The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef

Sep20

The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne by Catherine Reef.

Brief, indeed. Emily was 30 years old in December 1848 when she died of tuberculosis. Anne died of tuberculosis a few months later in May 1849. She was 29 years old. Their older brother Branwell had predeceased them by a few months (September 1848). He was 31 years old.

Charlotte wrote: “A year ago–had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849, had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through—I should have thought–this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams.”

Charlotte managed to outlive her siblings by a few years. She died at the age of 39—probably of tuberculosis. Oh, and by the way, the Brontes had two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died when they were young. Want to guess what killed them?

Therefore, one thing I learned from reading this tragic, true story of Victorian genius was that tuberculosis was (is?) really, really deadly, and I’m glad I didn’t live back then, before antibiotics. And I hope I don’t live to see a resurgence of TB, post-effective antibiotics.

I’ve alway found the Bronte family to be fascinating, even before I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I read a different book when I was just an elementary school student called The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. Ms. Clarke’s fantasy about the Brontes’ toy soldiers who come to life and try to return to the Bronte home in Yorkshire won the Carnegie Medal in 1962 (British title The Twelve and the Genii). Anyway, I loved that book, and it’s the story about the Brontes as children and about the stories they told to each other that first got me interested in the Bronte family.

I didn’t actually read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with understanding and enjoyment until I was in college. And I also read Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte when I was in college. What an amazing family! Even Branwell, with his Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester/Byron alcoholic character, hold a certain fascination.

This biography by Catherine Reef was more than decent, and I did learn a lot about the Bronte family. The book mentions the toy soldiers, and the friendship between Charlotte and Mrs. Gaskell, and several other details that were familiar to me. I also gleaned some new information. For instance, I had forgotten that Charlotte married, after Emily, Anne, and Branwell died. And I never knew how very dissolute Branwell was.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure Ms. Reef really understood the Christian faith of Charlotte and Anne, and perhaps Emily, although Emily seems to have been more private and perhaps less orthodox. She writes several times about how “religious” Anne was and about how Charlotte’s faith was “unshaken.” But their faith comes across in the book as a kind of quaint Victorian notion, rather than a real conviction and solace in grief. The author does quote Charlotte’s reaction to atheist Harriet Maritneau’s apologetic for atheism, Letters on the Law of Man’s Social Nature and Development. Charlotte wrote in response to Ms. Martineau’s lack of faith in God:

“The strangest thing is that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank, to welcome this unutterable desolation as a pleasant state of freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could?”

Still, if this biography doesn’t capture the fullness of the Brontes’ faith, it does give a reasonably detailed picture of the life and times of this remarkable family suited to readers age 12 and up. After reading Ms. Reef’s biography, I am wanting to read Charlotte Bronte’s other novels, Villette and Shirley, and Anne’s two books, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I’d also like to re-read Wuthering Heights and The Return of the Twelves, but not until after Cybils season is over.

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq by Bill Swan

Sep19

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq, The Story of Donald Marshall Jr. by Bill Swan.

This Real Justice book is the second by author Bill Swan in a series of nonfiction stories about Canadian teens who were wrongfully convicted of serious crimes and only exonerated after many years of incarceration. Swan’s first book in the series was about the case of Stephen Truscott, a high-profile murder conviction in which the convicted fourteen year old, Truscott, was exonerated after forty plus years in prison.

Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted of killing his friend/acquaintance Sandy Seale in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison in Nova Scotia, Canada. Donald Marshall Jr. was of Native American (Mi’kmaq) extraction, and his alleged victim was black, or “African Canadian” or “racialized”, as the book calls him. The author takes a statement from the Royal Commission that studied the case and makes it the centerpiece of his story:

“Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted and sent to prison, in part at least, because he was a Native person.”

Mr. Swan effectively ignores the “in part” part of that statement, and tells the entire story of Sandy Seale’s murder as if Mr. Marshall were completely trustworthy and totally innocent, while acknowledging that Marshall was in trouble with the law and had an explosive temper and lied, both before and after the alleged crime took place. I’m not denying that a dreadful miscarriage of justice happened and that Donald Marshall Jr. was unjustly imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. However, the author’s attempts to make Marshall into an innocent victim of racial bias, and even a hero for his supposed “courage” and “integrity,” fall flat.

The book calls Donald Marshall’s story “deeply troubling” and says that “conviction for a crime he did not commit scarred him for life.” Maybe. But this book did not convince me that Marshall was a hero–just a sad victim in a sordid case. I never got a sense of who Donald Marshall was —just a sense that he wasn’t the one who murdered Sandy Seale.

I received a review copy of Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq from NetGalley.

There is an adult nonfiction book about the Donald Marshall case: Justice Denied The Law Versus Donald Marshall by Michael Harris, and the book inspired a movie, also called Justice Denied.

Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson

Sep18

I can’t review this book for a couple of reasons. First of all Mr. Wilson’s writing is intimidating in its brilliance and cleverness. I’m not that clever. Secondly, I read Death by Living on my Kindle. I can’t put my finger on the difference, but something about reading a book on the Kindle makes it feel different, lesser, and difficult to capture. I think it has to do with not being able to easily flip back and forth and re-read parts, or something. Anyway, I am finding it hard to evaluate books fairly that I read on my Kindle, even if I enjoyed them, as I did this one. I just think maybe I would have enjoyed it more in print, on paper.

So, in lieu of a review, her are a few excerpts that I found noteworthy or highlight-worthy:

“Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.”

“I began to see the world more like a cook than a writer. There were boundless ingredients out there, combinations waiting to be discovered and simmered and served. There were truths and stories and characters and quirks that could clash badly, and some that could marry and birth sequels. I began to feel a lot more comfortable. It wasn’t all on me to create. It was on me to find. To catch. To arrange.”

“When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story.. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday School teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality.”

“The world never slows down so that we can grasp the story, so that we can form study groups and drill each other on the recent past until we have total retention. We have exactly one second to carve a memory of that second, to sort and file and prioritize in some attempt at preservation. But then the next second has arrived, the next breeze to distract us, the next plane slicing through the sky, the next funny skip from the next funny toddler, the next squirrel fracas, and the next falling leaf.”

“Imagine a world that is truly and intrinsically and explosively accidental. Explain time in that world, in the world with no narrative and no narrator. Why time? Why progression?”

“Time is that harsh current that thrusts us down the rapids of narrative causation. Every moment leads to another moment and those moments pile together, boiling and rolling in falls, creasing skin and blinding eyes and breaking bones and wiping minds. Why are we old? Because we were young. Why do we die? Because we lived.”

“No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with through death.”

“We are authors and we are writing every second of every day. A child scissors a couch, and that action is forever and always. It cannot be undone. But now it is your turn. What you say and what you do in response will be done forever, never to be appealed, edited or modified.”

So yeah, it’s a book about time and living abundantly and stories and choices and dust motes and upchuck. Yep, all of those things. So read it. But maybe not on an eReader.

Cybils 2013

Sep17

Yeah, hooray, I’m going to be judging Cybils again this year. Along with a great team of litbloggers, I’m going to be helping to choose the finalists for the Young Adult Nonfiction category this year, a category which I expect to add to my knowledge base and broaden my reading horizons.

My fellow nonfiction panelists are:
Jessica Tackett MacDonald, Her life with Books

Kim Baciella, Si Se Puede

Stephanie Charlefour, Love, Life, Read

Cheryl Vanatti, Reading Rumpus

Alyssa Feller, The Shady Glade

Sarah Sammis, Puss Reboots

This year’s Cybils is going to be fun. I hope you enjoy it, too, as I read and review nonfiction on all sorts of topics. I may even sneak over to the fiction side and read some of the nominees in the other categories. Hang on, and get ready to start nominating your favorite YA and children’s titles starting October 1st at the Cybils blog.

Golden Boy by Tara Sullivan

Sep17

“Burning in the daylight and hunted in the shadows, having albinism is often a death sentence in East Africa. In Tanzania, one out of every 1,400 people has albinism, a genetic condition characterized by a lack of pigment in the body. That compares to a global average of one in 20,000 people.” Huffington Post, June 15, 2013.

“In fact, the number of albino murders are decreasing in Tanzania because of all the publicity and the government’s stern warnings that they must stop. But African albinos still grow up in a world of prejudice and misunderstanding.” NPR, All Things Considered, November 30, 2012

“People with albinism in East Africa face profound social stigma and isolation, due to the negative myths that surround the condition. In addition, most children with albinism have early signs of skin cancer by their teen years, and only 2% of people with albinism live to reach their 40th birthday.” Asante Miraimu website.

Golden Boy, Ms. Sullivan’s debut novel, is the kind of book that impels the reader (at least this reader) to go to the internet and start looking up facts about the problem that is portrayed, in this case the persecution of individuals with albinism. But even without all the fact-finding follow-up, Golden Boy is a good story that highlights the difficulties and sheer pain of growing up and living in a place where you are humiliated and ridiculed and maybe even physically assaulted (or killed) as a result of physical differences. Even those of us who have never been persecuted or made to fear for our lives can identify to some extent with Habo, the albino protagonist of this novel, and his search for significance, his desire to see himself as more than just a zero-zero, the Tanzanian term for albinos.

Who hasn’t been made to feel like a zero at sometime by someone? But for for Habo, life is much more dangerous than it is for most people with low self-esteem, and the stakes are much higher than they are in the typical neighborhood bullying incident. People actually do kill albinos in the place where Habo’s family comes to live. And Habo must run away and hide himself, unable to trust anyone. Even the blind sculptor he meets, who doesn’t know about his secret, may become a threat if and when he finds out that Habo is an albino.

Yes, this story has a moral, but it is far from moralistic. Habo feels and acts like a real person, even as he becomes a fictional symbol for all of the children who suffer from the twin afflictions of abuse and physical impairment as a result of their albinism.

Other reviews of Golden Boy:
My Head Is Full of Books: “Golden Boy has just catapulted itself onto my list of top YA books of the year. The topic, living in Africa with albinism, is certainly a unique one. Yes, it is a story about prejudice and the effects of poor education, but it is also a story of acceptance and of bravery.”
Megan Cox Gurdon in WSJ: “This harrowing but ultimately redemptive story benefits from Ms. Sullivan’s deft use of simile: She writes that panic crawls up Habo’s throat ‘like a hairy spider.'”
Abby the Librarian: “an accessible novel with a compelling plot that will interest kids and may inspire them to learn more about the plight of albinos in Tanzania and what they can do to help.”

U.S. Constitution Day

Sep15

Constitution Day is celebrated in the United States each year on September 17th, the day that the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787. Educational institutions receiving funding through the Department of Education are required to participate by holding educational programs pertaining to the U.S. Constitution. I think this particular instance of unwarranted interference by the federal government in educational affairs is probably unconstitutional, but well-meaning and perhaps helpful. At any rate, if you want to introduce students—or yourself– to the U.S. Constitution and its meaning, here are some titles to help you to do so:

Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen. Subtitled “The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787,” this book is the one that gave me the story of the US constitution. It’s suitable for older readers, at least middle school age, but it’s historical writing at its best. I loved reading about Luther Martin of Maryland, whom Henry Adams described as “the notorious reprobate genius.” Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts who was”always satisfied to shoot an arrow without caring about the wound he caused.” (Both Gerry and Martin refused to sign the final version of the Constitution.) Of course, there were Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, George Washington, who presided over the convention in which all present knew that they were creating a presidency for him to fill, and Ben Franklin, the old man and elder statesman who had to be carried to the convention in a sedan chair. Ms. Bowen’s book brings all these characters and more to life and gives the details of the deliberations of the constitutional convention in readable and interesting format.

A More Perfect Union: The Story of Our Constitution by Betsy Maestro; illustrated by Guilio Maestro.

If You Were There When They Signed the Constitutionby Elizabeth Levy; illustrated by Joan Holub.

Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution by Jean Fritz; illustrated by Tomie dePaola.

We the Kids: The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States Illustrated by David Catrow.

We the People: The Story of Our Constitution by Peter Spier.

Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz.

Cobblestone: Celebrating Our Constitution. Cobblestone Publishing, September 1987. (magazine for kids)

Cobblestone: The Constitution of the United States. Cobblestone Publishing, September 1982. (magazine for kids)

Celebrate the Constitution game.

Sunday Salon: Links and Thinks

Sep15

What does the fox say? Thanks, Bill. I got my horse/fox laugh for the day.

I love this poem by one of my favorite bloggers: On the porch with Liza.

It’s amazing to me how hung up and mixed up we can be about skin color and personal appearance, and it’s not just black and white. Watch this video at Mitali Perkins’ blog, Fire Escape, called Rise, Dark Girls. Discuss.

Danielle by filmmaker Anthony Cerniello. Another video worth watching. My girls responded to the aging process with “yuck” and “eewwww”. Clearly we have issues to address as far as “ageism” and the graceful response to aging that I want my family to have.

One of my family members has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, so this new sitcom starring Michael J. Fox is of especial interest to me. What do you think? Can he pull it off? Will it be funny?

A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer

Sep14

Inspired (or scared silly) by Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Stephen King’s The Stand, author Amber Kizer says she first became fascinated with viruses and pandemics and apocalyptic survival when she was in middle school. “With Nadia and Rabbit’s story I got to live out one fantasy of a worst-case-scenario pandemic,” says she.

Nadia and Rabbit are a teenage girl and little brother, alive in world where a nasty weaponized virus has killed 98% of the world’s population. And what’s left is a lot of dead bodies and anarchy. It’s a pretty repulsive and violent world, but Nadia and Rabbit have been taught by their father, a marine, and their uncle, an epidemiologist in the military, to “be the cockroach”—in other words, to survive. So, using practical survival techniques and common sense, Nadia and Rabbit leave their home in Seattle to travel eastward to West Virginia where they hope to find their grandfather and uncle still living and preparing a place for them to survive in this brave new world. Don’t read any more if you want to read the novel for yourself without spoilers.

I liked this story a lot, although it had its flaws. The main thing that didn’t make sense was that Nadia and Rabbit at first think they might be the only people left in this world, but after the halfway point of the book, they meet people, other survivors, almost on every page. And there are plot developments that just seem to be dropped. At one point Nadia is captured, and her captors threaten to trade her to some one named “Jonah” who “wants all the girls.” In most stories, Jonah would show up later, and we’d get some idea about who he is and why he wants all the girls. In this story, Jonah is never mentioned again. That’s realistic, but not very satisfying as a story (see Chekhov’s gun).

Still, I recommend this story for those who have not tired of the recent spate of apocalyptic survival stories. Read-alikes would include: The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, Epitaph Road by David Patneaude, Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness, The Compound by S.A. Bodeen, Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, and Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeiffer.

2013 Cybils nomination category: Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Poetry Friday: Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl

Sep13

In 1846 fifteen year old Emily of Amherst, Massachusetts, meets a mysterious young man whom she nicknames “Mr. Nobody.” Since he refuses to tell Emily his real name, she is regrettably unable to identify him when he turns up dead in her family’s pond. However, Miss Emily Dickinson feels a responsibility not only to find out the name of the deceased but also to determine just how he died.

I was reminded of Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries as I read this murder mystery featuring a fictionalized Emily Dickinson as amateur detective. Emily, as portrayed in Nobody’s Secret, is a sharp, intelligent, and very private young lady who is already scribbling down poems in a secret notebook that she keeps hidden in a very secret place. Like Flavia, Emily is not afraid of dead bodies or possible confrontations with murderers, and she is just as determined and ingenious as that other fictional girl detective.

However, in this novel we have the added flavor and pleasure of poetry, and not just any poetry but the verse of Miss Dickinson herself. The author of this YA mystery writes in a note at the end of the book, “Emily’s poems inspired this story, especially ‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,’ which is about how enticing anonymity might be in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog! –

Emily Dickinson’s use of “creative punctuation”–particularly all the dashes– annoyed editors and publishers in the nineteenth century and provoked them to change her punctuation marks to more acceptable ones. That kind of editing, in turn, provoked Emily Dickinson, and as a result she did not allow very many of her poems to be published, or “corrected,” during her lifetime. Her poems also often had several versions. I memorized the one above a long time ago with the words “banish us” instead of “advertise”, and that’s the way I quote it, frequently, to my children.

A good solid mystery woven around immortal poetry: what more could one desire? Nobody’s Secret would be an excellent Cybils nominee in the category of Young Adult Fiction.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jen at Teach Mentor Texts.

The Rest of the Story: Phan Thi Kim Phuc

Sep12

The late Paul Harvey had a feature on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” in which he would tell familiar stories of well-known people and events or commonplace tales of ordinary people–and then tell “the rest of the story”, the part that not many people know or the part that gives the true story an ironic twist. I’ve been reading a lot of unusual stories with unexpected endings myself lately, and I decided to share a few of them with you here at Semicolon.

On June 8, 1972 nine year old Kim Phuc was with her family in her village of Trang Bang near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam when a South Vietnamese pilot mistakenly dropped napalm near the outskirts of the village. Photographer Nick Ut took a picture of the resulting scene, and the photo won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the World Press Photo of the Year in 1972. It is not a exaggeration to say that this photo of children attacked by America’s own allies in an already unpopular war helped influence American opinion against the war in Vietnam to such an extent that the Americans left Vietnam less than a year after the photo was taken.

'Kim Phuc - The Napalm Girl In Vietnam' photo (c) 2007, David Erickson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Mr. Ut took little Kim Phuc to a hospital where she received extensive treatment for her burns, and she survived and grew to adulthood in what became the Communist state of Vietnam. She was recruited by the Vietnamese government as a propaganda tool, the “napalm girl” who survived American and South Vietnamese wartime savagery. But it is the book that she discovered when she was a second year medical student in Saigon and what she did as a result of that discovery that make the rest of the story of Kim Phuc so intriguing and inspiring.

Want to read more about Kim Phuc and her amazing story of healing and forgiveness?

The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong.