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Reading About the Titanic

Sep12

On April 15, 1912 the luxury liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. 1595 passengers and crew died. Only 745 people were saved. For some reason, more than almost any other tragedy or shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic has inspired dozens, maybe even hundreds, of books, movies, poems, and other media. Here’s a list of a few of the Titanic books for children and young adults:

Children’s fiction:
Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Treehouse Series, No. 17) by Mary Pope Osborne.
Dear America: Voyage on the Great Titanic, The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, R.M.S. Titanic 1912 by Ellen Emerson White. 13-year old Margaret Ann, a London orphan, is hired as companion to accompany the rich American lady, Mrs. Carstairs, on the Titanic to America. Reviewed at Reading Junky’s Reading Roost.
I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912 by Lauren Tarshis. Reviewed by Becky at Young Readers.
Titanic by Gordon Korman. A series of three books about four young passengers and their adventures aboard the doomed ship. The titles are Unsinkable, Collision Course, and S.O.S. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
No Moon by Irene Watts. Louisa, a nursemaid, overcomes her fear of the ocean and sails with her charges to New York aboard the Titanic.
Back to the Titanic (Travelers Through Time) by Beatrice Gormley.

Young adult fiction:
Fateful by Claudia Gray. Paranormal romance with werewolves, danger, and the Titanic. Reviewed by Christa at Hooked on Books.
Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck. This one has a prophecy/supernatural angle, too. It seems to go with the territory. Mistress Amanda and her maid, Miranda, are almost identical in appearance, and Amanda exploits the resemblance for her own ends. However, when the two young ladies board the Titanic for their journey to America for Amanda’s wedding, they are unaware of how much is about to change for both of them. Reviewed at The Shady Glade.
Titanic Crossing by Barbara Williams.
Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn. Spiritualism and the Titanic. The Taylor sisters deal with their mom’s profession as a spiritualist, and in the process they meet up with many of the most famous characters of the age: Harry Houdini, Nicola Tesla, John John Astor, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Guggenheim and others. Lots of discussion of supernatural communication with the dead and whether or not spiritualists are truly gifted or fraudulent. I read this one just a couple of weeks ago, and I find it has lodged itself in a place in my mind. I keep wanting to look up more about Tesla in particular.
SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting. Typical teen romance-type novel with good historical detail. There’s a steward who foresees the disaster because of his supernatural “gift.” And there’s an underlying theme of class war and class distinctions just as there was in the movie, Titanic.
Titanic: The Long Night by Diane Hoh. Scholastic, 1998. Two couples face their fates aboard the Titanic.
Remembering the Titanic by Diane Hoh. Sequel to Titanic: The Long Night.

Nonfiction:
The Heroine of the Titanic by Joan W. Blos. A picture book about the “unsinkable Molly Brown.” Reviewed by Sally at Whispers of Dawn.
The Titanic: Lost and Found (Step-Into-Reading, Step 4) by Judy Donnelly. We have a copy of this beginning reader, and it’s a good introduction to the subject.
The Titanic Coloring Book by Peter F. Copeland. A Dover Publications coloring book.
The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic by Allan Wolf. Due out October 11, 2011.
Titanic (DK Eyewitness Books) by Simon Adams.

April 15th of next year (2012) will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It’s quite likely that more books, both for adults and for children, will be making an appearance in commemoration of that tragic event. If you have any suggestions to add to the above list, please leave a comment.

Reading about The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Sep10

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three who generally who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. Many of the workers could not escape the fire because the managers and owners had locked the stairwells and emergency exits.

Here are a few fiction books that dramatize and memorialize this horrific tragedy:

For children:
Lieurance, Suzanne. The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (Historical Fiction Adventures).
Eleven-year-old Galena and her older sister, Anya, are Russian-Jewish immigrants living with their parents in a one-room tenement apartment in New York City. Six days a week the girls walk to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Each morning Galena asks to see the pictures of family members inside the gold locket Anya wears around her neck before she and her sister part to work on different floors.
Littlefield, Holly. Fire at the Triangle Factory. (A Carolrhoda On My Own book).
In 1911 New York City, Jewish Minnie and Catholic Tessa can only be friends at the factory, but this friendship pays off when the famous and tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire takes the lives of many of their coworkers and threatens theirs.

For Young adults:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses.
Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan and her family are grateful to have finally reached America, the great land of opportunity. Their happiness is shattered when part of their family is forced to return to Ireland. Rose wants to succeed and stays in New York with her younger sister Maureen. The sisters struggle to survive and barely do so by working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Davies, Jacqueline. Lost.
Essie, 16, sews all day for pennies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to help feed her fatherless family and now to forget her little sister’s death. Then the fire happens.
Friesner, Esther. Threads and Flames.
Raisa has just traveled alone from a small Polish shtetl all the way to New York City. She finds work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sewing bodices on the popular shirtwaists. And she falls in love. But will she survive the fire?
Haddix, Margaret Peterson. Uprising.
Ms. Haddix gives the story a human face by making it the story of three girls: Bella, an immigrant from Southern Italy, Yetta, a Russian Jewish immigrant worker, and Jane, a poor little rich girl who becomes involved in the lives of the shirtwaist factory workers in spite of her rarified existence as a society girl. Semicolon review here.
Hopkinson, Deborah. Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909. (Dear America Series)
Angela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory.

For adults:
Weber, Katherine. Triangle.
Not only about the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, this adult novel is also about music. And it’s a history mystery. Recommended.

1910: Books and Literature

Sep7

Author Mark Twain died in on April 21, 1910. He was born in 1835 when the comet had last visited our solar system. Twain wrote in his autobiography: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”

Important books of 1910:
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House.
Sigmund Freud, Origins and Development of Psychoanalysis.
E. M. Forster, Howards End.

For children in 1910:
Maida’s Little Shop by Inez Haynes Irwin. One of Jen’s favorites: “Maida’s Little Shop was originally published in 1910, and was the first of a series of 15 books about the motherless daughter of a magnanimous tycoon, and her close-knit group of friends.”

'Vintage Kewpie Valentine Postcard Close-Up' photo (c) 2010, Cheryl Hicks - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/Andrew Lang’s last fairy book, The Lilac Fairy Book, was published in 1910. In all, Andrew Lang published twelve fairy-tale collections, starting in 1889 with The Blue Fairy Book. You can listen to all of Lang’s fairy tale collection books at Librivox.

Also in 1910, American illustrator and author Rose O’Neill’s first children’s book was published, The Kewpies and Dottie Darling. A few years later Kewpie dolls, based on Ms. O’Neill’s characters, became popular. There’s something about the Kewpie doll that I find disturbing. It’s supposed to be cute and innocent, but it seems . . . sort of sinister.

1904: Books and Literature

Aug1

The Nobel Prize for Literature was divided equally between poet Frédéric Mistral and dramatist José Echegaray y Eizaguirre.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Winston Churchill, The Crossing
2. Ellen Glasgow, The Deliverance
3. Anonymous (Katherine Cecil Thurston), The Masquerader
4. Miriam Michelson, In the Bishop’s Carriage
5. Mary Johnston, Sir Mortimer
6. George Barr McCutcheon, Beverly of Graustark
7. John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
8. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
9. Henry Harland, My Friend Prospero
10. Stewart Edward White, The Silent Places

The only book on the above list that I know is Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and I must commit heresy and admit that as a child I liked it every bit as much as the more famous Anne of Green Gables by L.M> Montgomery. They seemed to me to be the same book, or at least in the same series, with Rebecca Rowena Randall and her maiden aunts substituting quite well for Anne and Marilla. Since Rebecca actually came first, I wonder if L.M. Montgomery ever read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, either before or after she wrote her own story of a young girl from a large family sent to live with a stern spinster lady. Rebecca and Anne both bring joy and laughter and a bit of benevolent turmoil to a rather joyless home.

Similarities between Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm:
Rebecca is the second oldest of seven children, and her father is dead as the book opens. She has been quite involved in taking care of her siblings since her mother is so overworked, but she is sent to live with her aunts Jane and Miranda because her mother can no longer provide for all of the children. Anne is a poverty-stricken orphan who has been taking care of other people’s children in her foster homes, and she comes to live with sister and brother Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. Both Anne and Rebecca are imaginative, joyful, and exuberant, sometimes too much so. Marilla and Aunt Miranda are determined to turn their respective charges into proper young ladies. Matthew and Aunt Jane become allies for Anne and for Rebecca in the face of their more domineering sisters. Rebecca and Anne both turn out to be good students, especially in English and literature, and both of them study to become teachers. Both girls read and write poetry. Both girls have a more prosaic best friend for whom they are the catalyst for imaginative adventures.

Both books are good, and Ms. Montgomery was probably the better writer, hence the continued and greater popularity of Anne of Green Gables. However, I think Anne Shirley and Rebecca Rowena Randall would have been “kindred spirits” had they met each other, and perhaps Ms. Wiggin and Ms. Montgomery would have been friends, too.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
Henry James, The Golden Bowl
Henry Adams, Mt.-St. Michel and Chartres
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of Business Enterprise
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions. Semicolon review here. Green Mansions is a particularly interesting and romantic product of the times, set in South America.

As for this list, for the most part I know the authors, but not the books. I think I know Mr. Weber’s basic premise which was that Protestantism lends itself well to and encourages capitalism and business success. Ye olde Protestant work ethic.

Bloomsday, the day on which the action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) takes place in Dublin, was June 16, 1904.

Also on December 27, 1904, James Barrie’s stage play “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” debuted in London. It was hugely successful and inspired Walt Disney’s Peter Pan movie (1953), Hook (1991), a movie starring Robin Williams as Peter, and Finding Neverland (2004), a movie starring Johnny Depp as James Barrie.

Earthquake at Dawn by Kristiana Gregory

Jul18

Earthquake at Dawn is a book in the series Great Episodes, published in 1992 by Harcourt Brace. The novel is set before, during and after the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, and the story is based upon the stories of two real women who lived through the earthquake and its aftermath. Edith Irvine was a twenty-one year old photographer who was visiting San Francisco the morning of the earthquake. She hid her cameras in an abandoned baby buggy and took candid shots of the damage from the earthquake that San Francisco officials wanted to hide in an effort to reassure the public that the city was only slightly damaged and ready for more immigration and commerce. The other woman who appears in the book is Mary Exa Atkins Campbell who wrote a thirty-two page letter telling about her experiences during the earthquake and the subsequent fires caused, or at least exacerbated, by the damaged infrastructure and the lack of water.

It makes for a good story. Edith and her servant/friend, the fictional Daisy Valentine, wander about a ravaged San Francisco looking for Edith’s father. They meet up with not only Mary Exa, but also actor John Barrymore and author Jack London, who were actually present during the great earthquake and later wrote about their experiences, too. I always think that well-researched and engaging historical fiction is the most fun and memorable to learn history. You can get a general idea of what happened and how it affected the people involved in the event, and then if you’re interested, look more details for yourself. I especially like stories that are based on real-life characters like Edith Irvine and Mary Exa.

Go here to see some of Edith Irvine’s photographs of the earthquake’s aftereffects.

And here’s a movie made on Market Street in San Franciso just four days before the earthquake in 1906:

Only a couple of of these Great Episodes series books fit into my upcoming study of the twentieth century for this next school year:

Air Raid–Pearl Harbor!: The Story of December 7, 1941 by Theodore Taylor
Keep Smiling Through by Ann Rinaldi (1943)

What other historical fiction set in the twentieth century either for young people or for adults would you recommend?

What’s New in Books about Peculiar Children?

Jun19

A young teen boy finds that rather than being like his mundane and commonplace family, he is really one of the magical people, many of whom live in a sort of home for special children where they are free to practice their special magical talents. The world is divided between the commoners and the magically gifted, and the magical people are further divided into two groups: the good ones and the evil ones who, in an attempt to gain power, are about to destroy the world as we know it. Could it be Harry Potter?

Find out in my review on the new Youth Reads page at the The Point (Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint).

The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic by Jennifer Trafton

Jun15

Cybils nominee: Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nominated by Amy at Hope Is the Word, because she beat me to it.

Read the first chapter of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic.

The rest of it is just as good as the first chapter. End of review.

O.K. I do have more to say about this book. But I think mostly what I want to say is:

1. Read this book.

2. If G.K. Chesterton were living now and writing fantasy for middle grade readers, he would be accused of being Jennifer Trafton. Or she would be him. Or something.

3. Since my lovely Z-baby likes maps, here’s a link to a map of The Island at the Center of Everything.

4. How did she or her publisher manage to get Brett Helquist to illustrate? Mr. Helquist is the guy who did the illustrations for Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and for Blue Balliet’s Chasing Vermeer and its sequels. Perfectly wonderful pictures.

5. Persimmony Smudge wants to be a heroine. How is this ambition different from what I wrote about yesterday, wanting to be famous? Is it different? I think so, but I’m not sure how to articulate the difference.

“The truth was that King Lucas the Loftier had never gone down from the mountain in his entire life It meant no longer being On Top of Majestic, no longer being Lofty. It meant descending into the world of Everybody Else. He would have no idea what to do, where to go, how to behave. He wouldn’t know who he was anymore.”

6. Persimmony Smudge is a wonderful name for a character. So are the following names in the book: Guafnoggle the Rumblebump, Worvil the Worrier, Jim-Jo Pumpernickel, King Lucas the Loftier, Rheuben Rhinkle, Barnbas Quill, and Dustin Dexterhoof. (I’ve always liked the word “pumpernickel”, but I never thought of using it as a name.)

7. Insanitorious. Ludiculous. Ridiposterous. Flibbertigibbeted. Discumbersomebubblated. The presence of these words and others like them in this book compels the logophile to read and enjoy. Word play galoric.

8. You can buy a copy of the book at the Rabbit Room Store online, if you want. Or Amazon.

“You said might!” Worvil covered his face with his hands. “Of all the words that have ever been invented, that is the worst. All of the terror in the world hangs on the word might. The Leafeaters might kidnap me and keep me locked up underground forever. They might tie me to a tree and leave me to be eaten by poison-tongued jumping tortoises. A hurricane might flood the Willow Woods and both of us drown . . .”
Persimmony stared at Worvil and discovered that she liked him. He was a coward, certainly, but he had Imagination. She liked people with Imagination.

9. Have you read the first chapter yet?

10. Oh, just buy the book already. (No, you cynical people, I don’t know Ms. Trafton personally, and I don’t get a commission from recommending her book. I do get a few cents if you go straight from here to Amazon and buy the book there.)

“For the last time, I am not the one who puts gifts in the pots!”
“Well, if you don’t, who does?”
“I have no idea,” said the potter. “Who puts words of truth into the strings of a Lyre? Perhaps there some things that we are not meant to understand. Without a few mysteries and a few giants, life would be a very small thing, after all.”

Fairest By Gail Carson Levine

Jun7

Okay, so it’s been a very long time since I have written anything for this blog and I thought it was about time I started doing reviews on some of the books I read. I just recently read this book, about a week and half ago, but I didn’t think about writing a review for it until now.

So rather than reading Fairest I actually listened to it. I like doing that better so that I can do other things while I listen. I usually get more out of this, because the voice of the narrator always helps me to imagine the characters easier.

I thought it was an amazing book! I just realized that I really enjoy fairy-tale books, with princesses and magic and all that. I really enjoyed the whole book and I’m probably boring everyone so I will get to the point!

The book is about a girl named Aza. Her parents own an inn, the Featherbed Inn. They found her at their inn when she was a baby, so they aren’t her real parents but they are very nice to her. They live in Ayortha, where everyone sings. She has an amazing voice, but she is really ugly (or so she says) and hates how she looks. She learns how to do a singing trick she calls illusing where she sort of puts her voice somewhere else and she can make her voice be in that place.

A duchess comes to the Inn and ends up taking Aza to a Royal Wedding, where the King gets married to a commoner named Ivi. Ivi finds out Aza’s illusing trick, and manipulates her. Ivi can’t sing, and she gets Aza to illuse a voice for her. Aza becomes Ivi’s Lady in Waiting, and stays at the palace. Something soon happens to the king and then lots of things happen afterwards. Ivi meets a Prince and falls in love with him; she finds a magic mirror; a spell for beauty goes wrong; and she illuses for the queen, Ivi. I found this book to be really good and I hope other people do too.

Hopefully I will be doing a lot more book reports this summer and fall, thanks for reading them! 🙂

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 1, An Unexpected Party

May19

We’re reading The Hobbit in May, aloud to Z-baby, and Betsy-Bee is reading it to herself. I thought I’d blog about our journey from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and home again along with Bilbo and the twelve dwarves and Gandalf the Wizard.

I found a few old favorite quotations as we read the first chapter:

Of course, there the opening line, which my annotated edition of The Hobbit tells me is now so famous that it’s included in Bartlett’s: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

I’ve always enjoyed this exchange between Bilbo and Gandalf:
“Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.”

Then there’s this lovely exclamation from Bilbo: “Confusticate and bebother these dwarves! Why don’t they come and lend a hand?” Such a useful but fairly gentle imprecation!

This chapter also features two classic Tolkien songs: Chip the glasses and crack the plates! and Far over the Misty Mountains cold. I think Tolkien was, if not a poet, at least a competent and enjoyable lyricist. I wish I knew a really good tune to each of these songs. I’ve heard them sung on our cassette tapes of The Hobbit, but the tune there doesn’t stick in the mind.

Z-baby said that if all those dwarves showed up at her house, uninvited, she would have told them to get lost. Z-baby is not usually at a loss for words or suffering from any lack of confidence. Perhaps her assertiveness comes from being the youngest of eight. She has no choice but to assert herself.

Did you know that Belladonna Took, Bilbo’s mother, is the only female character named in The Hobbit? I wonder what Peter Jackson, et. al., will do with that lack of female characters in the movie? I’d just as soon they left it alone and made an all-male movie, but isn’t that against the Rules of Hollywood? Even war movies have to have a romantic interlude, right?

Bilbo serves seed-cake at his “unexpected party,” a delicacy that the book tells me is “a sweetened cake flavored with caraway seeds.” I poked about a bit for a recipe and found out that seed cake is an old British bread that originally did not have any sugar in it. However, I think a poppy seed cake, even if it’s not so authentic, sounds better than one with caraway seeds, so I think we might try out this recipe.

The girls, of course, had questions as we read:
Who is the Necromancer?
Answer: Sauron

What are smoke rings?
Answer: RIngs of smoke that come out of a pipe. But I have no idea how to produce them since I don’t smoke a pipe.

What are runes?
Answer: Elvish writing that looks like calligraphy and is somewhat mysterious. I was able to connect the word “runes” to the poem we are memorizing, The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, in which Poe says the bells are ringing in a “sort of runic rhyme.”

Z-baby wanted me to print out a copy of Thror’s map for her since she likes maps “just like the hobbits do.”
Maps of Middle Earth, including Thror’s Map.

As for me, I’m feeling rather Tookish today after reading the first chapter of this old favorite. How about you? Any adventures in your life this fine May?

The Warden’s Walk, The Hobbit Read-along, Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party.

Z-Baby’s Audiobooks: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

May11

We downloaded this classic story in audiobook form from Librivox, and Z-baby listened to it last night and today. The narrator was Lee Ann Howlett.

How was the narration on this story?
I hate when old men do the narration, and for girls they make the voices sound really high and annoying. The narrator for this book was good.

What was the story about?
Well, it was about a girl named Elizabeth Ann whose parents had died, and she lived with two of her aunts and another lady. One of her aunts was middle-aged, Aunt Frances, and the other one was old. Aunt Frances and ELizabeth Ann were best buddies, and Aunt Frances basically babied her. Then her old aunt got sick, so the doctor came and said that Elizabeth Ann needed to go somewhere else. They sent her to her one of her other aunts that didn’t really like her. So she went to another aunt and uncle and cousins, the Putneys.
At first, they didn’t baby her and they acted as if she was nine years old, which she was. She thought they didn’t even care about her. But then she got used to it, and . . . well, you just have to listen to or read the rest of the story to find out what happens.

How did the story end?
You have to listen to it. I can’t tell you how it ends!

What did Betsy learn in the story?
She learned to act her age. She also learned how to cook a little and how to make butter and other stuff, too.

In addition to the audio version, you can get this 1916 book in Kindle format for free, or in a paperback edition for about $10.00.