T(of)urkey-Day Reading List

Somewhere between the cooking, eating and socializing, I intend to steal some quality reading time. Here’s what I hope to get through by the end of the week:

I wish I could make spine poems like these wonderful compositions, but the best I can hope for is that the warrior sheep will find a flint heart in their quest, and that Charles and Emma find their lives changed by a girl in need of some serious painkillers. We’ll see how that works out.

What’s on your Thanksgiving reading list?

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Review: Flesh and Blood So Cheap

Review: Flesh & Blood So Cheap by Albert Marrin (Feb 2011)

The Triangle Fire. Say those words and you might recall a vague memory from high school history class. It’s not the kind of thing you can forget: in 1911, a fire broke out in a New York City factory, killing 146 workers, most of them young women. They were trapped on the top floors of a ten-story building with narrow exits and no sprinklers. Many chose to jump to their deaths rather than burn alive, and until September 11, 2001, the Triangle Waist Company Fire was the worst workplace tragedy in New York City history.

Sometimes the aftermath of an event is as important as the event itself. Albert Marrin uses the fire as a starting point to write about major social and labor reform. The book begins with a brief scene from the day of the fire. Marrin then jumps back to explain the circumstances that led up to that tragedy. He writes about immigrant life in the city’s tenements, labor strikes and unions. Ironically, the Triangle Fire was preceeded by one of the most successful strikes in American history. Workers won major concessions in that strike, yet it wasn’t enough to prevent the ensuing tragedy. It took a catastrophe to prompt significant improvements in workplace safety. Today, much of what we take for granted—fire escapes, child labor laws, accessible exits—are direct legacies of the Triangle Fire.

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Channeling Genius: Musical Edition

Review: Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein by Susan Goldman Rubin (published Feb. 2011).

Picking up from yesterday’s post on poetic genius, I’ve selected another biography to review, this time of the musical kind. Leonard Bernstein—conductor, composer, concert pianist—is a giant in the classical music world (and in America in particular). But I don’t envy Rubin’s job: how do you convey musical genius on the printed page?

Rubin goes for the casual approach. Her writing isn’t poetic, but reading the book is like chatting with a pal over lunch. Rubin packs the pages with anecdotes and photos until you feel you’re flipping through a thick family scrapbook.

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The Write Approach

May I have a word with you? Or two? Just a few will do. This is a recommendation, not a review, for aspiring writers and for anyone who’s read a book so mindbogglingly good, it left you wondering how the author wrote it. 

Word After Word After Word, by Patricia MacLachlan, is not just a beautiful story, it’s also a writing guide. When author Ms. Mirabel comes to teach Lucy’s fourth grade class, she explains that she writes to “change her life” but “people write for other reasons” and “all these reasons are good reasons.” Lucy also wants to change her life, but she’s convinced she has nothing to write about except sadness. As the class learns the basics of storytelling (landscape and setting shape character) and get the inside scoop on writing (outlines are silly!), Lucy discovers her reason for writing: to express what’s too hard to say out loud. MacLachlan provides snippets of the children’s “writings” and they’re simple but good. Thanks to this book, I feel encouraged to write unabashedly as well, although I wish the words would “whisper in my ears” as audibly as they do in MacLachlan’s.

Lois Lowry’s autobiography, Looking back: A Book of Memories, is like poring over her family album as she reminisces over a cup of tea. Paired with family photos (Lowry was a really cute toddler), the glimpses are often personal but not intrusive, funny, wistful, sad, a bit philosophic and evocative at times. Lowry describes her snapshots as perpetuating pieces of a kinetic sculpture, one memory leading to another, until one see the threads between them: Lowry, a shy but sharp observer even at a young age; family dynamics, especially those between sisters; the importance of keeping memories, both good and bad. Fans of Lowry’s books will especially appreciate seeing how moments in her life become a nesting ground for the stories we treasure. I also enjoyed the tender timey-wimey moments where Lowry imagines her younger self conversing with her mother when she was also at that age. Because until someone invents a functional time machine, our memories will have to suffice both for looking back, and forwards as well. That’s enough stories to last a lifetime, really.

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All things bats and beautiful

All things bats and beautiful
For all the attention they get in the media (vampires!, Batman!, rabid winged rodents!), to say that bats are misunderstood is a massive understatement. Neither menacing nor a pest, these winged creatures-more closely related to primates than to rodents-are integral to our planet’s health. For starters, they were excelling at the nightly pest control business long before the Caped Crusader. One little brown bat can catch 1,000 mosquito-size insects in a single hour!

Once we’ve been reassured with some basic bat facts, author Mary Kay Carson invites us into Bracket Bat Cave, which hosts a mammoth colony of mother-and-pup Mexican free-tailed bats, for the inside look. Bat scientist Merlin Tuttle is our guide. He’s been interested in bats since he was nine; as a teenager, he observed gray bats around his home and realized his guidebook was wrong–they do migrate! Through his research and the foundation of Bat Conservation International (BCI), Merlin hopes to reshape our preconceived notions of bats through education and photography, including a stunning picture of a lesser long-nosed bat hovering, wings aloft in an invert arc, over a giant saguaro cactus flower (photos by Tom Uhlman).

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Praising the Underdogs

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman (writer) and Beckie Prange (illustrator).

It’s hard to like bacteria. They’re smelly and slimy and cause a lot of disease. Sure, some help us digest food, but they don’t exactly inspire poetry…which is why Ubiquitous is so remarkable.

Bacteria
ancient, tiny
teeming, mixing, melding
strands curled like ghostly hands
winking, waving, waking
first, miraculous
Life

Sidman’s book celebrates the lowliest of creatures: beetles, ants, coyotes, crows. They’re worthy of our notice because they’re survivors and opportunists and scavengers. And they are admirable because they’re an evolutionary success—compared to them, humans are a flicker in the span of earth history (look at the endpapers to see what I mean. Let’s just say that there’s nothing like geologic time to make you feel insignificant).

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The Bitterest Sweets

Sugar Changed the World by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos: a review

Sugar changed the world—it’s an ambitious title for a brilliant book. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I picked it up. I expected a history of sugarcane and its role in the slave trade, followed by sobering info on obesity and processed foods.

How wrong I was. Everything I expected was there, but its scope was so much bigger. Sugar, as it turns out, is partly responsible for the spread of chess and Arabic numerals; it brought the ancient world together and facilitated the Industrial Revolution; it was deeply entrenched with the Atlantic slave trade, yet sparked the Declaration of Independence and Gandhi’s path of Satyagraha. Sugar, as they say, “moved, murdered, and freed millions.”

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Quest for the Chiru

The Chiru of High Tibet by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (writer) and Linda Wingerter (illustrator): a review

There is a place so cold,

it takes the fleece of five sheep to keep one person warm,

so high,

with so little rain,

the tallest tree is a shrub

that would not reach a grown man’s knee.

That place is the Chang Tang, the Tibetan plains where dwell the world’s chiru (chee-roo), small antelope-like creatures that produce shahtoosh, “the king of wools.” Each strand of chiru hair has one-seventh the diameter of human hair, and the resulting cloth is so soft, it is said that a shahtoosh shawl can be pulled through a hoop the size of a wedding ring. But such luxury comes at a cost: every shahtoosh shawl bears the hair of three to five dead chiru. The animals were hunted to near extinction, and although the sale of shahtoosh has been banned in many countries, poachers continue to drive an underground trade.

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Holiday Gift Guide

(This is a joint post by Jen and Lisa).

Now that it’s December, chances are you’ll soon be giving gifts.  And no matter what holiday you celebrate, it’s never a bad idea to return to the oldest form of entertainment: ink-and-paper. While it’s a good bet your recipient already owns Harry Potter and the like, here are eight less commonly reads books that are certainly worth keeping:

It’s a Book by Lane Smith (ages 12 and up)

In this delightful spoof, a monkey tries to teach a web-savvy donkey (called jackass, for obvious reasons) what it means to read a book.

How do you scroll down?
I don’t. I turn the page.

Does it blog? Tweet? Require a password?

No, it’s a book!

Although this is a short picture book, the target audience is really adults—both because of the term “jackass” and because it’s funniest to those who understand the printed book/electronic gadgets debate. If there’s any subliminal message about the future of the book industry, you’ll find it in the final pages, when the donkey succumbs to curiosity and loses himself in the book. Suddenly he can’t stop reading…but don’t worry, he tells the monkey, I’ll charge it up when I’m done.

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“Yes You Can” Make History Surprising

In Of Thee I Sing, Obama pays tribute to 13 famous Americans and their legacies in history, art and culture. The book is structured as a letter to his daughters, which allows Obama to address the reader directly, just like one of his speeches…except this time he’s facing children, not voters.

And instead of presenting policy, Obama has to convince kids that these people (many of them bit characters in school history books) are extraordinary—in about 50 words each.

Every hero is introduced by a question, followed by a description of his or her feats.

Have I told you that you are smart?

That you braid great ideas with imagination?
A man named Albert Einstein
turned pictures in his mind into giant advances in science,
changing the world
with energy and light.

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