Tag Archives: bookreview

These Slay Me

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Classic American Children’s Illustrators



Classic English Children’s Illustrators

I am completely incapable of resisting postcard books. 

Years ago, a book called Mommy, It’s a Renoir! suggested you introduce art to children with art postcards.  And that was all the justification/rationalization I needed.  One of the secret benefits to bibliophiles who homeschool is that an indulgence can morph into needed curriculum faster than you can say amazon dot com.  Who says this job doesn’t have bennies?

So these can function as picture books for toddlers; add a cute frame and you have a baby shower gift; write a note and you have a classy postcard.  Or if you are like me, they are just a delight-filled item that will make you smile.

Who are your favorite children’s book illustrators?

Who comes immediately to mind (but I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone important): Jessie Wilcox Smith, Beatrix Potter, Alan Lee, Kate Greenaway, Tasha Tudor, Garth Williams.
   

A Holocaust Robinson Crusoe

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I stayed up late last night reading The Island on Bird Street in one fell swoop.  Uri Orlev has written an exciting story based on his own experiences as a young Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.  In writing the book Orlev weaves themes from Robinson Crusoe into this WWII survival story.  After a roundup, Alex has been separated from his father; he waits for him in an abandoned building just inside the border of the Ghetto.

“This house is really not very different from a desert island.  And Alex has to wait in it until his father comes.  But his father does not come back right away and Alex begins to wonder if he ever will.  So he must survive by himself for many months, taking what he needs from other houses the way Robinson Crusoe took what he needed from the wrecks of other ships that were washed up on the beach.”
 ~ from the Introduction

Before his time of hiding, Alex’s mother and father had been preparing him for the unknown future, honing his survival skills. 

~ Whenever you pick a hiding place, always make sure that it has an emergency exit.
~ What counts most is the element of surprise. 
~  Look around you and behind you.  Danger doesn’t only strike from the front.

At one awkward encounter with a Polish looter, Alex offers to tell a joke to the man.  Their laughter diffused the tension.  Alex had remembered his father’s lesson.

~  With the Poles you’ve got to sound confident, even a little bit cheeky. And you’ve got to make them laugh.

Alex’s parents differed on the issue of trust. 

~  If you relate to people with trust and human kindness, they will always help you. (Mother)
~  Be kind but only trust yourself. (Father)

This story is full of courage, ingenuity, humor, resourcefulness, danger, friendship, and risk.  It parted from Robinson Crusoe in one disappointing way:  in his distress, Crusoe poured out his heart to God.  I thought it seemed unrealistic that a Jewish boy–well, any boy– left alone, in daily peril of losing his life, wouldn’t pray once or twice during the ordeal.  God was never once mentioned.

Wendell Berry’s Remembering

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Do you ever think about how your own, personal context affects your response to a book you have read? 

A book which didn’t interest you ten years ago, before you experienced that particular loss, may completely engage you today.  Conversely, a book which kidnapped you twenty years ago, rendering you incapacitated for all but the most necessary life functions until you finished the book, may produce yawns of indifference if you were to pick it up today.

My context in reading Wendell Berry includes many conversations with friends and family about an agrarian lifestyle and end-of-life medical issues. It most definitely includes The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book which has had an impact on our family’s thinking.  My point is that I’m in step with some of the messages Berry is delivering, which makes him that more dear to me.

Also, I am so grateful for the order in which I’ve read Wendell Berry’s fiction.  I believe it has made a difference.  I started with That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, which introduced me to the primary residents in Berry’s fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.  I learned the back story of so many families. Reading this first provided the context into which all the other books fit.    

Remembering follows the course of one day in Andy Catlett’s life.  There’s not much action: he takes a walk, he gives a speech, he gets on a plane and comes home.  Interspersed in the narrative are remembrances of the people who formed and molded Andy, contemplations on the twists and turns his life has taken.  As in most everything Berry writes, there is a focus not on what we have gained with technology, but what we have lost.  Farming methods are especially important.

What I love about Wendell Berry’s fiction:

1.  Sense of community.  Berry loves the word “membership” as a sense of people belonging to one another.  No one is done harvesting until everyone’s harvest is in.  Working, joking, relaxing, eating are all communal activities.  There is a connectedness that is often missing in other fiction.  “How long have you been here?” “Seventy-four years.” “But you’re not seventy-four?” “No,” Isaac said, and laughed, “my father is seventy-four.  We came here the year he was born.”  [I think that We is profound.]

2.  Realistic characters.  Berry’s protagonists–strong, masculine men and stalwart women–are never perfect.  Nathan Coulter is a tireless worker, but he is impatient.  Loveable Burley Coulter will charm you, but avoids making commitments.

3.  Descriptions of sex.  Got your attention, eh?  When Wendell Berry writes about sex, it is appropriate, achingly beautiful and sparse.  My single friend pointed this out to me.  “But to know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light.”  “He would come to me as my guest, and I would be his welcomer.” “His hand knew her as a man knows his homeland.”  

4. Biblical concepts naturally integrated into prose.  As a pastor’s daughter, I grew up reading and listening to stories which had an obligatory gospel message tacked on to the last chapter.  That is where I stopped reading.  Not because I hated the gospel, but because it was artless.  Berry’s biblical allusions abound, but they are often so subtle I don’t catch them until the second or third reading. “I thought of all the times I’d worked in that field, hurrying to get through, to get to a better place, and it had been there all the time.  I can’t say I’ve always lived by what I learned that day-I wish I had-but I’ve never forgot.” “What?” Andy says.  “That it was there all the time.” “What?” “Redemption,” Mat says, and laughs. “A little flowing stream.”  

5. A sense of place.   This is what most reviewers mention first.  Respect for the land, ties to the land, geography all matter very much to Mr. Berry.  ” In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore.  We all know what that beautiful shore is.  It is Port William with all its loved ones come home alive.”

6. Turns of phrase.  Wendell Berry is a master wordsmith.  When Andy met his wife to be: “He can see nothing wrong with her.  She has closed entirely the little assayer’s office that he runs in his mind.” “…observing scrupulously the etiquette of strangers”  An airplane engine: “a ludicrous hooferaw of noise and fire”

More of my thoughts on Wendell Berry.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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Whenever I take a trip, I deliberate about which books I should bring.  Which is truly not necessary whenever I’m visiting my family.  Because there are always wonderful books waiting for me there.  This is the book that was waiting for me in Maine.  Like The Thirteenth Tale,  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a book whose author understands the allure of a reading life. 

The Channel Island of Guernsey was occupied by the Germans in WWII.  With no communication with the outside world allowed, a group of neighbors and friends in the closed community found great comfort in reading books together.  The book is epistolary – written as a series of letters between Juliet, a London journalist, and members of the Society, who tell their story after the war.   I found myself going back and checking, reading carefully to catch subtle details and hints.   

The most persuasive words are quotes from the book itself – no spoilers, I promise. 

I don’t want to be married just to be married.  I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.  (p. 8) (my emphasis)
That’s what I love about reading:  one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It’s geometrically progressive-all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.  (p.11) [Yes!  Word perfect quote.]  

None of us had any experience with literary societies, so we made our own rules:  we took turns speaking about the books we read.  At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speakers was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves.  Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight.  We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.  Other Islanders asked to join us, and our evenings together became bright, lively times–we could almost forget, now and then, the darkness outside. (p.51)

Spring is nearly here.  I’m almost warm in my puddle of sunshine. (p.98)

Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person’s name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  (p.116)

This 2008 book is the perfect-for-fall, warm, easy read.  A few evenings of light-but-not-fluffy reading.  If this book were a food it would be a bowl of soup, perhaps butternut squash soup with a sprinkle of nutmeg. Thanks to you, my beloved sister-in-law Kathleen.  What percentage of my reading, I wonder, has been influenced by you? 

Addendum:  I’ve also described this as Huckleberry Pie reading: healthy sweet. 

An Evening with Kathleen Norris

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It’s hardly fair to write a book review on a book I haven’t yet read;  but since I recently attended a book reading where Kathleen Norris gave the background of <A href="http://www.xanga.com/private/Acedia and Me and read from it, perhaps I can introduce the book. 

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Acedia is pronounced uh-SEE-DEE-uh.  It means boredom, listlessness, lack of caring.  Acedia is something Norris has struggled with all her life.  She said this book has been percolating for over twenty years.  She believes that it is a struggle common to humanity.

Back when (1000 years ago) the major sins were categorized, there were first eight.  Acedia was telescoped into sloth and the deadly sins were seven instead of eight.  Norris is careful to distinguish acedia from depression by calling acedia a spiritual condition and depression a medical condition. She also sees sloth as physical laziness and acedia more a state of the mind.  It can exhibit itself both as torpor and frenetic activity. 

Fresh from a series of caretaking roles (Norris’ father and husband died after long illnesses) and still caring for her 91 year old mother, Norris spoke of times when she was so numb that she couldn’t pray.  She wasn’t so worried because she knew how many others were praying for her.  Much of the book is memoir, recounting what she has learned in the last difficult season of her life.

One feature of the book which insures I will read it is the commonplace entries in the back: quotes Norris has been collecting about acedia all her life. 

Kathleen Norris came across as a person of integrity, a woman comfortable in her own skin. She was neither pretentious, condescending, or arrogant.  She is a person I would delight in inviting to my house for dinner.  The Q & A was most interesting, especially because the Portland audience was across the spectrum.  Because my theology is  more conservative than hers, some of her answers caused me some inward wincing (e.g. her off-the-cuff definition of a Christian in response to a question had more to do with community than with Christ).     

Why I call Kathleen Norris L’English.

Previous post about acedia here.

A nugget on the subject of pride from Norris’ Cloister Walk.

 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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It has been fun to listen to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (read by the authors) while gardening, canning and freezing produce this week.  In this book Kingsolver, her husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille write about their family project of eating locally grown food for a year.  Only locally grown food.  Do you know what that means?  No bananas.  No lettuce from Mexico in the winter.  Their motivation seems primarily environmental (saving fossil fuels needed to ship food), but they make a good case for the superior quality of local food.

The book was a mixed bag.  Kingsolver writes warmly about their family life and the challenges involved with raising and growing enough food to can and freeze for winter months. This is their gospel and, despite their obvious attempts at a light touch, their message lumbered with sermonizing.  I caught myself groaning when Steven started talking.  Camille, a remarkably articulate college student, reminded me of a Preacher’s Kid who knows all the right answers and earnestly espouses them.  You had to love Lily, the eight year old with a thriving egg business, the only member of the family who didn’t actually write part of the book.

Sticking Points:

•  The section on fixing and eating meals as a family (at the table) was the best defense and best praise of family meals that I can remember.  The Hopp-Kingsolver family is obviously very hospitable and welcoming, with strong generational connectedness.  The descriptions of gatherings and parties made me want to slip in and join the robust fun.  

•  Their rational for discarding vegetarianism and resuming the eating of meat (which they raise and butcher themselves or bought from local farmers) was another excellent argument.  I married into a hunting family and 80% of our meat is wild game, birds, and fish.  I’ve always thought that if you are a meat eater – if you eat an animal that once lived, was killed and butchered – it is inconsistent to object to my husband killing and butchering an elk.  I thought that only vegetarians were consistent with an anti-hunting stance.  Barbara Kingsolver takes it another step.  She asserts that everything we eat was once alive.  Her respectful objections to veganism, in particular, are worth revisiting.

•  Because of this book, I plan to educate myself on heirloom seeds and plants, a term I never before fully understood.  I am persuaded to spend more money to get better quality with heirloom.

•  If you have young children and could only afford one organic food purchase, a pediatrician recommended it be milk.  Growth hormones in cow’s milk are nasty for young bodies.

On a practical note, I was listening late last night to Barbara’s rant against a January newspaper food column on making pesto, a helpful article in the wrong season,  when you’d need to live in the Southern Hemisphere to find fresh basil for making pesto.  I had scooped my own fragrant green pesto into my last half-pint jar and was wondering how to freeze small portions of the rest of my batch.  At that very moment, Kingsolver spoke of the convenience of small baggies of pesto in the freezer.  ~Aha~!  

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was good; but if I had only one book to read about food origins, I would enthusiastically recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma (book review here).  My next book to read in this category is Michael Pollan’s follow up to Omnivore: In Defense of Food.     

I’m off to the Farmer’s Market!

7 Short Book Reviews

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Read by request:


 I have to credit Eugene Peterson for his persuasive endorsement. It propelled this book into a national bestseller.  I don’t, however, share his evaluation.
 
The Shack tells an emotional tale of a family hit by tragedy and the road to healing afterwards.  Many readers connect with the emotion at a deep level. That makes it dicey to criticize the book.  The problem with the book is its theology.  It is outside orthodoxy.  Here is a review worth reading.


                                                                                                                                                                        
If I wasn’t a Christian I would love Three Cups of Tea.  What Greg Mortenson accomplished in establishing dozens of schools in Pakistan is truly remarkable.  As a Christian, however, I cannot swallow the pluralism and pragmatism (and I realize that I’m not representing all Christians in this statement). 

Mortenson sings “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” one night while he fights to stay alive; later he kneels and prays to Allah.  I think he would do anything to help the poor including praying to any god(s). He is a secular savior.  A friend remarked, “It’s just a great story – it’s not a spiritual journey.”  But isn’t all of life a spiritual journey? 

World War I reading:

Each title in this series is a phrase from a WWI poem. The storyline follows an English family of four grown siblings: a mum/housewife, a chaplain, a spy, and a young woman who drives an ambulance in France.  Perry, a convicted murderer at age 15 who later became LDS, doesn’t shy from hard questions.  Where is God in all of this?  What am I capable of doing?  How do we go on?  I don’t think Perry is up to P.D. James as a mystery writer, but the books engaged my interest.

Not an easy book to process, All Quiet on the Western Front is valuable as a first person account of a German soldier.   It is hard not to become numbed by the horror in the trenches, in the hospitals, and back at home.  I’m glad I didn’t read it in high school.  I don’t think I had the maturity to handle it then.


As I was reading about WWI, I often wondered what the trenches look like today.  Stephen O’Shea, author of Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of WWI made a walking tour of the 500 mile Western Front.  I found this opinionated travelogue and macro history an absorbing read.  O’Shea used a term new to me — war p*rn — to describe displays of  photographs of atrocities.  Quote: “Munitions are this region’s marble, a mineral resource that is available in limitless quantities.”  Word Bird find: Artesian = from Artois    


Easily the best book in today’s post, The Zimmerman Telegram displays Barbara Tuchman’s great skill as a historian and writer.  This book answers the question, Why did Woodrow Wilson lead the United States into WWI?  I never knew Pancho Villa was bankrolled by the German government.  This intrigue of diplomacy, spying, code-breaking, and politics reads better than any spy novel or thriller I’ve ever read.  Highly recommended.

Albert Marrin is an author I hold in high respect.  The Yanks Are Coming makes a great text book for studying the role of the United States in World War I.  The many pictures, maps and other illustrations are excellent complements to the prose.  The limited scope of the book doesn’t tell the whole story of WWI so I wouldn’t recommend it as the only source of info on The Great War.  My son and I both enjoyed reading it. Highly recommended.

   

 

Hannah Coulter

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When I received Hannah Coulter a few weeks ago, I determined to read it slowly. I limited myself to one chapter at a time, but often skimmed the previous highlights, just for the pure pleasure. 

As I read, I kept thinking “the folks would love this”, [fill in thirty names] will want to read this.  This is a perfect book to read aloud to Curt and Collin during our long Sunday drives to church.  At 186 pages it is a small enough book to give to readers who would be intimidated by an epic tome.

Hannah Coulter is the quiet telling of a woman’s tale, a tale of sorrow, goodness, love, hurt, work, holding and letting go.  It is Ecclesiastes 3 manifested in one woman from Kentucky.  “This is my story, my giving of thanks.”   Wendell Berry gives her a voice which is modulated in a pleasing tone.  She speaks of her pains and her joys with honesty, clarity, and wisdom. 

Here is a necklace of sentences from the book.

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.

“It [Hannah’s beauty] could get you an early start on a miserable life.”

When he came to work in the morning, Wheeler was like a drawn bow–lean and tense and entirely aimed at whatever he had to do.

Books were a dependable pleasure.

The days were separate and suspended, like plants in hanging pots.

Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad.

We had made it past hard changes, and all of us were changed, but we were together.

What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

“Hannah, my old girl, we’re going to live right on.”

“Margaret, my good Margaret, we’re going to live right on.”

He said it only when he knew that living right on was going to be hard.

The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. 

We sat down to it [Thanksgiving dinner], the four of us, like stray pieces of several puzzles.

There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing.

After she left, the house slowly filled up with silence.  

Hannah Coulter.

The Shield Ring

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The Shield Ring is a story of the Vikings and the Normans in the Lake District of England in the eleventh century.  The reader is rooting for the Vikings (for a change!) who keep a secret stronghold from whence they repel the Norman northern onslaught.   Sutcliff weaves the elements–a boy with a harp, an orphan Saxon girl, a sword called the Fire-drake, the Road to Nowhere, intrigue and espionage–into a vivid and vibrant story.

Sutcliff is the master of historical fiction.  Her prose lifts you from your modern surroundings like a hot air balloon. You land in a place and time and culture that is very Other but also faintly familiar.  Sutcliff does not explain every cultural reference; she lets the reader to work it out.  However, when I read Sutcliff, it is always her prose which delights me: her bright shining, shimmering prose.    

There has been a revival of interest in G. A. Henty’s books; I have a bookcase full, myself.  But if I had a choice between a Henty and a Sutcliff, I would take Sutcliff every time. 

It was a curlew that they were watching now, a curlew at his mating flight, weaving, it seemed to Frytha, a kind of garland of flight round the place where his chosen mate must be, among the heather.  He skimmed low over the ground, then suddenly swerved upward, up and up, hung a moment poised on quivering wings, and then came planing down, his wings arched back to show the white beneath, skimmed low again, and again leapt skyward.  And all the while he was calling, calling; a lovely spiral of sound bubbling and rippling with delight.  But his whole dance, undulating, floating, swerving, with always that flash of underwing silver on the downward swoop, was a dance of sheer delight.  p.16

Another Sutcliff review here.

Kiyo’s Story

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Dandelion,
How long have you been stepped upon?
Today you bloom.
haiku, author unknown
Kiyo Sato tells her family’s remarkable story of endurance and perseverance in Dandelion Through the Crack.  Sato’s father and mother emigrated from Japan to the Sacramento area, grew strawberries on a twenty acre farm, and raised nine children.  Ordered to evacuate, in May, 1942 the family, carrying what they could, were sent to the Poston internment camp.

Kiyo was allowed to leave internment in the fall to go to Hillsdale College. Every free space in her schedule is filled with a job to help pay her tuition.  After the war is over, the family returns to their farm, beginning the arduous process of rebuilding and replanting.

It’s been a while since I’ve stayed up into the single digit hours reading a book I Could Not Put Down.  The writing is good, but not cracking good.  The graphics and layout of the book have a feel of self-publishing.  The cover doesn’t call out, “Read me. Read me. Read me.”  But the story carries all the baggage and propels you through the pages. 

Sato family

I can’t help but love Tochan (Japanese for father) and Mama, the strong, hard-working, long-suffering parents whose daily graces and passions infuse their family with love and devotion.  Tochan loved books, plants, music (he began violin lessons while he was interned), his children.  Mama loved cleanliness, working, making food for her family, nurturing her children.  Kiyo, a youthful 85 year old, writes with the fidelity and love of a very thankful daughter.  Her words remind me of George Dawson in Life is So Good who remarked that if he could give anyone in the world this gift, he would give him the experience of having his (George’s) father as his own.

If you want more first-hand accounts of the Japanese internment, you can find them here. You can also watch fourteen short video clips of Kiyo Sato talking about her experiences.    

Thank you, dear Rachel, for giving me this book.