Laurent de Brunhoff, author of more Babar books following on those of his father, Jean de Brunhoff.
Virginia Lee Burton, author of The Little House and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Katy and the Big Snow.
Donald Crews, author of Harbor and Freight Train and Parade and lot of others. Big bold colorful illustrations, very few words.
Roger Antoine Duvoisin, author of Petunia and Veronica.
“When Veronica reached the streets of the city, she knew she was different. THERE WAS NOT ANOTHER HIPPOPOTAMUS IN SIGHT.
Only people, and more people, and still more people —people who stared at her, bumped into her, and shouted angrily at her when she stepped on their toes.
She was gloriously conspicuous.”
Phyllis Krasilovsky, author of The Cow Who Fell in the Canal and The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes.
“Well, as the days went by he got hungrier and hungrier, and more and more tired, and so he never washed his dishes. After a while there were so MANY dirty dishes that they didn’t all fit in the sink. So he began to pile them on the table.”
Allen Say, Japanese-American author of The Bicycle Man and Grandfather’s Journey
“When I was a small boy I went to a school in the south island of Japan. The schoolhouse stood halfway up a tall green mountain. It was made of wood and the wood was gray with age. When a strong wind blew, the trees made the sound of waves and the building creaked like an old sailing ship. From the playground, we could see the town, the ships in the harbor, the shining sea.”
Tasha Tudor, illustrator of so many beautiful books for children and creator of a beautiful life in rural New England.
“Life isn’t long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!”
Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
“Pierre’s madness consisted in not waiting, as he had formerly done, to discover personal attributes which he called ‘good qualities’ in people before loving them; his heart overflowed with love, and by loving without cause he never failed to discover undeniable reasons for loving.”
Two of my favorite novelists have birthdays today: Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James (b. 1920) and Leon Marcus Uris (b. 1924, d. 2003).
Although I like her detective novels very much, my favorite P. D. James novel as of now is Children of Men, a dystopian novel about a world where no children are born. I suggest that those who are struggling with the “quiver-full question” read James’ rather chilling picture of a future with no children at all. Read my review here. A movie version of Children of Men is due out in September. Computer Guru Son just read the book and liked it, I think.
Leon Uris is sometimes described as a “Zionist” and one obituary in the British newspaper The Guardian referred to him as a racist for his portrayal of Arabs in his admittedly pro-Jewish novels. I think this is an unfair accusation, but if you are Palestinian, or sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, you might not enjoy Uris’ novels as much as I do. Exodus, Mila 18, and QB VIII are all great stories with lots of historical information about Israel and the experience of modern Jews in Europe during and after World War II.
My thoughts about Uris and James and their books on this date in 2004.
Also born on this date:
Mary Calhoun, picture book author of Hot-Air Henry and other books about Henry the Adventurous Cat. I like the story of Henry getting trapped in a hot air balloon and going for a wild ride. It also seems appropriate for this time of year since this balloon lift-off event takes place a few miles from my home at the end of this month.
Anyone want to come visit? I’ll make you some enchildadas, beans and rice.
Fianlly, actress Evangeline Lilly is 27 years old today. Is anyone else going through LOST withdrawal this summer?
Edited and updated from June, 2005.
Joanne K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Rowling, who was born in 1965 which makes her younger than my baby sister(!), gave her character, Harry, the same birthday as her own. Am I the only reader in the English-speaking world who has has read none of the Harry Potter books and nothing by Dan Brown, especially not The Da Vinci Code? And I’m proud of my potterless, codeless mind. It has become a matter of stubborness and noncomformity for me not to read any of these books: I do not disrespect those who are Harry Potter fans or who loved Mr. Brown’s opus. I’ve already heard enough about all of them to know excatly what I’m missing, and I have too many other books on The List.
Are there any books that you do not want to read just because everyone else has read them?
Oh, I forgot to say that I’ve not read any of the Left Behind books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins either. Now do I win whatever this contest is?
Beskow, Elsa. Pelle’s New Suit. Harper & Row, 1929.
dePaola, Tomie. Charlie Needs a Cloak. Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Instead of one picture book from my curriculum booklist, Picture Book Preschool, I chose two books to compare and recommend, Pelle’s New Suit by Elsa Beskow and Charlie Needs a Cloak by one of my favorites, Tomie dePaola. Pelle’s New Suit, first published in 1929, is about a “little Swedish boy whose name was Pelle.” Pelle has his own lamb, but needs a new coat. So he shears the lams’s wool, takes it to his grandmother, and asks her to comb the wool. She agrees to do so in return for some help in the garden from Pelle. And so it goes. Each person that Pelle asks for help in making his coat asks him to do something in return. So children learn how a coat is made from raw wool, how work is exchanged for goods, and how one event follows another in a linear story. The original illustrations by Ms. Beskow are beautiful as you can see from the picture. (There’s also a Wonder Books edition with ilustrations by George Wilde, not as great.)
Charlie of Charlie Needs a Cloak makes his own cloak from the wool of his own sheep. However, the illustrations tell a parallel story of Charlie’s naughty little pet lamb who interferes with Charlie’s cloak-making at every step. Then, as the story ends, we see why Charlie needed a new cloak in the first place. Let’s just say that naughty pet lambs are hard on cloaks. The pictures are the salient feature in this book; there’s also a mouse in each picture who’s doing something a bit mischievous, too. Poor Charlie gets his red cloak after some hard work and a few tussles with the lamb, and there’s a short glossary of words in the back of the book to explain exactly what Charlie was doing when he sheared and carded and spun the wool.
Get both of these if you can and read them together. You might appreciate your winter coat a little more the next time you get it out of winter storage.
Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase a downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.
Emily Bronte, b. 1818. Some critics insisted that Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, must have been written by a man because no woman could have written such a passionate story. Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis one year after the publication of her only novel. She was 30 years old.
For children who are not quite ready for the sturm und drang of Wuthering Heights, I recommend The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. It’s the story of a boy and his sisters who find in the attic of their new house twelve toy soldiers that magically come alive. The soldiers turn out to have belonged to another boy, Branwell, and his sisters, and keeping them a secret becomes a challenge.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California was born on this date in Graz, Austria in 1947.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet, b.1844. His most famous poems are God’s Grandeur and Pied Beauty, both of which are beautiful poems. I read some others of his poems, and I rather liked this one:
At the Wedding March
GOD with honour hang your head,
Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
With lissome scions, sweet scions,
Out of hallowed bodies bred.Each be other’s comfort kind:
Déep, déeper than divined,
Divine charity, dear charity,
Fast you ever, fast bind.Then let the March tread our ears:
I to him turn with tears
Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
Déals trÃumph and immortal years.
Beatrix Potter, b.1866. Have any of you got any Beatrix Potter original postcards lying around the attic? If so, you’re rich, as far as I’m concerned. Some people recently found four cards in their attic that were illustrated and signed by Ms. Potter herself, and they’re supposed to sell for some phenomenal sum.
I think those are two rather nice people with whom to share a birthdate, don’t you?
Today is the birthday of author Christina Bjork (b. 1938), author of the beautiful book, Linnea in Monet’s Garden. In the book, Linnea, a young girl, and her neighbor, Mr. Blom, get to visit Paris and Giverny and see the places where Monet created his paintings. The book is a wonderful introduction to impressionist art and to the work and life of Claude Monet.
Also, Joseph Hilaire Pierre Ren Belloc was born July 27, 1870. (I love these long names I sometimes find for familiar authors. Why do most people nowadays only have three, or even just two, names?) Belloc was a devout Catholic and for a while, a Fabian, friend to both G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. As the three men debated Fabianism and socialism and Distributism in the press, GBS wrote a famous essay in which he called his two friends “the Chesterbelloc,†implying that Belloc did the thinking for the pair and led Chesterton astray. Later in their lives, Belloc and Shaw had little to do with each other, but Shaw and Chesterton remained “friendly enemies†all their lives. I missed Shaw’s birthday yesterday on the 26th.
Belloc on parental authority:
As between the Family and the State, Catholic doctrine is fixed. The family is the unit. The parent is the natural authority (auctoritas auctoris). The State is secondary to the family, and especially in the matter of forming a child’s character by education. Now here the State of today flatly contradicts Catholic doctrine. It says to the parent, “What you will for your child must yield to what I will. If our wills are coincident, well and good. If not, yours must suffer. I am master.†At least, so the State speaks to the poorer parent; to the richer it is more polite.
This quotation is directly applicable to the controversy over Abraham Cherrix and his and his parents’ decisions about Abraham’s cancer treatment. I wonder if the Cherrix family has money and that’s why they’ve managed to buck the government so far, or if they’re relatively poor and that’s why the state is giving them such a hard time. Either way, the government judges and social workers are wrong to intervene in what is essentially a family decision.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, b.1872. Here’s a favorite poem by Dunbar that my mom used to read to me.
Alexandre Dumas, pere, b.1802. I’m planning to read The Three Musketeers to my urchins this next school year. It’s such a great story.
I’ll let you know how the urchins like it. I expect to have a lot more swordplay going on around here as soon as I do read it–as if Karate Kid didn’t practice his sword and light saber techniques often enough as it is.
Robert Graves, b.1895. I, Claudius is a good novel, but I read that Graves thought of himself more as a poet than a novelist. We read some of his poetry in British literature class last year, but I don’t think my un-war-experienced high schoolers (nor I) appreciated his images and poems of the horrors of WW I too well. I do rather like this image:
Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
“Symptoms of Love,” lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961)
Athos would agree with the idea of love as a migraine. Maybe Aramis would, too.
Amelia Earhart, b.1897. Have you ever seen the picture book Amelia and Eleanor Go For a Ride by Pam Munoz Ryan about how Amelia Earhart gave First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt a ride in her airplane?