WIENER WOLF

WIENER WOLF, by Jeff Crosby (Hyperion 2011).  Wiener dog is bored with life with grandma.  What he craves is excitement!

But when he answers the call of the wild, he finds out the rebuttal is a little more than he bargained for...

With expressive illustrations and a timeless story, WIENER WOLF brings to life one dachshund's quest for self-actualization in this thoroughly fun, hilarious, and engaging picture book.

Jeff read from WIENER WOLF at BookPeople

THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS

THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS, by Carole Estby Dagg (Clarion/HMH 2011)(12+).  It's 1896, and seventeen-year-old Clara Estby and her mother Helga need to raise a lot of money fast -- to prevent foreclosure on the family farm.  Inspired by the intrepid Nellie Bly, they hatch a scheme to walk across the United States, from Spokane to New York City.  If they make it by the seven month deadline, a mysterious benefactor will pay them $10,000 and publish the account of their journey as a book.

En route, the mother-daughter pair encounters hardships and dangers and finds out more than a little bit about themselves and each other.

Based on the true story of the author's great-aunt and great-grandmother, THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS is a satisfying and thoroughly fascinating adventure road-trip.  Dagg offers a likeable protagonist and relationships that feel real in their complexity, while compellingly evoking the atmosphere of the era of William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley.

Happy Independence Day!

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

INTO THE TRAP

INTO THE TRAP, by Craig Moodie (Roaring Brook 2011)(age 10-14).  Twelve-year-old Eddie Atwell lives on an island off the coast of Massachusetts and comes from a long line of lobstermen.  It's his ambition to become one  himself.  But when his father tears his rotator cuff and thieves steal their catch, they could lose everything...

When Eddie stumbles upon the thieves' lobster cache and encounters Briggs Fairfield -- a rich-kid off-islander runaway from the local sailing camp -- he decides that it's up to him to stop the poachers and save the Atwell livelihood.  Together, the pair hatch a plot to catch the thieves.  But will it be enough?  And what if they, themselves, are the ones caught?

INTO THE TRAP is an exciting adventure on the water: a terrific story of friendship, danger, and justice, with an engaging protagonist and thrills aplenty. 

Writers and Dinosaurs: Dianna Hutts Aston

Dianna Hutts Aston and "Candlesaurus"

Dianna Hutts Aston is the award-winning author of numerous picture books, including AN EGG IS QUIET and A SEED IS SLEEPY, both illustrated by Sylvia Long.  Her latest book is A BUTTERFLY IS PATIENT, also illustrated by Sylvia Long. 

Click here for a 2006 interview with Aston and Long.

FEYNMAN

FEYNMAN, by Jim Ottaviani, ill. by Leland Myrick (First Second, Aug. 2011)(ages 12+).   In this biography in comic format, Ottaviani and Myrick bring to life one of the giants -- and true eccentrics -- of 20th Century physics.

From Feynman's childhood when his father told him stories about dinosaurs (!), young adulthood and college and graduate school, and later life when he worked on the Manhattan Project, won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, and served on the Challenger Commission, Ottaviani and Myrick provide a fascinating look at the private and public lives of a man who truly thought "outside the box."

FEYNMAN touches on the concepts behind quantum electrodynamics and the Feynman diagram, and provides interesting background to the genesis of the now-famous Feynman Lectures on Physics.  But in addition to introducing the professional life of the scientist, FEYNMAN also captures the mundane, the poignant, and the whimsical: Feynman's relationships with his wives, his safe-cracking, toying with military censors, and how he dealt with fame and the famous.

Altogether, FEYNMAN makes excellent use of the graphic format, providing a funny and fun introduction to the science and the scientist.  FEYNMAN should appeal to both the scientifically and non-scientifically inclined and makes an excellent accompaniment to Feynman's own memoirs, SURELY YOU'RE JOKING MR. FEYNMAN and WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?            

It's all Homer's fault...

The Supreme Court recently held that a California law outlawing the sale of violent video games to minors (18 and under) was unconstitutional.  In doing so, the majority, per Justice Scalia, had a number of things to say about literature for young readers, demonstrating that, at least, the issue of, and concern about, violence in books and media for young readers goes way, way back:

California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts [sic] for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers “till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy.” The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales 198 (2006 ed.). Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven. 

They had this to say about literature read by high-schoolers:

High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer’s Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. The Odyssey of Homer, Book IX, p. 125 (S. Butcher & A. Lang transls.1909) (“Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame”).

In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface. And Golding’s Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other of the Flies.

They go on to discus some of the history of attempts at regulating "minors' consumption of violent" media:

This is not to say that minors’ consumption of violent entertainment has never encountered resistance. In the 1800’s, dime novels depicting crime and “penny dreadfuls” (named for their price and content) were blamed in some quarters for juvenile delinquency. When motion pictures came along, they became the villains instead. “The days when the police looked upon dime novels as the most dangerous of textbooks in the school for crime are drawing to a close. . . . They say that the moving picture machine . . . tends even more than did the dime novel to turn the thoughts of the easily influenced to paths which sometimes lead to prison.” For a time, our Court did permit broad censorship of movies because of their capacity to be “used for evil,” but we eventually reversed course. Radio dramas were next, and then came comic books. Many in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s blamed comic books for fostering a “preoccupation with violence and horror” among the young, leading to a rising juvenile crime rate. But efforts to convince Congress to restrict comic books failed. And, of course, after comic books came television and music lyrics.

And a couple of comments on the nature of reading: 

California claims that video games present special problems because they are “interactive,” in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome. The latter feature is nothing new: Since at least the publication of The Adventures of You: Sugarcane Island in 1969, young readers of choose-your-own adventure stories have been able to make decisions that determine the plot by following instructions about which page to turn to.

As for the argument that video games enable participation in the violent action, that seems to us more a matter of degree than of kind. As Judge Posner has observed, all literature is interactive. “[T]he better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.” 

Footnote 5 addresses censorship of comic books:

The crusade against comic books was led by a psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “as long as the crime comic books industry exists in its present forms there are no secure homes.” Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 83d Cong., 2d Sess., 84 (1954). Wertham’s objections extended even to Superman comics, which he described as “particularly injurious to the ethical development of children.” Wertham’s crusade did convince the New York Legislature to pass a ban on the sale of certain comic books to minors, but it was vetoed by Governor Thomas Dewey…

Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 564 U.S. ___ (2011)(some internal citations omitted).

CHEESIE MACK IS NOT A GENIUS OR ANYTHING

CHEESIE MACK IS NOT A GENIUS OR ANYTHING, by Steve Cotler (Random House 2011)(ages 8-12).  Eleven-year-old Ronald "Cheesie" Mack is on the cusp of graduation from fifth grade.  But to get there -- and survive -- he has to navigate an evil older sister, an idiosyncratic family, a best friend who's hatching a scheme to unleash mice on the school, a graduation party, and mysterious artifacts found in his best friend's basement.

CHEESIE MACK is an enormously fun read:  Cheesie is witty and his conversational voice and relationships ring true to middle school and all that that entails.  Altogether, a fine novel of family, friendship and fifth grade angst and adventure.

First in a series.

BOOTLEG: MURDER, MOONSHINE, AND THE LAWLESS YEARS OF PROHIBITION

BOOTLEG: MURDER, MOONSHINE, AND THE LAWLESS YEARS OF PROHIBITION, by Karen Blumenthal (Roaring Brook 2011)(age 10+) provides a fascinating account of the passions on both sides of the temperance movement, which was intended to uplift American society by drying it out.  The apparent victory of the movement in the passage of the 18th Amendment led instead to a decade and a half of lawlessness and corruption... 

In BOOTLEG, Blumenthal does a terrific job of bringing the era to life and documenting the resulting societal upheavals.  An excellent introduction to the times and personalities of temperance and Prohibition.

10th Anniversary: RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME

Congratulations to my wife, Cynthia Leitich Smith, on the Tenth Anniversary of the publication of her first novel, RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME.  Go over to Cynsations to check out some reflections on the occasion!