The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick G. Banting by I.E. Levine

Oct2

I read this Messner published biography back in the summer, but I’m just now getting around to reviewing it. The dust jacket blurb says in a nutshell somethings of what I learned from the book:

“When Frederick Banting discovered insulin, he gave millions of doomed diabetics the gift of life. . . . Banting grew up on a farm in Canada. When his tomboy playmate Jane died at fourteen of diabetes, he was determined to one day find the cause of this mysterious disease. . . . Banting became a university instructor and researcher. He was still puzzled by the mysterious disease of diabetes. . . With Charles Best, his assistant, Banting sweated in a grimy attic laboratory, racing the time allotted him by Toronto University. Alternately sure of success and plunged into despair, they hung on grimly through a series of experiments. They succeeded in discovering Hormone X, but it took many, many months before they perfected the wonder drug—insulin.”

That’s the short version of the story. But I learned so much more about medical research and diabetes and early twentieth century medicine. Did you know:

* Until insulin, six out of every ten diabetics died of coma. And almost every juvenile diabetes sufferer died within a few years of diagnosis. Diabetes was a death sentence.

* Banting started out as an orthopedic surgeon, not an internal medicine doctor.

* Banting and Best killed a number of dogs in their experiments to isolate and produce what they called “isletin” (insulin), but they considered the dogs as “soldiers in the war against disease” and treated them as humanely as possible.

* Much of the research time they spent was unpaid. Banting and Best lived in poverty while they conducted their experiments to find the hormone that would control diabetes in those who were diagnosed with the “sugar sickness.”

* Banting received the Nobel Prize for his work on insulin, but instead of recognizing Charles Best as co-discoverer, the Nobel Prize committee named Dr. Macleod, the head researcher at Toronto University, who had been less than encouraging in the research of Banting and Best and not present for most of it.

As I have often said, I am interested in many things. This biography of a revolutionary doctor and medical researcher was an inspiration to persevere in the calling that I have been given, no matter how small. I’m not going to change the lives of millions of people with an incurable disease, but I am called to be faithful just as Banting was.

Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

May27

Very piratical. And romantical.

Not really bloody. Or violent. Well, not very. I mean, there are pirates. But Captain Peter Blood (that’s his real name) is a gentleman pirate. He only kills bad guys. And a lot of the really bad, violent stuff occurs off-stage, so to speak. Captain Blood reminds me of Captain Jack Sparrow, sort of quirky and not always trustworthy. He lives by his own code of honor and morality, and it’s not exactly the traditional one of his time and culture. Still, Captain Blood sees himself, and others mostly see him, as a gentleman, forced into piracy by circumstances beyond his control and trying to make the best of it.

The story begins in England, 1685. (You can read an article with detailed historical background to the novel here.) Peter Blood is a “bachelor of medicine and several other things besides.” He becomes inadvertently involved in the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II of England. Although he is innocent, guilty only of sheltering and assisting medically one of the fleeing rebels, Blood is convicted of treason, and in lieu of a sentence of execution, he is sent to Barbados as a slave. Eventually after years of captivity, Peter Blood escapes from his master in Barbados, but since he is an outlaw and an escaped slave with a price on his head, he has little choice but to become a buccaneer, or privateer, or in common parlance, a pirate.

Some of the events in Peter Blood’s career as a pirate sound very similar to the exploits of the actual pirate Henry Morgan, fictionalized in John and Patricia Beatty’s book, Pirate Royal. Sabatini explains this similarity in his book by saying that Captain Morgan’s biographer, Esquemeling, must have read the ship’s log of Captain BLood’s ship. “Esquemeling must have obtained access to these records, and he plucked from them the brilliant feathers of several exploits to stick them into the tale of his own hero, Captain Morgan. I mention it chiefly as a warning, for when presently I come to relate the affair of Maracaybo, those of you who have read Esquemeling may be in danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things which are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood.”

So, Captain Blood, the epitome of the pirate adventure story, published in 1922, is a good bet to recommend to teens and adults looking for pirate books. The Sea Hawk is another pirate story from the pen of the prolific Sabatini. Both of these novels were adapted into movies by the Hollywood film machine of the 1920’s and 1930’s, twice each, first as silent films and again as “talkies”, the latter starring the swashbuckling film hero, Errol Flynn.

Careless People by Sarah Churchwell

Feb2

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell.

Essentially, this book focuses on the autumn of 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald was beginning to think about writing The Great Gatsby and when all of the reading public was fixated on the salacious details of the Hall-Mills murder case in New Jersey, a bizarre and celebrity-driven murder and investigation that played out in the newspapers and probably influenced Fitzgerald’s story of murder and infidelity in several aspects. Ms. Chruchwell also includes the before and after stories of how Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda came to be the celebrities that they were and of how Scott Fitzgerald finished writing his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, and even what happened to him and to Zelda after that novel was published.

I learned several facts that I didn’t know while reading this volume of history and literary criticism combined. F. Scott Fitzgerald was only twenty-six years old in 1922 when he began planning his novel, and only twenty-eight when it was published. Zelda was even younger, born in 1900, twenty-two years old in 1922. She was only nineteen when she married Fitzgerald in April, 1920.

Their daughter, Scottie, was about a year old when they decided to move to New York from St. Paul, Minnesota. I’m not sure how the baby survived, although they did hire a nurse to take care of her, since the parents seem to have been constantly and continually drunk throughout the entire time that they lived in New York. I also am not surprised that Fitzgerald didn’t get far beyond the planning stages in writing his Great American Novel; I am surprised that he was able to write a coherent sentence, much less a number of short stories and the seminal beginnings of what would become The Great Gatsby.

“In May 1924 the Fitzgeralds sailed for Europe, to put the temptations of the New World behind them, with the conviction that they had left their old selves behind forever.” The temptations accompanied them; they got drunk in France just as well and just as often as they did in New York; and their marriage began to disintegrate. But Fitzgerald did write his novel, set in 1922 and based on the characters and the adventures that he and Zelda experienced in New York in that memorable fall of 1922. In particular the Hall-Mills murder case became a part of The Great Gatsby, inextricably intertwined in the characters of Daisy and Tom and Nick and Jordan and Gatsby himself and in the ideas of romantic adultery and carelessness and mistaken identity, insoluble crimes and American idealism.

If you’re fascinated by the Jazz Age, Prohibition, flappers, Scott and Zelda, and The Great Gatsby, Careless People has some good factual material as well as speculation and philosophy about the era and the meaning of the history and the novel and their intersection. The author gets a little carried away at times with passages like the following, coming at the end of each section of the purportedly nonfiction prosaic tome:

“Life is always there waiting to be transfigured into a splendid fiction, however sad or sordid its origins. A story of adultery ends in the violent extinction of a woman of tremendous vitality. A dreamer keeps faith with the faithless, an a double shooting draws coder in the cooling twilight, as e writer tires to determine whether what he holds in his hand is the past, or the future.”

However, reading about Scott and Zelda did make me think about sin and its intractable hold on our lives, about how genius can transcend even the tragic and injurious decisions we make, sometimes, and about what the real meaning of The Great Gatsby is. Did Scott Fitzgerald understand the tragedy of his own novel? Did Zelda? Do I?

â€œThey were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.â€

Scott and Zelda were careless, too, and sort of rich, but there came a time, later, when the piper had to be paid, and the party was over, and both their lives ended tragically. I wonder how many “messes” the “golden boy” and his “first American flapper” left in their wake? If sound self-righteous and Pharasaical, I don’t mean to be. I also wonder how many messes I’ve left for others to clean up and how many more I might have run away from if I had been rich and able?

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1922: Arts and Culture

Oct13

In mid-1922 the magazine Vanity Fair coined the word “flapper” to describe the new “free’ young women who were beginning to embrace a more relaxed and libertine lifestyle, at least in the big cities and East Coast enclaves of sophisticated culture. These women “wore shorter skirts, cropped their hair and danced brazenly in public.” The music they danced to was new, too. Jazz music with its syncopated sounds was the successor to ragtime, and the Twenties became the Jazz Age as the fashionable set tried out dances such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.

In 1922, Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At the same time, Al Jolson, a white singer and entertainer who often performed in blackface, was making hit song recordings such as April Showers and Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!). According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, “Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock ‘n’ roll.”

1922: Books and Literature

Oct9

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Eugene O’Neill, Anna Christie.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson: Collected Poems. The poem that everyone knows by Robinson, because Simon and Garfunkel rewrote it and set it to music, is Richard Cory. But here’s another rather enigmatic poem from his Pulitzer Prize winning collection:

Cliff Klingenhagen by Edward Arlington Robinson

Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine
With him one day; and after soup and meat,
And all the other things there were to eat,
Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine
And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign
For me to choose at all, he took the draught
Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed
It off, and said the other one was mine.
And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And smiled, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

Newbery Award for Children’s Literature in the U.S.: First awarded in 1922 to The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon.

Also published in 1922:

T.S. Eliot’s master poem, The Wasteland.

The Modernist classic Ulysses by James Joyce.

Sigrid Undset completes her Kristin trilogy with The Cross.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.

Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. I just saw the movie based on this book for the first time, and I thought it was delightful. It’s sort of a modern fairy tale that takes place in a land of enchantment, a castle in Italy. (No fascists to be seen.)

Reader's Digest – History, Content & Evolution

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And in February 1922, a new magazine, The Reader’s Digest, is launched. Sadly enough, the Reader’s Digest now is only a pale imitation of its former self. It used to be a fine place to get an introduction to the news topics of the day, plus feature articles, adventure and self-help, plus a condensed version of a best-selling novel or nonfiction story, plus some good jokes, anecdotes, and inspirational quotes. I’ve read it in the past several years a few times, and it just seems more commercial and less significant in the choice of topics and the depth of coverage. Nevertheless, here’s to Reader’s Digest, the magazine where lots of Americans, at any rate, learned to enjoy reading.

1922: Events and Inventions

Oct9

February 28, 1922. The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt, giving Egypt the gift of limited self-rule and independence, but there are significant limitations. Britain still reserves the rights to supervise the Egyptian military, communications, and foreign relations.

March 11, 1922. Mohandas Gandhi is arrested in Bombay for sedition. He is sentenced to six years imprisonment. Gandhi’s program of “non-cooperation” with the British government and the boycott of British goods is having some limited success in at least getting British attention for the nationalist movement.

June, 1922. U.S. scientists claim that the sun produces Vitamin D in the body, a vitamin that prevents the disease rickets.

June 28, 1922. The Irish Civil War begins. The two sides in the conflict are the forces of the Provisional Government that established the Irish Free State in December 1922, who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the Republican opposition (the IRA, Irish Republican Army), for whom the Treaty represented a betrayal of the Irish Republic. The war was won by the Free State forces.

August 23, 1922. Turkey attacks Greece in an attempt to recover land lost during World War I.

August, 1922. Hyperinflation in Germany means that 7000 German marks are now needed to buy a single American dollar.

September, 1922. U.S. pilot James Doolittle makes the first coast-to-coast flight across the United States from Florida to California, taking less than 24 hours to complete the journey.

October 28-30, 1922. 30,000 Fascist black-shirted followers of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, march on Rome in a demonstration of Fascist strength. King Victor Emmanuel, fearing a civil war, sends for Mussolini and asks him to take up the office of prime minister. Mussolini is now in a position to take over the Italian government as dictator and supreme leader of Italy. In November, Mussolini will be granted absolute power for the period of one year by the Italian government.

November 1, 1922. The Ottoman Empire is abolished and its last sultan Mehmed VI Vahdettin abdicates. Later in the month, the former sultan leaves for exile in Italy.

November 26, 1922. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in over 3,000 years.

December 30, 1922. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasia come together to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Hymn #52: Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

Jul26

Lyrics: Helen H. Lemmel, 1922.
Alternate Title: The Heavenly Vision

Music: Helen H. Lemmel, 1922.

Theme: Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:2.

O soul are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Saviour,
And life more abundant and free.
Refrain:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His Glory and Grace.

Through death into life everlasting
He passed, and we follow Him there;
Over us sin no more hath dominion –
For more than conquerors we are!

His Word shall not fail you – He promised;
Believe Him, and all will be well;
Then go to a world that is dying,
His perfect salvation to tell.

I was a bit surprised to find this hymn/gospel tune on the list. Not that it is unfamiiar, I’ve heard it all my life, and I think it has a great message. I just didn’t know that it was all that well-known. As it turns out in addition to the Alan Jackson countrified version above, Amy Grant, Hillsong, Newsboys, Michael W. Smith, Cynthia Clawson and many others have recorded this song.

The composer and author of the hymn, Helen Lemmel, was the daughter of a Methodist pastor. From a gospel tract called Focused by Lilias Trotter, a missionary to the Muslims of Algeria, Ms. Lemmel heard the words, “So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness.”

As she meditated on those words, Ms. Lemmel said: “Suddenly, as if commanded to stop and listen, I stood still, and singing in my soul and spirit was the chorus, with not one conscious moment of putting word to word to make rhyme, or note to note to make melody. The verses were written the same week, after the usual manner of composition, but nonetheless dictated by the Holy Spirit.”

Helen Lemmel wrote more than 500 other hymns, but this one has endured.

Sources:
Our Favorite Hymns: Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.
Wikipedia: Lilias Trotter.

Newbery Project: The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum

Feb4

In 1922, the first year that the Newbery Medal was awarded, one of the “runners-up” later called “honor books,” was The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by an Irish storyteller named Padraic Colum. Mr. Colum was a poet and a playwright and a friend of James Joyce, but his retelling of myths, legends, and folklore for children came to be his most enduring work. Padraic Colum won the Regina Medal in 1961 for his “distinguished contribution to children’s literature.” Some of his other books include The Children’s Homer, The Children of Odin, The Arabian Nights, and The King of Ireland’s Son. Padraic Colum was born December 8, 1881, and he died on January 12, 1972.

“In transferring a story of the kind I heard then to the pages of a collection, elements are lost, many elements —the quietness of the surroundings, the shadows on the smoke-browned walls, the crickets chirping in the ashes, the corncrake in the near meadow, or the more distant crying of a snipe or curlew, and (for a youngster) the directness of statement, or, simply the evocation of wonder.” ~Padraic Colum

Padraic Colum grew up listening to stories told by the fire or in the meadow, and The Golden Fleece is written in the voice of a storyteller; it’s meant to be read aloud and to evoke wonder. The syntax and writing style are poetic and begging to be read to listening ears. In addition to the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Colum blended into his narrative many of the older Greek myths: Persephone, Pandora’s Box, Theseus and the Minotaur, and the Labors of Hercules, just to name a few. I’m planning a year of ancient history and literature next school year, and I think The Golden Fleece will be our first read aloud as we study Greek history and literature.

Willy Pogany, the illustrator for this compilation, is one of my favorites. In some of the other books I have that are illlustrated by Pogany, his illustrations are full-color paintings, but the illustrations in The Golden Fleece are black and white line drawings reminiscent of the pictures on Greek vases. I can envision having my urchins copy one of the pictures in the book as an art project, then maybe make their own drawing in the same style.

Although The Golden Fleece would be perfect for read aloud time, I also think that all those kids who can’t get enough of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief might want to go to the source, so to speak, and I can’t think of a better source for Greek mythology than Colum’s The Golden Fleece. So, as I begin my Newbery Project, Padraic Colum’s Newbery Honor Book wins a Newbery renewal for its beautiful use of language and powerful storytelling voice. This one stands the test of time, maybe because the stories themselves are timeless, but also because the storyteller, like Orpheus the Singer, knew how to tell a tale.

“Many were the minstrels who, in the early days, went through the world, telling to men the stories of the gods, telling of their wars and of their births. Of all these minstrels non was so famous as Orpheus who had gone with the argonauts; none could tell truer things about the gods, for he himself was half divine.

Orpheus sang to his lyre. Orpheus, the minstrel, who knew the ways and the stories of the gods; out in the open sea on the first morning of the voyage Orpheus sang to them of the beginning of things.”

The Newbery Award: 1922

Jan25

1922 Medal Winner: The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon (Liveright)
Honor Books:
The Great Quest by Charles Hawes (Little, Brown)
Cedric the Forester by Bernard Marshall (Appleton)
The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure by William Bowen (Macmillan)
The Golden Fleece and The Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum (Macmillan)
The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs (Macmillan)

I searched for all these books using the handy WorldCat search box in the sidebar. The only ones that are readily available are the award winner for 1922, van Loon’s The Story of Mankind and The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum. I’m not going to bother with The Story of Mankind. I’ve looked at it before, back in library school, and it’s an outdated evolutionary tract. (“Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been dead, gave birth to life. The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea.”) You can read it here if you’d like.

As for the other easily obtainable book, The Golden Fleece, I actually have a copy on my groaning bookshelves. You can also read it online here, with illustrations by Willy Pogany, the same artist who illustrated my favorite poetry book, by the way. So the Newbery Honor book I’ll be reading for the week of January 28-February 3 is The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum. I’l be trying to answer these questions as I read:

Is the language too archaic or difficult for children of 2007?

Would Karate Kid (age 9) enjoy reading this book with his dad? He and Engineer Husband are already reading King Arthur, but they’re about to finish that book.

Are there more modern versions of the Greek hero stories that would be better, or is Colum’s book the gold standard?

Why did the committee that chose the first Newbery Award winner also name Colum’s book as a runner-up? Would librarians choose this book for a Newbery Honor if it were published in 2007?
Until the 1970’s the Newbery committe named an award book and sometimes several “runners-up.” In 1971 the term “runners-up” was changed to “honor books,” and all the runners-up from previous years were also changed to honor books.

If you already know the answers to any of these questions, or if you have read Colum’s book and have comments, or if you’d like to read with me, leave a comment so I’ll know who’s interested.

For those who didn’t read my previous post, I’m going on a journey starting this week through the annals of the Newbery Award and Honor books for Distinguished Children’s Literature. I’m planning to read a Newbery Award or Honor book each week this year. You’re welcome to play along if you’d like. I’ll post my reactions and thoughts on Sunday night, February 4th.

Before There Were Blogs

Sep30

Nowadays for snippets of information, household tips, news analysis, and humorous and autobiographical stories, I go to the internet, usually to blogs. Ten or more years ago I had a subscription to Reader’s Digest. It served much the same purpose, “an article a day of enduring significance.”

Dewitt and Lila Wallace founded the Readerâ€™s Digest Association in 1922.
Their vision for the company was based on a simple notion that people did
not have enough time to read all that was being published, and that people
needed a reading service that selected editorial material to inform, enrich,
entertain and inspire.

The result of the Wallacesâ€™ vision was a pocket-sized magazine, sold at an
annual subscription that would provide an article a day of lasting
interest â€“ and of enduring significance â€“ in condensed form. Today the
magazine offers a mix of engaging original and republished content to appeal
to contemporary tastes. It is the largest-selling magazine in the world,
published in 48 editions and 19 languages, and sold in more than 60
countries.

So how much “enduring significance” did those Reader’s Digest articles contain? Well, it just so happens that I have a lot of those old magazines collecting dust on a top shelf in my bedroom. I thought it would be fun to look at one every now and then and see how significant and enduring it was.

Reader’s Digest, September, 1974.

Current events: a compilation of articles and opinions on the possible eminent impeachment of Richard Nixon (didn’t happen), another on the “rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army” (whatever happened to Patty Hearst?), and still others on busing, Teamsters and the underworld, and the real cost of foreign aid. All of these pieces, while maybe of some historical interest, are dated, not enduring.

“The Colonies Must Be Punished!” by O.K. Armstrong is one of a series of articles, called Great Moments in American History: Bicentennial Feature; this particular article deals with the reaction in Britain and the colonies to the Boston Tea Party. I remember the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. On the Fourth of July, 1976, I was on my way to a youth evangelism conference in Dallas/Fort Worth. For a long time after that, through college, I had the T-shirt with bicentennial colors to prove it. Date yourself; where were you in July 1976?

Back to Reader’s Digest, September, 1974, there are some useful tips on how to make your houseplants behave, how not to get gyped by your auto-repairman, and how to reduce college costs. There’s the obligatory diet article, called “Beware the Diet Saboteur.” “Thousands of people are unable to reduce, obesity specialists find, because their kinfolk knowingly or unknowingly undercut their efforts.” The “psycho-analyze yourself” article is called “What Are You Afraid Of?” and gives us eight suggestions for coping with fear.

Merle Haggard and Sheik Ahmed Zaki al-Yamani get biographical profiles, not in the same articles.

The “special feature” at the end of the magazine is “Solzhenitsyn: Conscience of a Nation.” Enduring significance, yes.

He does not want his country remade in the image of the modern, free-enterprise West. In fact, to some of his admirers, this fierce clinging to everything Russian, including the old concepts of the Russian earth, Russian people, the spiritual values inherent in backward Russia, is one of his limitations as a man and a writer. But it is also one of his greatest sources of strength.

Finally, there’s a kidlit note:

Statement on the copyright page of Toolchest by Jan Adkins: “We have gone to considerable difficulty and expense to assemble a staff of necromancers, sorcerers, shamans, conjurers and lawyers to visit nettlesome and mystifying discomfort on any ninny who endeavors to reproduce or transmit this book in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the publisher. Watch yourself!”

By the way, Toolchest is a beautiful, old children’s book. It’s out of print, but available used from Amazon.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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