a few hours or a few days. Steady hot, dry winds laden with sand blowing all about and at speeds of up to forty miles an hour. We had just moved into our new home and had been fixing it up, repainting inside and out, etc. We had been in-country perhaps two or three weeks. One day we repainted the window frames, and as one does, laid down masking tape along the edge of each pane of glass to help minimize splashes and paint spills. We left it overnight for the paint to dry but when we woke the next morning, it was to a world closed in by whirling dust and a low dim wattage light of grey-brown. Our first ghibli. It continued on and on all through the day - a strange sensation with which we had no experience. It was awful in the sense that the power, sustained force, constant pittering of sand blasted against the house, the eerie noise of the wind, filled you with awe.

But like everything, it passed. By the next morning we were back to a cornflower blue sky with a bright yellow sun beating down. I went out to fulfill my designated chore of pulling off the masking tape from all the windows. It was then that I became aware of just how powerful those ghiblies were. What I discovered was that the tape was no longer recognizably tape. It had been completely baked onto, and indeed, into, the glass. Forty some years later I remain astounded. There was no peeling off the tape. No soaking and scrubbing away. Tape and glass were fused. The best that could be done was to use a straight edge and carefully scrape, scrape away. I got about half of it but the evidence of that one day of ghibli remained on the window panes when we left something more than a year later.

In Sweden I became familiar with the twin aspects of winter: the dreadfulness of being bone cold and the beauty of deep encompassing snow falls. Snow so thick that it stilled the very wind and sat in perfect balance inches deep on the thinnest of twigs. On beautiful winter nights I would sometimes wake and simply watch thick flakes drifting down in the yellow of the street lights, layering more and more on the ground, the world a deathly quiet, all noise blotted out.

There was that winter crossing from Sweden to Britain, across the North Sea by ferry. It was only about a thirty-six hour journey but as it turned out, a journey through the heart of a wintry North Sea storm. It was one of the few times I have come close to being incapacitated by sea-sickness. The only very minor humorous moment of the trip was passing one of the deck stewards at some point and seeing that he was as green about the gills as any one of his landlubber charges.

Then there were the tornadoes of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A couple of times over the years, we would fly back home in the summer to visit family and manage to time our arrival with summer thunder storms of disconcerting intensity. Flying through them to land engaged you with one set of fears. Having landed you then had to make your way across town with trees swaying and dipping, it seemed, into the street, the afternoon dark as night, the clouds piled up upon one another into the sky, dark and streaked with unnatural colors; lightning piercing the veil and the sound of deadly winds and not too distant thunder.

One memory is of visiting a great aunt the morning after such a storm. A tornado had hop-scotched its way down her street, thankfully on the far side. Her side of the street was untouched. The opposite side was like a checkerboard. The capriciousness of the tornado was such that it had house hopped down the street. One house was completely intact, windows in place, nothing out of the ordinary. Next to it would be the foundations of what had been their neighbor's home. Very little detritus, the wind had simply snatched up alternate homes, welcome mat to roofline.

Another memory remains of nominally sleeping on the fold-out sofa in my grandmothers little box home. It was a step down den, next to the garage with a single window with a pull-down blind. It was a long night listening to the hailing and howling of the wind, the distant explosions of transformers, the tearing sounds of trees and other unseen things being uplifted into the air. All these noises were matched to the periodic bright lighting up of the window blind with streaks of lightning followed by the more or less distant booms of thunder. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .

In Australia, we came to know the desiccation of drought and the ravages of brushfires. Here we were living on the outskirts of a major modern city, Sydney, with all the resources and trappings of a modern economy. And yet when push came to shove, we were just a temporary blot in the way of the forces of nature. One hot summer day the bushfires were especially bad and encroaching on the city, following the pathway up through nature preserves and parks, burning all in its path. Listening on the radio I ended up driving home from work in order to be prepared to escape with the family were the fire to take a wrong turn. We were fortunate; it did not come closer than half a kilometer away but that was far closer than I would have wished. I retain a surreal minds-eye image of standing in the driveway trying to gage the direction of the wind and being reminded at that moment of a reality-negative of Sweden - soot and ashes drifting quietly down all around me, building up on the ground, an ashen snowfall as it were.

Storms, winds, droughts, floods are, as would be expected, in our earliest literature. It's right there in the Bible, most starkly in the Old Testament (Isaiah 29:6 - Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.) It's there in Herodotus, in Ibn Battuta, in Marco Polo, in all the ancient traveler's accounts.

The capriciousness of the weather is recorded in the violent wind storm that knocked out a goodly portion of Xerxes' fleet just before the Spartans marched to their moment in history at Thermopylae. In fact, Xerxes had already had his moment of hubris at Hellespont where he had commanded a bridge of boats to be built across the mile wide gap. A terrible windstorm twice destroyed this temporary bridge. In retribution, Xerxes notoriously had the straight punished with three hundred lashes and branding by his soldiers. Herodotus, in his fashion, commented that this was a "highly presumptuous way to address the Hellespont".

Wind, rain, snow, fire and drought serve as the context for many stories, for the catalyst that leads to change, or simply as a quiet frame for the story. Half our sea stories seem to be substantially a retelling of the extremes of weather.

When reading to our children about the weather, there are stories of adventure, endurance, tragedy, and comfort. There are stories that teach them about precaution and resilience. There are stories that teach us to be a little bit more humble, to think ahead, to prepare, to anticipate our unplanned encounters with the blind savagery of the wind and the rain. Stories that help to calibrate a sense of respect and awe with an awareness of caution; of how to respect the force and unknowable will of nature without being paralyzed with fear.

I hope you enjoy this selection of tales and explanations and reference materials that we believe will help children to understand that weather is always with us and should never be ignored.

Don't forget the Story of Mongrel Grey by Banjo Paterson for a moving account of a flood.



This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema and Beatriz Vidal Recommended
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett Recommended
Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton Recommended
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats Recommended
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian Recommended
Sam Bangs and Moonshine by Evaline Ness Recommended
Snow by Uri Shulevitz Recommended
Noah's Ark illustrated by Peter Spier Recommended
Hide and Seek Fog by Alvin R. Tresselt Recommended
White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin R. Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin Recommended
The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris Van Allsburg Recommended
Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Karen Ritz Recommended
Hurricane by David Wiesner Recommended
Umbrella by Taro Yashima Recommended
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended
The Storm Book by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended
Clifford and the Big Storm by Norman Bridwell Suggested
Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss Suggested
Snowballs by Lois Ehlert Suggested
Gilberto and the Wind by Marie Hall Ets Suggested
Drylongso by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney Suggested
Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse and illustrated by Jon J. Muth Suggested
River Friendly, River Wild by Jane Kurtz and illustrated by Neil Brennan Suggested
Storm Boy by Paul Owen Lewis Suggested
Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco Suggested
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connie Roop and illustrated by Peter E. Hanson Suggested
Kate Shelley by Robert D. San Souci and illustrated by Max Ginsburg Suggested
Brave Irene by William Steig Suggested
Anna, Grandpa, and the Big Storm by Carla Stevens and illustrated by Margot Tomes Suggested
The Snow Walker by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Mary O'Keefe Young and Charles M. Wetterer Suggested


Independent Reader

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and illustarted by Evelyn Copelman and W. W. Denslow Highly Recommended
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George Highly Recommended
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis and illustrated by Tudor Humphries Highly Recommended
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and illustrated by Donald McKay Highly Recommended
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder Highly Recommended
The Good Dog by Avi Recommended
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Recommended
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Recommended
Incident at Hawk's Hill by Allan W. Eckert and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended
Inkheart by Cornelia Caroline Funke Recommended
Star in the Storm by Joan Hiatt Harlow Recommended
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Recommended
Seaman by Gail Langer Karwoski and illustrated by James Watling Recommended
Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O'Neill Recommended
Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman Recommended
Abel's Island by William Steig Recommended
The Cay by Theodore Taylor Recommended
Williwaw! by Tom Bodett Suggested
The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck Suggested
Tornado by Betsy Cromer Byars and illustrated by Doron Ben-Ami Suggested
Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford and illustrated by George Hughes Suggested
The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen Suggested
Powder Monkey by Paul Dowswell Suggested
The Day It Rained Forever by Virginia T. Gross and illustrated by Ronald Himler Suggested
Dark Water Rising by Marian Hale Suggested
Thunder from the Sea by Joan Hiatt Harlow Suggested
Blizzard by Jim Murphy Suggested
Twister on Tuesday by Mary Pope Osborne and illustrated by Sal Murdocca Suggested
Henry and Mudge and the Wild Wind by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Sucie Stevenson Suggested
Tornadoes by Seymour Simon Suggested


Young Adult

The Wanderer by Sharon Creech and illustrated by David Diaz Recommended
Halsey's Typhoon by Bob Drury Recommended
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Recommended
Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson Recommended
The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough and narrated by Edward Herrmann (AUDIO CD) Recommended
Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian Recommended
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson Recommended
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk Recommended
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger Recommended
Flood by Kathleen Duey Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/09/stormy_weather_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/09/stormy_weather_1.html Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:55:30 -0500 Pets
And now, just a few minutes later, I hear my wife calling upstairs to my daughter (to whom Sonja, the kitten, belongs), "Sarah, Sonja just fell into Merlin's water bowl." Life with pets is full, unpredictable, disgusting, and usually a joy.

Pets are a companion for a child, a better place for them to spend their time than on a Playstation. A pet is their last best friend when the rest of the world is ignoring them or failing to understand them. A pet can be their charge, their first foray into having responsibility for the well-being of another. And not to be overlooked is that, even for the very youngest child, a pet is one rung down on the family social hierarchy - there is someone to whom they can be senior.

Pets are an integral part of the family and in some ways might be viewed as a child's first real dry-run at life, responsibility and growing up. It is often said that acquiring a new pet, particularly dogs, is like adding a new member to the family. This is supported by scientists (see article), who peg the average dog's intelligence as roughly that of a two or two and a half year old human, with the capacity for understanding 165 - 250 words, rudimentary math skills involving amounts up to four or five, and basic problem solving capabilities. Perhaps reflecting their long term co-evolution with humans, dogs also have the capacity to undertake deception of one another and of their humans or, as one of the researchers put it, "they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs."

The human species is not simply a social group within itself as is well established, but has shown a predisposition in all its known history, as being a species accustomed to associating across specie barriers in a way not often discussed.

We have a large population of animals with whom we have shared our history and whom we have affected and been affected by. Cattle, camels, sheep, llamas, horses, goats, pigs, chicken, fish, turkey's, guinea-pigs, donkeys, etc. are all creatures with whom we have shared close proximity for many thousands of years. We have caught and suffered from their diseases as they have ours. We have exploited these animals as sources of food and sources of energy to move things. But there are a handful of creatures, usually also social animals, with whom our relationship extends beyond simple exploitation.

We have a history of close proximity to and interaction with other social creatures such as non-human primates, social carnivores such as dogs and wolves, corvids (crows and ravens), rats, parrots, etc. What differentiates this history from the simple exploitation of animals for food is that we extend to these other social creatures some sort of acknowledgement of their social similarity to us. We adopt them into our lives. They show up in our myths, fables and legends in ways that are quite different from other animals.

One of the earliest species with whom we have taken up was the canidae, dogs. Genetic evidence indicates that dogs and humans have been coevolving for at least a third of the time since we broke out of Africa and populated the modern world. With that long association, it is no wonder that there is such a latent affinity. We have had a lot of time to come to some sort of understanding.

Approximately 63% of US households (71 million out of 115 million households in total) have at least one pet. In order of popularity, dogs are present in 45 million homes, followed by cats (in 38 million homes but with more cats per home than there are dogs per home), fish, birds, rodents (politely called small animals in the survey), reptiles, and horses. In terms of total numbers 71 million homes are host to 382 million creatures (a third of which are fish). That's a lot of livestock that is cheek by jowl with us.

I don't know what proportion of children never have a pet; I wouldn't imagine that it could be all that many, though I do seem to meet a lot of kids with no pets. I suspect though, that it is something like meeting children who can't swim or can't ride a bike; not all that many but they make a disproportionately large impression because you are so surprised.

Children tend to love creatures with whom they share their lives, whether the pet is a large dog or horse or, at the other end of the scale, tiny pygmy hamsters or sea monkeys. While as parents we are perfectly aware of the time, expense, inconvenience, risks, and heartbreak that can eventually be associated with pets, it all becomes worthwhile when we see the genuine love and eventual responsibility a child can show for their best furry, feathered, or scaled friend.

Pets also become the source of a significant portion of the web of stories a family tells about and to itself. It is not just the pet that helps bind a family at moments of fraying, but the very action of storytelling which creates a part of the shared bond.

Sometimes we relate the stories of humor such as the time when our boxer dog, Brutus, escaped from our yard when we lived in Sweden. Sweden is very ordered and civilized and there just are not dogs running loose. While we children searched the neighborhood for our Houdini dog, my mother received a call from the local police station. In Swedish she was told that Brutus had been found running loose and that he was now being held down at the station if she would care to come fetch him. This she did. As they showed her into the holding cells to collect him, my mother realized that they had a man in the cell keeping Brutus company. The Swedes are a marvelous and humane people but this was a degree of caring that took her by surprise.

Even greater was her surprise when Brutus was released from the cell but the man remained. Not a dog companion he, but a fellow inmate.

Stories of shared family outrage as when one of our long line of boxer dogs deftly jumped up onto the kitchen table in order to delicately partake in the iced cake left there to cool. The outrage was not so much about the transgression itself, dogs after all will be dogs, so much as about the fact that he had carefully licked off all the icing and left the cake.

Secret family stories. In one home, we had a pantry and in which we kept things that needed to stay at a steady cool temperature. My mother's many foods and fancy trifles that she prepared for a cocktail party were carefully tucked away there on the day of the occasion. At some point over the course of the day's preparations, the door to the pantry was left microscopically ajar. To Brutus, this was clearly a simple invitation to investigate and sample. Fortunately he was discovered before his investigations and samplings had proceeded too far. However, he had tried out a pate loaf which my mother had made. Clearly, from the fact that it was only the end that was nibbled and had teeth marks on it, he did not favor pate. After properly berating Brutus for his forwardness, my mother set about rescuing and restoring what she could. When she came to the pate loaf, her pragmatic solution was to cut off the nibbled end and serve the rest of the loaf anyway. We young ones took special delight in watching who unknowingly ended up sharing the pate loaf that evening with our dog.

Stories of marvel, admiration and gratitude. When my older sister was a toddler of four or five years, we lived in Venezuela. Big old Duchess, yet another boxer, was the family dog who had been around for all of my sister's life and was a constant boon companion. One afternoon, B_____ wandered into the living room and seeing Duchess lying on the doorsill between the room and the outdoor veranda, began to toddle over towards her. As she approached, Duchess rose up, snarling and barring her teeth to B______. This had never happened before and, terrified, my sister ran shrieking to my mother. Mom came running to see what was the matter, fearful that Duchess might have contracted rabies. As she faced towards Duchess, from her greater height, my mother was able to look over the dog onto the veranda and see what my sister could not. There, in the corner, lay a large rattlesnake. Duchess had not been threatening B____, she had been protecting her from danger as best she knew how.

And on and on. For all the effort and disruption that they can be, most pets are a wonderful and ineluctable part of our family lives.

Our literature is rich in stories of family pets. We have here collected together stories which we hope can be used to prepare children for a new pet or remind them of how fortunate we are to share our lives with an animal companion. We have included a few horse stories but really they are a different booklist. Horses are wonderful animals but you don't usually want one curled up at the bottom of your bed. Likewise we have steered clear of general animal stories where the animal is the fantasy protagonist, a creature in the barn, a part of the natural habitat. These are stories of the animals to whom we are closest.


This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

Curious George by H. A. Rey Highly Recommended
Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day Highly Recommended
Harry and the Lady Next Door by Gene Zion Highly Recommended
Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Highly Recommended
Fish Out of Water by Helen Palmer Recommended
Allison by Allen Say Recommended
Billy and Blaze by C.W. Anderson Recommended
Dick Whittington and His Cat by Marcia Brown Recommended
Floss by Kim Lewis Recommended
Hey, Al by Arthur Yorinks and illustrated by Richard Egielski Recommended
McDuff Moves In by Rosemary Wells and illustrated by Susan Jeffers Recommended
Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag Recommended
The Mog Collection by Judith Kerr Recommended
Puss in Boots by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Ian Beck Recommended
Puss in Boots by Charles Perrault, retold by Paul Galdone and illustrated by Paul Galdone & Charles Perrault Recommended
Sam Bangs and Moonshine by Evaline Ness Recommended
The Adventures of Taxi Dog by Debra and Sal Barracca and illustrated by Mark Buehner Recommended
Bark, George by Jules Feiffer Suggested
Big Dog Little Dog by P.D. Eastman Suggested
Biscuit by Alyssa Satin Capucilli and illustrated by Pat Schories Suggested
Blaze and the Mountain Lion by C.W. Anderson Suggested
Cat Up a Tree by John Hassett and Ann Hassett Suggested
Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures With the Family Lazardo by William Joyce Suggested
Harry by the Sea by Gene Zion Suggested
Mcduff and the Baby by Rosemary Wells and illustrated by Susan Jeffers Suggested
Mcduff Comes Home by Rosemary Wells and illustrated by Susan Jeffers Suggested
Nothing At All by Wanda Gag Suggested
The Mysterious Tadpole by Steven Kellogg Suggested


Independent Reader

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Highly Recommended
Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard Highly Recommended
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg Highly Recommended
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey Highly Recommended
My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber Highly Recommended
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George Highly Recommended
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and illustrated by Michael Chesworth Highly Recommended
Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Highly Recommended
Stuart Little by E.B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended
The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith Highly Recommended
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley and illustrated by Keith Ward Highly Recommended
The Call of the Wild by Jack London and illustrated by Martin Gascoigne Highly Recommended
The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford and Carl Burger Highly Recommended
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls Highly Recommended
Babe by Dick King-Smith and illustrated by Maggie Kneen Recommended
Catwings Collection by Ursula K. Le Guin Recommended
Gentle Ben by Walt Morey and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended
Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes Recommended
Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary Recommended
Irish Red by Jim Kjelgaard Recommended
James Herriot's Dog Stories by James Herriot Recommended
James Herriot's Treasury for Children by James Herriot and illustrated by Peter Barrett and Ruth Brown Recommended
Kavik the Wolf Dog by Walt Morey and illustrated by Peter Parnall Recommended
Lad - Albert Payson Terhune and illustrated by Sam Savitt by Author Recommended
Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight and illustrated by Marguerite Kirmse Recommended
Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater and illustrated by Robert Lawson Recommended
Old Yeller by Fred Gipson and illustrated by Carl Burger Recommended
Rascal by Sterling North and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended
Ribsy by Beverly Cleary Recommended
Seaman by Gail Langer Karwoski and illustrated by James Watling Recommended
Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James Recommended
Sounder by William H. Armstrong and illustrated by James Barkley Recommended
Star in the Storm by Joan Hiatt Harlow Recommendation
The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erickson and illustrated by Gerald L. Holmes Recommended
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico Recommended
Thunder from the Sea by Joan Hiatt Harlow Recommendation


Young Adult

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell Highly Recommended
Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Malcolm Durrell Recommended
The National Velvet by Enid Bagnold Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/08/pets_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/08/pets_1.html Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:40:24 -0500 People Helping People sacrifice for strangers.

While a nearly universal trait, it is one that is particularly well established in the US. Arguments might be made as to why that is: is it our cult of the individual, our system of checks and balances grounded in the 10th amendment, our pioneer heritage where everyone needed to pitch in together? All are reasonable claims. But whatever the source, there is still the fact that America is an incredibly generous nation, whether measured by per capita giving in money, giving in hours, giving to the local community or giving to distant causes helping people in need.

It is interesting to observe this. Evolution has equipped us with exquisitely fine talents of identifying the "other", those that don't belong to our family, our community, our tribe. By definition, every culture, in defining what it is and what are its core attributes, at the same time defines what it is not and separates itself from others. Despite 40,000 years of refinement for identifying and rejecting the "other", in just a few hundred years we have slowly widened our definition of whom is human and who is worthy of respect and accord. The slow eradication of slavery, the extension of voting rights to every adult, the slow expansion of government obligation to provide some minimum form of health and income to all members, are all evidence of our basic humanity.

The greater tribute is not our collective agreements and decisions though. It shows up most startlingly and most magnificently as individual decisions to make a difference regardless of risk, and reputation and absence of reward. When people choose to do the right thing for others regardless of the cost to themselves.

This can show up in the smallest of gestures. The young be-tattooed and body-pierced seeming-thug in the mall, who jumps up to offer his arm to steady an old lady wobbling on the escalator. The enthusiastic volunteers for a Habitat for Humanity building project. The members of a children's chorus performing for the residents of an assisted living community. The generosity and commitment to our fellow citizens is around us daily in a thousand small ways.

Our childhood stories are full of tales of people helping others without expectation of return or recompense. Sometimes it is very particular: Annie Sullivan devoting her life to bringing Helen Keller out of her cell of darkness into the wide world. Sometimes it is wider and more nebulous: King Christian X of Denmark marking himself with a yellow star, inspiring his subjects to do the same, when the occupying Nazis wanted to so mark the Danish Jews. Nebulous but inspiring none-the-less.

Sometimes the heroism and generosity is nominally related to the person's job but is still above and beyond what one might expect. Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper's daughter comes to mind, as do stories beyond listing of fireman, policemen, smokejumpers, coast guard rescue pilots, etc.

War in all its tragedy creates the opportunity for man to display both his humanity along with his inhumanity. In Claire Huchet Bishop's Twenty and Ten, set in World War II occupied France, twenty young French school children take on the task of hiding ten refugee Jewish children at great risk to themselves.

For the very young there are such classics as The Little Engine That Could who makes the effort to help little children on the other side of the mountain when much more powerful and better prepared engines can't be bothered to do so. Also at the picture book level is one of my favorites, Cynthia Rylant's Silver Packages. A businessman has a car accident in the remote hills of the Appalachians in a snow storm and is rescued by individuals in the community. His thank-you is to return each year before Christmas to distribute silver packages to the children of the hills who have so little. The waves of that first rescue and his subsequent generosity ripple down the generations in this charming, quiet tale.

Then there are the biographies of people that went beyond a single act and made helping their fellow man their life mission. The stories of Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton of the Red Cross and Mary Breckinridge (of the Frontier Nursing service) in Rosemary Wells' Mary on Horseback, John Flynn of the Flying Doctor Service, etc.

We can tell our children what the rules are. We can lay out the commandments. We can teach them about right and wrong. We can talk about doing the right thing. But all that amounts to bringing the horse to the water. These tales are about people that take these basics and show what it can be like to be truly human, a mensch, a model.

Let us know your suggestions for stories about people selflessly helping people.

This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

The Little Ships by Louise Borden and illustrated by Michael Foreman Highly Recommended
The Yellow Star by Carmen Agra Deedy and illustrated by Henri Sorensen Highly Recommended
The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper and illustrated by George and Doris Hauman Highly Recommended
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski and illustrated by P. J. Lynch (CD narrated by James Earl Jones) Highly Recommended
Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty Recommended
America's White Table by Margot Theis Raven and illustrated by Mike Benny Recommended
Silver Packages by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Chris K. Soentpiet Recommended
Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Karen Ritz Recommended
Alphabet Adventure by Audrey Wood and illustrated by Bruce Robert Wood Recommended
A Picture Book of Helen Keller by David A. Adler Suggested
Mayday! Mayday by Chris L. Demarest Suggested
Smokejumpers 1 to 10 by Chris L. Demarest Suggested
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connies Roop and illustrated by Peter E. Hanson Suggested
The Cat With the Yellow Star by Susan Goldman Rubin and Ela Weissberger Suggested
The Storm by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Preston McDaniels Suggested
Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss Suggested
Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss Suggested
Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz and illustrated by Pat Cummings Suggested
Beauty And the Beast by Max Eilenberg and illustrated by Angela Barrett Suggested
The Lion and the Mouse by Aesop and retold by Bernadette Watts Suggested


Independent Reader

Twenty and Ten by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by William Pene Du Bois Highly Recommended
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended
Incident at Hawk's Hill by Allan W. Eckert and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended
Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian Recommended
Clara Barton by Wil Mara Recommended
Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman Recommended
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden and illustrated by Garth Williams Recommended
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein Recommended
Mary on Horseback by Rosemary Wells and illustrated by Peter McCarty Recommended
Knee Knock Rise by Natalie Babbitt Suggested
Fire in Their Eyes by Karen Magnuson Beil Suggested
Storm Warriors by Elisa Lynn Carbone Suggested
Dark Water Rising by Marian Hale Suggested
Darkness over Denmark by Ellen Levine Suggested
Rescue by Milton Meltzer Suggested
Blizzard by Jim Murphy Suggested
Anna, Grandpa, and the Big Storm by Carla Stevens and illustrated by Margot Tomes Suggested
Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross by Augusta Stevenson and illustrated by Frank Giacoia Suggested


Young Adult

No Greater Glory by Dan Kurzman Recommended
Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson and Isaac Monroe Cline Recommended
Medal of Honor by Collier, Peter and Del Calzo, Nick Suggested
Trauma Junkie by Janice Hudson Suggested
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger Suggested
Hiding to Survive by Maxine B. Rosenberg Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/05/people_helping_people.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/05/people_helping_people.html Wed, 06 May 2009 10:07:21 -0500 Mountains Mountains, to a young child, are everywhere. Adults are giants that can cause a crick in the neck trying to read the expression on that boulder way up there on top of the shoulders. Furniture in the living room is for scaling or burrowing into or behind. Steps on the stairs stretch forever upwards.

The only time we as adults regain some of this perspective is when we visit one of those amusement park features where you enter a room that is scaled so that the furniture is as large to an adult as regular furniture is to a child. It always causes a thrill of excitement and is at the same time somewhat disconcerting. I can recall when we would visit my grandmother in the summers when I was perhaps three or four. One of the many wonderful attractions of her home was Grandmother's Big Bed. Covered in a white patterned coverlet, her bed seemed to be the highest we had ever seen. You couldn't just sit on it or throw yourself down on it. You had to launch yourself up to it. Running for a high leap that might get you far enough up to pull yourself up the rest of the way. Alternatively, you had to climb up the crevasses and intersections made by the footboard. Once up there, you surveyed the entire room from what seemed a great height. The final act in this play always seemed to be the inevitable, king of the mountain contest. Once all the pint-sizes were up, there ensued a general wrestling riot to see who would remain as king and who would topple over the plunging side.

In hindsight, I realize that it was probably not all that extraordinarily high but if you are three foot high and the bed is three and half foot high, then you have a childhood mountain.

Mountains play an interesting iconic role in our culture - places of distance, purity, remoteness, asceticism, challenge. Remote fastnesses that are to be attained but still stand separate.

Perhaps part of this stems from folk memory. With the constant movement of peoples in human history, one group is always in some way encroaching on another, pushing aside, displacing and absorbing the weaker. The stubborn resisters, where numbers do not permit them to effectively turn back the incoming tide, often end up in one of three places; in desolate lands not desired by anyone else, on islands, or in the mountains.

We have wonderful stories of the noble and ascetic cultures of the Highlanders whether they be from Scotland or in other places on earth that scrape the sky, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Andes or Caucuses. In some places these are truly mountainous and almost impossibly inaccessible such as the Andes, Himalayas and Alps. In other circumstances, the peoples of the mountains are really just the people of the higher places: remote - yes but not truly inaccessible. People of the Appalachians, Apennines, Pennines, the Pyrenees, the Central Massif, the Rift Valley, the Atlas mountains, the Ethiopian Highlands, the Caucasus and the Zagros, and the ultimate icon of fierce, remote steadfastness - the Hindu Kush.

Mountains seem to end up as symbols of three different things. They are a place of purity and almost otherworldliness. They are a place of personal challenge, trial and exertion. They are a way of life with many desired attributes but not necessarily desired in itself. The stories we have collected here touch on all three of these elements.

As a place of remoteness and otherworldliness you have James Hilton's classic Lost Horizon, Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King. At the picture book level, Barbara Helen Berger's All the Way to Lhasa, and Ann Nolan Clark's Secret of the Andes.

We are heavy with the challenges of the mountains, primarily the challenge of climbing said mountains or the challenge of surviving said mountains. There are the iconic works by Jean Craighead George about surviving on one's own on a mountain, My Side of the Mountain followed in turn by On The Far Side of the Mountain, and finally Frightful's Mountain. Jon Krakauer's books also capture the exhilaration and terror of the stark mountain terrain in Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Eiger Dreams. It certainly is not primarily a book about mountains but there is a final chapter in Alfred Lansing's Endurance about the survival of the crew of Shackleton's Endurance which culminated in Shackleton and a couple of crew sailing a lifeboat some thousands of miles to the Sandwich Islands, landing on the west side of the island and having to scale the ridge of mountains which had never before been climbed in order to get to the island's whaling station from which they could dispatch a rescue mission to retrieve the remaining members of the crew. The climbing of the mountain ridge is gripping.

Finally there are the books about the people of the mountains. We have a great collection of tales of the people of Appalachia. Cynthia Rylant's Silver Packages is absolutely wonderful as a tale of giving and community and continuity. As is Rosemary Wells' Mary on Horseback, the true story of one of the early health pioneers to bring medical care to isolated communities in the mountains.

There are some great stories here that introduce children and teens to the mysteries and wonders of the mountains. Let us know which you enjoyed and what others you might recommend.



This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

Harold and the Purple Crayon written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson Highly Recommended
Silver Packages by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Chris K. Soentpiet Highly Recommended
All the Way to Lhasa written and illustrated by Barbara Helen Berger Recommended
The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston and illustrated by Barbara Cooney Recommended
Mountain Dance written and illustrated by Thomas Locker Recommended
Maxwell's Mountain by Shari Becker and illustrated by Nicole E. Wong Suggested
Tiger of the Snows by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Ed Young Suggested
Mountains of Tibet written and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein Suggested
Sally Goes to the Mountains written and illustrated by Stephen Huneck Suggested
Henry Climbs a Mountain by D. B. Johnson Suggested
Amber on the Mountain by Tony Johnston and illustrated by Robert Duncan Suggested
Ming Lo Moves the Mountain written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel Suggested
Blue Moon Mountain by Geraldine McCaughrean and illustrated by Nicki Palin and Tomislav Tomic Suggested
The Snow Leopard by Jackie Morris Suggested
The Sun, the Wind and the Rain by Lisa Westberg Peters and illustrated by Ted Rand Suggested
Planet Earth by Leonie Pratt and illustrated by Andy Tudor and Tim Haggerty Suggested
Mountains by Seymour Simon Suggested
Wild Places by Angela Wilkes and illustrated by Peter Dennis Suggested
How Mountains Are Made by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld and illustrated by James Graham Hale Suggested


Independent Reader

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George Highly Recommended
Heidi by Johanna Spyri and illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith Highly Recommended
The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning and illustrated by Kate Greenaway Recommended
Ida Early Comes over the Mountain by Robert Burch Recommended
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain by Alice Dalgliesh and illustrated by Helen Sewell Recommended
The Secret of Skull Mountain by Franklin W. Dixon Recommended
Frightful's Mountain by Jean Craighead George Recommended
On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George Recommended
Dogsong by Gary Paulsen Recommended
When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Diane Goode Recommended
Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman Recommended
Mary on Horseback by Rosemary Wells Recommended
Wish You Well by David Baldacci Suggested
High as a Hawk by T. A. Barron and illustrated by Ted Lewin Suggested
Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark and Jean Charlot Suggested
Over the Mountains by Michael Collier Suggested
Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler Suggested
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale Suggested
The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key Suggested
The Contest by Gordon Korman Suggested
To the Top! by Sydelle Kramer and illustrated by Thomas Lapadula Suggested
Christy by Catherine Marshall Suggested
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen Suggested
The Fear Place by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Suggested
The Haymeadow by Gary Paulsen Suggested
Mystery on Everest by Audrey Salkeld Suggested
Blind Mountain by Jane Resh Thomas Suggested
The Donner Party by Roger Wachtel Suggested


Young Adult

Endurance by Alfred Lansing Highly Recommended
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Recommended
Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado Recommended
Alive by Piers Paul Read Recommended
The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti and Robert Marshall Suggested
High Exposure by David Breashears Suggested
My Life As an Explorer by Sven Anders Hedin and Lisa Thomas Suggested
Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer Suggested
Between A Rock And A Hard Place by Aron Ralston Suggested
Peak by Roland Smith Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/03/mountains_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/03/mountains_1.html Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:08:15 -0500 William Shakespeare
"The English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven" wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Perhaps the two single largest tributaries are works created in the same twenty year span, the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare established himself as one of the major tributaries and has forever affected the flow of English literature, theater, language and philosophy. The breadth of his work in a mere thirty-eight plays (when many of his contemporary playwrights were writing and producing between fifty and a hundred plays or more) and a couple of hundred poems is quite remarkable.

Was there something unique about him or was he just in the right place at the right time. There are some milestone contributors to our Western Civilization whose contributions to our knowledge and way of thinking are much more specific, concrete and therefore more safely indisputable. Aristotle, Newton, Einstein all leap to mind. A writer is always going to be on more tenuous ground. An Aristotle changes our way of thinking about the world by changing our mental models. A Shakespeare changes the flavor of our thinking as it were.

There is no denying that there was something in the air and in the environment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all of Europe was blooming. Populations were resurging from the devastation of the black plague epidemics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. New ways of thinking were in the air. Exploration was pushing back the boundaries of ignorance and widening the scope of trade.

With the resurgence of population and the filling up of empty spaces across Europe, there was a knitting together of isolated populations. In Britain, the regional speech patterns were more than curious accents: an East Anglian might be close to incomprehensible to someone from Cornwall just as someone from Schleswig-Holstein might be to someone from Bavaria. With the spread of population came the reestablishment of roads and local trade. Isolated dialects came into greater contact with one another. The national languages became enriched by regional contributions. The advent of the printing press and more particularly, the increased use of local vernaculars instead of Latin, led to efforts to standardize spelling and grammar. We can read and comprehend Shakespeare as if he were writing within our lifetime instead of four hundred years ago. Another great author, Geoffrey Chaucer, writing just a century and a half before Shakespeare, is virtually incomprehensible to us unless translated.

Cervantes (Spanish and a contemporary of Shakespeare's) and other commanding authors such as Goethe (Germany) and Dante (Italy) all stood athwart this two or three century period of cultural and linguistic exuberance and some portion of their enduring fame is probably a function of being in the right place and the right time. And no doubt, Shakespeare was an extraordinary beneficiary by being the dominating author in the language that became the lingua franca of the modern world.

Yet it wasn't solely luck and passively showing up at the right place and time. Shakespeare's contemporaries were in his lifetime already recognizing and affirming his enduring greatness. As noted playwright and Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson wrote at that time, Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time."

In this period of linguistic flux, Shakespeare seized upon the language and made it sing, made it answer his bidding and made it a tool to be used as it had never been used before. Many hundreds of words have their first documented usage in Shakespeare's plays. Words we take for granted such accommodation, assassination, dexterously, dislocate, indistinguishable, obscene, pedant, premeditated, reliance, submerged. All of these were mustered into service by Shakespeare.

It was not just neologisms which marked Shakespeare. It was also his turn of phrase. A British journalist has in a couple of passages, made the point of just how deep a mark he has made on our day-to-day language. As Bernard Levin noted,
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have ever played fast and loose, if you have ever been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was as dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! For goodness; sake! What the dickens! But me no buts - it is alone to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.
Any one of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays is a playground of new words, and familiar phrases that have entered our everyday language. Take Hamlet for instance, one of his most admired works. Here is just a sampling of the turns of phrase that have crept into our familiar patterns of speech:
Frailty, thy name is woman!
More in sorrow than in anger
The primrose path of dalliance
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
The time is out of joint
Brevity is the soul of wit
More matter with less art
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it
The play's the thing
To be or not to be: that is the question
A king of shreds and patches
I must be cruel, only to be kind
Alas poor Yorick
A hit, a very palpable hit
The rest is silence
It's like the old joke: Lady comes out of the theater having seen Hamlet for the first time. "I don't see what all the fuss is about. It's just a bunch of quotes strung together."

The breadth and depth of Shakespeare's work is astonishing. Histories, dramas and comedies are certainly part of it but more critically, in the same play he wrote a script that appealed to the privileged and the penurious, to the educated and the untutored, to men and to women, to the bawdy and to the refined. The audiences in his Globe Theater all saw the same play and came away with the Bard having told them each a different story according to their own circumstance.

Without a doubt, perhaps the brightest literary star in any language. But! When and how to introduce him to children? His language does have some archaic turns of phrase. There are allusions that are predicated upon some knowledge of the classics and of history. Perhaps most challenging, many of his works hang on a knowledge and experience of the full range of human character. Most children are lacking in much of this knowledge and experience. They have not trod life's stage long enough to comprehend.

Indeed, Jonson might have expanded his famous observation to 'was not of an age, but for all time and all ages', for Shakespeare, in a way different from virtually every author, is a pleasure for life and an ever fresh companion. There are always new turns of phrase that you come across. Just the other day I was listening to an audio book version of Macbeth and a phrase registered that I had never paid attention to before. Banquo mentions that if he doesn't get a move on, he "must become a borrower of the night" i.e. if he doesn't start now he will have to travel after sunset.

That is one of the pleasures of reading Shakespeare. He is not only a master dramatist and poet, but he is akin to a wonderful puzzle, forcing you to fit into the mind of a person from a different time and place. Where activities ended at sunset and where speech was often allusive and indirect. In Henry IV, Pistol refers to his youthful carousing with that archetypal ne'er-do-well, Falstaff, and alludes to their having "seen the seven stars." This is exactly the sort of allusion that frustrates some children and intrigues others. The seven stars are the Pleiades, typically seen in the darkest hours of night. So one child will read this and go Huh! while another will puzzle their way into understanding that this is Shakespeare's indirect way of saying that Pistol and Falstaff drank their way into the wee hours of the night.

As life advances, I find myself not only continuing to re-read (and always finding more insight from) the plays that have always been my favorites (Macbeth, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest) but over time, reading and discovering the other plays that once left me indifferent. I am still growing into them even at this late stage.

Given that Shakespeare is truly an adult entertainment and most often requires adult sensibilities and life experiences, does it even make sense to introduce him to children. I think so, if only to counter the often pervasive myth that Shakespeare is too old, or too archaic, or too irrelevant.. In our perennial popular desire to turn away from gold in pursuit of pyrite, our institutions of learning cannot necessarily be relied upon to do Shakespeare justice.

I think the best approach is to plow the field in anticipation of a child later being exposed to Shakespeare for the first time and inoculate them against the prejudice towards past greatness. A favorite book I used with our children, and which is regrettably out of print, was Gina Pollinger's Something Rich and Strange, a selection of quotations and passages from Shakespeare in a heavily illustrated format. They might not be old enough to follow and understand the full story but children are always old enough to enjoy the music and magic of Shakespeare's language.

There is of course the perennial retelling of Shakespeare's stories by Charles and Mary Lamb in Tales from Shakespeare and more contemporaneously, Bruce Corville also retells most of the major play while retaining as much of the original dialogue as possible. Don't miss Edith Nesbit's retelling of a dozen Shakespeare plays in The Children's Shakespeare.

There are many quite good stories that are based on Shakespeare's life and times such as The King of Shadows by Susan Cooper or The Shakespeare Stealer series by Gary L. Blackwood. Even for young readers there are some happy choices such as Don Freeman's Will's Quill, or How a Goose Saved Shakespeare, and Marcia Williams' Tales From Shakespeare (retellings illustrated in cartoon style). There are also irreverent guides to Shakespeare that might particularly appeal to a Fifth Grade sense of humor such as Wayne Hill's Shakespeare's Insults.

Instead of praising Shakespeare further, let's leave with a sampling of one of the all-time greatest speeches as rendered by Shakespeare - that of King Henry V at Agincourt, the St. Crispin Day speech:
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.



This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare and Marina Kastan Recommended
William Shakespeare & the Globe by Aliki Suggested
Shakespeare's Quill by Gerry Bailey and Karen Foster and illustrated by Leighton Noyes and Karen Radford Suggested
Wills Quill, Or, How a Goose Saved Shakespeare by Don Freeman Suggested
Shakespeare Cats by Susan Herbert Suggested
Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard by Gregory Rogers Suggested
Bard of Avon by Peter Vennema and Diane Stanley Suggested
Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams Suggested
More Tales From Shakespeare by Marcia Williams Suggested
Macbeth for Kids by Lois Burdett & William Shakespeare Suggested
Twelfth Night by Lois Burdett and Christine Coburn Suggested
A Midsummer Night's Dream by Lois Burdett Suggested
Much Ado About Nothing for Kids by Lois Burdett Suggested
Hamlet by Lois Burdett and William Shakespeare Suggested
The Tempest by Lois Burdett and William Shakespeare Suggested
A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare by Lois Burdett Suggested


Independent Reader

The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood Recommended
Shakespeare's Scribe by Gary L. Blackwood Recommended
Shakespeare's Spy by Gary L. Blackwood Recommended
Enter Three Witches by Caroline B. Cooney Recommended
King of Shadows by Susan Cooper Recommended
Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Michael Foreman Recommended
Shakespeare Stories II by Leon Garfield and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Michael Foreman Recommended
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb and illustrated by Joelle Jolivet Recommended
The Children's Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Rolf Klep Recommended
Shakespeare by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Robert R. Ingpen Recommended
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt Recommended
William Shakespeare's Hamlet by Bruce Coville and illustrated by Leonid Gore Recommended
William Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream by Bruce Coville and illustrated by Dennis Nolan Recommended
William Shakespeare's Macbeth by Bruce Coville and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Gary Kelley Recommended
Romeo and Juliet by Bruce Coville and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Dennis Nolan Recommended
William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale by Bruce Coville and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Leuyen Pham Recommended
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by Bruce Coville and William Shakespeare and illustrated by Tim Raglin Recommended
Shakespeare: The Bard's Guide to Abuses and Affronts by William Shakespeare Recommended
Romeo and Juliet Together and Alive at Last by Avi Suggested
Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach Suggested
Welcome to the Globe! by Peter Chrisp Suggested
Shakespeare by Peter Chrisp and illustrated by Steve Teague Suggested
Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute Suggested
Something Rotten by Alan M. Gratz Suggested
Shakespeare's Insults by William Shakespeare, Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen Suggested
William Shakespeare edited by David Scott Kasten and Marina Kastan and illustrated by Glenn Harrington Suggested
Shakespeare Bats Cleanup by Ronald Koertge Suggested
Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer Suggested
Tales from Shakespeare by Tina Packer and illustrated by various Recommended
William Shakespeare by Stewart Ross Suggested


Young Adult

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson Recommended
Great Books by David Denby Recommended
William Shakespeare Complete Works edited by Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen and Heloise Senechal Suggested
Shakespeare by Harold Bloom Suggested
Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell Suggested
The Playmaker by J. B. Cheaney Suggested
Shakespeare's Words by David Crystal and Ben Crystal Suggested
Dating Hamlet by Lisa Fiedler and William Shakespear Suggested
So You Think You Know Shakespeare? by Clive Gifford Suggested
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare and edited by Roma Gill Suggested
Will In The World by Stephen Greenblatt Suggested
The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber Suggested
Coined by Shakespeare by Jeff McQuain and Stanley Malless and illustrated by R.O. Blechman Suggested
Swan Town by Michael J. Ortiz Suggested
Scribbler of Dreams by Mary E. Pearson Suggested
Will by Christopher Rush Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/02/william_shakespeare.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/02/william_shakespeare.html Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:29:47 -0500 Utopias Utopia - 1: an imaginary and indefinitely remote place. 2 often capitalized : a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions. 3: an impractical scheme for social improvement. Where are the Utopias in our children's books? They are surprisingly scarce on the ground. Justifiably, I guess, as it is probably oxymoronic to have a Utopia and dramatic tension. Happy endings - Yes. Quests for some better place - Yes. Dystopic worlds - by the galaxy full. But descriptions of an ideal place - pretty thin on the ground.

Why should this be? Well, perhaps it is that when our children are young, we shield them from painful realities; we are still coaxing them into a difficult world trying to use excitement and happiness. Our real world efforts to build Utopias have had a pretty dismal track record and don't fit too well with that agenda of happiness and excitement.

Part of it is perhaps disposition. Those authors that are fully engaged with the weakness of human nature and can, without jaundiced eye, view our strivings and shortfalls and capture them most artfully are the ones least likely to believe in a Utopia which by its nature is predicated on the rational perfectibility of man. Those writers that believe in the perfectibility of man through reason are perhaps a bit didactic and prone to write treatises rather than rip-roaring adventure stories.

All our collective modern efforts to achieve an engineered state of affairs where happiness and fulfillment reign, have ended in tragedy - Nationalism, National Socialism, Communism, Fascism. All are predicated on the belief that man can be educated or forced into a perfect world. All have end up being exercises in totalitarianism.

From our earliest writings, we have the pattern that has remained true down the ages: the Bible instructs that Utopia/Eden cannot be attained through man's efforts alone. Virtually all our stories follow this model. An ideal world is postulated to exist, people strive to get there or bring it into being. If they do, though, it always proves to be illusory. Something core to being human has been abandoned (H.G. Wells' The Time Machine) or the achievement is a temporary one before human nature reasserts itself (Mallory's Morte d'Arthur and the full panoply of the Arthurian legends of Camelot).

Utopias of whatever kind usually end up being used by authors as a foil for illuminating the nature of man.

There is, though, another aspect of Utopias that makes them almost inherently misanthropic and that is an incapacity to accommodate variety or the unexpected. Almost all Utopias are predicated upon some form of predictability (often enforced as with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984) or capacity to shield themselves from undesired change (such as James Hilton's Lost Horizon).

Change and engagement with the world are part of the human condition and part of the excitement for children growing up. They look forward with varying degrees of trepidation or excitement to the next big adventure, the next big milestone of accomplishment.

So most of the stories about some idyllic Utopia are really cast as a morality tale - Be careful what you wish for. That message, particularly for younger children, is usually delivered through rhymes, folktales and legends. We don't really need Utopias to carry that meme along.

There are a couple of utopia-like stories at the picture book level but most of the candidates are with Independent Readers and most especially at the Young Adult level. The slings and arrows of middle school have sensitized children to some of the more Machiavellian and dark elements of the human condition. It has predisposed them to regard the heartfelt plea "Can't we all just get along" as a nice sentiment with little probability of eventuating on its own accord.

For all that there aren't all that many Utopia based books out there, I think it is worthwhile having them around. They are actually an entertaining introduction to the questions underpinning all philosophy - how do we regulate our affairs to lead a good life. Getting children to consider these issues in the context of a story is a good launching point for more serious philosophical considerations.

Lord of the Flies was my introduction to this very narrow subgenre. I read it at perhaps twelve or fourteen and initially read it solely as an action/survival story. Having read it though, I found myself rereading it a number of times, fascinated by this idyllic paradise in the South Pacific, trying to understand what went wrong and how to deal with a situation where your opponents don't want to negotiate or resolve or compromise. They just want you to die or submit. Oddly pertinent to the conundrum we face on the world stage at this time.

For somewhat older readers there is always the practical lessons of managing affairs as relate by Machiavelli in The Prince and Ayn Rand's massive but still intriguing and relevant Atlas Shrugged.

There are other well-known tales which either skirt around the issues of god governance and the nature of man (Gulliver's Travels for example) or which explore the dangers of a putative utopia (Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm for example). I can only think of a couple truly cheery utopia like places in the independent reader levels, specifically The Wizard of Oz and Twenty-One Balloons.

We have put together a list below that is heavy on stories for IR and YA. What books can you think of that introduce children to the idea of an ideal world and how to achieve it?

This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

Hey, Al by Arthur Yorinks and illustrated by Richard Egielski Highly Recommended


Independent Reader

The Wonderful World of Oz by L. Frank Baum Highly Recommended
Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene Du Bois Highly Recommended
Lord of the Flies by William Golding Highly Recommended
Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley Highly Recommended
1984 by George Orwell Highly Recommended
Animal Farm by George Orwell Highly Recommended
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift Recommended
Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien Highly Recommended
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Highly Recommended
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley Highly Recommended
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and illustrated by Scott McKowen Recommended
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss and illustrated by Louis John Rhead Recommended


Young Adult

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams Highly Recommended
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth Highly Recvommended
Lost Horizon by James Hilton Recommended
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Recommended
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Recommended
Four Plays by Aristophanes by Aristophanes and translated by William Arrowsmith Suggested
The City of God by Saint Augustine and translated by Marcus Dods Suggested
Erewhon by Samuel Butler Suggested
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach Suggested
Island by Aldous Huxley Suggested
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin Suggested
Utopia by Thomas More Suggested
News from Nowhere and Other Writings by William Morris Suggested
The Republic of Plato by Plato and translated by Allan David Bloom Suggested
Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/02/utopias_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/02/utopias_1.html Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:05:32 -0500 Urban Living
Despite an idealization of the bucolic countryside with shaded glades and an easier pace of life, cities, since their inception some five thousand years ago, have exercised an inexorable pull of people from the country to urban life. The frank truth is that the myth of the noble savage and the free-loving native in a natural Eden are precisely that; a myth. Over the long haul, and usually even the short haul, city living, despite the sacrifices and the adjustments to personal habits that it requires, has been by far the better bargain for most people. People live longer in the city, enjoy better health, are richer, have greater gender equity, enjoy greater access to education and cultural resources, have lower infant mortality, etc. Not every single person, to be sure, but overall, the lesson is just about iron clad. Forget about going west: go to the city to seek your fortune.

City living is a technological, cultural, economic and political outcome not a function of the size of your country. Australia, a continent sized country with 20 million people, is more urbanized (91%) than the Netherlands with 16 million people on a virtual sliver of land where urbanization is measured at 90%. This despite Australia having 465 times as much land.

Modern man exited Africa about 75-100,000 years ago. The first walled towns or villages showed up around ten thousand years ago (Jericho in Israel at nearly five thousand years is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world). Cities showed up first in the Middle East; Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Persia then began appearing in Asia and Europe.

So - a hundred thousand years for the emergence of modern man; ten thousand years for the first towns; and last year for most people to now be living in a city. Progress of a sort.

What's so special then about cities that everyone seems to want to live in one? Well, there are the obvious reasons mentioned above which might be best summarized as opportunity and development. With one or two occasional (and usually temporary), exceptions there is a high correlation between the basic measures of well-being and the degree of a country's urbanization.

Why is this? Cities exist because of a capacity to generate surplus wealth (whether measured in baskets of grain, gold, or credits in a ledger). For most of our history as humans, we have been prey to weather, natural disasters, disease, and endemic warfare at a tribal level. That endemic warfare was in turn a function of insufficient productivity, people did not have enough to eat and so they sought to take what they needed from others.

With the first surpluses, people needed for the first time to band together to protect those surpluses. They began to have the capacity to plan not just for the next season's harvest but for things longer term. Roads, irrigation, permanent dwellings, etc. Planning required greater social cooperation and coordination. Urban dwellers moved beyond egalitarian familial decision making or close communal decisions based on the extended tribe. They had to develop new and more efficient forms of collective decision making involving people beyond their immediate family or tribe.

At the same time, with greater surpluses, cities were not only able to create larger more efficient forms of decision making, planning, and execution, but they also created the environment for new and more ideas and skills (such as writing) to be transmitted between individuals and from one generation and the next. More ideas among more people inevitably led to new ideas, new inventions.

The process of urbanization is therefore tightly bound up with the development of new forms of government (and gracious knows we have tried a lot of those), new forms of economy (trade, manufacturing and now the knowledge economy), new forms of technological development and new forms of cultural expression.

The archaeological evidence of early cities shows that this was not an easy or inevitably virtuous cycle. Concentrated power (politics) with larger and more concentrated wealth (economy and technology) led to a greater capacity for both improvement but also disaster. Greater concentrations of wealth in towns and cities made them natural targets for quick programs of income redistribution by foragers, farmers and passing raiders. This is of course why most early cities are in part characterized by defensive walls. Members not of the community had to be kept out because they were not part of the communal miracle of productivity and were likely to want to take the fruits of that productivity without exerting the disciplines required to create it.

Cities have not had an easy time but they have a winning promise to those willing to adapt to the disciplines and regulations required to make communal living among strangers feasible. For all that cities have attracted violent attention and have created the capacity to inflict destruction (through larger armies and advanced technology), it is clear that, despite our assumptions of an earlier Eden, the rural existence of foragers and farmers was far more violent. Evidence from the historical record as well as contemporary anthropological studies indicate that mortality among forager and agricultural communities from inflicted violence seems to uniformly range from a low of 5% to levels of 30%, i.e. 30% of all people died from some form of inflicted violence (punishment, war, personal attack, etc.). In most OECD countries over the past one hundred years, despite world wars, regional conflicts and what often seem to us as excessive levels of criminal violence, the mortality rate from violence is in the very low single digits. Almost everyone can anticipate dying from old age or disease.

Cities are a marked level of improvement for virtually all people on virtually all measures. Yet we seem to have an exceptionally ambivalent view of urbanization. We romanticize the rural past. We often directly or indirectly demonize the city.

Partly this is an artifact of history. Writers of children's books of the 1930's and earlier and through the 1960's had mostly grown up in rural and small town America. (America's urbanization stands at 76% and the big transition from country to city occurred between the World Wars and shortly thereafter.) Though they practiced their craft in the cities, they took as their subjects the idyllic recollection of their youth. Think of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Huck Finn in particular has attracted all sorts of dissertations as an emblem of the noble savage being suffocated by civilization and town living. Think of the works of Robert McCloskey (Lentil, Homer Price, Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, etc.) and Virginia Lee Burton (Katie and the Big Snow, The Little House, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel) all of which idolize rural or small town living. Granted McCloskey did have a nice portrayal of Boston in Make Way for Ducklings and Burton to some extent of San Francisco with Maybelle the Cable Car. But the ratio sort of tells the story.

More contemporary authors deal with cities in a somewhat more favorable light but still often in a markedly ambivalent manner. Cities might be good but we aren't sure about that. If you look at a list of the most commonly cited children's books among librarians, teachers, parents, etc. among the top one hundred titles, about a third are set in the country or small towns and/or depict the countryside in a very positive fashion (e.g. The Secret Garden, The Little House, Little House on the Prairie, My Side of the Mountain, Pippi Longstocking, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Blueberries for Sal, etc.)

Slightly less than 15% depict cities in a positive light, even making a fairly generous allowance for what is positive or considered urban (e.g. Mr. Popper's Penguins, Madeline, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Cricket in Times Square, All-of-a-Kind Family, etc.)

Given how critical cities are and have been to our progress and well being, surely they deserve a better shake than this. This is not to undercut country and small town living by any means. But what are some of the books that are set in the city and that celebrate the advantages of city living? Below is a cut at some of those tales.

Enjoy these representations of city living and let us know of others that you and your children might have enjoyed.


This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults

The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults


Picture Books

Make Way for Ducklings written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey Highly Recommended
The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small Highly Recommended
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile written and illustrated by Bernard Waber Highly Recommended
House on East Eighty-Eighth Street written and illustrated by Bernard Waber Highly Recommended
The Adventures of Taxi Dog by Debra Barracca and Sal Barracca and illustrated by Mark Buehner Recommended
Peppe the Lamplighter by Elisa Bartone and illustrated by Ted Lewin Recommended
Madeline written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans Recommended
C Is for City by Nikki Grimes and illustrated by Pat Cummings Recommended
Alphabet City by Stephen Johnson Recommended
The Journey by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small Recommended
City Mouse-Country Mouse and Two More Mouse Tales from Aesop by Aesop and illustrated by John Wallner Suggested
Urban Roosts written and illustrated by Barbara Bash Suggested
Madeline in London written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans Suggested
The Little House written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton Suggested
Katy and the Big Snow written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton Suggested
Abuela by Arthur Dorros and illustrated by Elisa Kleven Suggested
Good Night New York City by Adam Gamble and illustrated by Joe Veno Suggested
Sky Boys by Deborah Hopkinson and illustrated by James E. Ransome Suggested
My New York Holiday written and illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen Suggested
Taxi by Betsy Maestro and Giulio Maestro Suggested
This Is London written and illustrated by Miroslav Sasek Suggested
New York Is English, Chattanooga Is Creek written and illustrated by Christopher Raschka Suggested
You Can't Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman and illustrated by Robin Preiss-Glasser Suggested
Sky Scrape/City Scape edited by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Ken Condon Suggested
The Wheels on the Bus illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky Suggested
Trashy Town by Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha and illustrated by Dan Yaccarino Suggested


Independent Reader

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. (ILT) Denslow Highly Recommended
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and illustrated by Tasha Tudor Highly Recommended
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake Highly Recommended
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden and illustrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended
All-Of-A-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor Highly Recommended
Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers and illustrated by Mary Shepard Highly Recommended
Stuart Little by E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond and illustrated by Peggy Fortnum Recommended
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg Recommended
Underground by David MacAulay Recommended
Sahara Special by Esme Raji Codell Suggested
The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright Suggested
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh Suggested
Snow in August by Pete Hamill Suggested
The Best of Nancy Drew Classic Collection by Carolyn Keene Suggested
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace Suggested
145th Street by Walter Dean Myers Suggested
Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer and illustrated by Valenti Angelo Suggested
Child of the Owl by Laurence Yep Suggested
Rats by Paul Zindel Suggested


Young Adult

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith Recommended
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/01/urban_living.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2009/01/urban_living.html Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:57:32 -0500 Magical Toys toys under the tree. We don't usually think about it in this way but this is the time when the imaginative juices are primed. There are unfamiliar and intriguing smells from the kitchen, sparkling and enchanting decorations about the house, lights of rarely encountered hues are to be seen around the neighborhood, songsheets of music new to young ears and for whom Joy to the World or Little Town of Bethlehem are still fresh and have no whiff of nostalgia. There is an unusual inward turning, the building up of time with family, a reknitting together of strands that might have become frayed through a busy year. Traditions and family rituals, unfamiliar or forgotten by young minds, are given new life.

Some of our most powerful children's stories bring together the elements of this season - hope, imagination, magic, and toys. It is worth recollecting these powerful stories because they also become part of our future lives and those treasures that we in turn hand to our children.

E.T.A. Hoffman, a German author (1776-1822), was born in that geographically quixotic city of Konigsberg, Prussia, now known as the exclave of Russia, Kaliningrad. He was a leading exemplar of German Romanticism and suffered from a surfeit of talent. He earned his living primarily as a lawyer/jurist but wrote music, plays and poetry as well as painted. The work for which he is best known today is his Nussknacker und Mausekonig; Nutcracker and Mouse King written in 1816. The Nutcracker received a new lease on life through the magic of Tchaikovsky who accepted a commission to translate Hoffman's work into a two act fantasy ballet which premiered December 1892 (seventy years after Hoffman's death).

Since the original work is long out of copyright, there are many, many different versions floating around. Indeed, the French author, Alexandre Dumas (of Three Musketeers fame) did an adaptation of the original in 1847 and it was in fact that version that served as the basis for Tchaikovsky's work. The best retellings, while simplifying the story line somewhat, capture the sense of magic and imagination in the original as well as the element of mystery, suspense and danger. There is a certain darkness in the tale which characterizes some of the other deep classics that appeal to young children generation after generation. Think of motherless Peter Pan and the Lost Boys; of the tragic fate of Andersen's Little Mermaid; of the immolation of the Steadfast Tin Soldier.

The story of the Nutcracker is that of Maria Stahlbaum, a young girl in Frankfurt, eagerly awaiting the Christmas Eve party to which family (including her mysterious godfather Drosselmeyer) and friends are invited. She and her brother Fritz are given a beautiful nutcracker in the shape of a soldier by their godfather Drosselmeyer. That night, Christmas Eve night, the nutcracker appears to come to life to fight the evil mice, enchant Maria, whisk her to his far away kingdom (for after defeating the Mouse King he assumes his real form as a Prince upon whom a spell had been placed), and then, before dawn, resumes his shape as a nutcracker so that he might always be with her.

After all the phantasmagorical scenes and activities, the story ends (in Daniel Walden's retelling) with Maria's mother telling her:
"If Nutcracker came alive, it was because you like him so well. If you love something very much it is always alive . . . What a funny child you are today! Now get washed and dressed and have your breakfast. I'll light the fire."
Thus is achieved that close juxtaposition of magic and the quotidian which is inherent to every child discovering the world for the first time. And like all masterpieces of this nature, you are left wondering what really happened - what was real and what was imagined.

The Nutcracker is a wonderful tale but it is deep and it is dark and can be interpreted at many different levels. It is often better suited for slightly older children, perhaps six or eight years old. For young adults, it is actually a very interesting case study for trying to tie what was going on in the author's world (Napoleonic invasions of Prussia where Hoffman was living, Hoffman's personal careening between careers, etc.) to the text that he then created.

The final lines of Nutcracker are the central premise of Margery Williams Bianco's The Velveteen Rabbit, that love is not only a transformative experience but can actually transform things. A child receives a toy rabbit for Christmas but quickly sets him aside for other baubles. Later he takes up with the toy rabbit again and comes to love it deeply, so deeply that the rabbit is his critical companion as he suffers through a life threatening illness. He recovers but the toy rabbit is set aside to be burned as part of the general sanitization after the illness. It is then that the rabbit discovers that he has been so well loved that he becomes real. No simple summary of this tale can really capture, though, how much it touches the heart.

The transformative power of love is similarly central to the Hans Christian Andersen tale of The Steadfast Tin Soldier of which there are a number of excellent versions.

The Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy stories are simple masterpieces of delight for young boys and girls, relating the adventures of Ann and Andy who are stoical and immobile when people are about but play and have numerous adventures and misadventures with the other toys when left unwatched. Written and illustrated by Johnny Gruelle and based on a real doll he had given his own daughter, the Raggedy Ann and Andy stories were written in the 1910's through the 1920's and there is a whiff of the era in the books but largely they exist in that timeless world of a child's imagination.

The Adventures of Pinnocchio is yet another in these tales where a toy comes to life but differs in that, for most of the book, Pinnocchio is not a real little boy but an animated marionette. The Adventures of Pinnocchio is recognizable to many because of the Walt Disney version, but as is often the case, the original is much deeper and with more dark elements than managed to make it into the cartoon. This is not a bad thing. The story has more substance and less froth than the cartoon and keeps a child gripped when hearing the tale and coming back to it again and again.

One of my personal favorites, partly for the story, but mostly for the pictures is the perennial childhood favorite, The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, a house name for the original publisher, Platt & Munk. There have been subsequent releases illustrated by others but I think for sheer magical inspiration, none of them hold a candle to the original version illustrated by George and Doris Hauman.

Moving a little further afield from the magical toy theme you have others such as Winnie the Pooh and Polar the Titanic Bear in which there is no claim of magic per se. Instead you have a much loved toy that has a life of its own (Pooh) or some consciousness (Polar). Polar the Titanic Bear is based on a true story and is tremendously poignant, one of a good handful of discoveries I have made of newer books when reading to my children when they were young.

What I think is most wonderful about these type of stories is that, while often poignant and touching, they are also fun and affirming. Take a look at the list of books below and let us know which ones you enjoy or others you might recommend.


Picture Books

The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper and illustrated by George and Doris Hauman Highly Recommended
Raggedy Andy Stories written and illustrated by Johnny Gruelle Highly Recommended
Raggedy Ann Stories written and illustrated by Johnny Gruelle Highly Recommended
The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated by P. J. Lynch Recommended
Corduroy written and illustrated by Don Freeman Recommended
The Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffmann and illustrated by Don Daily Recommended
Santa Calls written and illustrated by William Joyce Recommended
Polar the Titanic Bear by Daisy Corning Stone Spedden and illustrated by Laurie McGraw Recommended
Arthur's Honey Bear by Lillian Hoban Suggested
The Nutcracker by Stephanie Spinner and illustrated by Peter Malone Suggested
Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson and illustrated by Daniel Kirk Suggested


Independent Reader

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco and illustrated by William Nicholson Highly Recommended
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco and illustrated by Michael Hague Highly Recommended
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline Recommended
Hitty by Rachel Field Recommended
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and illustrated by Roberto Innocenti Recommended
The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman Recommended
Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence Suggested
The Doll People by Ann M. Martin and illustrated by Laura Godwin and Brian Selznick Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/12/magical_toys.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/12/magical_toys.html Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:59:01 -0500 Frontiersman and Native American Interactions settlers/pioneers and the Native American peoples already in place. What makes this arena of storytelling so fascinating is that we have not collectively yet settled on a narrative structure. We don't know how the story goes or even how we want it to go.

It is easy in hindsight to believe that our present is the ineluctable result of the past. It did not appear so to those at the time though. Some of our most popular narratives, current and recent past, are simply poor didactic fictions crafted from an inability to imagine what life was like then.

Folktales, biblical stories and classical texts were more deeply and pervasively known then than now and helped shape an interpretation of all new encounters. On the other hand, current information of what was going on around them was notably sparse and slow to disseminate. In fact, the population of knowledge was pretty much just the opposite of today when one can count less and less on people sharing a common literary or cultural knowledge but can anticipate much greater awareness of the score of last night's game or the latest twist in some Hollywood celebrity's love life. We bring to our view of people of the past an expectation that we know how they thought and judge them by our current standards without allowing for our privileged position of knowing how particular stories ended.

In the very earliest days of the settlement of the America's there was a tendency to demonize Native Americans. They were the element out there beyond the settled boundaries where danger lurked. They raided settlements, butchered settlers and carried off women and children. They were savage and unpredictable.

Later, by the middle of the last century, these savage devils had morphed in popular representation into two dimensional characters in head-dresses and smoking peace-pipes. No longer relevant or a present danger, they were not represented in a malicious way or demonized; simply dismissed as quixotic, amusing, and irrelevant.

In the past twenty-five years, this imaging has morphed yet again, this time, either intentionally or accidentally, representing Native Americans as victims of a concerted ethnic cleansing. There is a greater inclination to attempt to understand this period of history from the Native American perspective, which is a worthwhile counterbalance to what came before which was mostly from the pioneers' perspective. It is ironic, though, that this contemporary storytelling is as ethnically insensitive and stereotyping as its predecessors but equally blind to that fact. In the modern telling, the Native Americans still lack agency - the capacity to demonstrate that they are individuals responsible for themselves and capable of crafting a life of dignity that may or may not, like everyone else, be marked with the outward trimmings of success.

It is all in how you view things. Most people are now aware that Leif Ericson and other Vikings made it to North America in 1000 AD and established an early, albeit in the event, temporary, settlement in Newfoundland. In fact, temporary settlements scattered along the northwestern coast of Canada continued for more than a decade before contact eventually dwindled away. While there were many likely reasons that this initial European discovery of and early settlement in North America failed, one significant reason is clear from the Vikings own writings; the resistance of the native skraelings, Native Americans. I think most people simply dismiss this first interaction as a simple false-start of settlement by Northern Europeans and think no further of it. The other way of considering this particular historical interlude is to view it as the first successful defeat of a new migratory invasion into North America. The Vikings were at the tail end of horrendously long "supply" line of several thousand miles. The technology differential between Native Americans and Europeans was not as dramatically wide in 1000 as it would be in 1500. Never-the-less, the Vikings were no pushovers. Viking raids, conquests and settlements extended over much of Europe (the British Isles, Russia, France, Germany, Poland, into Spain, etc.). The resistance and effective casting out of the Viking invaders from North America is a little recognized accomplishment in the pioneer history of North America.

The later discovery and settlement of North America by Europeans was a messy and uncoordinated affair with many cultures (on the European side) encountering many cultures (on the Native American side) and elements within each group seeking to align with elements of the other to wrest advantage over their traditional enemies: British seeking alliances with Native American tribes to contest incursions by the French and vice versa. Likewise between the British and the Spanish. Various elements of the Algonquin tribes sought alliances with the British against other traditional Native American tribes. Everyone viewed the other players as pawns to continue the battles with which they were already familiar.

Further, there was the complication of not only nationality but religion also. Protestants versus Catholics in this New World and even sect against sect such as Protestant Calvinists versus Church of England Protestants. The interaction between Plains Indians and settlers was not simply that between Native Americans and Europeans but the still more ancient contest between nomads and farmers.

Native Americans were decimated by the hidden enemy of new pathogens introduced into the continent by the new arrivals: smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, measles, etc. all took their massive toll. The technological gap was a gulf this time around compared to the 1000s. The numbers were different too - and they had to be for history to have taken the course it took.

We too quickly forget the simple numbers. Mortality rates of 10-30% per voyage by the early settlers were not unusual. Annual mortality rates in most settlements were 30-70% in the early years. Native American tribes, devastated as they were by diseases, were frighteningly effective in their early and continued resistance. They demonstrated remarkable flexibility in trying to navigate the tumultuous political waters created by the new invaders. The Indian Massacre of 1622 (resurrected in Ivan Noel Hume's book, Martin's Hundred), fifteen years after the settlement of Jamestown, repulsed English settlement in the vicinity for another generation.

King Phillip's War in 1675, effectively a coordinated alliance between numerous previously contentious Native American tribes to reverse the tide of immigration, was disastrous for both sides, but might easily have succeeded given slightly different circumstances. Native American raids on New England settlements were still occurring with some regularity into the middle 1700s.

Similarly, we lose perspective on time as we move west. Custer's Last Stand is so iconic that it is hard to realize that it occurred in the lifetime of grandparents of people alive today. The last Native American to come out of the hills, Ishi, did so as recently as 1911.

The interactions between Native Americans and Pioneers/Frontiersmen were complex and occurred in vastly different circumstances and time periods. When you begin thinking about it, we have all sorts of sub-narratives including:
* The almost completely overlooked but frequently fascinating interactions of Native Americans and the Spanish in the 1500 -1700s in the Southeast and Southwest
* The traditional New England fighting and trading in the 1600 and 1700s
* The cooperative but delicately contentious interactions of the mountain men and fur traders in the 1700s
* The contending but respectful foes a la Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett in the 1700 and 1800s
* The often overlooked frontiers and settlers of the Midwest in the 1700 and 1800s and,
* All those corresponding interactions in Canada, Mexico and Central and South America.
The history of the world is one of different groups of people intruding themselves for various reasons into the territories of others. The consequences of those intrusions span the spectrum of obliteration of the invader or the invaded, the establishment of both groups in some tense but stable symbiosis, the peaceful absorption of one group by the other (it not always being predictable as to which will occur; think of the successfully conquering Vandals in Spain and North Africa or the Normans in Britain, each militarily successful but each being subsequently subsumed by their conquered population), etc. The globe is a big place and the corners only finally got filled up in the past five hundred years or so (with the Maoris settling in New Zealand in the fourteen hundreds as being perhaps the last significant land mass to be reached.)

The world has been filled for centuries with contiguous migrations within continents but that is a somewhat different affair. The cultural, technological, political, economic, and biological (pathogens) differences are more a matter of degree than of kind when the migration is from within a confined area. The less familiar and difficult story to tell is that more recent one of the past five hundred years where migration has been freed from contiguous movements of people to the transformative shifts in populations from continent to continent and where the gulf of differences can be so great. We have some fascinating object lessons out there such as Abyssinia, Lesotho and the Kingdoms of Swaziland and of Thailand all managing to maintain their independence in the face of European colonization when others all around fell. We have seen some migrations (Europe into North America, South America and Australasia) succeed while corresponding movements into Africa and South Asia failed.

This is fascinating material from an historical and sociological perspective. Fascinating, in part, because we still don't know quite what to make of it. Who were the "good" guys, who were the "bad"?

So we continue to struggle collectively to figure out what kind of story to tell our children of our own past. We now know that European settlement into North America succeeded at the expense of the Native Americans but it was not always obvious that it would succeed and many had reason to believe that it couldn't succeed.

The three major trends of describing Native Americans (and particularly their interactions with pioneers), characterized as demonization, shallow stereotyping and victimization, all have deep flaws, most especially that they do not capture anywhere near the diversity and particularity of those interactions.

Below are a number of stories in which we hope a flavor of some of that variety of experience comes through. Reading about particular periods such as Thanksgiving, Westward Expansion, the Colonial Period, all have elements that capture some of the complex interactions between pioneers/frontiersman and Native Americans. This booklist is an attempt to gather some of that wide range into a single place to give a bit of the feel of complexity that actually existed.

Let us know which books you might recommend for children to learn about and experience through their imagination this particularly fascinating event.


Picture Books

A Picture Book of Sacagawea by David A. Adler and illustrated by Dan Brown Suggested
Children of the Wild West by Russell Freedman Suggested
This Land Is My Land by George Littlechild Suggested


Independent Reader

Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink Highly Recommended
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder Highly Recommended
Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling Recommended
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare Recommended
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Recommended
Pocahontas by Joseph Bruchac Recommended
Geronimo by Joseph Bruchac Suggested
Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims by Clyde Robert Bulla Suggested
Morning Girl by Michael Dorris Suggested
Guests by Michael Dorris Suggested
The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich Suggested
The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich Suggested
The Life and Death of Crazy Horse by Russell Freedman and photographs by Amos Bad Heart Bull Suggested
Indian Chiefs by Russell Freedman Suggested
The Talking Earth by Jean Craighead George Suggested
Death of the Iron Horse by Paul Goble Suggested
The Ledgerbook of Thomas Blue Eagle by Gay Matthaei and Jewel Grutman Suggested
Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw Suggested
Rachel's Journal by Marissa Moss Suggested
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell & Ted (ILT) Lewin Suggested
Streams to the River, River to the Sea by Scott O'Dell Suggested
Standing in the Light by Mary Pope Osborne Suggested
Mr. Tucket by Gary Paulsen Suggested
Sequoyah by James Rumford Suggested
Rain Is Not My Indian Name by Cynthia Leitich Smith Suggested
Trappers & Mountain Men by Anastasia Suen Recommendation
Bound for Oregon by Jean Van Leeuwen and photographs by James Watling & James Suggested
Night of the Full Moon by Gloria Whelan and illustrated by Leslie Bowman and Tony Meers Suggested


Young Adult

The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos Highly Recommended
A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz Recommended
Give Your Heart to the Hawks by Winfred Blevins Suggested
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown Suggested
Jim Thorpe, Original All-American by Joseph Bruchac Suggested
Across America on an Emigrant Train by Jim Murphy Suggested
Native American Testimony edited by Peter Nabokov Suggested
Crooked River by Shelley Pearsall Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/frontiersman_and_native_americ.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/frontiersman_and_native_americ.html Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:14:15 -0500 World War II Second World War, experienced the privations of the home front or served on its battlefields, is slipping from our grasp leaving only the books and the family stories. But what stories they are.

It is difficult to comprehend the encompassing and titanic nature of this conflict, which for our children today, seems to be almost ancient history. After all, it is way before the War on Terror, or the earlier Gulf War or even that distant conflict the Vietnam War. Putting the Second World War into numbers and facts can at first seem to be too clinical and almost desensitizing or even demeaning. Without those facts and numbers, though, it is too easy to lose hold of the magnitude and consequence of this conflict. There have been earlier "world wars", specifically World War One (of which it is often claimed that World War Two is merely an extension), and then earlier, the Napoleonic Wars (1790's to 1815).

So how do we quantify this as a World War? First there is simply the magnitude of the human impact. In martial terms, it was the largest conflict ever, involving 100 million soldiers (16 million in the US military). Nearly 100 nations were involved either because of battles or operations in their territories (fifty-five countries) or as members of either the Axis or the Allies.

70 million people were killed, the majority, nearly 50 million, being civilians and the majority of those (28 million) being civilians in China and Russia. In fact China and Russia accounted for 43 million (civilian and military) of all deaths in World War II. In terms of mortality, after Russia (23.1m representing 13.7% of the population) and China (20m representing 3.9% of the population), the countries next most affected by World War II were Germany (7.3m dead, 10.5% of the population), Poland (5.6m and 16.1% of the population) and Japan (2.7m and 3.8% of the population). The US and UK respectively suffered 418,000 and 450,000 deaths during the war, overwhelmingly military deaths though the UK did lose 68,000 civilians to the extensive bombing of Britain early in the war. US civilian deaths (just over a thousand) were individually tragic but comparatively minor in number, consisting primarily of citizens interned by Japan during the war but also including 68 civilians in Hawaii as a result of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and, generally little known, 6 civilian deaths from the balloon bombing campaign conducted by Japan against the mainland US.

The major countries involved in the conflict were, among the Axis; Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, (and at various times the Soviet Union, Finland, Thailand, and Iraq). Among the Allies were the US, UK, the Commonwealth, France, China, USSR, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Kenya, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Central America, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, and towards the end of the war virtually all the countries of South America.

Land battles occurred in all inhabited continents save South America and even there, there were instances of sabotage and intrigue. Little in Europe remained untouched by the destruction of war and North Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, South East Asia, and the Pacific all saw extensive and prolonged military campaigns.

The duration of the war, while not of the scale of, say, the Napoleonic wars, still was prolonged. For China, with Japan's invasion in 1936, the war lasted eight and a half years, for the UK for six and a half years, and for the US three and a half years.

The range of the conflict is part of what is so astonishing and is often the source of some startling and little known tales of the conflict. Among the lesser known and more remote corners touched by the war were the Azores Islands, Iceland, Madagascar, East Timor, the Aleutian Islands, Greenland, etc.

During the war there were all sorts of peculiar twists and turns in alliances. The Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war with the invasion and partition of Poland, but then became the victim in turn of German invasion and consequently an ally of the Western Alliance. Western-oriented Finland became an ally of Germany as a consequence of being opportunistically invaded by the Soviet Union and having to turn to Germany for support (the subsequent Winter War being one of the most remarkable David and Goliath contests ever). The Kingdom of Thailand became an ally of the Japanese as part of the effort to throw out the colonial powers from South East Asia. Vichy France fought against the Allies in North Africa, Madagascar, the Middle East and elsewhere. An independence group in India, the Indian National Army, mustered troops to fight with the Japanese.

At the end of the war, countries disappeared completely (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Manchuria) or had their boundaries substantially redrawn (Poland, Soviet Union, and Germany), or were called into existence (South Korea, East Germany, etc.).

The economic, scientific, political, cultural and philosophical ramifications of World War Two continue to unfold even today. Just as after the titanic contest of the Napoleonic Wars, there was nearly 100 years of peace, increasing prosperity and a tighter binding together of the regions of the world, so there has been so far sixty odd years of global peace (at least among the major powers), increased prosperity, and integration of the peoples and economies of the globe. Long may the trend continue.

Out of the massive destruction of World War Two and consequent rebuilding, (Europe and Japan lost much of its existing capital of factories, shipping, and transportation and had to replace nearly all of it; the US created a vast industrial infrastructure in the space of three years that had not existed before), came new prosperity and productivity. Whole fields of science were exponentially expanded (physics, medicine, surgical technology, chemistry, materials engineering, electronic measurement and detection, etc.) and industrial engineering and management techniques were either newly pioneered or applied to a whole different magnitude (the coordination and transportation of materials to support the manufacture of tens of thousands of tanks, planes, ships, etc. in a short time frame) and remarkable feats of engineering and manufacturing were accomplished such as being able to produce a completed (Liberty) ship forty days after laying the keel.

In politics and philosophies, the idea that the various forms of totalitarianism and the naïve hope that centralized decision making could be a force for good took a heavy knock, reinforced forty years later with the fall of the Iron Curtain. It took some thirty or forty years to throw off some of the constraining regulatory regimens put in place for war purposes around the shipping, trucking, railroad, airline, telecommunication, and financial industries. Who was it that said that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program?

For our purposes, World War II also saw an explosion of cultural productivity particularly in terms of writing. These ranged from straight-forward autobiographical accounts such as William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed, George MacDonald Frazer's Safely Quartered Out Here to biographical vignettes about specific adventures in the war such as W. Stanley Moss's Ill Met by Moonlight and Ted W. Lawson's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. There is some magnificent history to be had in first-person reporting such as John Hersey's Hiroshima or from historians such as Cornelius Ryan and his A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day. Regrettably, as the years have advanced, some of those wonderful accounts by actual participants and direct observers have drifted out of print.

There are some wonderful contemporary books of those distant events. Louise Borden's The Little Ships: The Heroic Rescue at Dunkirk in World War II, illustrated by Michael Foreman is a great example of momentous occurrence rendered in a fashion comprehensible and also moving to young minds. Carmen Agra Deedy's The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark, illustrated by Henri Sorenson, is another example. There are many, many perfectly adequate Independent Reader level fictional renditions of actual events; it intriguing though that they should be so popular currently when the actual accounts are even better without the transmogrification through the stereotype blender and the stock-plot cooking pan.

The real treasures remain among the books at the advanced Independent Reader and the Young Adult levels and those that were written nearer to the time of the events. Twenty and Ten; Run Silent, Run Deep; The Great Escape, The Snow Goose; The Caine Mutiny; Going Solo; the list is wonderfully long.

As always when reading of war, there is the treacherous path to tread - attempting on the one hand to honor the service and recognize the courage and heroism of those caught in the circumstances of war while at the same time attempting not to glorify the tragedy that is war. For some sensitive spirits, these events are too much. There are shadings as well - I enthusiastically enjoy World War II literature but find Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl almost impossible to re-read. Once was enough. Not because it is badly written. On the contrary, it still feels almost contemporary and I find the enormity of the tragedy almost overwhelming.

The literature of the Holocaust warrants its own list booklist. There is a disproportionate plethora of books, many of them of solid quality, covering the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. We have included a sampling of both these specializations in the list below. Our main objective though, is to cover the broader picture of this horrifically awesome event which affected a whole generation of people across the globe. People who are grandparents and great-grandparents today. In particular, by bringing attention to their stories, we seek to acknowledge the debt we collectively owe to so many who served, and who served heroically.

Let us know which World War II stories you share with your children.


Picture Books

The Little Ships by Louise Borden and illustrated by Michael Foreman Highly Recommended
The Yellow Star by Carmen Agra Deedy and illustrated by Henri Sorensen Highly Recommended
The Greatest Skating Race by Louise Borden and illustrated by Niki Daly Recommended
Across the Blue Pacific by Louise Borden and illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker Suggested
Sadako by Eleanor Coerr and illustrated by Ed Young Suggested
Journey To Topaz by Yoshiko Uchida and illustrated by Donald Carrick Suggested
The Bracelet by Yoshiko Uchida and illustrated by Joanna Yardley Suggested


Independent Reader

Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward Latimer Beach Recommended
Twenty and Ten by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by William Pene Du Bois Recommended
The Greatest Skating Race by Louise Borden and illustrated by Niki Daly Recommended
Going Solo by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake Recommendation
House of Sixty Fathers by Meindert De Jong Recommended
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico Recommended
Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff Recommended
Collins Atlas of World War II by John Keegan Recommended
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr Recommended
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo by Ted W. Lawson Recommended
Day of Infamy by Walter Lord Recommended
Good Night, Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian Recommended
Escape from Warsaw by Ian Serraillier Recommended
The Cay by Theodore Taylor Recommended
The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen Recommended
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Recommended
Graveyards of the Pacific by Robert D. Ballard and Michael Hamilton Morgan Suggested
The Journey That Saved Curious George by Louise Borden and illustrated by Allan Drummond Suggested
Spying on Miss Muller by Eve Bunting Suggested
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene Suggested
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry Suggested


Young Adult

Hiroshima by John Hersey Highly Recommended
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer Highly Recommended
Goodbye, Darkness by William Raymond Manchester Highly Recommended
Empire Of The Sun by J. G. Ballard Recommended
Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley and Ron Powers Recommended
Flyboys by James Bradley Recommended
The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Recommended
Das Boot by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim Recommended
Memoirs of the Second World War by Winston Churchill Recommended
Halsey's Typhoon by Bob Drury and Thomas Clavin Recommended
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler Recommended
The Great Escape by Anton Gill Recommended
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Recommended
We Die Alone by David Armine Howarth Recommended
The Second World War by John Keegan Recommended
Incredible Victory by Walter Lord Recommended
Love & War in the Apennines by Eric Newby Recommended
A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan Recommended
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan Recommended
With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge Recommended
Mila 18 by Leon Uris Recommended
Iron Coffins by Herbert A. Werner Recommended
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk Recommended
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/world_war_ii_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/world_war_ii_1.html Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:41:08 -0500 Ancient Greece Ancient Greeks were. There are those who take the position that all peoples and cultures are equally valuable and who get particularly exercised by the implied hierarchy that some cultures are more successful than others. While all individual persons may be morally equal in value, I think that it is reasonably clear that different peoples and cultures are more or less consequential. Just like successful people in life, it is fair to argue whether their success is solely or largely due to their own efforts or solely or substantially due to luck; that is being in the right place at the right time. What is difficult to argue about is that, for whatever reason, the Ancient Greeks were astoundingly consequential. And consequential in many fields.

In referring to Ancient Greece, we are usually discussing the period from 1100 BC (The Greek Dark Ages), through the era of Classical Greece (5th and 4th centuries BC), through the conquests of Alexander the Great (3rd century BC) and up to the time of the Roman invasion in 146 BC. Even though Greece as a collection of independent polities ended at this point, the nature and influence of Greek culture, as expressed in Hellenism, was just beginning to really gather steam and pushed through the Hellenistic period into the Byzantine period and into the Renaissance and modern era.

I think one of the things which makes the Ancient Greeks stand out so is not just the depth of their achievements but their astounding breadth. Were we to only have the Odyssey and the Iliad, we would hold the Ancient Greeks in deep respect. Someone has said that all of Western Literature is a footnote and elaboration on these two works.

But that is not all that we have from the Greeks. We have the product of what might have been the most significant two centuries in the history of mankind's intellect: the 5th through 3rd centuries BC when figures such as Pericles, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Herodotus, Archimedes, Plato, Pythagoras, Thucydides and others strode a small corner of the Earth and whose shadows still fall upon us today, twenty-five centuries later. What is additionally sobering is the density of these bright lights. Athens, epicenter of much Greek cultural effervescence was probably a city of not much more than a quarter of million. The extended Greek population on the mainland and in the islands and colonies probably did not exceed much more than a couple of million.

So where else did the Greeks excel? They either founded or gave structure to virtually all our main streams of knowledge: Political theory, Art of War, Mathematics, Philosophy, Literature and Theater, Art, History as a field of study, Architecture, Astronomy, etc. It is hard to find a field in which they were not among the first. And their real knack seems to have been to systematize and make practical the results of deeply conceptual and abstract thinking. Others peoples and cultures also made major scientific and academic discoveries (though not as prolifically or in as concentrated a period of time). But as often as not, these discoveries did not get translated into real world applications or were not sustained over time. As an example, I came across an account a couple of years ago indicating that the Ancient Chinese had mastered the art of making steel somewhere back in the first or second centuries AD but that the technique never spread and died out after a century or two. Likewise, the Aztecs invented the wheel - we know because we have extant surviving wheeled toys for children. However, they never, as far as we can tell, used it for transportation or engineering purposes. The Greeks generated new ways of thinking about things, applied them to a real world and achieved new insights and applications that were then not only used by themselves but by their neighbors and cultures far afield and distant down the years.

They were a curious people, a trait with which we can relate. Their drive to systemize knowledge was a function of their desire to know and understand their world. Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon were all moved to explore their world, not only territorially, but also historically. They were the fathers of history as a means of comprehending not only the past but using that past to anticipate the future. And like much of the writing of the Greeks, it remains strangely accessible despite being written in a different language, culture and age.
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds. - Herodotus's opening lines to the Histories, explaining what and why he is recording this history.
There are so many great quotes and lines among the rich treasures of Greek writings. I love Herodotus, an inveterate purveyor of tales, gossip and sometimes downright slander, "I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it."

Similarly, Thucydides explained his motivation in his opening paragraph:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world- I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately preceded the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable leads me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on as great a scale, either in war or in other matters.
As much as we know about the Ancient Greeks, we also know that there are large swaths of knowledge which they had that have disappeared into the dust of history. There are books by some of the great thinkers and philosophers which we know existed (see Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose) but which, tantalizingly have not survived. Every now and then something, such as the Antikythera Mechanism (http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Thing-Finder/2008/07/blind_trails.html), will turn up which tells us that the Ancient Greeks were even more knowledgeable and sophisticated than we thought they were.

They had a knack for putting incredibly complex ideas into easily understood concepts. Take as an example the conditionality of life. Herodotus, of course, that collector of tales near and far, relates the story of Croesus and Solon. We are still wrestling with understanding the degree to which our fortune is under our direct control versus the degree to which we are all subject to the whims of random fortune. Michael Macrone relates this in his It's Greek to Me! (out of print) as does Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Fooled By Randomness. Taleb recounts the story of Croesus and Solon as related through Herodotus.
Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression "rich as Croesus" to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited by Solon, the Greek legislator known for his dignity, reserve, upright morals, humility, frugality, wisdom, intelligence, and courage. Solon did not display the smallest surprise at the wealth and splendor surrounding his host, nor the tiniest admiration for their owner. Croesus was so irked by the manifest lack of impression on the part of his illustrious visitor that he attempted to extract from him some acknowledgement. He asked him if he had known a happier man than him. Solon cited the life of a man who led a noble existence and died while in battle. Prodded for more, he gave similar examples of heroic but terminated lives, until Croesus, irate, asked him point-blank if he was not to be considered the happiest man of all. Solon answered: "The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy." . . .

Yet the story of Croesus has another twist. Having lost a battle to the redoubtable Persian king Cyrus, he was about to be burned alive when he called Solon's name and shouted (something like) "Solon, you were right" {again this is legend}. Cyrus asked about the nature of such unusual invocations, and he told him about Solon's warning. This impressed Cyrus so much that he decided to spare Croesus' life, as he reflected on the possibilities as far as his own fate was concerned. People were thoughtful at that time.
Hence the famous line - Call no man happy until he dies!

This is another area in which the Ancient Greeks are kept close to us - in daily language. We are perhaps aware of it when we use words that are clearly of Greek origin such as democracy, epicurean, laconic, olympian, cynic, hedonist, meander, etc. Less aware we might be that some of our common adages, concepts, sayings, and idioms reach back those thousands of years: a wolf in sheep's clothing, the golden mean, the sword of Damocles, rich as Croesus, cutting the Gordian knot, a Trojan horse, don't count your chickens, the siren song, caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the Hippocratic oath, the Muses, if you want peace prepare for war, speak well of the dead, man is the measure of all things, the philosopher king, the unexamined life is not worth living, nothing in excess, Deus ex Machina.

Look around day to day, listen to the words and phrases we use - the Greeks are still among us, perhaps laughing at our unexamined lives.

How to introduce our children to these living dead who stalk our every footstep? Well of course, to start with, there are Aesop's fables, the various versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Greek myths and legends as a critical foundation, not only for understanding the Ancient Greeks, but to some extent, understanding ourselves today. You can find a more complete listing in some of booklists, but we have included selections in this booklist as well.

We have also included stories about some of the events of the period, the battles, the inventions, the invasions, the heroes, the villains, etc. There are also, particularly at the Young Adult level, retellings of some of the ancient stories in either a more contemporary structure or even, in a couple of cases with some fantasy elements to give the familiar story a new twist. We hope that your children will gain both a comprehension of the impact of the Ancient Greeks as well as an interest to know more about these amazing people.

There are a couple of poems that bear reflecting upon in considering what we think of the Ancient Greeks and just what we can really know about them. One is the provocatively emotional Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats and the other is The Gloomy Academic by Louis MacNeice. Both evocative of these ancient peoples, and of how close and yet how distant we are from them.


Picture Books

Aesop's Fables by Aesop and illustrated by Michael Hague Recommended
Aesop's Fables by Aesop and illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger Recommended
King Midas and the Golden Touch by Charlotte Craft and illustrated by Kinuko Craft Recommended
The Classic Treasury of Aesop's Fables by Aesop and illustrated by Don Daily Suggested
Aesops Fables by Aesop and illustrated by Charles Santore Suggested


Independent Reader

The Children's Homer by Padraic Colum amd illustrated by Willy Pogany Highly Recommended
Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Highly Recommended
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan Highly Recommended
Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff and illustrated by Alan Lee Highly Recommended
The Wanderings Of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliff and illustrated by Alan Lee Highly Recommended
Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch and illustrated by Sabra Moore and Richard P. Martin Recommended
The Golden Fleece by Padraic Colum and illustrated by Willy Pogany Recommended
Cupid and Psyche by M. Charlotte Craft and illustrated by Kinuko Craft Recommended
The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton Recommended
The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton Recommended
Mythology by Edith Hamilton Recommended
Perseus by Geraldine McCaughrean Recommended
Theseus by Geraldine McCaughrean Recommended
Favorite Greek Myths by Mary Pope Osborne and illustrated by Troy Howell Recommended
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan Recommended
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan Recommended
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan Recommended
The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan Recommended
Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney Suggested
The Fire Thief by Terry Deary Suggested
Greek Gods and Heroes by Robert Graves Suggested
The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes Suggested
Odysseus by Geraldine McCaughrean Suggested
The Odyssey by Homer and Geraldine McCaughrean and illustrated by Victor G. Ambrus Suggested
The One-eyed Giant by Mary Pope Osborne Suggested
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner Suggested
Men and Gods by Rex Warner and illustrated by Edward Gorey Suggested


Young Adult

Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield Highly Recommended
The Landmark Thucydides edited by Robert B. Strassler Highly Recommended
The Landmark Herodotus edited by Robert B. Strassler Highly Recommended
The Sand-Reckoner by Gillian Bradshaw Recommended
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea by Thomas Cahill Recommended
The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan Recommended
The Isle of Stone by Nicholas Nicastro Recommended
The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield Recommended
Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield Recommended
Tides of War by Steven Pressfield Recommended
The Virtues Of War by Steven Pressfield Recommended
Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault Recommended
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault Recommended
The Praise Singer by Mary Renault Recommended
The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault Recommended
Ilium by Dan Simmons Recommended
Archimedes and the Door to Science by Jeanne Bendick Suggested
Achilles by Elizabeth Cook Suggested
The Ten Thousand by Michael Curtis Ford Suggested
Troy by David Gemmell Recommended
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/ancient_greece_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/11/ancient_greece_1.html Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:53:29 -0500 Nonsense Verse nonsense verse? It is easier perhaps to say who were its creators or earliest practitioners: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. English has always had a form of nonsense verse in the extensive portfolio of tales, jingles, and rhymes that form our Mother Goose (see Pigeon Post essay of July 6, 2008). There are many jingles that remain current in our language and cultural vocabulary about which there is little or no agreement as to what the rhymes actually mean, ipso facto, nonsense poetry.
Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
ashes! ashes!
we all fall down.
Is this some folk recollection of the 14th century experience of the Bubonic Plague, a vestige of some ancient Druidic rite, or something else entirely? Even though we have lost the original context, this and other currently unfathomable Mother Goose rhymes, likely at one time did make sense - we have simply forgotten what the context was and how to understand it.

Nonsense verse is verse deliberately created to puzzle, amuse and bewilder and the earliest or certainly most prominent practitioner was the estimable Edward Lear. Much of what he created was written to entertain his charges as tutor to the children of the 13th Earl of Derby. Lear published his first collection of nonsense verse in 1846, A Book of Nonsense, which was basically a collection of limericks which he wrote and illustrated. Despite the apparent amateurishness of his sketched illustrations, Lear was actually a lifelong and talented artist and painter. His ornithological paintings were held to be in the same class as Audubon.

The poetic form of limericks existed before Lear but he made it his own in a way rarely seen. Perhaps only Shakespeare is as closely associated with a specific form of poetry, sonnets, as is Lear with his limericks. These limericks in his first publication have the core attribute of nonsense verse - the individual lines are comprehensible but the whole verse is incomprehensible, puzzling, or uses words in an ambiguous way which a child still mastering the language can experience as a light-bulb moment.
There was an Old Man of Peru,
Who never knew what he should do;
So he tore off his hair, and behaved like as bear,
That intrinsic Old Man of Peru.
The mental image of some distinguished old gentleman behaving like a bear is likely to get a laugh from most children. Thrown in is the bonus of trying to figure out how an Old Man of Peru can be intrinsic. Then there are the ones where Lear just makes an improbable situation seem normal.
There was an old person of Ewell,
Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;
But to make it more nice, he inserted some Mice,
Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.
Mouse gruel - Mmmhh! A dish likely to appeal to all those of the snips and snails and puppy dog tails persuasion.

Lear's limericks are rich in unusual words which are likely to catch the attention of children still mastering the language and collecting words like shiny pebbles on the shore. Invidious, ombliferous, dolorous, umbrageous, incipient, intrinsic, oracular, mendacious, borascible, ecstatic, whimsical, amiable, globular, incongruous - Lear's people are all uncommonly adjectively enhanced. With ombliferous and borascible, you see what was later to become one of the frequently distinctive marks of nonsense verse - the made up word. Lewis Carroll was particularly prone to this technique of which his Jabberwocky is probably the most well known example and, as incomprehensible as it is, remains ever popular among young children today. Perhaps there is a feeling of relief that the adult is at an equal disadvantage as the child in understanding the poem.
Jabberwocky
By Lewis Carroll

'TWAS brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Calloh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lear often exploited the wonderful malleability and multiple meanings of the English language in such a way as to make a child think about things in a way differently than they are accustomed to. These forms are known as Wellerisms; for example, '"I see" said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.' An example from Lear would be his The Table and the Chair who go walking about on their four legs.

Both Lear and Carroll later, expanded on the simple limerick and began writing extended poems that told some form of tale but incorporated made up words, logical incongruities, puns and multiple meanings. Some of the more famous include Father William, Jabberwocky, The Walrus and the Carpenter, The Crocodile, and The Lobster Quadrille by Lewis Carroll. Lear had Calico Pie, The Owl and the Pussy Cat, The Pobble Who Has No Toes, The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, The Quangle Wangle's Hat, and The Akond of Swat.

More contemporary practitioners of nonsense poetry who appeal to children include Ogden Nash, Spike Milligan, Kenneth Grahame, John Ciardi, or Earl L. Newton.

The gap between good and bad books can be pretty wide. The gulf between good and bad poetry can be larger still. The chasm between good and bad nonsense verse is of a Grand Canyon magnitude.

It is uncommon, outside the works of Edward Lear, to find collections of nonsense verse. More practically, individual poems are often released illustrated by contemporary illustrators. For example, Jan Brett has illustrated Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussy Cat, which serves as a wonderful introduction for young children to the pleasures of nonsense verse.

Nonsense verse serves as a great bridge from the rhymes of Mother Goose to fuller poetry later on, while at the same time continuing to cultivate a love of language and the artistic manipulation of words. It also, I think, instills a respect for the fact that not everything, least of all in poetry, is necessarily comprehensible. I am thinking of Longfellow's Excelsior. Another example might be that thrilling final verse of Browning's Childe Roland:
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
I love it, but I don't yet understand it and perhaps being comfortable with both states is a product of an early exposure to nonsense verse.

Attached is a list of stand alone illustrated versions of some nonsense poems, nonsense verse collections as well as some poetry anthologies which include some good nonsense poems. Let us know which nonsense poems your children enjoy.


Picture Books

The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear and illustrated by Jan Brett Highly Recommended
"A" Was Once an Apple Pie by Edward Lear and illustrated by Suse MacDonald Recommended
Poetry for Young People by Robert Browning and illustrated by Joel Spector Suggested
The Doubtful Guest written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Suggested
The Object-Lesson written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Suggested
The Gashlycrumb Tinies written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Suggested
The Seals on the Bus by Lenny Hort and illustrated by G. Brian Karas Suggested
The Quangle Wangle's Hat by Edward Lear and illustrated by Louise Voce Suggested
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear and illlustrated by Anne Mortimer Suggested
Poetry for Young People by Edward Lear and illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith Suggested
The Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Bridget Starr Taylor Suggested
Ride a Purple Pelican by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Garth Williams Suggested
Scranimals by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Peter Sis Suggested


Independent Reader

A Book of Nonsense written and illustrated by Edward Lear Highly Recommended
Custard the Dragon and the Wicked Night by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Lynn Munsinger Highly Recommended
Nonsense Verse by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Lorna Hussey Recommended
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Stephane Jorisch Recommended
Amphigorey written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended
Amphigorey Again written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended
Amphigorey Also written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended
Amphigorey Too written and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended
Edward Lear by Edward Lear and edited by Vivien Noakes Recommended
The Best of Ogden Nash by Ogden Nash and edited by Linell Nash Smith Recommended
The Annotated Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Henry Holiday and edited by Martin Gardner Suggested
Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll by Lewis Carroll Suggested
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear and illustrated by Stephane Jorisch Suggested
So Much Nonsense by Edward Lear Suggested
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/10/nonsense_verse.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/10/nonsense_verse.html Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:08:56 -0500 Children Putting On Plays Children Putting on Plays booklist).

The mere act of reading is in itself an exercise of disciplined imagination, converting the dark scratchings on paper into a set of images in the mind's eye. The more we bind ourselves to the protagonist and their actions and adventures, the more we spread the wings of imagination. The ultimate extension is when we become involved in the protagonist's own imaginings. Sometimes this magic of imagination spills over into the real world.

The first time I saw this was years ago with our firstborn, when he was perhaps a couple of years old. For some reason I was relating to him the story of how one time, before he had been born, his mother and I got home on a Friday evening. We had planned to go out to dinner and a movie, were running late and moving fast. I was in one room grabbing some clothes when I heard a noise: "Sally, was that you?" "No, I thought it was you."

I scouted around the house, not initially finding the source of the sound. When I got to the living room, the light began to dawn when I saw some bird droppings. Clearly a bird had flown down the chimney and was in the house somewhere. Moving into the dining room, I found the culprit. There, in the scrabbly branches of a rescued rubber plant, sat an uninjured but rather disconcerted woodpecker.

I got my heavy leather work gloves, stalked my woodpecker, and despite his protests, managed to capture him without injuring myself or him. Taking him gently outside, I enjoyed that distinctive pleasure of tossing a living creature into the air to see him take wing to freedom.

All this I related to a wide-eyed two year old. Over the next week, he asked to hear the story a number of times again. I obliged. About a week later I got home from work late of an evening, just in time to put this little boy to bed. But first he needed to tell me something that had happened to him that day. "I got home from play school this afternoon and I heard a noise in the house . . ." He had made the story his own. There were a couple of plot twists and changes in sequence and detail but the authorial piece de resistance was when he traced the noise to the dining room and discovered, not a woodpecker but . . . a parrot in the rubber plant.

That was perhaps my first view into the ability of a young mind to absorb a story and make it their own. Later I saw this happen again in a different fashion. Unfortunately, I don't recall the book which was the catalyst to this event. Our oldest, then about ten years old, had read in a book he particularly enjoyed, about some children who had put on a play for their own amusement. He promptly designated himself Producer and Director, and shanghaied his younger sister as assistant producer/stage hand/general dog's body. Finally, because every play needs an audience, he dragooned his six year old brother as the admiring audience.

I don't know how many hours they busied themselves about building a stage in their bedroom, constructing some marginally functional marionettes, developing a script and translating that into a production. By the time I found them though, they had just been through a very rough rehearsal, had delighted themselves with the sophistication of their play and now wanted an adult audience as well. I was happy to oblige.

One seed from a book, the idea of putting on their own play, led to a whole afternoon of entertainment, a whole raft of lessons about planning, writing, producing, and best of all, a sense of accomplishment.

In which stories are there such seeds? We have put together a very brief booklist below in which children put on a play or some other production for their own edification or that of others. Perhaps these stories might inspire your children to let their imagination work its magic, taking an idea from the literary ether and making it real in the real world for others to enjoy. Let us know if there are other stories of which you are aware that might serve as inspiration.


Picture Books

A Time to Keep written and illustrated by Tasha Tudor Highly Recommended
House on East Eighty-Eighth Street written and illustrated by Bernard Waber Highly Recommended
A Certain Small Shepherd by Rebecca Caudill and illustrated by William Pene Du Bois Recommended
Wombat Divine by Mem Fox and illustrated by Kerry Argent Recommended
The Nutcracker by Janet Schulman and E.T.A. Hoffmann and illustrated by Renee Graef Recommended
Maurice Sendak's Really Rosie Starring the Nutshell Kids by Maurice Sendak Recommended


Independent Reader

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Highly Recommended
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Robert Sabuda Highly Recommended
Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes Highly Recommended
The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson and illustrated by Sue Porter Highly Recommended
Theater Shoes by Noel Streatfeild Highly Recommended
Little Men by Louisa May Alcott Recommended
Hazel Green by Odo Hirsch Recommended
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder and illustrated by Garth Williams Recommended
The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood Suggested


Young Adult

Hamlet by William Shakespeare Highly Recommended
]]> http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/10/children_putting_on_plays_1.html http://blog.moonshadowecommerce.com/WEBLOG-NAME/Pigeon_Post/2008/10/children_putting_on_plays_1.html Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:03:47 -0500 Fear and Anxiety Fear and Anxiety book list). There at the center of our brain lurks the amygdala, an evolved center for processing threatening situations. Like almost everything in life, fear is a continuum, dependent on some golden mean. No sense of fear and we are quickly and effectively eliminated from the gene pool. Too much fear and we become incapacitated. The ability to recognize a dangerous situation and respond appropriately is a fine balance and dependent on a well calibrated amygdala.

Psychologists and neuroscientist debate whether fear is an innate emotion. For example, it is argued that fear of snakes is an innate emotion and that, of course, makes a fairly attractive evolutionary narrative. The evidence, however, suggests that young children are not necessarily innately fearful of snakes per se, but rather, are innately alert to them. Just as our eye and brain are attuned to sensing motion over stasis, so we appear to be oriented towards detecting long thin slithering things. The fear appears to be developed later, as a learned response.

For clarity, it is perhaps useful to distinguish fear and anxiety. Both of them have medical definitions, but I am using more of the vernacular where anxiety is interpreted as a milder, lesser form of fear and where the terms are often meant to make the distinction of presence - we fear something that is happening whereas we are anxious about something in anticipation of it occurring.

What do children fear? Nothing and many things. As a parent you are always stepping in to caution them about something (No, I don't think it's a good idea for you to offer that snarling stray dog your sandwich) while simultaneously encouraging them to do something which to them must seem unhinged (You'll love it in that deep, cold ocean full of unseen things). Per About.com, the most common anxieties in the general population (including adults) are: Acrophobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), nyctophobia (fear of the dark), ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), trypanopobia (fear of needles/injections), astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightening), nosophobia (fear of having a disease), mysophobia (fear of germs), triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number thirteen).

I am not sure how prevalent the last three are among children. In fact, I would guess that there are some better candidates instead of those three: fear of strangers (xenophobia), fear of the water (hydrophobia), fear of dogs (cynophobia), fear of school (didaskaleinophobia), fear of public speaking (glossophobia) and fear of tests (testophobia), would all be candidates. Throw in separation anxiety and fear of monsters under the bed and you probably have a reasonably complete list of most of the anxieties that afflict a child at one time or another as they grow.

As adults, we learn to manage and control our environment so much better than a child can ever do that it is hard to recapture the raw powerlessness and vulnerability that a child experiences. It is interesting to think back to the fears that you had as a child. I don't recall any debilitating fears but do distinctly remember a period where I had a very healthy respect for snakes. I don't think I ever had a fear of public speaking, but certainly an aversion to it. Was there a fear of the dark in my youngest days; I suppose there was because I do recall night lights about.

Sometimes fears of childhood carry over into adulthood and lay about just waiting to be rediscovered. After dating Sally for a couple or three years, we married and then a couple of years later, we took a vacation in Sweden where I had lived for a period as a child. After visiting Stockholm, we flew to Gotland, a large island off the southeast coast, the capital of which is a Middle Ages, Hanseatic League city, Visby. During our stay, we made an excursion to the middle of the island to visit Torsburgen, a massive walled prehistoric settlement. It is on a raised area of land and in the center of the enclosure the parks people have erected a structure similar to a fire watch tower. You can climb five or six alternating runged ladders (like on a naval ship) to get to the top (about sixty feet up) from which vantage point you can see for miles around: beautiful fields of golden wheat, green grass, red poppies and bright yellow rapeseed.

It was a gorgeous summer day as can only be experienced in those northern climes: sunny enough to warm you but with the air cool and fresh. A blue vaulting sky, powder puffed with clouds. This was going to be a stunning vista. When we arrived at the tower, Sally said she was tired from the hiking and would rest while I went up. I just knew she would kick herself if she missed this view and encouraged, cajoled, and finally herded her to the top. Only on arriving there, with her grasping hold tightly to the railings, did I discover that, after all these years, "I'm afraid of heights." Well, it was a stunning view, but I am not sure she appreciated it. It took a long time to get down. And I have yet to live it down.

Fear is not easily moderated by logic or facts. Sally, despite a fear of heights, is perfectly fine flying on planes as long as she doesn't look down. One time, perhaps when I was six, seven or eight, I was visiting my grandparents who lived on a lake up in northeastern Oklahoma. Their "cabin" fronted a creek on one side and the lake on another. As was our habit on sunny days, one afternoon, my grandmother brought a chair down the hill to watch over me while I went swimming. I was happily splashing about when of a sudden, I saw what looked like a snake's head in the water not more than twenty feet from me. As if in a cartoon, I have the impression of my rising from the water, running along the surface, hitting the shore and not stopping till I had raced all the way up the hill to the cabin.

My grandmother called to me, "Sakes alive, what has got into you." I explained about the snake. She peered out over the lake. 'That's not a snake, it's a leaf." We discussed this for some time. She argued that it was not moving therefore must not be a snake. I imagined it to be tired or wounded. Somehow she talked me into re-entering the lake, and of all things, swimming back out towards it to investigate. I got within fifteen feet, remained convinced that it was a snake, and set new records returning to shore. Michael Phelps had nothing on me. We repeated this cycle two or three times and I probably got within six feet of whatever it was before finally calling it quits. Logically I accept my grandmother's argument - probably a leaf but if a snake, dead. Simultaneously, I remain viscerally convinced it was a snake. Possibly one just playing possum to lure me in.

Paradoxically, fear can be a source of entertainment for others and occasionally for ourselves. In hindsight I am able to laugh about the snake in the water just as my grandmother did at the time. It took a while for me to come around to that perspective though. When we go camping with the boy scouts there is always someone afraid of spiders or scorpions and they become the source of much unsympathetic commentary and entertainment for their fellow scouts who are blithely imperceptive of their own insensitivity. Not all fears are groundless. We have one scout who has had past run-ins with skunks who seem to seek him out. His trepidation about the skunk population at any new camp site is always good for extended ribbing which he good naturedly partakes in - all the while keeping an eye peeled for any local representatives of the polecat population coming to seek an audience.

For most children, fears and anxieties prove to be passing phases. They adapt and adjust. While respectful of snakes, I no longer fear them to the same extent. My last encounter with one that made my adrenalin flow was some years later. In college, I took the summer between junior and senior year to travel around Europe, mostly in Germany where I was practicing my German to pass a fluency test when I returned (and on which my graduation depended) but towards the end I made my way down to Greece and ultimately to the island of Rhodes. Travelling around the island on my own on a motorcycle was a wonderful experience. At one point, I stopped by the ruins of an ancient Greek town perched along a ridge running down the center of the island. After poking around among the ancient stone paths, foundations and walls, I came to the edge of the settlement, looking out across the small peasant farms that dotted the valley in front of me. I stood perfectly still, absorbing the sun, soaking up the view and breathing deeply the pine scented air and the smell of the summer dried shrubbery around me.

It was at that moment of solitude and deep quiet that I became aware of a rustling sound. Looking down I saw, not more than a yard in front of me, a four foot black snake slithering along, as unaware of me as I had been of him. The jolt of adrenalin nearly rocketed me up the hillside but I managed to stay rooted in place and the snake passed into the undergrowth. Later at a taverna, I met a very old Greek gentlemen who had spent some years in Chicago in the 1920's and 30's as a laborer before returning to his home island. He still had some basic English after all those many years and I related my story of the close encounter with the snake. I asked him if the snakes on the island were poisonous. He was very definitive. "No! No poisonous snakes." But then less reassuringly he added "Some people say they are but I say no."

If your child is wrestling with some fear or anxiety, how as a parent can you use books to help them? Obviously discussion is a starting point. It is a delicate decision about how to best approach some anxiety that is becoming discombobulating. On the one hand, by grasping the nettle, you risk making too much of the anxiety and exacerbate the situation. Left unaddressed and you risk it festering into something incapacitating.

One useful approach is to look at any negative situation with which a child is dealing and look for books that deal with the antidote to that situation, then find books that portray the proximate issue in a positive light and finally to find books that deal with the specific issue. In general, it is preferable to find books in that order.

So if the situation is fear, then the action is to find books that profile courage (the antidote to fear). If the proximate issue is to do with water, then find books that highlight the positive aspects of sailing, deep sea diving, ocean creatures, etc., i.e. books that cast a positive light on water. And if the specific issue is a fear of the ocean, find books that feature some protagonist that has that fear and overcomes it. It is usually best to work through books in that order: antidote books, proximate issue and then the specific issue.

This book list focuses on books related to specific issues. Courage will be treated as a separate book list as will books about proximate topics like flying (see Pigeon Post essay of August 24, 2008, Flying), the ocean, the dark, starting school, (see Pigeon Post essay of August 3, 2008, First Day of School), etc. Specific issue books frequently skirt awfully close to being overly simplistic and didactic. We have, in general, tried to find those books that tell an interesting story that happens to encompass the particular fear.

Collected in this book list are stories in which the protagonist suffers and overcomes some specific fear, or in which some element of the plot hinges upon someone's fear of something. These are books in which a child can see someone else experiencing and dealing with the issue with which they are wrestling. Specific fears that are addressed include starting school, nightmares, the dark, monsters, separation, etc.

Let us know what books might have worked for you and your child in helping them overcome some anxiety or fear.


Picture Books

Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban and illistrated by Garth Williams Highly Recommended
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak Highly Recommended
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon Highly Recommended
Switch On The Night by Ray Bradbury and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Recommended
Ghost's Hour, Spook's Hour by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Donald Carrick Recommended
Carl Goes to Daycare by Alexandra Day Recommended
Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz and illustrated by Pat Cummings Recommended
Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Barbara Firth Recommended
Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson Recommended
The Bus Ride by William Miller and illustrated by John Ward Recommended
Oh My Baby, Little One by Kathi Appelt and illustrated by Jane Dyer Suggested
Monster Brother by Mary Jane Auch Suggested
Brave Little Monster by Ken Baker and illustrated by Geoffrey Hayes Suggested
Franklin in the Dark by Paulette Bourgeois and illustrated by Brenda Clark Suggested
Franklin and the Thunderstorm by Paulette Bourgeois and illustrated by Brenda Clark Suggested
Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley Suggested
The Very Noisy Night by Diana Hendry and illustrated by Jane Chapman Suggested
There's a Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer Suggested
The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark by Jill Tomlinson and illustrated by Paul Howard Suggested
Will You Come Back for Me? by Ann Tompert and illustrated by Robin Kramer Suggested


Independent Reader

I'll Protect You from the Jungle Beasts by Martha G. Alexander Recommended
My Mama Says There Aren't Any Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, Creatures, Demons, Monsters, Fiends, Goblins or Things by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Kay Chorao Recommended
Alexander, Who's Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Robin Preiss-Glasser Recommended
Ira Sleeps over by Bernard Waber Recommended
Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith Recommended
Train to Somewhere by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Ronald Himler Recommended
Outfoxing Fear by Kathleen Ragan Recommended
The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested
The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested
The Berenstain Bears Get Stage Fright by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested
Bears in the Night by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested
The Berenstain Bears in the Dark by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain Suggested
Who's Afraid of the Dark? by Crosby Newell Bonsall Suggested
Arthur Lost and Found by Marc Tolon Brown Suggested