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Noteworthy and Encouraging: June 1st

Born on this date:

Henry Francis Lyte, b.1793. Anglican minister, hymn writer and poet. His most well-known hymns are Abide With Me, Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken, and Praise My Soul the King of Heaven.

John Masefield, b. 1878. Poet, novelist, writer of children’s stories, and more. I wrote about Masefield and his poem Sea Fever here. He also wrote two long and famous narrative poems, The Everlasting Mercy and Dauber, and his children’s stories, The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights. I’ve not read the children’s books, although I have them in my library, but I can say his poetry is worth reading.

James Daugherty, b. 1889. Artist, children’s book author and illustrator. Mr. Daughety wrote Daniel Boone (Newbery Medal winner); Poor Richard; Henry David Thoreau: A Man for Our Time; Of Courage Undaunted: Across the Continent with Lewis & Clark; Marcus and Narcissa Whitman: Pioneers of Oregon; and three books in the Landmark series, The Magna Charta, The Landing of the Pilgrims, and Trappers and Traders of the Far West. He also wrote and illustrated the picture book Andy and the Lion, a Westernized version of the legend of Androcles and the Lion.

Some of Daugherty’s books and artwork are somewhat controversial these days. He describes the Native Americans in his award-winning biography of Boone as “savage demons”, “rats in the night”, “outlandish”, “infesting the woods”, “cat-eyed”, and “copper-gleaming”. And the illustrations that Daugherty provides for these same Native Americans do nothing to soften the images drawn by his words. (My own children hated listening to Daugherty Daniel Boone when I read it to them back in the day. The language was too flowery and poetic for their taste.) Nevertheless, I think Daugherty was quite a talented illustrator and author, and I suggest you try out his books for yourself and form your own opinion.

Born on This Day: June 5th

Richard Scarry, 1919-1994, illustrated and sometimes wrote the text for more than 300 children’s books, most of them set in the imaginary metropolis of Busytown. Busytown was inhabited by various anthropomorphic animals with names such as Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, Postman Pig, Bananas Gorilla, and my favorite, Mr. Frumble.

Scarry’s characters and stories lent themselves well to cartoons and video, and several series and individual videos were made of Busytown’s denizens. Here’s one example from Youtube; many more are available for watching:

The books are mostly a bit too busy for my tastes, but my children enjoyed them back in the day. If they are twaddle they are fairly harmless twaddle. Unfortunately, I think, some of Scarry’s stories and illustrations were edited and updated in later editions “to make them conform to changing social values.” Characters in cowboy or Indian costumes were deleted or re-clothed, gender roles were de-emphasized or switched so that girls were driving bulldozers and boys were cooking and cleaning. Such silliness.

If you want to try out a Busytown adventure, I would suggest Pig Will and Pig Won’t: A Book of Manners, Mr. Frumble’s Worst Day Ever, Be Careful, Mr Frumble, or Please and Thank You Book.

Charlotte Zolotow, b.1915, d.2013

Children’s author and book editor Charlotte Zolotow died yesterday at the age of 98. She wrote and published over seventy picture books for young children, including Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, William’s Doll, Big Sister Little Sister, and Over and Over. As an editor for Harper and Row, she was instrumental in publishing such authors as ME Kerr, Paul Zindel, Kara Kuskin, and Patricia MacLachlan, whose lovely book Sarah Plain and Tall won the Newbery Award.

Some of my favorite books by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by many of the picture book world’s most gifted illustrators:

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Here at Semicolon, I wrote a birthday celebration post for Ms. Zolotow a few years ago, and there’s a linky there. I’ve moved it here so that if you want to link to your post about Charlotte Zolotow and her legacy, you can. I’m adding links myself to the tributes I find so that I can go back and read them again when I want to remember. Or I can just read her books. The books will last.

Links and Thinks: June 5, 2013

Great Summer Reading Suggestions from Breakpoint and The Chuck Colson Center.

Free June Desktop Wallpaper and Calendar from The HOmeschool Post.

Born on this day:

Federico Garcia Lorca, b.1898, d.1936. Spanish playwright and poet. He was actually executed by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Richard Scarry, b.1919, d.1994. Author of busy, busy children’s books set in Busytown and featuring characters such as Lowly Worm, Bananas Gorilla, Huckle Cat, Mr. Frumble, and others.

Allan Ahlberg b.1938. Author with his wife Jan of The Jolly Postman, The Jolly Pocket Postman, and The Jolly Christmas Postman. Ahlberg on children’s books: ” . . . just because a book is tiny and its readers are little doesn’t mean it can’t be perfect. On its own scale, it can be as good as Tolstoy or Jane Austen.”

Ken Follett, b.1949. Mr. Follett gained fame as a writer of political thrillers, and then turned to historical fiction with 1989’s epic novel The Pillars of the Earth. I read Pillars, but I wasn’t terribly impressed. He’s good at creating characters and setting, but the attitudes and cultural mores in the book sometimes felt anachronistic to me.

Links and Thinks: June 4, 2013

'Book Exchange' photo (c) 2012, oatsy40 - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Telephone booth transformed into a library. What a wonderfully British idea! I wish I had a telephone booth to metamorphose into a little library.

June 4th is Aesop’s Day.

Also, on June 4, 1989, approximately 300-800 Chinese students and others died. Do you know what happened on this date?

Paris Books for Kids. Chapter books set in Paris, and picture books set in Paris. I love lists like this one. In fact, I’d really like to publish a follow-up to my Picture Book Preschool curriculum, called Picture Book Around the World.

Traditional Marriage Movement Sweeps through France. Who would have thought? “Their mouths overflow with the words ‘equality of man and woman.’ But why should marriage not be a place of equality, too, so that a child will be raised by man and woman? What a strange idea!”

Saturday Review of Books: June 25, 2011

“Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.”~George Orwell

Mr. Orwell, author of the classic novels 1984 and Animal Farm, in addition to several volumes of essays and nonfiction, was born on June 25, 1903. He eventually added the following ideas and terms to our collective wisdom:

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Big Brother is watching you.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

SatReviewbuttonIf you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Beckie@ByTheBook (The Confessions of Catherine de Medici)
2. Beckie@ByTheBook (Darkness Follows)
3. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (The Penderwicks at Point Mouette)
4. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (All of Baby, Nose to Toes)
5. Amy Reads (On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe)
6. Amy Reads (Rape New York by Jana Leo)
7. Amy Reads (Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis)
8. Diary of an Eccentric (War & Watermelon)
9. Diary of an Eccentric (Forgetting English)
10. Diary of an Eccentric (Mr. Darcy Goes Overboard)
11. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Neffenegger
12. Becky (Tombstones and Banana Trees)
13. Becky (Mirror Ball)
14. Becky (Pompeii City on Fire)
15. Becky (Saint Training)
16. Becky (Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator by Mo Willems)
17. Becky (If Rocks Could Sing)
18. Becky (Squish Super Amoeba)
19. Becky (Babymouse Mad Scientist)
20. Becky (Press Here)
21. Becky (Back to School With Betsy)
22. Laura (The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet)
23. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Ranger)
24. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Mostly Harmless)
25. Collateral Bloggage (Final Jeopardy)
26. Glynn (Nightmare)
27. Cindy Swanson (The Private Patient)
28. FleurFisher (22 Britannia Road)
29. FleurFisher (The Best of Everything)
30. FleurFisher (Poker Face)
31. europeanne (3 books)
32. Graham @ My Book Year (A Visit from the Goon Squad)
33. Janet (The Westing Game)
34. Brooke (The Red Queen)
35. Brooke (The Dawn of Illumination)
36. Brooke (Beastly)
37. jama’s alphabet soup (Sarah Emma Edmonds Was a Great Pretender)
38. jama’s alphabet soup (Vegetable Picture Boosk)
39. DebD (In Siberia)
40. Word Lily (False Witness)
41. Alice@Supratentorial(The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
42. SmallWorld Reads (The Postmistress)
43. MK {Abomination & Barbie Dolls}
44. Hope (more on WWII Diary)
45. Bluerose’s Heart(Hourglass)
46. A Foodie Bibliophile in Wanderlust (Divergent)
47. BookBelle (Rain Village)
48. Becky (Nemesis by Agatha Christie)
49. Becky (Small acts of Amazing Courage by Gloria Whelan)
50. Becky (William’s Midsummer Dreams by Zilpha Keatley Snyder)
51. Becky (Miles from Ordinary)
52. Becky (Front and Center)
53. Becky (Rumpelstiltskin Problem)
54. Becky (Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic)
55. Summer @ The Brothers H (The Hunger Games)
56. bekahcubed (Firegirl)
57. Brandy @ Afterthoughts (Poetic Knowledge)
58. dawn (A Mother’s Rule of Life)
59. Becky (Am I Really a Christian?)
60. Marijo Taverne
61. Yvann @ Reading, Fuelled By Tea (Snapshot)
62. SenoraG (Peter and the Vampires)
63. Gina @ Bookscount(Joe is Online)

Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in June, 2010

Adult Fiction:
The Laws of Harmony by Judith Hendricks.

Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver. Ms. Shriver rants about health care, and tells a pretty good story. Semicolon review here.

Mandala by Pearl S. Buck. Set in India, not China.

Children’s and YA Fiction:
Dolphin Song by Lauren St. John. Semicolon review here.

Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Semicolon review here.

The GIrl Who Saw Lions by Berlie Doherty.

Escaping the Tiger by Laura Manivong. Laotian refugees escape to Thailand, then to America. Semicolon review here.

Exposure by Mal Peet. Soccer and celebrity in South America. Semicolon review here.

Claim to Fame by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Would you like to be able to hear anything anyone said about you, anywhere in the world? Semicolon review here.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow. Computer games and organized labor? Semicolon review here.

The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan. Sequel to The Last Thing I Remember. Semicolon review here.

Countdown by Deborah Wiles. Where were you in 1962? Semicolon review here.

Ice by Sarah Beth Durst.

Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George.

Beautiful by Cindy Martinuson-Coloma. Finalist for the 2010 Christy Award for Young Adult Fiction. Semicolon review here.

Nonfiction:
Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland. Memoir of a woman diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Too Freudian for me, but it seemed to work for the author.

Disrupting Grace: A Story of Relinquishment and Healing by Kristin RIchburg. Another memoir, this time about a failed adoption. The adoptee in the story seemed, in my amateur judgement, to have a juvenile version of BPD, but in children it’s called “attachment disorder.” Semicolon review here.

Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by Adam Shepard. Semicolon review here.

June 4th is Aesop’s Day

A farmer placed his nets on his newly sown plough lands, and caught a quantity of Cranes, which came to pick up his seed. With them he trapped a Stork also. The Stork, having his leg fractured by the net, earnestly besought the Farmer to spare his life.

“Pray, save me, Master,” he said, “and let me go free this once. My broken limb should excite your pity. Besides, I am no Crane, I am a Stork, a bird of excellent character; and see how I love and slave for my father and mother. Look too, at my feathers, they are not the least like those of a Crane.”

The Farmer laughed aloud, and said: “It may be all as you say; I only know this, I have taken you with these robbers, the Cranes, and you must die in their company.”

Moral: Birds of a feather flock together.

I Corinthians 15:33 Stop being deceived: “Wicked friends lead to evil ends.”

Happy Birthday to Charlotte Zolotow

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Charlotte Zolotow was born Charlotte Gertrude Shapiro on this date in 1915 in Norfolk, Virginia. Because her books have been so beautifully meaningful to me and so treasured by my children, I included ten of her more than seventy books in my preschool read aloud curriculum, Picture Book Preschool. (Only two other authors, Peter Spier and Gail Gibbons, have that many books on the Picture Book Preschool reading list.)
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Big Sister and Little Sister. I love this story of how a little sister hides from her slightly overbearing big sister, but repents when she hears Big Sister crying. It’s the classic sister story.

I Like To Be Little. Originally titled I Want to Be Little, a child rejoices in the things she can do and enjoy because she’s still small.

Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. This book won a Caldecott Honor for Maurice Sendak’s watercolor illustrations, but I love it for the story. According to Ms. Zolotow, Mr. Rabbit is inspired by Harvey, the six foot tall friend of Elwood P. Dowd. But Mr. Rabbit is so wonderfully helpful and at the same time a bit dense as he suggests the same sorts of impractical presents over and over.

Over and Over. A little girl experiences the year as a series of holidays and events and then learns that everything will happen over and over every year. “She remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, a Christmas tree and a birthday cake, a Thanksgiving dinner, and valentines. But they were all mixed up in her mind.”

51CDZcP-cPL._SX258_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_Sleepy Book. The perfect bedtime story about how pigeons and bears and kittens and fish and finally children go to sleep, the children “warm under their blankets in their beds.”

Something Is Going to Happen. Unfortunately out of print, this book describes how a family wakes up with the feeling that “something is going to happen,” and they discover that it has snowed in the night.

The Storm Book. In this one, Ms. Zolotow writes about an impending summer storm instead of a snowfall, but the sense that something exciting is going to happen is palpable in this book as the children play outside and then watch the storm come and go.

Summer Is. A seasonal concept book that takes the reader through all four seasons with a poetic text full of tangible, memorable seasonal details. Also out of print, darn it.

The Summer Night.

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William’s Doll. Here’s the story of how Willliam’s Doll came to be, and although it was somewhat controversial back in the 1970’s when it was published, William’s Doll has become a beloved picture book portrayal of how all children need to learn to nurture as well as build and throw a ball. In talking about WIlliam’s Doll, Ms. Zolotow says that she’s a feminist, but that the book wasn’t written to bolster feminist ideology. Well, I’m not a feminist, but I think William’s Doll is a fine story for boys and girls who want to play with the toys that give them joy whether they’re “boy toys” or “girl toys”.

Now it’s your turn. Please leave a link to your post celebrating Charlotte Zolotow’s birthday, her work, her influence as an editor, or anything else Zolotow-related. Ms. Zolotow’s daughter, author Crescent Dragonwagon has promised to stop by and read the posts to Ms. Zolotow who is vision-impaired, but still living in her home.

Crescent Dragonwagon: me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence

The next Semicolon Author Celebration will be July 10th, a celebration of the life and work of John Calvin, an author of a very different stripe from Charlotte Zolotow. However, if you’re a fan of Mr. Calvin, a Calvinist, or a semi-Calvinist, think about writing something to link on that date.