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Birthday Watch: March 26th

Mar26

Nathaniel Bowditch, b.1773. We read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham last year. He’s a very interesting character, a Yankee seaman and an extraordinary mathematician and ship’s captain. Let your boys read this one, and anyone who is interested in numbers and math.

Edward Bellamy, b.1850. His very popular novel, Looking Backward, was set in the future in the year 2000, and in it Bellamy envisioned a socialist utopia. People have been trying, unsucccessfully, to make the novel come true ever since he wrote it.

A.E. Houseman, b.1859.

Robert Frost, b.1874.
The Door in the Dark
Fire and Ice
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Betty Macdonald, b.1908.
Carrie at Reading to Know reviews Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

President’s Day in Poetry and Prose

Feb16

Leetla Giorgio Washeenton by Thomas Augustine Daly.

More Washington Poetry.

O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman.

White House site with mini-biographies of all 44 U.S. Presidents.

More information on the Presidents for President’s Day.

Recommended Children’s Books about the Presidents:

The Buck Stops Here by Alice Provensen.

So You Want to be President? by Judith St. George and David Small.

Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull.

A Book of Americans by Rosemary Carr and Stephen Vincent Benet.

George Washington and the Founding of a Nation by Albert Marrin

George Washington’s World by Genevieve Foster

The Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz.

Old Hickory: Andrew Jackson and the American People by Albert Marrin.


Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman

Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered
 by Barry Denenberg

Unconditional Surrender: U. S. Grant and the Civil War by Albert Marrin.


If You Grew Up WIth Abraham Lincoln by Ann McGovern

Bully For You, Teddy Roosevelt by Jean Fritz

The Great Adventure: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of Modern America by Albert Marrin.

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery by Russell Freedman.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Russell Freedman.

Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter’s Story by Wilborn Hampton.

Dickensian Birthday Celebration

Feb7

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens!

Born on this date in 1812, Mr. Dickens has been delighting readers for over 150 years.

Dickens Novels I’ve Read: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend

DIckens Novels I Have Yet to Enjoy: Hard Times, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Favorite Dickens Hero: Pip, Great Expectations

Favorite Dickens Villain(ess): Madame Defarge, Tale of Two Cities

Favorite Tragic Scene: Mr. Peggotty searching for Littel Em’ly (Is that a scene or an episode?)

Favorite Comic Character: Mr. Micawber, David Copperfield

Favorite Comic Scene: Miss Betsy Trotter chasing the donkeys out of her yard, David Copperfield

Strangest Dickens Christmas Story We’ve Read: “The Poor Relation’s Story”

Best Dickens Novel I’ve Read: A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield is a close second.

Dickens-related posts at Semicolon:

LOST Reading Project: Our Mutual Friend by Charles DIckens.

Scrooge Goes to Church

Dickens Pro and Con on his Birthday.

Quotes and Links

Born February 7th

Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

A Little More Dickens

Other DIckens-related links:
Mere Comments on Dickens’ Christianity.

A DIckens Filmography at Internet Film Database.

George Orwell: Essay on Charles DIckens.

Edgar Allan Poe Meets Charles Dickens.

An entire blog devoted to Mr. DIckens and his work: DIckensblog by Gina Dalfonzo.

And finally, here’s a re-post of my own Dickens Quiz. Can you match the quotation with the Dickens novel that it comes from?

1. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

2. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

3. “I would rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a life as this!”

4. “It’s over and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.”

5. “If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass–a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience–by experience.”

6. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

7. “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.”

8. “It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,” said he, “to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel.”

(HINT: these come from the eight DIckens novels that I have read. Which is from which?)

Semicolon Author Celebration: Charles Wesley, b. 1707

Dec18

Today is the birthday of hymn writer Charles Wesley, author of two famous Christmas carols, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and the lesser-known Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus. In addition, he wrote approximately 5500 more hymns and spiritual songs.

Christmas in Charles Wesley’s Journal:

1743: “Christmas-day. I heard that one of our fiercest persecutors, who had cut his throat, and lay for dead some hours, was miraculously revived, as a monument of divine mercy. Many of his companions have been hurried into eternity, while fighting against God. He is now seeking Him whom once he persecuted; was confounded at the sight of me, much more by my comfortable words, and a small alms. He could only thank me with his tears.
I read prayers, and preached, “Glory be to God in the highest,” to a people who now have ears to hear.”

1749: “Christmas-day. The room was full as it could contain. We rejoiced from four to six, “that to us a Son is born, to us a Child is given.”

Dueling Hymns: Augustus Toplady and Charles Wesley

In church last Sunday our pastor preached on the Biblical sources for Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. I am so thankful that God saw fit to give human beings the gift of song and of music to give joy and aid memory. And I’m thankful for all those Wesleyan hymns, most of which I’ve never heard. A gift yet to be discovered.

Hymns by Charles Wesley That I Do Know and Love:

A Charge To Keep Have I
Amazing Love! How Can It Be?
Arise My Soul, Arise
Christ The Lord Is RIsen Today
Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
Jesus Lover of My Soul
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
O For a Thousand Tongues To Sing
Rejoice the Lord Is King

If you have a post today (or any other day) concerning Charles Wesley, please leave a link to join in the celebration. And thanks to Hope for reminding me, forgetful thing that I am.

1. Hope in Brazil
2. God and Sinners Reconciled		 3. Ruth (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)
4. Circle of Quiet (Come Thou Long Expected Jesus)5. Challies on Charles Wesley

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Semicolon Author Celebration: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Dec11

According to WIkipedia:

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He returned to Russia in 1994.

I actually read The Gulag Archipelago, the whole thing I think, some twenty or thirty years ago. Honestly, I don’t remember much about it —except that it was long.

Solzhenitsyn, the man, was not a perfect person. He has been accused of anti-Semitism and of a superficial Russian patriotism that ignored the deep problems in post-communist Russia. Perhaps so.
But in his 1978 address to Harvard graduates, he was not afraid to speak truth to the elite students who were there to hear an innocuous commencement speech from a famous dissident. They got more than they bargained for.

Solzhenitsyn said:

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

The speech itself is worth reading.

So today we celebrate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an imperfect man who wrote long books, showed great courage in his resistance to the oppressive system of Soviet communism, and spoke some hard truths even at Harvard. If you have something to say about Solzhenitsyn and his writings, please leave a link in the linky.

One more quote from Mr. Solzhenitsyn: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”