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Four short stories about rather selfish kids. One has a birthday party. He is forced to invite a dweeby kid he is ashamed of being around. He would rather hang out with one particular boy with whom he would really like to be friends. The dweeb manages to ruin the party in a manner altogether different from what our narrator had expected. The second story is about a boy who goes to his Grandmother's house and learns to be a little bit less self centered when he and his Grandmother go to see the Leonids. Sent to a fat camp, a third kid learns a little bit about something when she has a strange councilor who comes around only on Friday nights. The last story is by our narrator's mama, who bested a white kid at the school she was bussed to, and still managed to learn a lesson.
Happy reading.
According to the premise of this book, gods need believers to exist. The god Om, the national god of Omnia, the most oppressive theocracy in Discworld, is not actually believed in by most of his followers. They believe only in their established church. So when Om accidentally transforms himself into a turtle, most people can't hear his cries. It is only three years after his accidental transformation into a turtle that he runs into one of his true Believers- a novice named Brutha, who is not very clever, but is nonetheless very smart, and has a nearly perfect memory. The evil Vorbis, head exquisitioner, is planning to rule Ephebe, and when he finds out about Brutha's memory, he decides to bring Brutha with. In Ephebe, there are many philosophers. The one with no real followers in Ephebe is a blind philosopher who happens to have written a pamphlet about how the world is on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle, which is discworld is true. He has, unbeknownst to himself, become a symbol among those wishing to overthrow Vorbis and Omnian rule. Anyhow, throw it all together and you get a rather funny but nonetheless profound story.
Happy reading.
Word Freak Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players
by Stefan Fatsis
Joe Edley, the Scrabble Association's in-house expert, is a health nut who practices tai chi. He is hated by many for what is percieved as his extreme arrogance; he doesn't care about wether or not he is perceived as a good player. Joel Sherman, called G.I. Joel for his GastroIntestinal problems, has extreme health problems that prevent him from holding a real job and allow him to devote his life to Scrabble. Matt Graham takes hundreds of pills in an attempt to make himself sharp enough to win at Scrabble. Lester Schoenbrun is a communist who got hooked on Scrabble in New York's Flea House, which is fabled for its chess players. Daniel Goldman was an orthodow Jewish teenager (he isn't teenage anymore) who played on Saturdays without being able to write down his scores or use an electric timer. Of course, Scrabble features some less eclectic players as well, but this book focuses on those people who make the world of competitive Scrabble interesting to read about.
Also included in this story is Fatsis' own story; he took time off his job with the Wall Street Journal to research the Scrabble world and ended up being sucked into the world he was supposed to only study. He studied off of flashcards to learn bingo blocks and memorized all of the two and three letter words. He entered Scrabble tournaments and raised his rating from 760, around 2000th of registered American Scrabble players, to 1733, around 180th of Scrabble players. The toy company plays and strategies are discussed with all the understanding expected from a Wall Street Journalist. The toy company histories relevent to the development of Scrabble are analyzed thouroughly. There are some interesting politics still relevant; Hasbro has Scrabble rights in the U.S. (and I think in Canada) and Mattel, its archnemesis, owns the rights to Scrabble abroad.
Each chapter is well written and interesting. The arrangement of the chapters, however, is quite perplexing. Chapters are not in chronological order, until the end of the book where there are a series of chapters about Fatsis' own Scrabble experienses. It is very annoying to hear how Fatsis has made a breakthrough in his Scrable playing, and then go back to when he's struggling beforehand. It is silly to hear about the invention of Scrabble, and then go back to the history and repeat the story of it's invention.
How much do you play Scrabble?
Happy reading.
Mortal Engines The Hungry City Chronicles
by Philip Reeve
Tom Natsworthy, third class apprentice historian, finds out that his hero Thaddeus Valentine isn't really such a great guy the day that that London finally finds a smaller town to eat. Among the town's inhabitants is a girl named Hester Shaw. She runs for and tries to kill Valentine, but Tom stops her. Tom runs after Hester Shaw and confronts her. She tells him her name and jumps out the waste chute, into outland. When Tom asks Valentine who Hester Shaw is, Valentine pushes Tom down the waste chute to join Hester Shaw. Tom and Hester have lots of dangerous adventures, in each escaping death only through astounding luck. We are also told what is going on in London, through the eyes on Katherine Valentine, our villain's teenage daughter.
In case you're a little apprehensive about reading a part of a series, not to worry, this is the first one in the series (the author's first book, even), and it does still have a fairly final sort of ending, although it is the right sort for a series. The premise of the series, that, in the 40 somethingth century, we, the ancients will have mostly destroyed the world, and technology will depend mostly on what we developed, is a little weak, but still interesting. Just where this world stands technologically is a little unclear. On the one hand, heavier than air flying machines are discussed as though they don't exist, but airplanes are almost certainly extant(extant means currently existing, Nate) in the story.
It also seems bizarre that "seedy"s would have made it that long, without the continued existence of the computer.
Happy reading.
Rambam's Ladder A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give
by Julie Salamon
Rambam, Maimonides, was a Jewish scholar and physician in the twelfth century, who outlined eight levels of giving. Julie Salamon, when looking for ideas for a book about giving, liked his ladder. Her book on giving takes her name for each rung as the title of each chapter, although the connecton between the rung and the chapter is shaky at best. Each chapter has a story about a charity, a little bit about Maimonides' philosophy, and a bit of Julie Salamon's own thoughts about charity. This book does not really explain "why it is neccessary to give", and I'm not convinced that Salamon really has a firm understanding of Rambam's ladder. At the end of the book, she does provide Isaac Klein's translation of Rambam's ladder, and you can interpret it yourself. This book is well written, and intersperses its topics well. Salamon has some ideas for giving here. Happy reading.
When 6A's beloved teacher Miss Cintron leaves for South America to teach there for a year, 6A plans to get her back by acting so awful that no other teacher will put up with them, so that Miss Cintron will be forced to return. They run through seven substitutes with no problems. But the old Bad Breath, their principal, finds a man willing to be their permanent teacher. His name is Goldberg Fred. Not Goldberg, comma, Fred, but Goldberg Fred. Mister Fred is different. He is not bothered by their attacks. He bats Alice's spitballs away with his eyes closed, and he makes perfect paper airplanes. He does roll call by first name, and loves Sousa marches. His extraordinary hearing includes the ablility to hear thoughts. 6A thinks that he might be an alien. Mister Fred challanges them to figure out if he could be an alien, and if so, where he might have come from, and if there have ever been his kind on earth before.
This is one of my favorite books. Unfortunately, Mister Fred went out of print in 1994. The Chicago public libraries still have a few copies, and it's definitely worth ordering if yours doesn't. Some interesting points to think about while you read this book- notice that Anya(our narrator) often says "a kid" instead of naming her classmates. How many classmates are actually mentioned? Does Anya know the names of all of her classmates? Which last names match which first names?
Question: Have you ever had a teacher you thought was an alien? Would you want to have an alien for a teacher?
Happy reading.
Luka has been reared for his entire life, eleven years, by his servant, named Atami, who calls Luka "Your Holiness" and tells him that he, Luka, is the emperor of China, as foretold by a prophecy, which says that the one with five moles under each foot will be the greatest emperor. At the outset of this story, however, Atami is only a beggar, and Luka and Atami sometimes go hungry. One day, Luka and his two ragamuffin go to watch beggars at the Mogo garrison, and they see Atami defending a woman's home from being demolished. Luka attacks the Mogo warriors threatening Atami, and Atami is forced to show his real powers, which he gets from Yin Gong, which appears to be a power related to Kung Fu. Atami defeats the warriors, but now that the Mogo emperor Ghengi knows of their presence, he is wary. When Atami tries to do a funeral ritual for a woman, Ghengi and his warriors come in, claiming that they have outlawed the ritual. Atami is captured and Luka tries to hide with a fur merchant. The fur merchant betrays him, and Luka is sentenced to death, suspended for six months so that he can serve as a miner.
Luka goes on to escape with the help of the Yin Gong master who had taught Atami, who had been imprisoned by Ghengi fifteen years earlier. After being taught Yin Gong by his grandmaster, Luka and the grandmaster go to a Wu Xia temple which is doubling as an orphanage because of the number of orphans under Ghengi's rule. Luka goes on to have many more adventures, none of which he really wanted to have, and I won't spoil the ending.
I don't know how much of this book is fact and how much is fantasy and fiction. The Mogos under Ghengi are almost definitely a reference to the Mongols, possibly under Ghengis Khan. I recognize a little of the Chinese from a Chinese class I took, and the author, as it says on the back cover, was born in China near a temple.
Happy reading.
The Secret Alliance The Extraordinary Story of
the Rescue of the Jews Since World War II
by Tad Szulc
These are the stories of the illegal emigration and immigration of Jews to the Holy Land, from 1939 and the White Paper (the British limit on Jewish immigration to Israel) until the exodous of Soviet Jewry. Soviet Jewry is not really discussed because this book was printed in 1991. Part 1 is the story of how Jews were smuggled and bought out of Europe as the Nazis were moving in. Did you known that Eichman tried to give Jews away for money? Or that he was, before the war, cooperating with the mossad to get Jews to Palestine? Or that King Boris of Bulgaria got all the Jews of Sofia(capital of Bulgaria) into hiding in the mountains, and that the Bulgarians thought that his subsequent mysterious death was his divine punishment for helping Jews?
Part 2 is the saga of the Jewish survivors of World War II, and the holocaust, and how they tried to get into Israel shortly before, during, and immediately after the war of independance. Included as a part of this saga are the communist governments new regimes and attitudes towards Jews.
Part 3, The Middle East and North Africa, is about Jews who were not from Europe, whose lives and communities were threatened by hightened anti-semitism after Israeli independance. This is mostly how the black Jews and the Jews of Morroco managed to flee their countries, but also the stories of Iraqi, Egyptian, and other Jews in the region. In Iraq, the Kurds helped to smuggle out the majority of Iraq's ancient Jewish community, in exchange for the aid that the Israeli army gave them, including military training and a hospital.
Although the material in this book is interesting, the writing style is less than captivating. The perspective of the Jews being rescued is given only once, and could have made the book much richer. The viewpoint taken really lauds American Jewry. It also comes from a very secular viewpoint, and does not sympathise with the religous Jews shown, and even shows their adherence to their principles as being foolish and weak. There is a nice map on pages four and five, which is helpful. There is an index and a bibliography, but endnotes and/or footnotes would have been nice, because in reading, I wondered who gave Szulc which perspective (for example, was the person describing a certain operative as being someone who really stood out for being handsome his wife?).
Educational reading.
In 1937, the aviatress Amelia Earhart disappeared with her plane and navigator. She was never found, and no one knows where she went down or what went wrong. In this novel, Mendelsohn speculates that Earhart and her navigator, Noonan, landed on an island uninhabitted by humans. Here is the account of how Earhart viewed her life and how she and Noonan made a new life for themselves on their island.
The narration is from the island, far into the future, when, to Amelia, the story is already irrelevant. The Earhart portrayed is a person who has been hurt and hurts people as much as she can, consciously or not. She hates her husband, her navigator, and pretty much everyone else. She is a smart and rational person who finds it easier to accuse and be crabby rather than solve her problems and cheer up.
It's an interesting story beyond speculation on Earhart because Earhart is shown maturing on the island, when she is finally forced to deal with her problems, and can no longer hide them. There is no longer anyone to hide them from. The style is unusual, and somewhat poetic.
Happy reading.
Shepherd(17), our narrator, hears a message in one of his tapes that no one else can hear. It says, save her life. Shepherd does not know who the her in the message is, but he hopes it is Mary Sutherland, a freshman in his Spanish I class. But Mary runs with a tougher crowd(which is why she would have to be saved) and pretty soon Shep is in over his head, lying to his best friend and to his parents.
This story makes me a little uncomfortable, because I don't like the way Shep lies, or the voice he hears, or how the reader can tell that Shep is getting into trouble when Shep himself doesn't seem to see it. But the narration does sound authentic, and is well written. The ending is a good one, but a little unclear.
Happy reading.
Books Reviewed:14
Total Books Reviewed:110
Days Blogged/Days In Period:10/61
New Members:none
Total Number of Members:3 active, Welcome Nano(who intends to change his sn to Nate the Great). All of you inactive members, post already.
Number of Hits This Data Period:183
Toal Number of Hits:901
Features Added:well, the sidebar in the index now has a list of publishers.
Comments: There were fewer posts this month because I was on vacation. The new sitemeter gives me reports on who visits but really doesn't seem to be recording all hits.
Tony, Charis, and Roz are friends who live in Toronto, lived in the dorms in McClung Hall College at around the same time, and have very few other common grounds. Except that all three have been hurt by another woman, who also went to college with them, Zenia. The storytelling begins with an account of the day on which the friends find out that Zenia is not dead, as they had believed. The day is recounted first from Tony's perspective, then Charis', and them Roz's. The table of contents really explains the format of the book. It looks like this:
Onset 1
The Toxique 5
Black Enamel 121
Weasel Nights 219
The Robber Bride 323
The Toxique 445
Outcome 515
Onset and Outcome are what they say. The Toxique is devided into six parts, each friend's story twice, telling parallel stories. The friends are at the restaurant The Toxique telling each other their stories for this part. The middle three chapters are their histories, their childhoods and how Zenia wronged them. Since they were hurt in order, there is little repetition in this part of the book. Watching the story come together, from Now to Then to Now is awesome.
But although the manner in which this storytelling is performed is awesome, the prejudices of the story are not. Most glaringly, the only male characters in this book with any backbone are gay. Even those characters are somewhat excluded. From this book, we could come away with the impression that all guys who are not gay are misogynistic ^$%*$@*$&s, with the exceptions of those who are stupid. I don't like that. I also don't like the stereotypical representation of gay. If the male characters in this book had had more character, I could have sympathised more with the women who care about them. It is nonetheless a powerful story.
Happy reading.
Chad's summer starts out really well. The girl he's been thinking about all year is back, there's a really awesome bozo on the boardwalk, and his best friend is, as usual, with him to enjoy it. This does not last. Chad is accused of a theft he didn't commit, and while he does get off, the witness who smugly watches the whole thing and refuses to speak up for Chad turns out to be his mother's new tenant, and is also the Bozo Chad had admired. To make things worse, Chad's best friend comes down with a mysterious illness. And just to prove that bad things come in threes, the Girl starts going out with the guy who really did commit the theft Chad was accused of. If you can't think of a really neat ending to these problems on your own, you have to read the book. Even if you can think of an ending, you have to read the book anyways. At the worst, you'll learn a little about boardwalks.
Happy reading.
The End Of Homework
How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell
That title has to draw you in. Who ever thinks of homework as "disrupting families, overburdening children, and limiting learning"? Well, ok, probably the majority of kids could tell you that. But who knew that there were studies to back that up? And that there are adults supporting less homework?
Apparently, there have been adults opposed to homework for over a hundred years, and a 1901 California statute even banned homework for people under 15. This book also examines homework from an economic perspective: it's harder for kids with two working parents or parents with poor educational backgrounds to do their homework. I think that the book looks at economic issues a little too much, and that it doesn't address some issues related to this topic that interest me. I emailed the authors and said as much. Mr. Buell tells me that his book, Closing the Book on Homework, addresses these issues more thouroughly.
Thoughtful reading.
Solomon's Sword
Two Families And The Children The State Took Away by Michael Shapiro
Gina Pellegrino(19) gave birth to a girl on June 26, 1991, in New Haven, Connecticut. The hospital records say that she lied about her name and age. Gina denies this. After the baby was born, Gina left the hospital. When she did not come back, the Department of Children and Youth Services tried to contact Gina under the name that the hospital had for Gina. The DCYS put the baby in foster care, and they asked a judge, John Downey, to declare the baby a legal orphan. He granted this request. The DCYS then put a notice in the papers saying that if the child was not claimedin 20 days, parental rights would be terminated. 20 days went by, and no parent showed up. The baby was given to pre-adoptive parents, Cindy and Jerry LaFlamme, who had been waiting for a child for years. They were told that the child was risk-free, meaning that there was no possibility of anyone returning to claim the baby. They baptized the baby as Megan Marie, having been told by their caseworker that this was alright. In the meantime, Gina Pellegrino had, with the support of her mother, come to the DCYS to reclaim her child. Gina claims that the DCYS tried to stall her. Ms. Pellegrino got a lawyer, and went to court. After a long court battle, Gina got the baby, whom she renamed. Jerry LaFlamme's mother called the media, which made a big stink. The state went to court on behalf of the LaFlammes, to declare Gina an unfit mother, to declare that the best interests of the baby were to stay with the LaFlammes, whom she viewed as her parents, and to ask that the baby be returned to the LaFlammes. After a very long battle, it was decided that the Gina would keep the child.
During a drug bust on Chicago's west side, the police found 19 children, 18 of whom were under nine, living in an apartment in filth. The children belonged to six women, five Melton sisters and the sister of one of the Melton's boyfriend. The police removed the children and charged the women with misdemeanor child neglect. A video photographer publicized the story with images of the police removing the children from the apartment. The children were placed in foster care and with their relatives. Only one the children was found to have been actually abused- he had cerebral palsy and had been burnt with cigarettes. His mother was the only one the mothers whose parental rights were removed by the judge. The remaining mothers worked to learn how to become better mothers, and were allowed to visit their children. In the end, seven of the kids were adopted, eleven live with realtives, six are moved from home to home. This adds to more than 19 because the sisters had other kids.
In Solomon's Sword Shapiro goes over these cases from all aspects. He discusses historical perspectives of children, adoption, and salvation. The problems with the social services are discussed and also the cost, the lack of available placements, the disillusionment and fatigue of many social workers, and the impact of media coverage on public perspective. In the end, the picture is frightening. The social services of America are going nowhere fast, and it's an expensive ticket to that nowhere.
The first case in this book is written in a much happier light than the second. In the first, Shapiro can take a decisive stand on what should happen- Megan should be with the people who want her, her adoptive parents. That she isn't with them is something Shapiro sees as a miscarriage in justice. The Melton story is much less clear. There are more people involved in more than one issue, and Shapiro might have done better to have focused more on one of the mothers, and only some of the children. No solution is offered to this case; Shapiro does not see a way out and so that story is written with too many distractions to be very readable. It is still an important picture.
Thoughtful reading.
While Standing On One Foot Puzzle Stories and Wisdom Tales from the Jewish Tradition
by Nina Jaffe and Steve Zeitlin, Pictures by John Segal
17 stories/ riddles from Jewish tradition are included in this anthology. Some of these stories are very famous: I had already heard 14 of these stories in many guises. Some I heard almost exactly the way they are told here, and others have twists that were new to me. All of the stories have short introductions, so that I learned some of the background of the stories I knew.
Happy reading.
Thomas Derwent(11) and his father Patrick Derwent(age not given) of Belthorp, England, Earth are really Tonitheen and Vateelin from the planet Ormingat. They have been on Earth for five years, and now it is time for them to return to Ormingat. On their way to their space ship, they run into trouble in the form of a truck. Mr. Derwent accidentally shrinks so that the truck does not kill him when it runs him over, and Thomas is separated from his father. Now he must figure out how to contact his father so that he will not be left behind when the space ship leaves for Ormingat.
On the front cover of this book(or at least the edition I am reading), a man and a boy are pictured holding hands. The boy looks around six or seven, and that is the way Thomas acts in this book. 11 year olds in real life who believe that they are aliens from outer space are not generally viewed as normal kids with active immaginations; they have problems. And in that vein, the people portrayed in this book seem overly simplistic and naive. However, the premise of this book, aliens kids in our midst being raised as us, is interesting.
Happy reading
This is the journal of Cody Lee Carson. He is starting fifth grade in a new town in a new school where nobody knows him, and he is determined to put this new start to good use. And he does, becoming somebody his parents can be proud of even at report card time. Disappointingly, this book does not feature any mutant underwear. In his old life, Cody's pants once fell down at school, revealing his tweety bird underwear, and in his new life Cody dreads the stigma of underwear. In the final pages of this book, we do see underwear as ... uh oh, no giving away the ending. Read it yourself. ANYhow, a funny book.
Happy reading
The Whore's Child And Other Stories
by Richard Russo
This is a collection of seven short stories. The title story is narrated by a college professor teaching a writing workshop. A nun comes to his class, and begins writing the story of her childhood in a convent as the daughter of a whore. In the convent, the girl is woefully mistreated, and she constantly prays for the demise of the nuns and the return of her father. Only to find out *Bleep Bleep Bleep...Ending Giveaway Warning...Warning...If you don't want to see the ending before reading the story, look away. Bleep Bleep Bleep* from one of her fellow students that her "father" was really her mother's pimp.
All of the stories are wryly and artfully narrated. Three cover the lives of authors/ English professors, which suggests that the stories have an element of autobiography in them, in this case a good thing.
Happy reading.
