bookpagedev

Children's & YA

Cooking up a dandy Yankee Doodle

Review by bookpagedev

Everyone knows that Yankee Doodle went to town, but he’s never made his journey quite like this! At the start of this zany book, Yankee Doodle clutches a feather and rides wildly down a country lane, shouting “Macaroni!” Meanwhile, waddling ducks run for their lives. Cows, pigs and bunnies stand agape, wondering what just passed.

This is yet another entry in Little, Brown’s “Sing-Along Stories” series, whose titles include The Lady with the Alligator Purse, Miss Mary Mack, Skip to My Lou, and more. The books appear simple, but let me attest that they have topped the charts in our house. Yankee Doodle features a page of music and lyrics, then the “story,” and ends with activity suggestions (name all the words in the song that rhyme with “doodle,” or organize your own parade, etc.). The text features silly new lyrics that go with the original tune. As Yankee Doodle and his pony careen down the road, they pick up a girl with a pink polka dot dress, her poodle, a toad, and a rooster. Eventually the crew opens a restaurant, appropriately called “Yankee Doodle’s Noodles,” where all of these companions help run the show (“Toad and pony were the cooks/The waiter was the poodle”).

A great big cock-a-doodle-doo for Nadine Bernard Westcott’s whimsical, colorful illustrations. The relatively simple faces of her animals and characters are remarkably expressive. Check out Westcott’s poodle, for instance, as a rooster lands on his back ouch! She also adds plenty of fun small touches, such as the menu noting that dessert is “more macaroni and cheese.” I guarantee that read-aloud readers will be sing-along singers with this book in hand. Just think of the Yankee Doodle tune while reading the following: “Oh, how they ate! They cleaned each plate!/They gulped and gobbled oodles!/They’d never munched so fine a lunch,/Especially the noodles.” No doubt a generation of young readers will think that Mary Ann Hoberman’s new rendition of Yankee Doodle represents the real lyrics.

Everyone knows that Yankee Doodle went to town, but he's never made his journey quite like this! At the start of this zany book, Yankee Doodle clutches a feather and rides wildly down a country lane, shouting "Macaroni!" Meanwhile, waddling ducks run for their lives.…
Children's & YA

Life on the wrong side of the tracks

Review by bookpagedev

Almost 17 percent of American children live in poverty, a startling statistic. Michele Ivy Davis gives readers a touching and realistic glimpse into the life of one of these children in her new novel Evangeline Brown and the Cadillac Motel. Davis must have grown up poor, or had close friends who did, because she shows a dead-on understanding of what it’s like on the other side of the tracks. Evangeline (Eddie, to her friends) Brown lives in a sleepy little Florida town called Paradise, and she doesn’t like her home life very much. There’s a lot not to like. For starters, her mother died when she was small, and she lives at her father’s business, a run-down motel with the tail end of a pink Cadillac mounted on one wall. If that weren’t embarrassing enough, she sports a wardrobe of second-hand clothes, and most of the time when she gets home from school, her father is passed out, drunk. She shuns, and is shunned by, the other kids at school, and with sixth grade starting up, she’s dreading the wizened old teacher she’s sure to get.

Imagine Eddie’s surprise when young Miss Rose strolls in the door! Her happiness quickly turns to consternation when her new teacher puts her in the front of the class, and after sizing up a few test scores, begins to call on her more than she’d like. She reluctantly tries out for the choir at Miss Rose’s behest, but the last straw comes when she finds out that the teacher is planning on visiting her at home! With the help of her new friend Farrell, the son of her dad’s drinking buddy, Eddie decides on a drastic plan of action she’s going to run away. Davis accurately captures the mixture of resentment and shame that many poor children feel, but also delivers plenty of the thing they need most: hope. The winner of the Dutton Children’s Books Ann Durell Fiction Contest, Evangeline Brown and the Cadillac Motel is a winning first novel that young readers will learn from and enjoy.

Almost 17 percent of American children live in poverty, a startling statistic. Michele Ivy Davis gives readers a touching and realistic glimpse into the life of one of these children in her new novel Evangeline Brown and the Cadillac Motel. Davis must have grown…
History

The definitive political honeymoon

Review by bookpagedev

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office came during the country’s worst moment in history. The Great Depression was at its darkest point the economy in collapse, people desperate for jobs, money and food. During these bleak days many questioned whether democracy itself was a failure, suggesting America needed a dictator on the order of Mussolini or the barely known Hitler to set things right. These voices did not come from the bizarre fringes of society, but from such prominent sources as The New York Daily News and national columnist Walter Lippman. Almost no one saw much hope for the future, in America or anywhere else.

But Roosevelt did. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope turns the dial back to those early days when few knew whether any solution could save the nation from teetering into fascism on one side and revolution on the other. Newsweek political columnist Jonathan Alter argues that Roosevelt offered a sea change in politics, an ability to depart from the way things had always been done, tied to a willingness to experiment to try anything until something worked. It was this combination, along with the gift of talking directly to the common man, that allowed Roosevelt to bring hope back to America. The Defining Moment is a fascinating window into a time that changed the very way our nation thinks about government and its role in society. At times Alter’s political biases poke through, but his writing is deft, pulling the reader rapidly along and creating a feeling of tension that echoes the desperation of the times a remarkable achievement for a book examining bank runs, government social experimentation and bureaucratic foibles. If you want to understand how our government came to be what it is today, or if you just want an interesting read about a pivotal time in history, this is indeed a defining book. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first hundred days in office came during the country's worst moment in history. The Great Depression was at its darkest point the economy in collapse, people desperate for jobs, money and food. During these bleak days many questioned whether democracy itself was…
NonfictionTrue Crime

Cold case file: Boston Strangler

Review by bookpagedev

The Boston Strangler was the prototype for modern serial killers. He was also more fearsome than those who would follow in his bloody footsteps in the impression of invincibility that he cast through his community in the early ’60s, before he was caught, or, more precisely, until Albert De Salvo was arrested and the terror came to an end. Doubt nonetheless lingers over whether De Salvo was in fact the perpetrator of 13 murders ascribed to the Strangler.

But another mystery haunts this case, involving a petty criminal named Roy Smith. Smith was convicted of killing Bessie Goldberg, an older woman who had hired him to do odd jobs at her home in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. Her death was identical in most respects to those attributed to the Strangler: She was choked from behind with a stocking, with no signs of protracted struggle, which suggested that the killer had somehow persuaded her to let him into her home. The jury’s guilty verdict sent Smith to prison for life yet the Boston Strangler remained active for months to come.

Meticulously, precisely, Sebastian Junger dissects the roles that Smith and De Salvo did or did not play in this drama in A Death in Belmont. Other characters emerge, none more compelling than Junger’s mother, who had a chilling encounter with De Salvo at the height of Strangler hysteria. Junger, whose previous works include The Perfect Storm, writes dispassionately, letting the narrative build its own momentum, unburdened by lurid, tabloid-oriented excess. A Death in Belmont, then, is primarily an intellectual exercise, in which the facts are enough to rivet the reader’s attention even as the author’s lines of inquiry weave elaborate patterns of examination.

The book ends with a series of unanswered questions, which point toward a different kind of wisdom, based on broader issues of right and wrong. It is a powerful and honest thing to end a book like this with something that feels more like a beginning. Robert L. Doerschuk is a former editor of Musician magazine.

The Boston Strangler was the prototype for modern serial killers. He was also more fearsome than those who would follow in his bloody footsteps in the impression of invincibility that he cast through his community in the early '60s, before he was caught, or, more…
Sports

Living the high life

Review by bookpagedev

In light of today’s steroid scandals, it’s both ironic and nostalgic to revisit a time when a baseball player’s worst sins were womanizing and drinking. The great Babe Ruth was guilty as charged on both counts, and Leigh Montville’s The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth makes no attempt to sugarcoat the Bambino’s human failings. Montville, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, fully acknowledges the efforts of Ruth’s previous biographers even drawing upon some of their primary sources then proceeds to take his own singular aim on the subject. Alas, many of the details of Ruth’s early life are shrouded or not fully documented, and after he’d become a national sports hero of unparalleled wealth and fame, events were often filtered through a contemporary press that seemed more determined to inflate the man’s image rather than publicize the unbridled truth. Montville makes a stylish effort to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and he further engages the reader by effectively putting Ruth in the context of his peers and the cataclysmic times that spanned the First World War, the Roaring ’20s and the Great Depression. Yet the most compelling episodes concern the Babe’s formative years, most of them spent at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, where a spartan order of Catholics essentially raised him, taught him baseball and facilitated his opportunity to turn pro, thus giving rise to a Horatio Alger story on a grand scale. Montville vividly presents the heroic details of Ruth’s playing career, making it clear that, despite all the home-run-hitting prowess that changed the face of the game and set records that stood for decades, Ruth was also a dominant pitcher who could have had a Hall of Fame career in that position as well. What plainly emerges here is that Ruth was a simple, unreflective guy with huge appetites, who loved playing baseball, being a celebrity and spending his money on the good life. Montville captures these essentials with sufficient color, while also effectively describing the Babe’s inevitable professional decline and his bittersweet final years outside of the game, where he lingered as a tame curiosity figure before dying of cancer in 1948 at the age of 53.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

In light of today's steroid scandals, it's both ironic and nostalgic to revisit a time when a baseball player's worst sins were womanizing and drinking. The great Babe Ruth was guilty as charged on both counts, and Leigh Montville's The Big Bam: The Life and…
Children's & YA

A few of her favorite things NOT!

Review by bookpagedev

“Alberta is a girl of particular tastes,” begins this rib-tickling picture book. Indeed, young Alberta likes what she likes. And watch out if she doesn’t! Her spiel on dogs (“not her favorite things”) gives you an idea of her opinions: “I do not like large ones that drool, but small ones that keep their tongues in their mouths are okay. . . . Dogs have to be smaller than my knee for me to like them.” Picture books occasionally present kids as relatively simple, one-dimensional characters, but any parent can tell you that Alberta is an excellent model of the likes and dislikes of real children. AnnaLaura Cantone’s illustrations give the perfect sharp edge to the book’s humor. Her style is what I call “modern primitive,” but her sumptuous pastels, her use of mixed media and her character’s amusing expressions are definitely the work of a pro.

As the book progresses, readers learn about a variety of things that are not Alberta’s favorites: cats, food, colors, baths. Her remarks on toothpaste are guaranteed to bring a smile to any child and parent who have engaged in head-to-hand toothbrush battles: “She has tried mint, cherry, orange, and bubble-gum flavor, but none of them tastes very good. ÔIf I could never brush my teeth ever again, that would be fine with me.’ ” Cantone’s illustration shows Alberta’s mother brandishing a giant toothbrush that is truly a bristly scrub brush. Alberta’s bulging eyes and red pigtails make her resemble Pippi Longstocking undergoing shock therapy.

This slightly devilish book delivers a fine message at its end, without being syrupy sweet. What turns out to be Alberta’s favorite thing? “ME!” Why, of course we should have guessed.

As with most of my favorite picture books, the end papers are not to be missed. A passage notes: “Everyone has particular tastes. This means you.” Below are eight questions, such as “Which is better, pizza or spaghetti?” and “What is your favorite word.” If you want to develop your child’s sense of humor, My Favorite Thing is bound to be a favorite.

"Alberta is a girl of particular tastes," begins this rib-tickling picture book. Indeed, young Alberta likes what she likes. And watch out if she doesn't! Her spiel on dogs ("not her favorite things") gives you an idea of her opinions: "I do not like…
Fiction

Final work from a talented playwright

Review by bookpagedev

It’s outrageous that Wendy Wasserstein is dead. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who wrote such groundbreaking works as The Heidi Chronicles and An American Daughter, lived just long enough to complete her first novel, Elements of Style, a darkish comedy of upper-crust errors. Indeed, Wasserstein’s death came so suddenly that the back cover of the book’s advance copies retains the announcement Author Tour, May 2006. It makes you gasp.

The novel, set post-9/11, covers a couple of years in the lives of ultra-rich Manhattanites and their warmhearted, lonely pediatrician, Dr. Francesca Frankie Weissman if the book has a central character, she’s it. At the edges of her life are Samantha Acton, beautiful, blue-blooded and bored to the point of recklessness, and her husband Charlie, a celebrity dermatologist who keeps the fat cells from the buttocks of his clients in the fridge, just in case. Charlie, however, is a mensch, which can’t be said for the piggish movie producer Barry Santorini, who collects Samantha as the most glittering of his prizes. He’s married to the mousy, self-effacing Clarice, whose life is dedicated to making his life work. Most of these folks have kids who dress up in Prada and attend tony kindergartens in which their parents have struggled, with Darwinian fervor, to enroll them.

The book is funny, sometimes appallingly so ( Glass was scattered on the street like an American Kristallnacht, except the shards were splattered with nonfat Frappuccinos ), and Wasserstein often displays her famous ear for dialogue. But her story darkens as the characters are confronted with one calamity after another: cancer, jail, infidelity, the declining health of beloved parents, suicide bombers, war and the final, Gatsby-esque cover up of a homicide. If Wasserstein were still alive and working on her second novel and umpteenth play the reader might close this book with a shrug and a rueful smile. Now, one can only finish this funny, compassionate book with an aching heart. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

It's outrageous that Wendy Wasserstein is dead. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who wrote such groundbreaking works as The Heidi Chronicles and An American Daughter, lived just long enough to complete her first novel, Elements of Style, a darkish comedy of upper-crust errors. Indeed, Wasserstein's death…
Fiction

The unbearable sweetness of being

Review by bookpagedev

The older Philip Roth gets – he is 73 – the more skillful, economical, perceptive and quietly daring his novels become. There is an irony in this, given the atmospherics of his amazing new novel, Everyman, which explores old age, infirmity, isolation and the inevitable yet always surprising fact of our personal extinction.

We meet Roth’s nameless protagonist (who is about the same age as Roth himself) at his funeral, where his estranged sons, loving daughter, older brother and surviving friends and relatives gather to remember him, not always fondly. Then the story moves back in time, not in a straight march to childhood, but circuitously, like consciousness itself, as an aging man remembers – or dwells upon – incidents in his life and on the progressive debilitation of old age. "Old age isn’t a battle," the protagonist thinks at one point, "old age is a massacre."

Like most Roth protagonists, the hero of this story is not entirely likeable. Thrice married, a sometimes wandering husband, perhaps a sexist, estranged from his sons, filled with opinions we might disagree with, he has nevertheless been a dutiful son, a good father (to his daughter, at least) and, strangely, a loving ex-husband to his first wife. But most of all he is possessed of consciousness and an inner life and a moral (not moralistic) sense of himself that we respond to. Roth’s great art has always lain in his ability to illuminate these inner selves. Here Roth is at his most artful, because the consciousness he writes of is facing the annihilation of its own consciousness, which is, of course, the fate of every man.

The first Everyman was a medieval morality play in which death refined every man’s understanding of what was true and good and eternal. With a nod – or perhaps a wink – toward that original, Roth asserts something quite different. In this slender, enthralling, beautifully crafted novel about aging and death, Roth vividly reminds us of how intensely sweet life is.

 

The older Philip Roth gets - he is 73 - the more skillful, economical, perceptive and quietly daring his novels become. There is an irony in this, given the atmospherics of his amazing new novel, Everyman, which explores old age, infirmity, isolation and the…

Marketing must-haves

Review by bookpagedev

Most marketing books make grand boasts, but get vague when it comes to the details of recreating their plans in the real world. Not so for these two gems. How to Become a Marketing Superstar by Jeffrey J. Fox is a short but snappy book filled with tips on innovation and creativity. His contrarian’s proclamations (“Loss leaders are for losers,” and “Make a big splash instead of a lot of little ripples”) speed readers through his mini-chapters. Marketers will love Fox’s straightforward advice.

Most marketing books make grand boasts, but get vague when it comes to the details of recreating their plans in the real world. Not so for these two gems. How to Become a Marketing Superstar by Jeffrey J. Fox is a short but snappy…

He walked the line

Review by bookpagedev

Chet Raymo is simply the best literary naturalist writing today, producing elegantly written, insightful books that open from a seemingly modest premise into a dizzying (and sometimes humbling) view of our place in the universe. Recently retired from teaching astronomy in Massachusetts, Raymo has lately been producing a perfect little book every year or so. His latest, Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian, is brief, tightly written and told in the irresistible voice that Raymo has established as his trademark: literate, enthusiastic, alternately educational and lyrical. This time around, he begins by walking along much of the Prime Meridian (zero degree of longitude) in England. Raymo’s route takes him near Newton’s rooms at Cambridge, Darwin’s home in Kent, even the area where Piltdown Man was found. He uses these geographical prompts to open up his story. He tells the fascinating tale of how a prime meridian was determined and why it was even necessary. He explores the broader view of the cosmos that emerged from Newton’s work, and the greater context for human life that resulted from Darwin’s. Raymo can’t resist a quirky character or an entertaining anecdote. As he walks near Lyme Regis, for example, he tells the story of pioneer dinosaur researcher Mary Anning. Clad in the long skirts required in the early 19th century, she scoured the chalky cliffs for fossils, the sale of which supported her family. By doing so she helped change our whole view of the past. Some of Raymo’s books, such as The Soul of the Night, are more lyrical and personal, emphasizing his way of connecting to the spiritual implications of natural history. However, even such straightforward science and history books as Walking Zero always manage to be more than they seem at first glance. Raymo is always interested in meaning, in the philosophical implications of scientific discovery. He is our apostle of the joy of curiosity, and Walking Zero shows him at his best. Michael Sims is the author of Adam’s Navel and editor of The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel.

Chet Raymo is simply the best literary naturalist writing today, producing elegantly written, insightful books that open from a seemingly modest premise into a dizzying (and sometimes humbling) view of our place in the universe. Recently retired from teaching astronomy in Massachusetts, Raymo has lately…

Fighting for the new frontier

Review by bookpagedev

More than 600 million people watched on live television as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969. In fact, America’s space program was very public from its beginning, with both tragedies and triumphs broadcast to the world. But another great power was racing to the moon in the 1960s: the Soviet Union. Only successes like Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit were reported from the secretive, repressive Soviet side; failures remained unknown for years, even decades. Now, with newly released sources from modern-day Russia, the complete story of the technological and ideological struggle to reach the stars has been recorded by Deborah Cadbury in Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space. Cadbury, an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, depicts the Cold War fight through the remarkably personal war of nerves between two earthbound men who never met or even spoke to one another: Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. Both men were, in addition to brilliant engineers, visionaries who dreamed of traveling to the moon, the stars and beyond. Both were also haunted by their pasts. Space Race traces their life stories and describes the mixture of intrigue, daring and luck that brought them to the pinnacle of their field.

Von Braun barely escaped capture by the Soviets at the end of World War II and left his native Germany to start building rockets for the United States, where his Nazi past often raised suspicions. Korolev, denounced to Stalin by a colleague, nearly died in a labor camp, was pardoned and began designing and building spaceships for the Soviet Union. By 1969, both sides had produced the astounding machines and confident attitude that would put human beings on the moon.

A companion book to a four-part National Geographic television series, Space Race is an admirable record of humanity’s daring first forays away from the home planet. Chris Scott was among the 600 million watching Armstrong step onto the moon.

More than 600 million people watched on live television as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969. In fact, America's space program was very public from its beginning, with both tragedies and triumphs broadcast to the world. But another great power was racing to…
Children's & YA

Get me to the church on time

Review by bookpagedev

Yee-haw! Now gather ’round to hear about the rip-roarin’ tall tale by Tony Crunk in Railroad John and the Red Rock Run.

This one’s about a good-natured, very round gentleman named Lonesome Bob, who aims to get hitched to Wildcat Annie. Lonesome is traveling with his pal, Granny Apple Fritter, a tiny woman with a very large hat and a big spirit to match. The wedding is in Red Rock at exactly 2:00, and Lonesome can’t be late, because Wildcat Annie is a woman of little patience.

Never fear, says Railroad John, who drives the Sagebrush Flyer train. I’ve driven this train for forty years, and we’ve never been late once yet! Of course, there are bound to be obstacles, and the first one is Bad Bill, who sits aboard his steed on the tracks at Dead Man’s Curve. His horse needs some energy, Bad Bill explains, and he gallops away with all of the train’s coal. Never fear, says Granny, who pulls out a platter of her Hard-Shell Chili-Pepper Corn-Pone Muffins. Her muffins are hot enough to set fire to an iceberg, and, sure enough, they get that train moving down the track. Of course, catastrophe after catastrophe meets the speeding train, but amazingly, everyone on the train gets to the church on time, and the tall tale ends with much rejoicing. There’s also one last laugh for readers: the recipe for Granny Apple’s magic muffins which includes such hard-to-get items as porcupine eggs and rattlesnake milk.

Michael Austin’s illustrations in brown tones that resemble old sepia photographs are brimming with movement and excitement. Kids will love this spirited tale, which offers an imaginative glimpse of old-time railroad travel and its travails. Alice Cary hails from a family of longtime railroaders.

Yee-haw! Now gather 'round to hear about the rip-roarin' tall tale by Tony Crunk in Railroad John and the Red Rock Run.

This one's about a good-natured, very round gentleman named Lonesome Bob, who aims to get hitched to Wildcat Annie. Lonesome is…
Children's & YA

Root, root, root for the home team

Review by bookpagedev

Baseball is a superstitious sport. It’s a well-known fact that many major leaguers follow superstitious rituals, including Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, who ate a meal of fried chicken before every game.

If ballplayers are superstitious, fans are even worse, and Danny Gurkin has to be the most superstitious of all. In Paul Haven’s new novel, Two Hot Dogs With Everything, the 11-year-old middle-schooler is trying his metaphysical best to help his hometown team, the East Bubble Sluggers. He eats special hot dogs before every game, sits in his favorite chair while he watches the team on television, crosses his fingers and his toes, and sometimes stands on his head. It’s not doing much good the Sluggers haven’t won a championship in 108 years, which was back when chewing gum magnate Manchester Boddlebrooks owned the team. When Danny and his friends hear about a plan to tear down dilapidated Boddlebrooks Mansion and replace it with a shopping mall, they decide to visit the place and try to find a way to save it. What they get is a meeting with a mysterious caretaker and a way, maybe, to save the Sluggers’ season. Two Hot Dogs With Everything is a baseball novel with everything: a whimsical, exciting plot; cool illustrations by Tim Jessell; and most of all, a full set of crazy characters, including Danny’s dad’s boss, Mayor Frompovich, Willie the hot dog man, the fierce history teacher Mrs. Sherman, the mysterious caretaker Seymour Sycamore, and the villain of the book, the powerful owner of the champion Texas Tornadoes, Diamond Bob.

Can Danny overcome the machinations of Diamond Bob to give the Sluggers the championship? What luck you’ll just have to read the book and find out! James Neal Webb carries a buckeye in his pocket for luck at all times.

Baseball is a superstitious sport. It's a well-known fact that many major leaguers follow superstitious rituals, including Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, who ate a meal of fried chicken before every game.

If ballplayers are superstitious, fans are even worse, and Danny Gurkin…

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