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Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine

My daughter picked up this book and said, “This book sure doesn’t look like a book by my favorite author of Ella Enchanted and The Two Princesses of Bammarre.”

If you’re looking for more reworked fairy tales, the genre in which Ms. Levine has become famous, don’t look at Dave at Night. Nevertheless, it is a story about an orphan boy who has adventures, meets a “princess”, and frees his buddies from an evil “giant.” So, maybe it is a reworked fairy tale, set in 1920’s Harlem.

Dave Caros is Jewish, and when his beloved papa dies after falling off the roof of a house he was helping to build, Dave is left with his (evil) stepmother Ida who either can’t or doesn’t want to take care of him. So, he is sent to the HHB, Hebrew Home for Boys. Unfortunately, the HHB has a lot of other names, made up by the boys who live there: The Hell Hole for Brats, Happy House of Bullies, Hopeless House of Beggars, Hollow Home for Boys—you get the idea.

Other than the fairy tale parallels, one interesting thing about the book that it’s told in first person from Dave’s point of view; however, at least as an adult, it was always obvious to me that Dave might not be entirely accurate in his depiction of the HHB as a hellhole and his family as uncaring and mean. Yes, Mr. Doom, the orphanage administrator and the villain of the piece, is a paskudnyak, as one of the characters in the book calls hims, a real blackguard. But maybe the HHB isn’t quite as bad as Dave makes out. And maybe there are compensations for the suffering, deprivation, and abuse that the boys go through: buddies, art classes, a chance to live in relative safety.

Dave is a wonderful narrator. Everything for him is simple, as a child would think it should be. And the story paints a vivid picture of Harlem in the 1920’s as Dave escapes from the orphanage during the night and goes to rent parties and mixes in high society with the goniff, Solly. Dave and Solly meet and tell fortunes for bootleggers, business people, and 1920’s guys and dolls. And, of course, everything ends happily, just as it should in a fairy tale with a boy hero like Dave.

Recommended for aficionados of hero tales, 1920’s Harlem, Jewish cultural history, orphan stories, and just good middle grade fiction. Ms. Levine says it may be her favorite of all of her books.

By the way, I like the cover art by Loren Long on my library copy of the book much better than I like the above cover, but the picture above was what was at Amazon. My cover is the one that’s pictured at Ms.Levine’s site, and I think it’s a lovely work of art.

1926: Events and Inventions

January 27, 1926. Scottish inventor M. John Baird demonstrates his new machine capable of the wireless transmission of moving pictures using a cathode ray tube. The invention is called by its inventor, television.

'Robert Goddard with his Double Acting Engine Rocket in 1925' photo (c) 2010, NASA on The Commons - license: http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/February 25, 1926. Francisco Franco becomes the youngest general in the Spanish army.

March 16, 1926. Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts.

April 7, 1926. An assassination attempt against Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini fails. Italian Fascist Party member march in the streets and vow their loyalty to Mussolini. The Pope says that Mussolini is obviously being protected by God.

May 3-12, 1926. General Strike in Britain. A coal miners’ strike begins on the 1st of May, and on the 3rd a general strike in support of the coal miners is called. The general strike causes the shutdown of mines, transportation, iron and steel works and other industries and paralyzes the country for 10 days. The general strike ends when public opinion goes against the striking workers, but one million coal miners are still on strike.

June 13, 1926. Marshall Joseph Pilsudski takes dictatorial power in Poland. Many Poles believe that the Polish army will under Pilsudski’s command will soon attack SOviet Russia.

September, 1926. Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang troops under General Chiang Kai-shek capture hang-kow and begin the unification of China. China has been suffering for the past several years, since 1916, under the fighting of warlords in various regions who refuse to answer to a central government.

October 23, 1926. Leon Trotsky is removed from the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin is becoming more and more powerful.

December 25, 1926. Japan gains a new emperor after the death of Emperor Yoshihito who had ruled Japan for the past 14 years. Twenty-five year old Emperor Hirohito, who has been regent for his ailing father for the past five years, will now become Japanese head of state on his own.

Notable deaths in 1925: Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino, Eugene Debs, Annie Oakley, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet.

Apparent Danger to The Shooting Salvationist

Odd. This book, Apparent Danger, about Fort Worth Baptist preacher J. Frank Norris, has apparently been re-published under a different title, The Shooting Salvationist, with more publicity. I read the book last year, and I thought it was quite good, good enough that I included it in my Top Eight Nonfiction Reads of 2010.

Everything old (2010) is new again. Does this sort of thing happen often, a book being re-published (maybe re-edited?) under a different title?

Texas Tuesday: Apparent Danger by David R. Stokes

Apparent Danger: The Pastor of America’s First Megachurch and the Texas Murder Trial of the Decade in the 1920’s by David R. Stokes.

I get a lot of emails from publicists pitching books that I might want to review here on the blog. Mostly, I don’t respond because a) most of the books just don’t sound that interesting to me, and b) I don’t like being pressured to read a book and write a review on someone else’s time schedule. However, when I received an email about Apparent Danger, I took the bait because I am interested in Texas history, particularly Southern Baptist history in Texas, and the book was about the notorious J. Frank Norris, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth from 1909 until Norris’s death in 1952.

What I knew about Norris before I read the book: He was the pastor of FBC, Fort Worth. He got thrown out of or left the Southern Baptist Convention with his church. He was a real, live “fundamentalist.” He was involved in some kind of scandal or something?

What I learned from the book: J. Frank Norris was much more than just a run-of-the-mill pastor of a large church. He was a celebrity with aspirations to become the religious and political leader of the fundamentalist movement after the death of orator and politician William Jennings Bryan. The “scandal” I vaguely associated with Norris was really more than one scandal, but the biggest one was that he shot and killed an unarmed man in his church office —and was subsequently indicted and tried for first-degree murder. (And we think we have outrageous behavior among the clergy nowadays!) Of course, the book goes into much more detail about Norris, the murder, the trial, Norris’s relationships with Fort Worth’s finest, almost everything you’d ever want to know about Fort Worth and its politics and culture in 1926.

And I ate up every word. The picture that Mr. Stokes paints of this larger-than-life preacher and his strange reaction to criticism and controversy is fascinating. I kept trying to figure out what made J. Frank Norris tick and why so many people were so devoted to him and to his church for so long. That I never completely understood or got answers to those questions was not the fault of the author so much as the subject. Pastor J. Frank Norris didn’t seem to want to be understood so much as feared and followed and obeyed and admired. He was virulently anti-Catholic, associated with the Ku Klux Klan if not a member, and yet he spent a lot of time visiting in the homes of his six thousand church members and and seemed to see himself as a crusader against the evils of alcohol, gambling, and immorality in general. But he didn’t see anything immoral or even questionable about his shooting of Mr. D.E. Chipps in cold blood in the church building on July 17, 1926.

I thought the book, again, was wonderful in its detailed and comprehensive view of the time period and of the particular circumstances of Chipp’s death and the subsequent trial of J. Frank Norris. At the same time I very much wanted to know who Norris was and why he did what he did. Did he really believe what he preached? Was he a charlatan out to make a buck and enjoy his power over the masses? Was he ever sorry for the events of July 17th? What did his children think of him? Or his grandchildren? If he didn’t really believe the Bible, how did he sustain such a ministry for a lifetime? If he did, how did he square his actions with Jesus’s commands to practice peace and humility and lovingkindness? How could a Christian man ever feel justified in killing another human being, even in self-defense? (Oddly enough, George W. Truett, pastor of FBC, Dallas, during the same time that Norris was in Fort Worth, accidentally shot and killed a friend in a hunting accident, and it nearly ended his ministry. Truett was deeply depressed by the accident and only recovered after much prayer and encouragement from his congregation and family.)

I found this article, A Tale of Two Preachers, by author David Stokes linked at his website, and it added some to the story. But still I came away from the book wishing I knew more about this man, Doctor J. Frank Norris. (He received an honorary doctorate from Simmons College, as my alma mater, Hardin-Simmons University, was called back in those days.) How could he continue on for twenty-five more years in the ministry at the same church without ever revealing his heart? Did he have a heart? Did he preach the gospel, or just so much legalistic, racist, anti-Catholic nonsense? Was it all so mixed-up that you couldn’t sort it out? What really sustained Norris, besides Kipling’s poem If, a poem he had posted on his study wall and could quote by heart?

Apparent Danger is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of fundamentalist Christianity, of Fort Worth, of Texas Baptists, or of religion in the 1920’s. It reads like a fresh news story and seems to be well-researched and sourced without having the story itself get bogged down in footnotes and minutia. Recommended history.

The Most Important Book I Read in College

Lessons from a Bear of Very Little Brain by Sam Torode.

“In four years of college, the most important thing I did was read Winnie-the-Pooh. My saying this will surprise many of you, and it is with no small shame that I admit it. How, you ask, could I have made it through childhood, and all the way into college, without reading Winnie-the-Pooh?”

I linked to this article in Boundless last year on A.A. Milne’s birthday (b.1882), and this year I can’t resist it again. What was the most important book you read while in college? I think I read some of C.S. Lewis for the first time while in college, and if so, I would have to count those as my most important books. However, maybe I read all of C.S. Lewis while still in high school; in which case I would choose Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I stayed up until 3:00 AM to finish Les Miserables, and I had an 8:00 AM class that morning. For me, staying awake until 3:00 in the morning was an unusual occurence; my head usually hit the pillow at 10:00 PM every night. Only a very good book could keep me turning pages until the wee hours. Anyway, back to Pooh, I agree with Mr. Torode that for one who was never introduced to Pooh as a child the meeting would be a Momentous. Occasion.

More Milne and More Pooh:
Pooh’s Page Recipes, stories, postcards, games and puzzles.
Pooh Corner Biography, song lyrics, information about Pooh toys.
Winnie the Pooh–An Expotition Interactive game, coloring pages, other pictures.
The Adventures of the REAL Winnie the Pooh at the New York Public Library.

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926.