(++++) GIFTS GRAND AND GLORIOUS

The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 1—Call Me Joe; Volume 2—The Queen of Air and Darkness. Edited by Rick Katze. NESFA Press. $29 each.

M.C. Escher “Reptiles” 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle. Pomegranate. $17.95.

Lost Worlds. By John Howe. Kingfisher. $22.99.

Versus: Warriors. Illustrated by Steve Stone. Kingfisher. $19.99.

The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

     ’Tis the season of gifts, ’tis the season of wonders, ’tis the season of wonderful gifts – if you choose carefully, looking for items that will entertain, enthrall or educate long past the season in which they are given. Thus, ’tis a fine season for the first two volumes of a planned multi-volume Poul Anderson series from NESFA Press. Anderson is one of the grandest of grand masters of science fiction, having won seven Hugos and three Nebulas – the top awards in the field – and actually being named a Grand Master in 1998. Anderson (1926-2001) was a strong advocate of space exploration, a believer in the improvability (if not perfectibility) of humanity, and a dedicated chronicler of larger-than-life characters cast in heroic settings that would try them deeply – leading sometimes to success, sometimes to failure. The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson is a rather capriciously edited series – the stories appear in no apparent order – but it is also a marvelous one, giving readers a chance to explore Anderson’s world (and worlds) in depth while also showing how his storytelling evolved over time (his later stories are often quieter and less stormingly heroic). The 26 stories and poems in Call Me Joe include Anderson’s first published tale, “Tomorrow’s Children” (1947), and range to as recently as 2001 (“Kinnison’s Band,” a poem with echoes of Aristophanes that is here printed immediately after “Tomorrow’s Children,” on the same page as that story’s ending). The Queen of Air and Darkness includes 19 pieces, one of which is the wonderful title story (published in 1958) and the rest of which appeared between 1956 (“Operation Afreet”) and 1993 (no fewer than 10 different pieces). Anderson was a prolific writer, an old-style SF stylist (which means his works tend to be straightforward and narrative-driven), a man of ideas and action rather than psychology (there is little analysis of characters in his works), and an author unafraid to bring sociopolitical matters into his tales (his philosophy was essentially libertarian). Individually, his tales are a treat. In these two sumptuous volumes – more than 500 pages each – they are a feast that will last long past the winter holiday season.

     Equally outré and equally certain to carry well into 2010 is Pomegranate’s excellent and very difficult jigsaw puzzle based on M.C. Escher’s famous study in two and three dimensions, “Reptiles.” This is one of a series of Escher-based puzzles from this very innovative publisher, and any of them will delight jigsaw fans. “Reptiles” may even make fans for these puzzles, because there is so much in it: a planter containing two cacti, an open book, a stoppered bottle near a glass, and several objects over which a crocodilian creature climbs after emerging into three dimensions from a notebook page on which its basic, flattened form has been drawn two-dimensionally. The creature completes a circuit of its environment before climbing back into the two-dimensional world that gave it birth – but of course the creature only looks three-dimensional, since the medium itself is a two-dimensional one. Since the whole wonderful “Reptiles” concoction is done in black-and-white, it is very difficult indeed to figure out just what piece of the jigsaw puzzle goes just where. Escher’s works are treats for the mind as well as the emotions. So is this puzzle, which takes his work into…well, into yet another dimension.

     The pages of Lost Worlds seem to have three dimensions as well, so realistically and with such care are they drawn by John Howe, who was one of the concept artists for director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Visual splendor is what this book is all about, as Howe portrays lands real and fictional with equal skill and attention to detail. The names are the stuff of legend: Ultima Thule, Shambhala, Mohenjo-Daro, Rapa Nui, Cahokia, Cibola – but which existed and which did not? And what of Babylon, Atlantis, Troy, Asgard, Camelot and Avalon? What of them was real? How much is legend? Howe’s marvelous illustrations make every place seem as real as every other, and the brief narratives about each of the Lost Worlds explain what we know and do not know about them. The Garden of Eden, for example, may have been somewhere in the plains of Mesopotamia; Mount Olympus is real, “though no one, of course, has ever seen the gods there”; and so on. The information here is solid, but it is not what makes this book so attractive as a gift for ages 9-12. It is Howe’s great skill at bringing to life long-gone lands, or ones that never were, that makes this a book to treasure.

     History comes to life in a different way in Versus: Warriors, where everything shown is real except the underlying premise of the book: battles between warriors who existed at very different times and in very different places and therefore never met in the real world. Like a gladiatorial video game seen in slow motion (and with far less gore, although plenty of implied violence), Steve Stone’s book posits fights between, for example, an Aztec and a Viking, or a Spartan and a Mongol. Hyper-realistic illustrations show each warrior’s weapons, fighting style and other data – pages are laid out like video-game still shots. Then – and this is where the book gets really interesting – one member of each pair is selected as the winner, for reasons that are cogently argued from a historical perspective. At the end, the five winners are compared and an overall champion is picked – again, based on known skills of the real-world fighters. And then there are “rematch” pages, suggesting alternative matchups whose outcomes it is left for the reader to decide. Offbeat design, strong graphics and a cleverly analytical approach make Versus: Warriors an unusual gift for readers ages 10 and up for whom mindless slash-and-crush video-game action is not quite enough.

     And how about a present for students’ more serious side – one that relies not on strong graphic design but on intelligence, not on punchy action but on words? The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition makes a wonderful gift – yes, in the Internet age; perhaps especially so in the Internet age. It is true that you can look up word definitions online easily, but not necessarily more quickly than you can look them up in this dictionary – because a Web search for a word turns up so many sources, and you may need to jump from one to the next to the next to find a definition that fits the particular circumstances in which you have seen the word. And niceties of this dictionary – a style manual, commentary on alternative pronunciations (“ax” for “ask,” for example), usage notes and more – are available online only if you go actively looking for them. In this dictionary, they are an integral part of the presentation, which they enrich significantly. It is unlikely today that a printed dictionary will be the sole source of word definitions for the high-school-and-up audience for which this one is intended; and that is fine, since the ability to use hyperlinks and other online tools to figure out vocabulary while doing online reading is valuable – and a necessary skill for college and the world after graduation. But as long as school work and pleasure reading continue to involve books (including electronic books), having a handy dictionary like this one nearby is a great boon – and brings the bonus of serendipity. One example: look up “jaguar” and you will find, in the margin of the page giving the definition, a picture of a jaguar – plus pictures of Andrew Jackson, Jesse Jackson and Cheddi Jagan. And maybe, just maybe, a quick, almost subliminal look at those pictures will spark a young reader’s curiosity about something or someone he or she never intended to look up. And maybe, just maybe, that will start his or her thoughts in entirely new and fruitful directions. The Internet is the perfect place to go for a directed search. For an expansive one – one with the potential to take the mind somewhere new – try The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition.

(++++) A CORNUCOPIA OF COMICS

14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box: A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Children at Play: A “Cul de Sac” Collection. By Richard Thompson. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

The Natural Disorder of Things: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 25. By Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Lust and Other Uses for Spare Hormones: A “Zits” Look at Relationships. By Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Math, Science, and Unix Underpants: A Themed “FoxTrot” Collection. By Bill Amend. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     Thirteen dollars gets you an uncounted number of laughs from a wide variety of sources in a size you can actually read (unlike the size now accorded to most newspaper comic strips) in these excellent new collections from Andrews McMeel. The preeminent workplace-oriented strip of our time, Scott Adams’ Dilbert, is now in its 33^rd collection – with all strips in color – and as usual is filled with ideas that are just slightly too plausible to be real. There is Dilbert’s invention, the “carbicle,” which let you drive your workplace around – but, as Dogbert points out, unfortunately lacks a bed. There is the character who becomes Employee of the Month for the superb command of jargon with which he says “we need to plan the plan’s planny plan” – but unfortunately the guys with nets show up looking for him. There is “forcible relocation to an agrarian society” as the penalty for asking for too much technical support. There is Dilbert exposing the double standards permeating Congress when he is called to testify there, causing one lawmaker to say, “I yield my time to the hypocrite from another state.” There is the inspirational poster, “If all else fails, your coworkers are edible.” Throw in the three-headed rebate-preventing monster Rebaterus, a woman who laughs too much, and a performance review describing an employee as “like a blister on a skunk’s colon,” and you have a modern version of what Mad magazine used to call “humor in a jugular vein.”

     The amusements are gentler but no less surreal in Children at Play, the second collection of Cul de Sac, one of the most visually as well as verbally interesting comic strips of recent years. Expect to pause every now and then to try to understand just what is going on with Alice Otterloop; her big brother, Petey; their parents; and the various hangers-on who populate Richard Thompson’s world. Watch Alice do her dances on the manhole cover! See Petey have an out-of-body experience that ends when all of his selves are knocked down by a soccer ball! Listen to the “skweeks” as Beni tries out his new hammer! See Alice try to make her eyes extend on stalks! Observe Dill peeking through the Otterloops’ mail slot “as a community service”! Read along with “A Child’s Garden of Haiku” in a Sunday strip written entirely in haiku form! Hear the legend of Pulpy Joe and his watermelon head! Watch Petey dance to the tune he makes up by saying the names “Alice-Beni-Dill” real fast! Then discuss the merits of Halloween candy – “I like candy corn because it tastes like wax” vs. “I like eating wax, but only in crayon form.” And when you stop laughing, read the book again.

     Or move on to a different sort of family and laugh there. “There” would be the MacPherson house, where The Natural Disorder of Things includes oldest child Zoe helping baby Wren break the annoying habit of always saying “da da da da da” by teaching her to say “no no no no no” unstoppably. Middle child Hammie decides to be called “H” from now on, because capital “H” is a manly letter that looks like a goal post or steel beam – except that small “h,” as Zoe points out, “looks more like a potty chair.” After her hair, nose and face get pulled and twisted innumerable times while Wren is feeding, mom Wanda learns why she should “never breast-feed with your hands full.” Also here, you can learn the game of “X-treme sistering,” at which Zoe is an extreme expert. Meet the cicada that takes up residence on Hammie’s nose. And catch the wisdom of dad Darryl: after everyone else says Hammie’s drawing looks like an eel, the wise father takes a peek and immediately says, “It’s an elephant” – gaining Hammie’s instant appreciation (and then, when Wanda asks how he knew what it was, Darryl explains that “all of his elephants look like eels”). Jerry Scott’s writing and Rick Kirkman’s art meld so perfectly in Baby Blues that it is hard to imagine a better-matched team. To see how well Kirkman and Scott work together, just check out the “Ask a Mom/Ask a Dad” strips – for example, to the question “Can you fix it?” the mom answers, “I’ll get the manual,” while the dad says, “I’ll get the duct tape.” This is almost too true to be funny. Almost.

     If there is another strip with the collaborative punch of Baby Blues, it is the other one that Scott writes: Zits, for which Jim Borgman provides some truly amazing art. The latest Zits collection is a “theme” book whose focus is one of those things you can’t really get into in newspapers, even in 2009 (at least, not in newspaper comic strips). The word Lust is in huge red letters on this book’s great cover, which shows Jeremy Duncan and girlfriend Sara in a lip lock so intense that everything around them is burning up (including the back cover), each has sprouted multiple hands to hold the other that much closer, and their faces have merged into a single face. The cover alone makes this book worth buying. But there’s much more inside, including not only Jeremy and Sara but also multiply pierced Pierce and his girlfriend, D’Ijon, plus RichandAmy, always seen as tightly wrapped together as their names (name?) – until they briefly and very traumatically break up before getting very together again (two people wearing a single pair of shoes – enough said). The “lust” element here is implied rather than seen – the newspapers of 2009 are not even close to where the underground comics were in, say, 1969 – but Scott and Borgman extract hilarity even from that situation, as when Jeremy fantasizes about the school guidance counselor in jungle costume and “Mrs. Robinson” pose; and Jeremy’s parents embarrass their son into more incoherence than usual when they start giggling after having a weekend alone together. Toss in some of those patented (well, they should be patented) Borgman surreal-art strips, such as one in which Jeremy and Sara call each other names and turn into whatever they are called (chicken, pig, Neanderthal, Miss Goody Two-Shoes), and you have a collection whose main theme is hilarity.

     Ditto the first “themed” collection of Bill Amend’s almost-late, almost-lamented FoxTrot, which now runs only on Sundays. It’s really a shame that it is no longer possible to get a daily dose of Math, Science, and Unix Underpants. Amend has a degree in physics, of all things, and he often used math and science – sometimes rather complex math and science – in his strips, usually through the character of 10-year-old Jason. The new FoxTrot collection includes examples of the many ways Amend brought these subjects into the strip: Paige exults at getting a 91 on her math test until Jason reveals that he got 108 on his. Jason and his pal, Marcus, program a printer to spit out 1,000 labels saying “kick me” that they can paste on fellow students’ backs. Jason struggles through a poetry assignment and then reads a computer book to relax, because “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a binary tree.” Sixteen-year-old Peter starts drooling on his math test when a question about π makes him think of pizza. Jason (who really does wear Unix underpants) sets up the family’s answering machine to require callers to “press the square root of 1,296 minus the cube root of 13,824 times 17.5 minus the 4^th root of 1,908,029,761.” There is much more of this, all of it thoroughly in character – that is, in the character of each member of the Fox family and the people with whom the Foxes interact – and it all adds up to a delightfully funny collection from which, if you are not careful, you just might learn some math or science. Now, how comical would that be?

(++++) ANIMAL PLANS – HUMAN ONES, TOO

Crow Call. By Lois Lowry. Illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Scholastic. $16.99.

Cornelia and the Great Snake Escape. By Pam Muňoz Ryan. Illustrated by Julia Denos. Scholastic. $4.99.

The Secret Plan. By Julia Sarcone-Roach. Knopf. $16.99.

The Busiest Street in Town. By Mara Rockliff. Illustrated by Sarah McMenemy. Knopf. $16.99.

Imogene’s Last Stand. By Candace Fleming. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

     There are plots aplenty in these books, some hatched for or by animals, others created entirely by and for humans. Crow Call is a sensitive memoir of a time in 1945 when Lois Lowry and her father, who had just returned from service in World War II, went hunting for the crows that were eating the crops. Liz, as the girl in the book is called, has never hunted and is not sure she wants to. But she does want a hunting shirt – a boy’s shirt – and her father agrees she should have it. And she is willing to try using the crow call to bring the crows close enough to be shot. But the actual shooting – she is not so sure. What she is sure of is that “the stranger who is my father” is home, and she wants to be with him and do what he does and become part of a complete family again. And so father and daughter interact, joke, have both playful and serious talks, and eventually Liz uses the crow call with tremendous success – and her father does no shooting that day, although he knows he will have to at other times. This is a wonderfully touching story, made all the more realistic by the near-photographic quality of Bagram Ibatoulline’s illustrations – which, however, are done in subtly muted tones that reinforce the nostalgia of Lowry’s recollection.

     A much lighter animal plot is the subject of Cornelia and the Great Snake Escape, an easy-to-read paperback for kindergartners and first-graders, in which Cornelia gets a corn snake named Corny that she just can’t seem to keep in its cage. Pam Muňoz Ryan gets the basics of snakes as pets exactly right, having Cornelia learn what sort of cage to use and how to keep the snake in it – even though snakes are excellent escape artists. Corny, it turns out, is unusually good at getting away, even when three books, and then four, are put on top of the cage. Cornelia’s mom, who was not too fond of the idea of a snake in the house in the first place, has had more than enough by the time Corny slips into the family car’s air vent and disappears. But Cornelia’s dad has a good idea – luring Corny out by setting up a soft spot warmed by a lamp – and this actually works, as it often does in real life. The family eventually figures out what to do, and everyone ends up happy – including Corny, who is mostly drawn realistically by Julia Denos but is also shown with an occasional unrealistic (but cute) smile, as when he is basking happily in the warmth of a lamp.

     There is nothing realistic in The Secret Plan created by an elephant named Milo and his three cat friends, Henry, Harriet and Hildy. The plan is to stop bedtime forever – because it always interferes with the friends’ play. Julia Sarcone-Roach shows the friends trying to hide, camouflaging themselves, wearing a hilarious disguise, and trying to sneak outside – all to no avail. Bedtime keeps catching up to them, until Hildy hatches a new plan that involves some “big, furry monster feet from Halloween.” And this plan actually works! Well, almost… This is a simple and delightful bedtime story, pleasantly and amusingly illustrated in a way that almost makes the friendship of the suburb-dwelling kittens and baby elephant seem plausible – even when it involves all of them sneaking around together, each just as silent as the other.

     A little silence and contentment is all the humans want from The Busiest Street in Town, but Rushmore Boulevard is built for speed, not contemplation. Agatha May Walker and Eulalie Scruggs, who live on opposite sides of the street, cannot even cross it to visit each other – until Agatha decides to do something about all the hustle and bustle. So she puts her “wingback chair…smack-dab in the middle of the street” and simply sits in it, as traffic screeches and honks all around her. When people yell at her, she offers them gingersnap cookies she has made herself. And Eulalie, looking out from her house, sees all this and brings out “a piano stool, a card table, and a Parcheesi set,” and the two friends sit together in the middle of the street as traffic belches and blusters past them. But the traffic has to slow down now, and that means that soon, other people can walk into the street, and children can start to play there, and each new arrival of a person forces traffic to slow even more, and then the whole neighborhood gets involved, and people plant flowers and stage parties and play music and generally have a grand time. “It took a while these days to drive down Rushmore Boulevard,” writes Mara Rockliff. “But no one minded.” And there is a very happy ending to the whole fantasy – but it is a fantasy, accentuated by Sarah McMenemy’s pretty illustrations. Children will enjoy the book, but adults will need to warn them not to try to duplicate it on a real-life busy boulevard.

     However, kids might manage to emulate Imogene Tripp if they, like Imogene, live in a small and isolated town. Candace Fleming’s Imogene’s Last Stand features a young heroine with a passion for history and a penchant for quoting famous people of the past (who are shown and briefly discussed on the inside front and back covers). Imogene lives in tiny Liddleville, New Hampshire, where a shoelace factory will soon be built to revive the town’s economy. That means tearing down the Liddleville Historical Society, which is in a house so dilapidated – as Nancy Carpenter’s apt illustrations show – that it is no wonder no one ever visits. Imogene and her dad decide to fix the place up, but even after they do, no one comes there – and teardown time is fast approaching. So plucky Imogene launches a “Save Our History” campaign – which meets with no success whatsoever. But then, just as she is about to give up, she makes an amazing discovery – and then she contacts a historian – and then she makes a dramatic gesture that prevents the bulldozers from knocking down the house. TV crews show up, everything takes on a carnival atmosphere, and eventually the historian arrives – and Imogene and her love of history prevail! Realistic? Not very – but the message that a little girl can take on City Hall (literally: the mayor is the biggest proponent of the shoelace factory) is an empowering one. And the amusing way Fleming and Carpenter handle the story keeps it from becoming preachy, while reinforcing the importance of history and of young people’s involvement in keeping the past alive. That’s quite a lot to accomplish in 40 pages, and Imogene’s Last Stand manages to pack it all in very successfully.

(++++) SAFER AND EVEN MORE SECURE

Norton Internet Security 2010. Windows 7/Vista/XP SP2. Symantec. $69.99.

     Year after year, Symantec makes small incremental improvements to its Norton line of utility products. But, to misquote George Orwell, some years are more equal than others – and the changes in Norton Internet Security 2010 add up to more than the ones in the last several years of updates. This needs to be pointed out up front, because what is interesting about the new version of this security program is that most users will not notice how much better it has become.

     Here’s why: having successfully reduced the previous Norton Internet Security drag on system performance with the 2009 version of this protection suite, Symantec this year made the product even easier to use and better at its primary job of protecting users’ computers (up to three for the $69.99 price). One-click installation is simple and quicker than in past years (five minutes or less), and – this is a neat trick – when the 2010 version runs into problems during installation, it tackles them instead of crashing. That is, it offers solutions, suggests approaches, and can even make decisions on its own (about whether to run a preinstall scan, for example).

     Once installed, Norton Internet Security 2010 does something that no previous version has done: it uses an approach called reputation-based security technology to supplement the signature-based and behavior-based protection of previous years. This add-on approach, which Symantec has labeled Quorum, has the potential to undercut one of the most troubling weapons of malware creators: their ability to turn out new instances of malicious code very quickly. The reason Symantec’s counterattack works is that Quorum evaluates download source, age and other factors for every file. So a file that is a) new and b) downloaded from a Web site that is not well known and that few people have used will be automatically regarded as suspect even if it does not seem harmful. This should let Norton Internet Security 2010 intercept threats very quickly – and that is increasingly important, since a great deal of modern malware is written to exist in any single form for less than 24 hours (the time needed to release signatures to detect a threat). Malware writers are, in effect, doing drive-by computer hijacking these days. Quorum fights back.

     What matters to users, though, is that they will not know Quorum is there. In fact, they will have only rudimentary evidence that Norton Internet Security 2010 is working at all, most of the time. Both unobtrusive and non-intrusive, the software percolates along in the background so effectively that users will notice it only when it warns them about a threat. Like earlier versions, Norton Internet Security 2010 protects against viruses, Trojans, rootkits, spyware and more, and includes a firewall, intrusion protection, Web protection and E-mail protection for POP-3 and SMTP-compatible E-mail clients (and if you don’t know the terminology, don’t worry – all it means is that most E-mail is protected). Furthermore, Norton Internet Security 2010 integrates with browsers and search engines to warn users away from sites that may be malicious or compromised. And it is designed for Windows 7 as well as for Vista and XP, so it works effectively in any operating system a PC user is likely to have.

     You might think the improvements to Norton Internet Security 2010 come at the cost of bloat – after all, more features, more need for memory and hard-disk space, right? But not so: the suite does not require substantial RAM or system resources and does not noticeably slow down other processes.

     The fact that users already familiar with Norton Internet Security will not notice much new this year is remarkable, considering the changes in the product. The interface is similar to those of previous years, although not identical – for instance, the main screen is now in three sections called Computer, Network and Web instead of the previous Computer, Web and Identity. But the screen still gives you a snapshot of your security at a glance, says whether any actions need to be taken, and lets you turn features on and off; and, as before, has monitors on the left-hand side of the screen that show current CPU usage and how much of that Norton is taking up. The main screen is all you need for a security overview, and will be plenty for many users. But those who enjoy poking around in the innards of their computer (figuratively speaking) can go much more deeply into the system by clicking on links such as Performance, System Insight and Network Security Map. System Insight can be particularly useful if problems develop unexpectedly: you can use this feature to find out (for example) whether an odd behavior began after you installed certain software – and if it did, you can uninstall that program and see whether the problems disappear. The result is a kind of collaborative model of system protection, with Norton Internet Security 2010 doing most of the work but letting you investigate matters on your own if you wish to do so.

     Among other improvements in Norton Internet Security 2010 are an anti-spam component that Symantec says is 20% more effective than previous ones; a free subscription to OnlineFamily.Norton, which lets parents adjust children’s Web access; and Norton Safe Web (previously introduced in Norton 360, version 3.0), which shows whether any Web sites that turn up in search results are potentially dangerous (it works with Google, Bing and Yahoo!). There are also a few changes that are not really improvements, such as a main-screen link called Vulnerability Protection, which lists programs that Symantec has found to have vulnerabilities. That sounds good, but the list is generic, not related to what you actually have on your computer – so there is really no value to looking at it. Furthermore, Symantec’s continued insistence on offering protection for only a single year remains an irritant, especially if you use Norton Internet Security 2010 on only one computer, which makes it pricey. Nevertheless, the new version of Norton Internet Security is improved in so many ways that it certainly makes sense to upgrade from earlier incarnations (in other years, this has often been a close call). This is simply the best Norton Internet Security yet.

(++++) OPERAS NEW AND (SORT OF) OLD

John Adams: Nixon in China. Robert Orth, Maria Kanyova, Thomas Hammons, Marc Heller, Tracy Dahl, Chen-Ye Yuan, Melissa Malde, Julie Simson, Jennifer DeDominici; Opera Colorado Chorus and Colorado Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos. $26.99 (3 CDs).

Britten: The Beggar’s Opera. Susan Bickley, Jeremy White, Leah-Marian Jones, Tom Randle, Robert Anthony Gardiner, Donald Maxwell, Sarah Fox, Frances McCafferty; City of London Sinfonia conducted by Christian Curnyn. Chandos. $34.99 (2 CDs).

Tchaikovsky Romances. Dmitry Hvorostovsky, baritone; Ivari Ilja, piano. Delos. $16.99 (2 CDs).

     One of the greatest accomplishments of President Richard Nixon – some would call it the matter for which he will be positively remembered – was opening normalized relations between the United States and Communist China. It may be that only so staunch an anti-Communist as Nixon could have pulled off such a rapprochement in the midst of the Cold War. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, and his meeting with Mao Tse-tung and Madame Mao, could be the stuff of opera – even though it was, in reality, the stuff of politics. But John Adams has made it the stuff of opera with Nixon in China, which is now available in a mostly excellent recording led by Marin Alsop, assembled from several live performances in June 2008. Alsop, who directed the Colorado Symphony from 1993 to 2004, clearly knows how to bring out the best from the musicians, and the fine vocal performances by the principals help move along a story that is short on action (most of what happens is ceremonial) but is focused, in Alice Goodman’s libretto, more on the characters’ inner lives and their sense that they are making history. That is particularly the case with Nixon (Robert Orth, who does an excellent job inhabiting the character of this complex and deeply flawed president) and his wife, Pat (Maria Kanyova, a fine foil for her husband and an equally strong singer). Arrayed against them, yet with ultimately the same sense of being present at a historic moment, are Mao Tse-tung (since revised in spelling to Zedong), who is mostly bluster in Marc Heller’s portrayal, and Madame Mao (Tracy Dahl, whose voice is slightly shrill but whose characterization is effectively chilling). Chen-Ye Yuan makes Cho En-lai thoughtful and introspective, but there are some overdone political notes in the opera’s rather buffoonish characterization of Henry Kissinger (well sung by Thomas Hammons). This is an interesting and impressive opera that is certainly one of Adams’ most important works, but it should be noted that it is by Adams, which means there are long sections of repetitive music – some of which seem to wear on the orchestra, which is otherwise well-balanced and responsive to Alsop’s direction. Diplomacy in opera certainly came a long way in the 82 years between Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow and Adams’ 1987 work, which features – in addition to Adams’ trademark repetitiveness – frequent rhythmic changes and passages of neo-Stravinskian sound. This is a highly impressive performance of one of the few recent operas that seem likely to gain at least semi-regular stagings. And kudos to Naxos for providing the libretto.

     This is not to say that operatic success is assured even to the very best of composers. Witness the case of Benjamin Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera, which is infrequently performed and rarely recorded (the last recording dates to 1993). This is, in fact, the least known of Britten’s stage works, although it does hold the boards from time to time in England. What Britten did in this 1948 opera was rework John Gay and Johann Pepusch’s wonderful (and bawdy) 18^th-century “ballad opera” of the same title – not in the way Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill did when they created The Threepenny Opera from the same source, but in his own musical language. The 1728 original was inspired by a letter from none other than Jonathan Swift to no less a figure than Alexander Pope, and consisted of no fewer than 69 songs – the idea being to create a play for actors who could also sing. In Britten’s hands, this is transformed into an actual opera, or meta-opera, since the concept involves re-setting the scene in a laundry filled with beggars – who reenact the Gay/Pepusch story of the often-appealing scoundrel Macheath and his two lovers (wife and mistress). Britten keeps the original’s audience-participatory ending, in which patrons can help save Macheath from the gallows with their applause (Brecht and Weill jettisoned it in order to strengthen their sociopolitical points about Weimar Germany). And even though Britten uses the original 18^th-century tunes in this opera, he gives them his very personal compositional stamp – and considerable satirical bite, although of a type quite different from that of Brecht and Weill. The changes, additions and updates to Gay’s libretto are by Tyrone Guthrie, and they are by and large quite effective; it helps enormously to be able to follow along in Chandos’ included libretto. The performance is a very fine one, with the intimate feeling appropriate to a chamber opera and with soloists who all manage to combine genuine operatic vocalization with verbal bite. Tom Randle is particularly good as Macheath, but Leah-Marian Jones (Polly), Sarah Fox (Lucy), Susan Bickley (Mrs. Peachum) and Jeremy White (Mr. Peachum) more than hold their own, and the interplay of the other soloists with the principals is very effectively managed by conductor Christian Curnyn. The performance is so good that it argues for more-frequent stagings of this underappreciated Britten gem.

     Prefer something more of the Romantic era – and more romantic as well – than either Adams or Britten? The Dmitri Hvorostovsky release called Tchaikovsky Romances can be looked at as an encore to the full-length operas – or simply as two full CDs of encores. Hvorostovsky’s rich, expressive baritone voice has just the right timbre for “None but the Lonely Heart,” “It Was in the Early Spring,” “Don Juan’s Serenade” and the other short but sweet – often very sweet – songs here. There are two dozen in all, each delivered with gorgeous tone and a great deal of feeling, and all of them accompanied in just the right vein by pianist Ivari Ilja, who provides firm support without ever getting in the way of what is clearly a vocally focused recording. In truth, listening to all 24 songs at one time may be a bit much: Hvorostovsky has considerable vocal power and impressive range, but the songs themselves become a bit monochromatic after a while. This release therefore gets a (+++) rating: as well sung and well played as it is, it does tend to be a bit “much of a muchness.” But it certainly offers plenty of Romantic/romantic singing – it’s just that it’s more effective when taken a bit at a time than in a single large dose.

(++++) AMAZING WORLDS FOR AN AMAZING YEAR

2010 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Anguished English; Shakespeare’s Insults. Desk—M.C. Escher. Postcard—Frank Lloyd Wright Designs. Mini Wall—Frank Lloyd Wright Designs. Wall—Edward Gorey: The Doubtful Guest; Buddhist Paintings. Pomegranate. $12.99 each (English; Insults; Postcard); $14.99 (Escher); $7.99 (Mini Wall); $13.99 each (Gorey; Buddhist).

     Many companies make calendars, but only one, Pomegranate, makes calendars that seem to open the doors to an ever-unfolding series of worlds – worlds of art, of beauty, of language, of humor and joy and even transcendence. The biggest problem with Pomegranate’s calendars is deciding which world, or worlds, you want to enter in the coming year. It’s easy to go overboard and choose a different world for every room (good for sales, of course, but perhaps just a little extreme). So here are a few options among the very many this company offers for 2010:

     Anguished English and Shakespeare’s Insults are day-to-day calendars for people who want to be immersed in a world of words. But not just any world of words. Language commentator Richard Lederer has a high old time finding instances of ambiguous reference, unintended double meanings, erroneous punctuation that changes what people intend to say, and more. There are 13 categories of mishaps in Anguished English, covering everything from signage to sports to courtroom misdemeanors (of the linguistic sort). Here you will find people spreading the Gospel in foreign lands and being congratulated on assuming the missionary position; an oral surgeon being given a small token of achievement – that is, a dentist receiving plaque; plus plenty of malapropisms and confusing translations (notably from Japanese into “Engrish”). Some of the chuckles are obvious – and some may have you wondering what’s so funny, until you realize that you yourself are unintentionally mangling the language.

     Of course, no one used the language as Shakespeare did, and the Bard was the grand master of, among other things, scurrilous comments. Shakespeare’s Insults goes well beyond the “bite my thumb at thee” that so incenses the youths at the start of Romeo and Juliet. Whoreson knaves abound here, in works both well-known and less so, as Shakespeare has characters curse each other in language most foul – if you can understand it. The calendar helps you do so: every page puts its quotation in context, explaining not only where the excerpt comes from but also just who is saying what to whom, under what circumstances, and why. Shakespeare was a master of insinuation as well as out-and-out nastiness, and you’ll find plenty of both here – a trip to the darker side of the Elizabethan world.

     But Shakespeare’s world is less strange than that of M.C. Escher, and if you really want to visit somewhere odd in 2010, take in the scenes in the M.C. Escher 2010 Engagement Calendar. This is one of several Escher-based calendars from Pomegranate, and it is a particularly happy melding of form and function. Here are not only Escher’s famous black-and-white works that challenge the senses to figure out just what is going on (such as “Up and Down” and “Concave and Convex,” in both of which directions become interchangeable), but also fascinating color engravings (such as “Stars,” featuring chameleons within a most unusual space object, and “Depth,” in which fishlike winged creatures fly or swim from or to infinity). The spiral-bound, lie-flat calendar provides room for notes for every day of the year; and its samplings of Escher’s earlier, more realistic drawings of people and objects are a well-selected contrast to his more familiar and outré designs.

     The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright are particularly adaptable to calendar use, with their colors and unusual use of geometric forms. If you would like a smaller spiral-bound calendar than the Escher one – but still with enough space to jot down a note or two for each day of the year – the Wright “postcard calendar” offers beauty with a bonus. The bonus is that 26 of the pages can be easily removed (they are perforated) and sent as postcards – an exceptionally clever design that gives this calendar value even after you finish using each week. The postcards are quite attractive: a 1927 design for the cover of Liberty magazine, a 1903 art-glass window design, plus textile and carpet designs and much more. Offbeat and unusual, this calendar makes a particularly fine gift for anyone who enjoys Wright’s art and architecture.

     In fact, Pomegranate uses Wright’s work in quite a number of different ways. Some of the same designs that appear in the “postcard calendar” also adorn the attractive Wright mini wall calendar for 2010. The abstracts and geometrics here, their colors brilliantly reproduced, very attractively brighten up a small space, such as a work cubicle or a bathroom or small bedroom. Wright’s wallpaper details in multiple shades of blue, in bright orange or in multicolored geometrics really stand out, with textile, rug and magazine designs of all sorts bringing splashes of color to every month.

     Or perhaps you would prefer a world both larger and weirder. Then, by all means, consider the full-size wall calendar, Edward Gorey: The Doubtful Guest. Gorey’s ink drawings, extremely meticulous and often very dark, adorn the months in his tale of a strange, vaguely birdlike creature that wears white canvas shoes, shows up at the door unannounced one cold winter’s evening, and remains for 17 years (and still counting) – tearing up books, sleepwalking and disappearing into the soup tureen. Amusing and disturbing at the same time, this story – an allegory of the immigrant experience – retains its oddity and rather soulful depiction of turmoil in a more-or-less Victorian setting more than 50 years after its original publication in 1957. Gorey is something of an acquired taste, and this calendar will not be for everyone, but those who find his observations quietly unsettling – and admire them for that quality – will very much enjoy immersing themselves in the world of The Doubtful Guest all year long.

     By now, though, if all you want is a touch of peace, quiet and beauty, consider Buddhist Paintings, featuring works from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. This calendar assembles a dozen devotional works on cloth and from hanging scrolls, some made as long ago as the 13^th century and others from modern times. There is remarkable consistency of imagery despite the vast time span here: the deities and other figures are still shown much as they have been for many hundreds of years. Deities such as White Tara of China and Penden Lhamo of Tibet, the six-armed guardian Mahakala and the guardian Skanda – these and more are depicted in rich colors and textures, with intricate background detail highlighting the figures and projecting a sense of beauty, protection and peace. This calendar takes you to a world away from everyday humdrum and hectic life – a journey that can be revivifying at any time of any month of the coming year.

(+++) COMICS OF MANY KINDS

Tundra: Nature’s Favorite Comic Strip. By Chad Carpenter. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Stone Rabbit #3: Deep-Space Disco. By Erik Craddock. Random House. $5.99.

Kit Feeny: #1, On the Move; #2, The Ugly Necklace. By Michael Townsend. Knopf. $5.99 each.

I Spy Fly Guy! By Tedd Arnold. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.

     Comic-strip-style characters get used in all sorts of ways these days, in books for people of all ages. Tundra is one of the longer-lasting strips of which most people have never heard. It has been around since 1991, with Chad Carpenter using his single-panel format in an attempt to emulate The Far Side in a much colder setting. Carpenter was raised in Alaska and now lives in Wasilla, the town better known for its association with Sarah Palin – who makes no appearances in these strips, which are determinedly apolitical. Carpenter has no recurring characters per se, but he peoples (if that’s the right word) his strip with the same themes again and again: overly fussy scavengers feasting on roadkill, offbeat talking snowpeople, and characters from fairy tales and old legends. Paul Bunyan (once seen to be wearing very large women’s shoes) and his blue ox, Babe (sometimes turned into a blue steak) show up repeatedly; moose of all kinds (but mostly dumb) appear again and again; one snowman appears in a car’s passenger seat in the car-pool lane, while another drinks a hot beverage and complains of “brain-thaw,” and a gossipy third one is “always poking her carrot into everyone’s business.” Then there are animal-vs.-animal jokes, such as chickens eating takeout and saying “tastes like Bob” and two deer putting a “tick me” sign on a third. And the dish that ran away with the spoon takes up with a ladle, and an unfaithful gingerbread man has frosting on his collar, and Tinkerbell flies into a bug light, and so forth. Some of these jokes are old; some are funny the first time, but not in their second, third or fourth variations. Carpenter’s far-north settings sometimes provide offbeat humor – involving hunters, spawning salmon, etc. – but in book form, his panels start to drag a bit after a while.

     Nothing drags in the fast-paced Stone Rabbit series. Both it and Kit Feeny are preteen-oriented sequences featuring cartoon characters handling life with varying levels of absurdity. Stone Rabbit’s usual nemesis, Henri the turtle, takes a back seat in Deep-Space Disco, because here the real menace is Melvin the Plutarkian, who looks just enough like Stone Rabbit to switch places with him and try to conquer Earth while Stone Rabbit gets tried by an intergalactic court for Melvin’s crimes. This is all silly (and fairly standard) stuff, but Erik Craddock’s drawings whirl and swirl enjoyably across the pages as Stone Rabbit is repeatedly put into impossible situations that force him to exclaim, “Crudmonkeys.” He does escape, of course, and Melvin is brought to justice, of course; and Henri, of course, comes out on top in the end. The best pages here are the ones with no story at all – just lots of weapons and spaceships zipping back and forth in great swirls of color.

     Craddock’s art resembles that of Michael Townsend in some significant ways – perhaps not a surprise, since both attended New York’s School of Visual Arts. But Townsend’s Kit Feeny is decidedly more down-to-earth than Craddock’s Stone Rabbit. Kit is a bear (more or less) living in a standard family in a standard suburban setting, having adventures along the lines of those in the Babymouse books – but oriented more toward boys. Kit and the other characters – including his friends, his parents and his younger twin sisters, April and Bonnie – are pleasantly enough drawn, and some of the ideas are good. For instance, in On the Move, Kit and his family move to a new neighborhood, and Kit is so distraught at leaving his best friend behind that he decides to become a “lonesome hobo.” And in The Ugly Necklace, Kit and his new best friend, Hoff, try to figure out how to pose as rich adults so Kit can get his mother a super-fancy birthday gift. The writing, unfortunately, tends to be uninspired, so the stories end up being a bit too commonplace. And there is nothing like the snippy narrator in the Babymouse books to make the Kit Feeny tales a tad more pointed. On the other hand, they do rely on characters – rather than the action/adventure of the Stone Rabbit series.

     Tedd Arnold’s Fly Guy series is more simply plotted and aimed at even younger readers. The latest installment in the story of a boy named Buzz and his pet fly (who can say Buzz’s name) is perhaps not the cleverest, but it is amusing, and the characters are drawn as exaggeratedly as usual. The plot is simply that Fly Guy gets carried to the dump after hiding in a trash can during a game of hide-and-seek that occurs just as the garbage truck comes along. Buzz gets his father to drive to the dump so Buzz can recover Fly Guy – but there are flies everywhere at the dump, so Buzz has to come up with a clever way to figure out which one is his fly. Fans of the characters and the series will enjoy this latest entry, which may be slight but manages to be endearing as well – no small feat for a story that shows Fly Guy eating garbage and features trash everywhere.

(+++) MAKING BIG TOPICS ACCESSIBLE

Really, Really Big Questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. By Stephen Law. Illustrated by Nishant Choksi. Kingfisher. $16.99.

Life Story: The Story of Life on Our Earth from Its Beginning Up to Now. By Virginia Lee Burton. Houghton Mifflin. $22.

The We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids. By Michael Ungar, Ph.D. Da Capo. $15.95.

     Making big topics understandable to young readers and their families is a noble endeavor even when it is not a wholly successful one. So Stephen Law, a British philosophy professor and journal editor, deserves praise for Really, Really Big Questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything, even though the book tends to tread too lightly to make the impression Law obviously seeks. There are four chapters here: “The Great Big Universe Puzzle,” “Mysterious Minds and Robots That Think,” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and “Seeing and Believing.” Each contains a series of questions: “What is nothing?” “What is it like to be a bat?” “How important is happiness?” “Does astrology really work?” Law tends to dance around many of the questions, apparently hoping readers ages 9-12 will get to the answers themselves, but often conveying the notion that there are no right or wrong answers – a noble thought in philosophical terms but less so in scientific ones. For example, “Did someone design the universe?” meanders from the blithe comment, “If a designer designed the universe, who designed the designer?” to a quotation about a puddle from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who here seems to be something of an ultimate authority. Indeed, although the work for which Adams is most famous is not mentioned, it is clearly a big influence on Law, since the third volume of Adams’ five-volume SF trek is called Life, the Universe and Everything. But to return to Law’s book: “What makes stealing wrong?” explains that a successful bike theft may make the thief happy, but it makes the victim less happy and also worries or frightens other people, so “there is less happiness overall.” Well, yes, but why, exactly, should the successful and happy thief care? It is unfair to fault Law for offering better questions than answers – that is what philosophers and many other people do all the time – but there is a “well, maybe” tone to this book that becomes wearing after a while. And Nishant Choksi’s cute illustrations do little to clarify the underlying seriousness of purpose – although they are often fun to look at in their own right.

     Life Story takes on an even bigger subject – the entire history of life on our planet – but Virginia Lee Burton’s 1962 book does not hold up very well, even in its new, updated edition. Burton, best known for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House, casts Life Story as a play in a prologue, five acts and epilogue, using left-hand pages for simple narrative and right-hand ones to show the events on a stage. The narration tends to be a bit coy for modern tastes: “Way back in time when our Earth was young no Life could have lived on it.” And the need for compression leads to writing that seems dismissive of vast ages of Earth’s development, such as the single sentence, “Fish, which first appeared in Cambrian oceans, grew more abundant,” to cover one of the major developments of the entire Ordovician period. There is an underlying perkiness to the narrative that is rather ill at ease with the subject matter: “Some [dinosaurs] had developed armor for protection from their meat-eating cousins.” And the “play” conceit wears thin quickly. On the other hand, the basic science here is sound. Left-hand pages, in addition to narrative, show fossils of specific animals and give their names and the names’ pronunciations. And there have certainly been updates, such as the reference to “our Sun’s family of eight planets” now that Pluto has been demoted from planetary status. But some narrative that could have been changed has been left intact: “Historians tell the story of the rise and fall of the great civilizations of the Old World and the discovery of the New World” could easily have been altered to “and their discovery of what they called the New World,” which would be more in line with contemporary sensibilities. Life Story is probably too simplistic for many modern families, but it does offer some accurate skim-the-surface science and a certain period charm in its illustrations.

     It is to the young members of The We Generation that books such as Burton’s are least likely to appeal. Dalhousie University School of Social Work research professor Michael Ungar believes that today’s children – he has two of his own – gravitate increasingly toward “we” thinking and away from the “me” orientation of their parents (presumably including Ungar himself). Ungar believes it is incumbent on today’s parents not only to learn from their children (about electronic social interconnection, for example) but also to guide them into realms of compassion and community interest. Ungar’s book is a template for a certain form of social and political liberalism – the kind that encourages attending religious and cultural events of people of other beliefs so as to celebrate and foster diversity. A good deal of what Ungar urges is plain and simple unselfishness and cooperation, which are certainly worthy goals: family cooperation to make holiday dinners a success, for instance, or making carefully thought-out gifts for others instead of rushing to the store to buy something mass-produced. But much of The We Generation assumes a certain idyllic lifestyle that has definite political undertones: constantly asking children how their actions make others feel, for example, or arranging play dates with kids of many ages so your children can help younger ones while being assisted by older ones (all of whom presumably share the same social values). The basic idea here – and it is a good one – is to avoid providing children so much that asks nothing of them that they become focused entirely on themselves. Ask more of kids, and expect more of them, and they will deliver more, writes Ungar – from toddlers learning to say thanks for birthday gifts to preteens looking after pets and teenagers planning school events and helping pay for their own clothing. This is essentially a continuation of the argument that Ungar made previously in Too Safe for Their Own Good, and it is an entirely reasonable one: “Helping our children learn to feel compassion for others and to act responsibly is an old-fashioned idea that needs revisiting.” Parents who share Ungar’s worldview will surely find The We Generation uplifting, with its positive viewpoint, “tips lists” of behavior, and such chapter titles as “Monster Homes Make Monstrous Children.” But there is a certain smug certainty underlying Ungar’s prescriptions that will likely be off-putting to readers who are not predisposed to accept his recommendations even before he presents them.

(++++) WINDOWS 7: BEYOND THE HYPE, SOLIDITY

Windows 7. Microsoft. Home Premium upgrade, $119.99; Professional upgrade, $199.99; Ultimate upgrade, $219.99.

     Don’t buy Microsoft’s hype about Windows 7. Don’t buy any of the hype. But do buy the operating system: it’s a very worthwhile upgrade from either XP or Vista. In fact, Windows 7 is in many ways what Vista ought to have been: it retains the advances of that little-loved OS while subduing many of its most egregious faults, such as extremely long boot times.

     There is little that is game-changing in Windows 7, and that is part of what makes it so good. Whether you replace XP or Vista with this new OS, you will be able to adapt fairly quickly and will get a boost in productivity and (especially if you have been running XP) security and networking capability.

     The problems that led many XP users to refuse Vista upgrades – constant and overdone security warnings, compatibility issues affecting both hardware and software, plus the aforementioned glacial boot and reboot pace – are solved in Windows 7. True, there are some new irritations, such as the absence of integrated E-mail, video editing and calendar programs; but in fairness, this is not Microsoft’s fault – its bundling of functional programs with its operating systems has cost it many years of lawsuits and many billions of dollars. And all the programs that are no longer included can be downloaded for free.

     What Windows 7 does is make a user’s interface with the computer more pleasant, easier and speedier. The new, taller taskbar now lets you pin icons of often-used programs anywhere you like, and move them around as you wish. Then, hovering over a taskbar icon brings up a small preview showing the program in miniature view – a refinement of a similar Vista feature, since now every open window in the program shows up separately in the preview screen and can be brought to full size simply by moving the mouse over it. If you do that, all other desktop windows become transparent in a neat appearance trick called “Aero Peek.” Being able to close windows within the preview screens is another refinement.

     Actually, taskbar icons do even more – maybe too much for some people’s tastes – by providing popup menus listing recent files used or frequent actions taken. This feature takes some getting used to, but can really speed work along – or be ignored if you don’t care for it.

     Microsoft went for some cuteness as well as practicality in Windows 7, for the first time. The “Snap” feature lets you turn windows into full-screen size by dragging them to the top of the screen, or half-screen size by dragging them to the left or right edge; and “Shake,” a feature that sounds silly but is actually great fun to use, lets you make your current window the only operating one by simply grabbing its title bar with the mouse and shaking – at which point all other windows disappear. Very neat.

     Among other improvements in Windows 7 is a “Libraries” feature that pulls together all files of a specific type, such as Documents or Pictures, no matter which folder or hard disk you keep them on – although this does take some getting used to and can be confusing until users adapt to it. There is also, thank goodness, a security-warning feature (“User Account Control”) that is easily adjustable, so you can decide how sensitive to changes you want your computer to be – a significant improvement over the intrusive Vista version, which was much harder to alter. Furthermore, hardware and third-party software generally run far more easily and better in Windows 7 than in Vista, although it’s a good idea to check out your programs’ compatibility by downloading and running Microsoft’s free Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor before trying to install the new OS.

     As for which version of Windows 7 to install: well, Microsoft really hasn’t made that decision much easier than in earlier operating systems. It continues to offer multiple flavors for this latest OS. They range from Starter, which comes preloaded on netbooks, to Ultimate, which packs in everything Microsoft could think up, such as the ability to switch among 35 different languages. The business-oriented Professional version is helpful if you need to access a company network remotely, but otherwise, it is overkill. Most users can and should opt for Home Premium, which is sufficiently full-featured under the vast majority of conditions.

     Upgrading, though, can be a chore – not if you are going from a version of Vista to the identical version of Windows 7, but very much so if you are changing versions or upgrading from XP. A same-version Vista upgrade is as close to a pleasure as any change in OS could ever be: you simply install Windows 7 over Vista and keep all your settings, programs and files, all in an hour or so. And the hardware requirements for Windows 7 are, thankfully, just about the same as they were for Vista (a welcome change from Microsoft’s previous habit of requiring ever-more-powerful hardware for each new OS). Unfortunately, an upgrade from XP is far from easy. It requires you to back up all your files, wipe your hard disk, install Windows 7, then reinstall all programs (including re-downloading and reinstalling any patches and upgrades) and files. This is extremely time-consuming and is not helped much by Microsoft’s Easy Transfer utility, which moves files but not programs. It is still worth doing – XP is, after all, eight years old, and was actually designed back in 1999, which makes it a real relic. But be prepared to invest considerable time and effort in the upgrade (or, of course, you can always stay with XP until you buy a new computer with Windows 7 preinstalled).

     Incidentally, upgraders should remember to stick to the same type of operating system they are used to when moving to Windows 7. The new OS comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and the 64-bit one can improve performance by letting computers use more random access memory (RAM). If you do buy a new computer with Windows 7 already installed, it will likely have the 64-bit version. And there are 64-bit Vista computers out there, and even a few 64-bit XP ones. However, the admirable compatibility of Windows 7 with existing applications – and, more significantly, with older hardware – has a greater chance of breaking down in the 64-bit world, since not all third-party hardware and software makers have created 64-bit drivers for all their products. What this means, in simple terms, is that if you are satisfied with the way your programs and peripherals run on your current computer, and you have the more-common 32-bit OS (either Vista or XP), then you should go to 32-bit Windows 7 and wait to buy a new machine for the 64-bit version.

     The increasing use of the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on new computers points to the fact that this OS seems poised to take advantage of some computer features that exist in only rudimentary form today – in other words, it is more forward-looking than earlier Microsoft operating systems. For example, Windows 7 has a touch-screen feature that lets users move windows, flip through photos and more – the sort of thing iPhone owners, for example, have come to expect. But the special screen required to use this feature is not yet widely available. Still, when it is, Windows 7 will show another of its strengths.

     This is not to say that this OS is all strengths. Its networking feature is improved – for one thing, you can now see all available networks by clicking a single taskbar icon – but it remains on the cumbersome side. Its “HomeGroups” feature, intended for easier sharing of files among home-network PCs running Windows 7, does not work particularly well and requires the use of long, complex and irritating passwords. And because Microsoft continues to dominate the OS world and is therefore highly attractive to spammers and scammers, users still need third-party antivirus and other self-protection programs to keep malware away and defend their computers (Microsoft’s own efforts at protective software are not robust enough to keep up with the bad apples out there). This need for protection is not a flaw in Windows 7, but it is a fact of life for users of any Microsoft OS – and, it should be said, would become a factor for Apple users if that company’s computers ever took over enough market share to make attacks on them sufficiently profitable for botnet creators and other thieves.

     In effect, what Windows 7 does, in addition to adding a few nice-to-have features, is to take all the good things that Microsoft built into Vista – and there were many of them, despite that operating system’s bad reputation – and make them easier to use and less intrusive. One good example of this (among many) is the Start menu, whose improved layout and instant search capability build on what Vista had (although – fair warning – it can still get cluttered as you install third-party software) and make the menu significantly more enjoyable to use. Yes, the word is “enjoyable.” Windows 7 does not make any huge strides in the OS world, but the small ones it makes almost all work well, giving users a relatively clean, uncluttered interface with improved usability, better speed, easier access to whatever they want, and a generally more pleasant working and playing environment. It’s a very, very fine operating system – to which users of Vista and XP should seriously consider upgrading.

(++++) KEYBOARD SUBTLETIES

Idil Biret Beethoven Edition, Volume 12: Piano Sonatas Nos.4, 8 (“Pathétique”) and 27. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Schumann: Kinderszenen; Brahms: Paganini Variations. Claudio Arrau, piano. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Liszt: Organ Works, Volume 3. Martin Haselböck, organ. NCA. $24.99 (SACD).

     There are interesting contrasts between the interpretations of a distinguished pianist taught by some of the grand masters of the earlier 20^th century – and those of one of those masters himself. The latest Idil Biret Archives issue – 12^th in her Beethoven Edition and sixth in her cycle of the piano sonatas – includes recordings of Sonata No. 4 from 2002, No. 8 from 2006 and No. 27 from 2004. As in all her more-recent recordings appearing on the IBA label, Biret shows considerable sensitivity and lyricism in these readings, allowing herself rubato (but not to excess) while letting the structural underpinnings of the music come through clearly. The first two movements of No. 4, which are dark and brooding, come off particularly well here; the lighter third and fourth movements are a touch less impressive, as if Biret cannot quite let go of the solemnity of the earlier part of this sonata – but they are certainly well played. In the “Pathétique” (whose name, unlike those of several other famous Beethoven sonatas, was chosen by the composer himself), Biret plays for depth and drama throughout, but at the same time highlights the work’s careful structure (for instance, the compressed dynamics of the finale prior to the return of the first subject). Thus, she melds emotion to intellect – a common approach for her, and one that works particularly well here. It does not come across quite so well in Sonata No. 27, a proto-Romantic work in which Biret’s focus on control is insufficiently leavened by emotional expressiveness. This two-movement work is a difficult sonata to interpret and not an especially popular one with listeners. Biret handles it with skill and with sensitivity to, among other things, the first movement’s key changes and the second’s decorative flourishes; but it feels almost as if she dissects the music rather than allowing it a natural flow.

     Biret is a disciple of Alfred Corot and Wilhelm Kempff, not Claudio Arrau, but it is nevertheless interesting to contrast her Beethoven with Arrau’s 1974 recordings of Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Brahms’ Paganini Variations. Arrau is all suppleness and flow on Pentagon’s SACD re-release. The Schumann is comparatively easy to play, and some pianists tend to overwhelm it as a result. Not Arrau. He takes these small childhood scenes – remembrances, really, by a composer who wrote them when he was not yet 30 – and plays each with straightforward simplicity that nevertheless hints at subtleties just beneath the surface. Arrau makes it possible to enjoy the 13-movement suite entirely at face value, as a divertissement, and then return for another hearing in which it seems there is more going on than appeared at first. The delicacy and balance here are quite special. And for out-and-out virtuosity, there is the contrast with Brahms’ very theatrical handling of a Paganini theme – in a work whose première the composer himself performed. These variations are all about technique, and are very tough to play indeed, but Arrau makes their difficulties subservient to their excitement as he builds each of the work’s two “books” (which contain 14 variations apiece) toward breathless climaxes. There is something unassuming rather than flashy in Arrau’s pianism, which in these two works he puts so clearly at the service of the composers’ very different intentions. The result is a disc that is simply a delight to hear.

     Virtuosity is subservient to content as well in Martin Haselböck’s remarkable cycle of Liszt’s organ music. The provenance of these works is frequently complex – Liszt would often tweak others’ organ arrangements of his music, or sometimes alter them substantially, instead of creating them himself from the start – but the historical details are of less interest than the works themselves. The longest of the 11 pieces included in the third volume of this series is Prelude, Fugue and Magnificat from the Symphony to Dante’s “Divina Commedia” (1856-60), begun by Liszt’s assistant, Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg, then substantially altered by Liszt himself. This is, in fact, Liszt’s largest individual arrangement for the organ, and it is a work of towering strength – with an especially impressive fugue (the portion on which Liszt did the most work). Also here are the 1859 version of “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” whose 1862 version Haselböck played in Volume 2 of this series, and Ora Pro Nobis (1865), a work of comparative simplicity and delicacy that makes an effective contrast. Two Wagner-focused pieces appear as well: Pilgrim’s Chorus from “Tannhäuser” (second version, 1862), whose surface simplicity conceals a very artful arrangement, and Am Grabe Richard Wagners (At the Grave of Richard Wagner) (1883), a heartfelt and intimate work whose expressiveness is heightened by inclusion of some Wagnerian motifs. The other works on this disc – whose somewhat disconnected arrangement is its only significant failing – are “A Magyarok Istene” (Hungary’s God) (1881), one of several arrangements Liszt made of a revolutionary poem; Excelsior! – Preludio (1874), one of whose themes Wagner used in Parsifal in 1882; Resignazione (1877), one of several late works in which Liszt seems to express failure or asceticism; Angelus! – Prière aux Anges Gardiens (also 1877), a somewhat less downbeat piece from the same time period; Agnus Dei from Verdi’s Requiem (another 1877 work), a lovely and simple adaptation; and Der Choral “Nun Danket Alle Gott” (1883), a piece considered inferior to Liszt’s earlier organ works when it was first heard, but one whose incorporation of old church music gives it a certain elegance. Haselböck’s playing is sensitive and involved throughout: this is clearly music that he not only understands well but also cares about very deeply.

(++++) THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF STRINGS

Dvořák: Violin Concerto; Romance in F minor; Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No. 1. Arabella Steinbacher, violin; Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Marek Janowski. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Chants d’Est/Songs from Slavic Lands: Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ernö Dohnányi, Alexander Tcherepnin, Franck Krawczyk, Sergei Prokofiev, Bohuslav Martinů and Gustav Mahler, plus two Jewish traditional songs. Sonia Wieder-Atherton, cello; Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by Christophe Mangou. Naïve. $16.99.

     Programs of variety, sensitivity and subtlety distinguish these two well-played disks, although Arabella Steinbacher’s SACD has more depth and is more nuanced than Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s CD. Steinbacher offers a contrast between the high Romantic art of Dvořák and one of the first violin concertos to move past it: Karol Szymanowski’s one-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 (1916), which manages to be highly expressive while going beyond traditional Romantic esthetics and traditional tonality. The Szymanowski, which is played first on this SACD, sounds straightforward and even tame from the vantage point of almost a century later, but Steinbacher makes no attempt to hide its modernity (1916-style) as she attacks the work with both care and gusto, especially notably in the cadenza (written by Paweł Kochański, who helped Szymanowski understand the intricacies of the violin and to whom the composer dedicated the concerto – although Kochański was not the first to play it). Just how far Szymanowski had moved beyond the Romantic ideal is clear in the contrast between his concerto and Dvořák’s Romance in F minor, which the composer reworked for violin and orchestra from a movement of one of his string quartets. Steinbacher nicely controls what can be a level of swooning sentimentalism here, although she plays the work with care and emotion – and is well supported by Marek Janowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, whose sound here is lusher than in the Szymanowski. And then comes Dvořák’s only Violin Concerto, written for Joseph Joachim – who, however, did not care for it and never played it in public. Today it is easy to dismiss Joachim’s objections to the structural liberties that Dvořák took in the work, but in the Romantic era, the composer’s ideas – notably the abrupt shortening of several parts of the first movement and its attacca progression into the second – would have seemed to deny the work (and the soloist) a full measure of expansiveness. Steinbacher plays here with a full, even elegant sound that maximizes the concerto’s effectiveness while showing how firmly it sits in the great Romantic expressive tradition.

     Expressiveness is a major focus of Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s CD of folk, religious and traditional music drawn mostly from the parts and peoples of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wieder-Atherton’s program looks wonderful on paper, and her cello playing is sumptuous and lovely, but somehow the juxtaposition of these various short pieces does not quite work – with the result that this CD gets a (+++) rating. There is a sense that Wieder-Atherton is trying too hard to make a point that never quite gets made. An excerpt from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers is followed by parts of Dohnányi’s Ruralia Hungarica, after which there is a Jewish traditional “Song in Remembrance of Schubert” and then the Tatar Dance from Tcherepnin’s Songs and Dances. The underlying musical traditions of these works bear some resemblance to each other, but the pieces coexist rather uneasily here, in a disconnected fashion. And after the Tcherepnin, Wieder-Atherton plays Jeux d’enfants by Franck Krawczyk (born 1969), which is avowedly based on Janácek’s Moravian Folksongs but draws on a much-changed musical language. Then we return to Russia for a short piece from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, followed by Martinů’s Variations on a Slovak Folk Song and an instrumental version of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen from his Rückert songs – and then, at the end, there is another Jewish traditional piece, this time a dance. The emotions skitter helter-skelter throughout this CD, which ultimately is united mostly by Wieder-Atherton’s style and her sensibility. The individual pieces on the disc are a pleasure to hear, and Wieder-Atherton plays them well (and gets good backup from Sinfonia Varsovia under Christophe Mangou, which in this case means the orchestra stays mostly in the background so the limelight remains on the cellist). But as a totality, the CD does not quite hang together, for all the beauty of the playing.

(++++) ANIMALS IMAGINED AND REAL

The Bog Baby. By Jeanne Willis. Illustrated by Gwen Millward. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

A Book of Sleep. By Il Sung Na. Knopf. $15.99.

Black Beauty. Retold by Sharon Lerner. Illustrated by Susan Jeffers. Random House. $16.99.

Winter’s Tail: How One Little Dolphin Learned to Swim Again. By Juliana Hatkoff, Isabella Hatkoff, and Craig Hatkoff. Scholastic. $16.99.

     For joy and for life lessons, animals – real ones and made-up ones – are unsurpassed in books for young readers. The Bog Baby, for ages 3-7, has an old and simple message: “If you love it, let it go.” But it is here framed in ecological awareness and shown in an exceptionally charmingly drawn woodland setting. Jeanne Willis tells of two sisters who, instead of going to a friend’s house, go fishing in a magic pond in Bluebell Wood. What they catch is a wonderfully adorable, frog-sized blue creature called a Bog Baby, with “boggly eyes and a spiky tail and…ears like a mouse.” Soft as jelly, the Bog Baby has wings “no bigger than daisy petals” but cannot fly. The girls take the Bog Baby home, make him a beautiful place to stay in a bucket, play with him and feed him and don’t tell their mother about him, since they caught him when they went somewhere they weren’t supposed to go. But then the Bog Baby gets sick, and the girls have to tell their mom, because they love him so much. And Mom isn’t angry – but she knows that “the Bog Baby is a wild thing. He doesn’t belong here.” And the girls learn the hard lesson that “if we really loved the Bog Baby, we had to do what was best for him.” So they let him go – and then, a generation later, in a surprise ending that isn’t really surprising at all, not one but hundreds of Bog Babies reappear in a truly delightful final illustration by Gwen Millward. Every one of the creatures in this picture has its own pose and its own expression, and the illustration is simply priceless – but no better than Millward’s other marvelous ones, which make this book as much a delight to the eye as it is to the heart.

     A Book of Sleep features calming pictures of real animals and a story arc that starts with a watchful owl at night and ends with a tired one as day dawns. Il Sung Na’s simple story shows quiet sleepers (koalas), noisy ones (an elephant), standing ones and moving ones, all observed by the owl, whether they sleep alone (giraffe) or all together (penguins). That’s all there is to the narrative – but it is plenty for a nighttime book for ages 1-5, offering warmly envisioned animals resting comfortably in a wide variety of environments. A Book of Sleep may be just the thing to read to a young child who can’t quite settle down at bedtime.

     Sharon Lerner’s retelling of Anna Sewell’s classic, Black Beauty, is not a book for bedtime at all. Intended for slightly older readers, ages 6-8, this 40-page illustrated version of Sewell’s novel retains much of the drama and cruelty of the original, with Susan Jeffers’ illustrations giving a realistic picture of Black Beauty’s many misfortunes and his eventual rescue and happiness. Parents familiar with Sewell’s book will find Lerner’s adaptation an accurate (if highly compressed) retelling and, perhaps, an entry point to the longer work for children who may be reluctant to tackle it in its original form. Jeffers beautifully portrays Black Beauty’s days as a happy colt – warned by his mother that “there are many kinds of people in this world: some are kind, some are cruel, and some are just careless.” And readers watch Black Beauty encounter people of all those kinds, from the caring Gordon family to people who whip and abuse him to drivers of London horse cabs to, eventually, a young boy whose grandfather, Mr. Thoroughgood, helps restore the horse’s faith in human kindness. Black Beauty is a meaningful story for children of all ages, its lessons communicated firmly but gently; this illustrated version should open up its joys and sorrows to a whole new group of young readers.

     Black Beauty, although realistic, is a fictional story. Winter’s Tail could well be the stuff of fiction, but it is the true story of a real animal: an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin that became so badly caught in the ropes holding a crab trap that its tail was seriously damaged and eventually fell off. The Hatkoff family members – who have previously chronicled the real-life struggles and triumphs of orphaned hippo Owen, giant tortoise Mzee, polar-bear cub Knut and a family of mountain gorillas – have again fastened on a marvelous, uplifting chronicle that, remarkably, includes the actual photos of Winter’s rescue as well as the ones of her rehabilitation. Winter proves amazingly adaptable: after her tail falls off, she figures out how to swim by moving her body side to side – although dolphins normally swim with an up-and-down motion. But Winter’s solution begins to cause spinal problems for her, and her caretakers at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida realize she needs further human help. The solution turns out to be a custom-designed prosthesis that eventually allows Winter to swim in normal dolphin fashion – a happy ending toward which the book builds fascinatingly, step by step. Four back-of-book pages of more-detailed information on dolphins, Clearwater Marine Aquarium and the prosthetics manufacturer provide additional depth to the story – and a fascinating look at some ways in which the work of helping Winter is now helping humans as well. The result is a wonderful tale of a wonderful tail.

(++++) WELCOME 2010, AGAIN AND AGAIN

2010 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Get Fuzzy; Cul de Sac: This Exit; Liō: Monster under the Bed; Joy of Cooking; The Office; Australia. Desk—Dilbert; Peanuts. Andrews McMeel. $13.99 each (Get Fuzzy; Cul de Sac; Liō; Joy of Cooking; The Office; Dilbert desk; Peanuts desk); $8.99 (Australia).

2010 Calendar: Wall—Little Nemo in Slumberland. Sunday Press Books. $14.95.

     That sound you hear faintly, tripping along the corridors and hiding just out of sight in the distance, is the approaching new year, the final one of the first decade of this century. But fear not, for 2010 is sure to bring amusement, enjoyment, escapism and even (if you like) a bit of education, thanks to the many wonderful calendars that will help you get through the year one day (or one month) at a time.

     Andrews McMeel always offers a plethora of wonderful comic-strip amusements in calendar form, and the coming year is no exception. Just as there are cartoons for all tastes – indeed, many strips nowadays are targeted for specific tastes – there are day-to-day calendars that will keep you amused all year with the antics and/or wry comments of your favorite characters. Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley’s increasingly pointed chronicle of the life of feckless human Rob with put-upon mixed-breed dog Satchel and über-self-centered Siamese cat Bucky, features the one-fanged cat’s daily conceited utterances and ever-failing moneymaking schemes, as well as Bucky’s plots against monkeys and ferrets, Satchel’s constant (usually unsuccessful) attempts to stay out of the way of feline abusiveness, and Rob’s ineffective attempts to find a way in which all species can just get along. Cul de Sac, one of the most inventive comics of recent vintage, follows four-year-old Alice Otterloop (“outer loop,” as in the outer lanes of a highway ringing a major city) and her older brother, Petey, in suburban adventures that manage to be both almost-real and entirely surreal. From the thoroughly appropriate education at Blisshaven Preschool Academy to the antics of Alice’s father, Peter, whose tiny car seems to be smaller than he is, life in the suburbs is not so much skewered by Richard Thompson as it is dissected – not only with telling dialogue but also with art that is actually worth looking at every day.

     One comic whose art is the point is Liō, a pantomime strip in which words sometimes occur but are never spoken by the boy with the odd name after whom the strip is named. This is a dark strip, but in an amusing way, and if that seems hard to imagine – well, it is hard to imagine, although apparently not for Mark Tatulli, the strip’s creator. Liō’s friends include swamp beasts, cephalopods, Death (who in one strip delivers sweet treats marked “Death by Chocolate”), under-bed monsters, space aliens of all shapes and sizes, and the occasional zombie. How much of this is in the boy’s imagination, and how much is in his “real” world, is one of those questions you can enjoy asking yourself all year with this calendar.

     At the opposite extreme of wholesomeness and verbiage is Joy of Cooking, where all you get is words, and they’re suitably delicious. Every page of this calendar includes recipes and kitchen tips, tricks and hints, with material taken specifically from the 75^th-anniversray edition of this highly popular cookbook. The step-by-step instructions make the recipes easy to follow, and since all of them are short enough to fit on a tear-off calendar page, they should be simple enough for even a busy cook to try once in a while.

     But what’s keeping you busy? If it’s the office, you might enjoy the silly-to-sparkling dialogue from the fifth season of The Office, offered daily in calendar form. No scenes from the NBC show here, true, but this is a program driven by verbal punches and plots rather than by intense action sequences. In fact, strictly speaking, the action at Dunder Mifflin isn’t much different from the action at real-world offices – and that, of course, is what gives The Office its charm. Well, that plus the fact that the characters speak more pithily and amusingly than most people do most of the time in most real offices. From promotional schemes to office romances, The Office takes everyday work life and dresses it up in snappy dialogue that fans will enjoy day after day – assuming, of course, that they want to be reminded of the contrast between the office in the show and the one in which they work.

     But suppose you want to get away from it all each day of the year, not be immersed in an alternative office reality – and are not a “foodie.” What if you just want a calendar to give you a daily peek at somewhere beautiful and exotic? One good choice could be the Australia mini day-to-day calendar for 2010: this island continent is far enough away so most North Americans have not seen it in person, and it has extraordinary beauty – ranging from the world-famous wave-shaped Sydney Opera House to the bleak, red, otherworldly landscape of the Nullarbor Plain. From Australia’s magnificent beaches to its bustling cities and amazing natural wonders, this little calendar is filled with wonderful sights. And it really is a little calendar, so take that into account: it is small enough to hang on a metal cubicle wall or a refrigerator door (a task made easy by the magnets on its back), and that is a plus; but at times the calendar seems too small to contain a place as expansive as Australia. Of course, you could always pay a visit and see everything life-sized….

     Day-to-day calendars have retained buyers’ interest despite the increasing use of electronic organizers; but the once-ubiquitous desk calendars (or “daily planners,” if you prefer) have become less popular. That’s too bad, because there is still something useful about seeing an entire week of work and appointments at a glance when you look away from your computer screen (which, for your eyes’ sake, you need to do occasionally!). And there are some wonderful comic-strip-based desk calendars available, too, such as the Dilbert and Peanuts versions for 2010. In fact, although these two calendars are the same size – 8½ inches in one dimension, 7¼ in the other – and are both spiral-bound so they lie flat, their execution is as different as the comics that appear on every left-hand page. The Dilbert calendar is vertical in layout, and each day of the week gets a long, narrow, unlined space in which you can take notes (Saturday and Sunday are half-size). Peanuts is laid out horizontally, and each day gets a vertical, lined block of space (again, half-size for weekend days). The result is that Dilbert is more useful for making notes or writing sentences across a page, while Peanuts is better for listing appointments or things to do. And anyone who likes the work of Scott Adams and Charles Schulz equally won’t go wrong by buying both.

     But if you really want a dose of magnificent comic-strip art – art that has never been equaled and, given the shrinkage of newspapers, likely never will be – you may want to treat yourself to a truly wonderful wall calendar showing scenes from Winsor McKay’s astonishing Little Nemo in Slumberland. One of the greatest comic strips of all time, this surrealistic strip from the early 20^th century pushed the boundaries of comic-strip art in ways that are still beyond almost anything ever done in the medium. The full-color Sunday strips gorgeously reproduced in the 2010 calendar include some in which Nemo’s dreams are really surpassingly strange. One has him sliding down an apparently endless banister until he eventually slides right out of bed and wakes up (each strip ends with Nemo awakening). Another has him dreaming that his bed comes to life – and as its legs grow and it starts walking, the panels themselves become more and more elongated. Another features mermaids and takes place half on land and half in the water. And McKay’s truly bizarre version of the old year giving way to the new has to be seen (and marveled at) to be believed. The 2010 Little Nemo calendar may whet your appetite for more of McKay’s superb art and storytelling – and in fact its dozen strips are taken from two collections of McKay’s Sunday strips published, like the calendar itself, by Sunday Press Books. There has never been cartooning quite like McKay’s, so don’t be surprised if even a full year of his images is not enough. Luckily, the publisher has a way for you to get more – a bit of good news for any time of year.

(++++) AND THE DISC KEEPS SPINNING

Unseen Academicals. By Terry Pratchett. Harper. $25.99.

     Let us now praise Terry Pratchett. Or rather Sir Terry Pratchett, the author having been knighted early this year under circumstances that would call into question his inheritance of the mantle of arch-satirist Jonathan Swift if there were any way to call that into question. Pratchett is quite thoroughly British, and Swift was Irish, but Pratchett still seems a most unlikely knight of the realm. After all, he spends much of his time undermining everything on which the realm and its former colonies, such as the United States, are built.

     Unseen Academicals is Pratchett’s most thoroughly British book in some time, and that may give pause to some readers on the western side of the pond, who will wonder what in heaven’s name Pratchett means by passing references to scouse (a kind of meat and vegetable stew) and characters called bledlows (perhaps having to do with a village in Buckinghamshire, although the author never quite makes that clear). More importantly, Americans will be bewildered by the alleged subject of Unseen Academicals, which is football – none of your bleedin’ American-style “game” with padded uniforms on refrigerator-sized slabs of human meat and with endless time-outs, but real football, with hooligans and no stopping the game unless somewhat gets killed and maybe not even then, and almost no scoring at all (the greatest player of all time scored four points in his entire career, we learn early on). This is real football, not to be demeaned by being called “soccer,” especially since it has some of the daintiness of rugby thrown in.

     But because this novel is set on Discworld, which of course is not Earth, not at all (“There are more things in Heaven and Disc than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” one sage character sagely observes), it is inevitable that this book about football is not about football, or at least not wholly, and maybe not very much after all, although to be the judge of that, you will have to read it, which is a remarkably exhilarating and laugh-and-thought-producing experience. The book’s title refers to Unseen University, good old UU, the centerpiece of Discworld wizardry, except that much of the magic therein appears to have gone rogue and an obscure provision in a long-ago bequest turns out to require the occasional playing of a football game lest the wizards be deprived of their preferred choice of many dozens of different types of cheese.

     Obviously this is a Romeo and Juliet story (that’s obvious, isn’t it?), and it just so happens that there are two violently, virulently opposed football clubs, one of them supported by the son of the aforementioned highest scorer of all time (who, however, works at UU and does not intend to play football and come to the same bad end as his father), and the other supported by perhaps the most beautiful and empty-headed model ever to grace the front page of a Discworld newspaper while wearing a beard. And her name is actually Juliet – of course it’s a Romeo-and-Juliet story.

     Never assume. It’s not. Or rather it is, but that’s no more the main point than is football. Or cheese. What is so astonishing about Pratchett’s peculiar genius – and it is genius, but only with the qualifying adjective – is the way he casually throws in oblique references to earlier Discworld books and recurring characters while taking a new novel such as Unseen Academicals in entirely different directions that eventually tie into all that has gone before. So Lord Vetinari, tyrannical and perfectly Machiavellian ruler of the city of Ankh-Morpork, plays the other characters here like the game pieces they turn out to be. Rincewind and his walkabout luggage show up, and Death has a bit part, too, being as pithy and self-aware as usual. And there are passing references, which indeed pass very quickly, to dwarfs digging ever deeper beneath the city, to the game of Thud, to the Assassin’s Guild, and so on. Interwoven with these are offhand comments that Pratchett appears to make for no better (or worse) reason than that he can get away with them. Thus, “as an eyewitness the average person is as reliable as a meringue lifejacket.” And, she “met the gaze, which was quite difficult, of Mr. Wobble, the three-eyed transcendental teddy bear.” And, “It was like listening to two ancient dragons talking to each other with the help of an even older book of etiquette written by nuns.” And by the way, please note that in Ankh-Morpork, a trolley bus is really a troll-ey bus, which means a troll with seats upon his back, suitable transport for the reasonably well-to-do.

     Now, all the aforesaid relates only tangentially (or perhaps subliminally) to the tale of Juliet and her Romeo (whose name is actually Trev); and no mentioned has yet been made of Juliet’s steadfast and much smarter (if homelier) friend, Glenda, who learns to listen to sherry and for whom a character named Nutt may be a beau. Nutt may in fact be the most important character here, his origin mysterious, his appearance peculiar, his knowledge and strength both prodigious despite his meek and mild and near-starved appearance. His ability to un-die may turn out to be important. Or maybe not, in the grand scheme of things, where the overriding question is whether UU can not only field a football team but actually win a game without using magic. Or maybe there is some other overriding question. It’s all quite wonderfully confused and confusing, and thoroughly satisfying. Or, as UU’s Archchancellor Ridcully says at one point to Glenda, “I see there are a great many things we don’t yet understand.” To which Glenda replies, “Yes, sir. Everything.”

     Praise be to Pratchett.

(++++) PUNS AND OTHER AMUSEMENTS

From Russia with Lunch: A Chet Gecko Mystery. By Bruce Hale. Harcourt. $15.

Dial M for Mongoose: A Chet Gecko Mystery. By Bruce Hale. Harcourt. $15.

Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel about Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out. Edited by Ted Thompson, with Eli Horowitz. Delacorte Press. $12.99.

     Silliness knows no bounds – certainly none of age. Preteens who graduate from the pun-filled world of Bruce Hale’s tales of Emerson Hicky Elementary School will find plenty of somewhat more grown-up nuttiness in Noisy Outlaws (and so forth), originally brought out by the publisher McSweeney’s in 2005 and now available in paperback.

     But first, back to Emerson Hicky. The 14^th and 15^th adventures “from the tattered casebook of Chet Gecko, Private Eye,” move right along in the well-worn path of the first 13 – a path that Gecko fans will enjoy continuing to travel. From Russia with Lunch (its title itself a pun, or at least a variant, on a famous adventure/mystery movie – as are all the titles of Chet Gecko books) features the usual amusements in chapter titles: “Stu Pigeon,” “Witch and Famous,” “Nobody Does It Badger,” and so on. And it has a typical topsy-turvy plot: machines are taking over school functions usually done by humans (courtesy of a mysterious Russian inventor, Dr. Tanya Lightov), and students are going through personality reversals (teachers’ pets talking back – that sort of thing). Intrepid and sticky-footed Chet needs to get to the bottom of the intertwined happenings without running afoul of what may turn out to be witchery. And speaking of “afoul,” Chet’s partner, the mockingbird Natalie Attired, turn from a fowl friend to a foul fiend here, abandoning him just when he most needs her help. “I went down hard, like a steel-belted birthday cake,” remarks Chet at one point. But of course he eventually picks himself up (which, as it happens, requires him to crawl) and solves the case.

     And that brings Chet, and readers, to Dial M for Mongoose, in which the nefarious doings stink. Really stink, as in “stink bomb.” And that is only the first of many indignities visited upon Emerson Hicky and its students and teachers, as the school gets messier and messier while the principal decides janitor Maureen DeBree (as in “more debris,” of course) has lost her cleanliness touch and needs to go. Chet knows that can’t be so – there’s dirty work afoot. Or under foot, as it turns out. And as the chapters roll by – “Jerry Dooty,” “Clues Blues,” “Cold Hard Crash” and the rest – Chet (with Natalie’s help and the occasional lice-cream sandwich) manages to misconstrue all the clues until the mystery more or less solves itself. Which is just fine.

     But when young readers outgrow Hale and his Chet-ventures – and they will – where can they turn for offbeat stories for slightly older (and perhaps slightly more mature) readers? Noisy Outlaws… is one place – the title alone is so long that it tells you a great deal about the anthology’s approach. What you have here is a profusely illustrated volume of short stories (and a comic strip and a crossword puzzle), plus one-and-a-half offerings by Lemony Snicket (pen name of Daniel Handler). The complete offering by unfortunate-events expert Snicket is the book’s introduction, which he promises readers will find tedious; the partial one is the last entry, which runs just over one page, breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and is followed by seven blank pages that readers can use to complete the story, or at which they can simply marvel, having paid for their blankness. Anyway, Noisy Outlaws… includes works by Nick Hornby, George Saunders, Kelly Link (a genuinely scary story about whether a monster is genuinely scary), Jon Scieszka, Sam Swope (a variation on the three-wishes fairy tale, including a mother who is a real ogre, not just a human with the personality of one), Clement Freud, James Kochalka (a tale in postmodern comic-strip form), Neil Gaiman (a story of epicureans whose ultimate exotic meal proves too hot to handle, much less swallow), Jeanne DuPrau, and Jonathan Safran Foer (a fantasy about a part of New York City that has mysteriously disappeared, if it ever existed). There is also a self-described ““excessively difficult crossword” by David Levinson Wilk (answer key provided). As in any anthology, some items are more successful than others, but this story grouping is considerably better than most, showcasing a wide variety of styles, sensibilities and subjects. The illustrations are in a large number of different styles, too, and give Noisy Outlaws… a freewheeling appearance as well as a decidedly odd one. It’s the sort of thing Chet Gecko might come up with if he actually ate the lunchroom’s broccoli-and-lima-bean pie – and found it had spoiled.

(++++) WHEN VIRTUOSI COMPOSE

Joachim: Violin Concerto in One Movement, Op. 3; Violin Concerto in the Hungarian Style, Op. 11. Suyoen Kim, violin; Staatskapelle Weimar conducted by Michael Halász. Naxos. $8.99.

Sarasate: Music for Violin and Orchestra, Volume 1—Zigeunerweisen; Airs espagnols; Miramar—Zortzico; Peteneras—Capriccio espagnol; Nocturne-sérénade; Viva Sevilla!; Fantasie sur “La Dame Blanche.” Tianwa Yang, violin; Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra conducted by Ernest Martínez Izquierdo. Naxos. $8.99.

     It makes sense for brilliant instrumentalists to compose music for themselves, and there is a longstanding tradition of their doing just that – dating back, in the case of violinists, to Vivaldi, who wrote at least some of his hundreds of concertos for himself to play (and, incidentally, may well have written the words to the poems that accompany his four most famous ones, The Four Seasons). Not everyone cared for Vivaldi’s playing – apparently some contemporaries found it a touch on the showy side and therefore unseemly, especially for a priest – but it certainly attracted attention. And attracting attention is one thing that violin superstars do exceptionally well. In the 19^th century, the ultimate violin virtuoso was Niccolò Paganini – who, not surprisingly, created a series of concertos that would let him display his technical prowess, and also wrote (among other things) a set of 24 caprices that remain a pinnacle for every modern would-be virtuoso to scale.

     But Paganini may not have been the most influential performer among 19^th-century violinists, for his main interest was in displaying his own talents. Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) was expert not only at showcasing his own abilities but also at bringing out the best in some of the Romantic era’s greatest composers. Joachim established Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, previously deemed nearly unplayable, as a mainstay in the concert hall. He was instrumental in reviving interest in Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Schumann and Dvořák wrote their violin concertos for him, although he never played either of them. He advised Bruch, who also wrote works for him, and Joachim’s close friend Brahms composed his Violin Concerto for him – although Joachim played it only six times. The F-A-E Sonata by Brahms, Schumann and Albert Dietrich was written for Joachim as well. In addition, Joachim wrote a small number of works himself – about two dozen – including three violin concertos. The first two, played by Suyoen Kim on a new Naxos CD, are a study in contrasts. Violin Concerto in One Movement is strongly influenced by (and dedicated to) Liszt, who was an important influence on the young Joachim but from whom Joachim later broke, allying himself with the more-conservative musical approach epitomized by Brahms. This is a youthful and exuberant work, with two cadenzas in its single extended movement, and with plenty of opportunities for virtuoso display. Joachim’s second concerto, Violin Concerto in the Hungarian Style, was published after Joachim’s break with Liszt, but it handles its Hungarian inflections with Lisztian panache, especially in the finale. Joachim was himself Hungarian, and the multiple thematic elements reflecting Hungary in this concerto are impressively managed as well as atmospheric. These are good concertos for top-notch young violinists such as 22-year-old Kim to play, demanding excellent technique without requiring great emotional depth. These Joachim concertos, especially the second, have considerable flair, and Kim tosses them off very effectively, receiving fine backup from Staatskapelle Weimar under Michael Halász.

     Another 22-year-old virtuoso, Tianwa Yang, brings plenty of fire and spirit to the compositions of another great 19^th-century violinist, Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908). Sarasate was more in the tradition of Paganini – a superb player whose technique was highly influential – than in that of Joachim, whose tremendous abilities were placed at the service of some of the great composers of his and earlier times. Sarasate’s use of vibrato and emphasis on his instrument’s tone are just two of his areas of influence on other violinists. His music, written in various folklike styles, has a fairly narrow emotional range (languorous to flighty) and tends to sounds a bit repetitious when heard in large quantities. But many of his works, when listened to individually, are gems – notably including Zigeunerweisen, perhaps his best-known display piece. The distinct Hungarianisms of this work (which uses the same concluding melody that Liszt chose for one of his Hungarian Rhapsodies) make an interesting contrast to the more typical Spanish and Basque music heard in most of the other works on this CD. Among the disc’s highlights are the lovely Nocturne-sérénade, which is graceful and more subtle than most of Sarasate’s music; and Fantasie sur “La Dame Blanche,” based on François-Adrien Boieldieu’s 1825 opera, which combines considerable lyricism with plenty of fireworks. Ernest Martínez Izquierdo and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (which was founded by Sarasate in 1879) give Yang excellent accompaniment throughout these works – and since Naxos has designated this CD as Volume 1 of a series, there should be considerably more of Sarasate’s music, and his approach to the violin, still to come.

(+++) TRIBUTES

El Sistema: Music to Change Life. A film by Paul Smaczny and Maria Stodtmeier. EuroArts DVD. $24.99.

Within a Dream: A Celebration of the Artistry of Richard Hickox. Chandos. $18.99 (2 CDs).

     Overtly celebratory productions are, in a sense, quite beyond criticism. They are generally of interest only to people who already know what is being celebrated, and those people need not be told if the person or event is wonderful (they believe that already) and will not listen if things seem to fall short (they will not believe that to be possible). So releases like these two inevitably have the flavor of “preaching to the converted,” a fact that their sheer exuberance underlines. This in no way means they are uninteresting or poorly produced: both the film El Sistema and the two-CD Richard Hickox set contain a great deal of worthy material. But too much adulation comes to seem as if those delivering it are trying a little too hard – not that fans of El Sistema or Hickox would ever feel that way.

     The Paul Smaczny/Maria Stodtmeier film is essentially an affirmation of a well-conceived program that has produced one international musical superstar – conductor Gustavo Dudamel – and has pulled hundreds of thousands of poor children into choirs and orchestras. This is El Sistema, brainchild of Venezuelan musician/politician José Antonio Abreu; and the documentary follows a number of wonderful stories (including Dudamel’s) in showing how the music-education program has brought many, many children out of the violence and hopelessness of the barrios and into a world filled with hope and opportunity. It is almost too uplifting for words – although there are plenty of words here, including some from Abreu himself. But there is a problem: El Sistema is essentially a political creation, and as such is now firmly under the control of Venezuelan caudillo and self-proclaimed “Bolivarian revolutionary” Hugo Chávez. Filmmakers get no access to El Sistema or to anything else in Venezuela without the approval of Chávez, and Chávez is not known for approving in-depth studies that show him, his policies or his nation in an unfavorable light. This situation throws something of a pall over El Sistema, which does not address its dependency on Chávez at all and remains focused on heartwarming stories. And the stories are heartwarming, with children as young as age two taken off the “mean streets” of the nation, taught the basics of music, provided with instruments and lessons in the hundreds of núcleos throughout the community, and given the chance to become part of an ensemble. The youngsters make music six days a week for four hours a day, and the film emphasizes that this time gives them respite from otherwise difficult lives, providing safety and a supportive environment. But consider: if this were occurring in, say, Fascist Italy or Communist Romania, questions would surely be raised about regimentation, about using the approach to generate support for the government and specifically for its leader, about the whole arrangement being a method of control and a tool for solidifying power. These are not questions that are present in El Sistema, and perhaps they could not have been asked while still allowing the filmmakers such extensive access to the program and its participants. Yet one wonders, in listening to Dudamel and others speak of the marvels of El Sistema, how much freedom they have to say anything less than adulatory, and how free the filmmakers would have been to include criticism if it had been given. This is not to take anything away from El Sistema as a film (it is a well-made documentary), from the music education it chronicles (which has clearly had remarkable successes), or from Abreu himself (who comes across as a dedicated and farsighted man). But hagiography, whether of a person or of a system, is always (almost by definition) overdone. In today’s Venezuela, it seems particularly out of place.

     The issues with the two-CD tribute to Richard Hickox are somewhat different. When a respected musical figure dies unexpectedly, as Hickox did in November 2008 at the age of 60, outpourings of affection are to be expected; and it only makes sense for Chandos, for which Hickox made some 280 recordings, to create a memorial tribute such as this one. The fact that royalties from Within a Dream are being donated to The Richard Hickox Foundation is a plus: the foundation promotes British music and composers and helps boost the careers of young British singers and conductors – worthy causes all. Furthermore, the two CDs contain more than 153 minutes of music – close to the medium’s 160-minute capacity – and so deserve to be called generous. But they are, for all that, a very limited look at Hickox, one of whose distinguishing characteristics was the ability to carry an overall concept of a lengthy work through the entire piece, even while effectively bringing out details of individual sections. There is, of course, no room for anything very long in a “tribute” production, and what Chandos offers here is 22 tracks of very well-played music not only by British composers (Bridge, Britten, Elgar, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and others) but also by Dvořák, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Verdi and more. The result is a set that proves that Hickox was versatile and had a fine ear for musical detail in shorter formats; but this is certainly not an in-depth exploration of the conductor. And fans of Hickox will likely have much of this material in their libraries already. This set is a lovely gesture and a money-raiser for a good cause, and certainly lets part of the Hickox style come through to listeners – but only part of it, and not necessarily the most distinguished or important elements.

(++++) NEW YORKERISMS

The New Yorker: On the Money—The Economy in Cartoons, 1925-2009. Edited by Robert Mankoff. Andrews McMeel. $24.99.

Old Farts Are Forever. By Lee Lorenz. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     There are some very special things about The New Yorker, not the least of which is how determined it is to have people regard it as special. To that end, the magazine has developed a unique sense of humor in its cartoons – some of which are haughty but not particularly funny, others of which are in-jokes of one sort or another, and still others of which are hilarious in a sophisticatedly offbeat way. One topic that the magazine does not cover particularly well is finance, so it may come as a surprise that so many of its cartoons have dealt with matters monetary over the years. Still, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his introduction to The New Yorker: On the Money, these are not really the cartoons of people who understand financial matters or Wall Street (even though that famous center of capitalism is, after all, in New York). These cartoons are mostly those of bemused characters who just can’t quite figure out what all that financial fuss is about and how the “money business” works. And yet many of these offerings are extremely funny. There is the well-dressed man walking into the IRS holdings his hands up in surrender. There is the husband ruefully telling his wife that they are now living beyond their second income. There are the Wall Street traders looking up at the display board to see the start of the Biblical phrase of doom, “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.” There is the IRS bureaucrat telling the irritated (and presumably under-audit) businessman, “Maybe we do bungle the spending of your tax dollar, but you’ll have to admit we do a bang-up job of collecting it.” There is the down-at-the-heels miner who pans a large gold nugget from a stream and says, “Damn it! Now I’ve got to revise my estimated income.” There’s a megastore in which men and women with shopping carts roam aisles adorned with signs such as “Mutual Funds,” “REITs,” “Tax Exempt Municipals” and “U.S. Treasury Notes.” And there is one down-at-the-heels man saying to another, “There, there it is again – the invisible hand of the marketplace giving us the finger.” The cartoons are arranged by decade – a very few from the 1920s and a good selection thereafter – but the best ideas transcend their times, poking fun at (and a few holes in) the whole notion of prosperity for its own sake and the people who pursue it. The New Yorker is often a touch too snooty for its own good (although many of its readers think that is their own good), and the frequent disdain for the monied class in these cartoons melds uneasily with the fact that the magazines’ subscribers are scarcely downscale. But even if this creates some dissonance and ambivalence within the cartoons, it also helps give them a kind of wry effectiveness – and an impact quite different from that of the cartoons in, say, The Wall Street Journal.

     But it must be said that The New Yorker seems more at ease with cartoons about relationships than with ones about dollars and cents. Lee Lorenz, longtime cartoon editor of the magazine (before Robert Mankoff, editor of On the Money, took over) and a contributor of more than 1,700 drawings to it, offers some samples of his work in the small but delightful Old Farts Are Forever. The title comes from a panel that could have gone into On the Money. It shows three older businessmen sitting together, apparently at a club, with one saying, “Wunderkinden come and go, but old farts are forever.” Most of the Lorenz drawings here, though, are about interpersonal relationships. Young woman to older man, at a party: “It's certainly refreshing to meet someone sixty years old who looks sixty years old.” Long-suffering wife to her husband: “Of course I still love you – it’s called the Stockholm syndrome.” Woman lying in a bed with two men, one on each side of her, both of them reading books, as she turns to the one on her left: “Howard, I’m seeing someone else.” Wife to husband when Death shows up at the door: “It’s the closure fairy.” Thoroughly bored dog’s thought as his owner pets his head: “Mr. Dennison is survived by his long-time companion, Rusty.” Futuristic scene with sweet and busty young woman talking to grizzled man: “Gee whiz, Mr. Collins – two hundred and six isn’t old!” Old Farts Are Forever offers more chuckles than guffaws, but there are plenty of them to be had, and Lorenz – who says he has become an “old fart” himself – is a fine companion in and chronicler of this age group’s amusingly skewed world.

(++++) CHRISTMAS IS A-COMING

’Twas the Night Before Christmas. By Clement Clarke Moore. Illustrated by Jon Goodell. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $17.99.

A Christmas Manger. By H.A. Rey. Houghton Mifflin. $9.99.

The Christmas Book: How to Have the Best Christmas Ever. By Juliana Foster. Scholastic. $9.99.

The Little Prince Deluxe Pop-Up Book. By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $35.

Dinosaur Park. By Hannah Wilson. Illustrated by Steve Weston. Kingfisher. $17.99.

     Christmas is not that far away – and here are some wonderful new books to help put you in the mood. The familiar verses of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas are enlivened in the handsome new Accord edition of the poem by illustrations that make use of lenticular animation – or “AniMotion,” as the publisher calls it. This is a technique in which pictures (or, in this book, parts of pictures) seem to move as you change the angle of the page, lending an animated element to the story. The Star of Bethlehem grows larger at the start of the poem as a comet whizzes past; a candle flame visibly flickers; those sugar-plums really do dance in a child’s dream; and, later, a toy train moves under the Christmas tree and Santa’s belly does indeed shake when he laughs. The naïve charm of the otherwise old-fashioned illustrations mixes pleasantly with the modern technology that makes parts of the book seem to move, even though Jon Goodell takes some liberties with the words of the poem: Santa is human-size, not a “jolly old elf”; there is no indication that “his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot”; and there is no sign of his pipe smoke encircling his head – the pipe seems to be a toy. Ah well – these pictures are not so much about accuracy as they are about enjoyment, and kids will certainly get plenty of that as they watch elements of this much-loved poetic tale appear to come to life.

     It is the religious elements of Christmas that come to life in A Christmas Manger, a wonderful crafts project for the whole family. Curious George creator H.A. Rey (Hans Augusto Reyersbach) was Jewish, but this 1942 work is entirely Christian, using words from the gospels of Matthew and Luke to tell the familiar tale of the birth of Christ, and then showing the animals, Three Kings and angels adoring the Holy Family. The book’s design is tremendously clever: every figure can be neatly punched out of the pages – no scissors or other tools required – and then folded so it stands up. Cutouts in the inside front and back covers are storage pockets for the figures, so they can be set up year after year. And when they are set up, they produce a traditional manger scene that kids can arrange as they wish and that parents can use to teach the story of Jesus’ birth visually – to go along with the Biblical words that the book includes. This is a lovely family activity and an effective way to recount the Christmas story, especially to young children.

     For a guide to the more secular aspects of Christmas, families can turn to The Christmas Book, which explains the origins of many Christmas traditions (cards, Santa Claus, caroling, Christmas trees, etc.) and offers suggestions on activities such as holding a Christmas party, preparing Christmas dinner (including for vegetarian guests), wrapping presents, and making edible gifts (several recipes are included). Stories of how Christmas is celebrated around the world are especially interesting: in Greenland, people feast on raw, decomposed auk meat; in Iceland, instead of one Santa, there are 13 imps; in Ukraine, revelers welcome spiders into their homes to commemorate a folktale about magic arachnids that turned webs into silver and gold. Add in the suggestions for games that kids can play – plus some for adults – and you have a winner of a book that will help keep your Christmas spirited.

     And speaking of Christmas gifts: anyone who loves Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novella, The Little Prince, will be absolutely charmed by the new pop-up version, which would make a very generous gift for a child or a marvelous addition to a family’s own bookshelf of treasures. This is the complete story, not the sort of abridgment that would more usually appear in a pop-up book. And the illustrations are the original ones created by Saint-Exupéry himself for the first edition in 1943 – not modernized at all, just rendered into three-dimensional form through very clever pop-up designs. Adults encountering the book for the first time, or re-encountering it after some years, may be surprised at how…well, adult the book is, for all its reputation as a children’s work. The core statement in the book – “What is essential is invisible to the eye” – is scarcely what one would expect in a story for children. And the Little Prince’s adventures, on six planets inhabited by foolish adults and then on Earth, are far from the kind of mundane and innocent fun that so many children’s books offer. The fact is that The Little Prince is not a children’s book, or certainly is not wholly one, and the wonderful pop-ups in the new edition make that clear (and increase the work’s many ambiguities) by giving the author’s unusual illustrations greater prominence. This is a treasurable edition of a wonderful work, highly recommended as a gift for Christmas or any holiday.

     Even in pop-up form, The Little Prince will be a bit too much for younger children, but they too can have a wonderful time with pop-ups – in Dinosaur Park, which is nearly an entire play set in book form. Open this very cleverly designed book and you get four separate pop-up scenes set in a make-believe zoological park featuring dinosaurs – think Jurassic Park without the scares. Each scene bears unidentified footprints and is imprinted with questions, such as “Who hunts hadrosaurs?” and “Who is trying to eat the eggs?” Kids find the answers in the bound-in “Dinosaur Park Field Guide,” which tells about several dinosaurs and shows their tracks – which can be matched to the ones in the pop-up scenes. And the dinosaurs themselves are contained in a packet bound into the back inside cover of the book and marked “Warning!! Dinosaurs – Open if You Dare.” When kids do open the flap, out come perforated, press-out dinosaur pieces that easily stand up and can be placed within the pop-up scenes – or used for play elsewhere. For children ages 3-6, Dinosaur Park makes a wonderful gift: colorful, educational, filled with things to do and lots of fun to use. It’s a treat for any occasion in any season of the year.

(+++) EVERYDAY WONDERS

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life. By Cami Walker. Da Capo. $19.95.

Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently—Why It Helps Your Kids and Can Strengthen Your Marriage. By Kyle Pruett, M.D., and Marsha Kline Pruett, Ph.D. Da Capo. $15.95.

     Most of life is made up, not of grand triumphs and failures, but of small, everyday successes and less-than-ideal outcomes. And in the long run, the daily accumulation of positives and negatives turns out to be what matters most – not only to adults but also to children. In the case of 29 Gifts, the small successes were a way to pull out of a very deep and dark hole indeed. Author Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her early 30s, and soon found herself depressed, sleepless, in constant pain, and addicted to prescription drugs designed to keep the effects of the incurable disease at bay. Then Walker, a believer in alternative medicine, got some surprising advice from an old friend, a South African medicine woman: start giving gifts to others – 29 of them in 29 days. Initially skeptical, Walker soon embraced the concept as a way to change her perception of herself and her MS. By Day 29, she wanted to give a gift to the world, and did so by launching the Web site, www.29gifts.org. Thousands of people have signed on and are now doing their own forms of gift-giving. Interestingly, a reader need not believe in shamanism, “natural healing” or any of the other alternative-medicine buzzwords to understand how the 29 Gifts approach could work. It forces the participant to think outside herself and beyond her disease, focusing – even if only briefly – on other people and what they want or can use. The reason is that the gifts need to be mindful, not arbitrary. For example, you can give more money than you usually would to a street performer, and you can listen empathetically to a friend who is having a tough time; Walker did both these things. But you cannot do the reverse. Walker interweaves her own story with that of the movement that she now so strongly supports. For instance, she talks about her husband, Mark, not being a believer: “Though I’ve tried several times, I still haven’t managed to convince Mark to try the Giving Challenge and sign up to share stories. He thinks it’s uncool to ‘brag’ about the things you do for others.” Mark is apparently not an Oprah fan: this book practically exudes Oprah-ishness, with all sorts of heartfelt comments and teary moments and affirmations galore. In fact, it is so relentlessly upbeat (despite the sections devoted to Walker’s struggles) that it wears rather thin after a while. “While I was busy comparing our outsides, I lost sight of what we have in common on the inside.” “Over time, my relationship…evolved and we are now close friends.” “I want to send out a sincere thank you to every person who has chosen to take part in the 29 Gifts Movement.” And so on. It’s all very uplifting, potentially of genuine value in teaching people to look outside themselves and the daily grind of their lives, and often quite syrupy.

     Partnership Parenting is more matter-of-fact and more child-focused. Actually, its focus is the traditional family unit of mother, father and child; and the husband-and-wife team of Kyle Pruett and Marsha Kline Pruett focuses on the need for a “parenting team” to turn the “inherent contradictions” between male and female parenting styles into learning opportunities. The basic argument here is that men and women naturally gravitate to different styles where children are concerned: mothers tend to protect and nurture, while fathers tend to push kids toward independence and exploration. It is absolutely necessary to accept this underlying premise for this book to have any value – arguing with it undermines the foundation of the whole approach. Indeed, the authors are fond of absolute statements throughout. For example, when writing about discipline, they say, “By age two…shame arrives on the scene to help children control their impulses. It works now – as opposed to when they were younger – because the child’s growing moral sense and self-awareness combine, rendering her capable of figuring out embarrassment and, more importantly, its causes and effects.” Or, regarding “retaliatory behavior” such as pushing buttons on household media, it “isn’t expected until a child is closer to three.” And: “Even when mothers and fathers are equally involved in raising children, mothers may feel a sense of ownership of the children compared to fathers.” Readers who accept the Pruetts’ comments at face value – and, to be fair, many of them are backed up by solid research – will find suggestions in this book for embracing different styles of parenting instead of arguing about them and then seeking a “middle ground.” Think of parenting as a team sport, the Pruetts suggest: each parent plays a different position, and each needs to understand and appreciate – and support – what the other does. Partnership Parenting is mostly about ways in which to develop that support system, which the authors say will be good not only for children but also for parents themselves. One particularly useful idea is to be sure you and your partner agree on really major issues, such as schooling and values, and then allow yourselves to disagree on various everyday matters, even if that seems inconsistent. The Pruetts argue that this teaches children to handle diversity better. Much in Partnership Parenting is not intuitively obvious, and some elements will be questionable, especially if parents have significantly different styles. But the book’s suggestions for managing conflict, handling discipline effectively, and finding ways to strengthen the parental bond even when two people approach child-rearing differently, are certainly worth considering – and may make it easier to develop a family structure that works better for children and adults alike.

(+++) VARIETIES OF ANGST

Gone from These Woods. By Donny Bailey Seagraves. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

Road to Tater Hill. By Edith M. Hemingway. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

Wild Girl. By Patricia Reilly Giff. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

The Hanging Hill. By Chris Grabenstein. Random House. $16.99.

     Troubles come in all types in these books for preteens, but in only one size: big. Gone from These Woods starts with a hunting accident, but what it is about is the aftermath. Eleven-year-old Daniel Sartain goes hunting, unwillingly, with his Uncle Clay, and is happy not to shoot the rabbit that Clay points out – but, as Daniel straightens up, the gun goes off. Daniel panics, vomits, runs for help, can barely look at his uncle’s still form, but eventually gets help – only to find out that Clay is dead. And then Daniel has to cope. “The sandwich didn’t even taste like food as I tried to chew it.” “I just wanted to sink down into the warmth of my bed and disappear.” “Now I felt jagged edges all over. They hurt. Hurt like my whole body was nothing but broken bones jabbing through tender skin.” The path to healing is a long one and by no means a straight line, and Daniel’s family situation doesn’t help much: his mother is supportive, but his dad drinks, has a nasty temper, and has a family tragedy in his own life that still eats at him. It is eventually Daniel’s own memories of Clay that come to his rescue, as when he rediscovers in a closet the jacket last worn on the fatal day: “Couldn’t look at it without seeing blood that wasn’t there… I’d worn this same jacket when Clay took me to the county fair in Athens [Georgia] a few weeks ago.” And then Daniel’s thoughts turn to pleasant memories, and eventually to a “conversation” with Clay, whose voice Daniel hears saying, “When somebody you love dies, you don’t follow them. You keep going, for them and for yourself. You walk where they can’t walk anymore.” Daniel finds enough inner strength to confront his bullying father, and the result is a cautiously optimistic conclusion.

     Road to Tater Hill follows much the same story arc, despite being set in a different time: the summer of 1963. There is death here, too, and of a particularly cruel kind: 11-year-old Annie’s brand-new baby sister, Mary Kate, dies just one day after being born, shattering Annie’s family (whose last name, Winter, evokes the chill that comes over all of them). Annie’s father is absent – with the Air Force in Germany – and Annie turns increasingly inward as she watches her mother decline into depression. This book, like Gone from These Woods, has a rural setting, but Road to Tater Hill uses it differently. The Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina give Annie a stream to which she escapes, complete with a stone she calls her “rock baby.” They also make it possible for Annie to meet an elderly recluse named Miss Eliza, who is ostracized by the community because she just served 30 years in jail for killing her husband. Gradually, preteen and old woman come to trust each other, and Annie learns that her family is not the only one to have lost a baby or fallen victim to grief. And it is through Miss Eliza that both Annie and her mother finally come face-to-face with their own deep sorrow and their enduring love for each other.

     The love in Wild Girl is for a horse – whose name is the title of the book. The one who loves her is 12-year-old Lidie, a Brazilian girl whose father and brother have moved to the United States and who eventually joins them in Queens, New York. Lidie faces some expected adjustment difficulties and some unexpected ones. Like any immigrant with a language barrier, she has difficulty communicating with teachers and classmates. But she also has trouble communicating with her own family: everyone treats her like a little girl, and her father gives her an old, tame horse to ride – not realizing that Lidie has become an accomplished rider. And that is where Wild Girl comes in: Lidie is determined to ride the apparently untamable filly, believing (accurately, as it turns out) that she and Wild Girl are both having adjustment difficulties and will turn out to have a lot in common. “I knew what it was like to feel alone. I knew that terrible ache,” thinks Lidie while observing Wild Girl – whose own feelings are given in third-person sections that complement Lidie’s first-person narrative. A confrontation between Lidie and her father leads to greater understanding on both sides, and a conclusion that cements the notion that both Lidie and the filly are wild girls – both of whom eventually find contentment in their surroundings.

     There is nothing to be content about in The Hanging Hill, a sequel to Chris Grabenstein’s The Crossroads that moves the earlier book’s supernatural elements to a new setting. In fact, things had to move somewhere else after what happened to the home of 11-year-old Zack Jennings and his stepmother, Judy, in the first book. Judy is an author of kids’ books, and she and Zack are spending a few relaxing weeks (along with Zack’s dog, Zipper) rehearsing a new musical based on one of Judy’s works. At least they should be relaxing weeks, but unfortunately, Zack keeps seeing ghosts – this is something he does all the time – and the theater is haunted, and the director wants to raise the evil dead by doing dastardly things to a child born under a full moon. That would be Zack, who “was sort of short and kind of skinny and really didn’t look all that tough, even when he took off his glasses.” Grabenstein’s blend of spookiness and humor is somewhat more forced here than in The Crossroads, where the scary parts predominated. Zack makes a new friend, Meghan McKenna, who of course gets caught up in the supernatural mysteries that seem to follow Zack everywhere, including to the Hanging Hill Playhouse. Zack’s dead mother reappears, apparently not having given Zack enough trouble in the previous book, and there is a young Native American girl ghost who asks whether Zack is a demon, and the ghost of a killer named Mad Dog Murphy who unaccountably knows Zack’s name, and a bunch of good ghosts as well, including a onetime actor who declaims to Zack, “Be not afraid of greatness, lad!” The Hanging Hill is not quite a romp and not quite a chiller. By the time Meghan tells Zack that “there are so many other mysteries we still have to unravel,” things have gotten pretty thoroughly confused. Like the prior Zack Jennings novel, this one ends up being somewhat overdone even though it is often a lot of fun to read.

(++++) OFFBEAT BUT ON-TARGET BEETHOVEN

Beethoven: Complete String Quartets and Große Fuge. Borodin Quartet (Ruben Aharonian and Andrei Abramenkov, violins; Igor Naidin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello). Chandos. $69.99 (8 CDs).

     One of the world’s longest-lived string quartets, the Borodin Quartet – which was founded in 1945 by Moscow Conservatory students as the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet and adopted its present name a decade later – is also one of the world’s most distinguished. It is best known for its relationship with Shostakovich, who consulted the quartet’s members on every one of his 15 works in this form. The group’s performances of the Shostakovich cycle are therefore as close to definitive (in terms of understanding the composer’s intentions) as anyone’s can be.

     But the Borodin Quartet also made a specialty of Beethoven, recording his complete quartets twice: once for Virgin Classics (2003) and again for a series of Chandos CDs building up to the group’s 60^th anniversary in 2005. Chandos has now released the entire eight-CD set of its cycle in a single box, and it is an unusual and fascinating set to hear. The playing is powerful and focused throughout, and the sound is exemplary – unmarred by the sort of miking, unfortunately common these days, in which the musicians’ breathing is as audible as some of their notes. The works have the feeling of near-perfect live performances, which means they are not exactly done according to the score but are filled with small instances of emphasis and rubato in which the quartet members engage so naturally and with such apparent ease that they sound as if they are casually getting together to make music that just happens to be of the very highest quality. The weighting of the instruments is particularly good: even in tutti passages, individual voices stand out clearly (abetted, again, by the fine sound quality), and the result is a clarity of expression that comes through particularly effectively in the sudden, dramatic chords that are a Beethoven hallmark throughout the cycle.

     What is especially unusual about the Borodin Quartet’s approach is that it refuses to put Beethoven on a pedestal. This is some of the greatest quartet music ever written, true, and everything gets its full due here. But the unexaggerated songfulness of the performances, their unaffected lyricism, will come as a surprise to listeners used to hearing Beethoven’s quartets performed with all the intensity that they usually receive. The tempos tend to be fast throughout this cycle (although they never feel rushed), and there is a communicative brightness to the quartets that is often missing in performances that seem to emphasize their importance in musical history. The Borodin Quartet’s approach is especially attractive in the six Op. 18 quartets, whose generally light tone is mixed with a winning expressiveness. No. 5, in particular, is a marvel, showing Beethoven in a Mozart mood and with his folklike themes in full swing. The finale of No. 6 is worth special mention, too, for its unabashed joyfulness.

     But the players’ lyricism carries through from the earliest quartets all the way to the final ones, and that is a big surprise indeed. The cantabile elements of Op. 95 really sing, for example, and the latest quartets – Opp. 132 and 135 – here sound very modern, very symphonic, but far more directly communicative (which means far less dense and distanced) than in most performances. This is quite an untraditional approach to the late quartets, and it takes some getting used to – and well repays the time investment. There is boldness as well as the far more common quality of introspection in these late-quartet readings; and, perhaps through the players’ intimate familiarity with Shostakovich, these readings give a highly effective sense of just how far into the future late Beethoven actually looked.

     Power, focus, lyricism, songfulness, tonal beauty, and unanimity of approach – with never a sense that any player is going off in a direction even slightly different from that of the others – are the hallmarks of this excellent cycle. The one significant disappointment here lies at Chandos’ feet, not the quartet’s: the eight-CD set includes no information on the music whatsoever and only a very sketchy enclosure giving spare information on the Borodin Quartet’s history. This set deserves far better.

     Still, it is the music that matters, and the performances are as exemplary as they are (at times) unusual. This set stands not only as a wonderful 60^th-anniversary marker for the players but also as a superb legacy for cellist Valentin Berlinsky, who held his position for an astonishing 62 years, retiring only in 2007, and who died in December 2008. Berlinsky was not an entirely uncontroversial figure: he was a Communist Party member who was accused of betraying other musicians to authorities (a charge he denied). What is certain, though, is that he left behind recordings of tremendous worth, including this Beethoven set – and that unlike political machinations, high-quality performances of great music will stand the test of time.

(++++) BEASTS, FOR REAL AND FOR FUN

Never Smile at a Monkey (And 17 Other Important Things to Remember). By Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin. $16.

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea. By Sy Montgomery. Photographs by Nic Bishop. Sandpiper. $8.99.

Nathan Fludd, Beastologist: Book One—Flight of the Phoenix. By R.L. LaFevers. Illustrated by Kelly Murphy. Houghton Mifflin. $16.

     “This book is about creatures…whose dangerous nature may not be so obvious,” writes Steve Jenkins in Never Smile at a Monkey. To be more precise, it is about some creatures whose dangers are less than clear – and some that are dangerous in ways you might not expect. In the “non-obvious” category would be the amusing-looking platypus, which has venomous spurs on its hind legs; the electric caterpillar, whose hairy bristles can be dangerous to humans (although it turns into a harmless moth); and the tang, an attractive coral-reef fish often used in salt-water aquariums that has a sharp spine on either side of its tail and can inflict serious injury. In the “unexpected dangers” arena are the spitting cobra, whose bite most people would instinctively know to avoid – but which can also spit its venom accurately more than eight feet; the hippopotamus, whose huge size would keep most people away, but which will charge if its path to water is blocked; and the fierce-looking African buffalo, whose unpredictable temper means it may attack without warning even if you keep your distance. Jenkins does not sugarcoat the effects of getting too close to these creatures – several of them can kill people. His illustrations show everything clearly, without romanticizing or anthropomorphizing what he depicts. Black-bear cubs, for example, are shown in all their wide-eyed cuteness – along with a warning that the mother is usually nearby and can be aggressive and extremely dangerous. At the end of the book, Jenkins offers considerably more detail on where the various creatures live and just what makes them so deadly. Oh – and the book’s title? Showing teeth to a rhesus monkey is a sign of aggression, inviting an attack from a sharp-toothed mammal that does not understand that humans consider smiles to be indicators of friendship.

     Many of the creatures depicted in Jenkins’ book and others are far harder to find in the wild than readers might think. Among mammals, one of the rarest is the tree kangaroo, which, Sy Montgomery writes, looks “like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up. Impossibly soft, with a rounded face, button eyes, pink nose, pert upright ears and a long thick tail, it was about the size of a small dog or an overweight cat, with plush brown and golden fur.” There are 10 kinds of tree kangaroos, all hard to find and getting even scarcer as the forests where they live are cut down. Quest for the Tree Kangaroo is the story of a scientific expedition to New Guinea, a large island (second in size only to Greenland) where strange and rare animals abound: birds with poisonous feathers, egg-laying mammals called echidnas, and many more. At the center of the book is the team’s research leader, Lisa Dalbek. Readers follow her and the team on lengthy hikes through gorgeous countryside teeming with strange plants and animals. Also insects – lots of them. Anyone thinking that field research is glamorous will soon encounter the reality that the scientists did: steep and difficult climbs, slippery rocks, rotten logs, and rain. Lots of rain. The photographs by Nic Bishop are astonishing in their beauty and variety, and Montgomery’s text provides real insight into the scientific life, the animals and other creatures the expedition finds, and the villagers who act as guides and helpers. By the time Dalbek is quoted as saying “this is really intense work – this really challenges you on so many different levels,” armchair scientists will better understand not only the intensity but also the joy of coping with the many challenges.

     But all that is real-world stuff. Young readers looking for something more escapist as lighthearted fun can turn to Flight of the Phoenix, the first book in a planned series about 10-year-old Nathaniel (Nate) Fludd and his distant cousin, Phil A. Fludd, the world’s only living beastologist. Phil – Aunt Phil, that is (yes, Phil is a woman) – explains that beastologists study animals that most people think are just myths, such as basilisks, griffins and manticores. Actually, Phil herself doesn’t explain that – the dodo does. It seems that dodos are merely extremely rare, not extinct, and this one (whose name is Cornelius) talks quite well, thank you, and – well, there is certainly nothing real-world about Flight of the Phoenix. But then, R.L. LaFevers doesn’t intend there to be. Abetted by amusing illustrations by Kelly Murphy, LaFevers takes Nate and Aunt Phil to Arabia for the laying of an egg by the world’s only phoenix. Along the way, Nate befriends a gremlin; on arrival, he learns some Fludd family history (including the fact that the family has a “black sheep”); and eventually, he not only has to watch over the phoenix but also must figure out how to rescue Aunt Phil, who has fallen into the hands of Bedouins. And all this is just the start of Nate’s education in becoming a beastologist – not a real-world profession, true, but one that readers will surely enjoy imagining in all its glory (and without all that real-life discomfort and mucking about).

(++++) MAGICS

Thanks a LOT, Emily Post! By Jennifer LaRue Huget. Illustrated by Alexandra Boiger. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

The Magical Ms. Plum. By Bonny Becker. Illustrated by Amy Portnoy. Knopf. $12.99.

The Fairy Godmother Academy #1: Birdie’s Book. By Jan Bozarth. Random House. $7.99.

     An exceptionally inventive etiquette-related book for ages 4-8, Jennifer LaRue Huget’s Thanks a LOT, Emily Post! is about what type of etiquette still works – and what does not quite work – in the modern age. Huget’s wonderful idea here is to introduce a touch of magic into the whole etiquette issue. She takes fictional characters created by Emily Post for her original book of etiquette (published in 1922), and has them take up residence in a thoroughly modern household that is run by a mother who is trying to get her four kids to behave (there is no sign or mention of a father). These ghostly figures hover over the kids as their mom tries to enforce etiquette lessons – sometimes taking a direct hand in modern life (by lifting elbows off the table, for instance) and sometimes simply watching with appropriate reactive expressions (usually ones of dismay, given the way these kids behave). As clever as Huget’s approach is, what really makes the book work so well are the excellent illustrations by Alexandra Boiger, who shows the Post-created characters as blue-tinted adults in old-fashioned clothing, moving silently through the bustling household. But they do not stay silent forever. After the girl who narrates the book throws a two-page tantrum about the word “couldn’t” (that is, all the things Emily Post said the kids couldn’t do), the Post-created characters start interacting with her, explaining that Emily Post herself did not always have perfect manners when she was little – and, later, giving the narrator an idea about how to un-Post the house. How that works out – and whether or not it is all for the best – is the subject of the rest of the book, which is not only delightful in itself but also an excellent jumping-off point for discussing the value of a common-sense approach to manners and etiquette.

     The magic tends to be of a different – and, it must be said, more commonplace – sort in books for preteens. This is not to say that magic itself is commonplace, but it does tend to operate in more-or-less-expected ways in works for slightly older readers. The Magical Ms. Plum uses it for humor, The Fairy Godmother Academy for adventure. Bonny Becker’s work is a sort-of-chapter book, centered on one of those strangely wonderful adult figures around whom magical events just seems to cluster (think of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, for example). Ms. Plum runs a classroom in which teachable moments come in the form of things that cannot possibly be: a tiny horse that poops a lot and patches up the relationship between two girls; a head-perching parrot that gives a boy a lesson about talking too much; squirrels that teach neatness and organization to a girl with a messiness problem; and so on. The magical creatures come out of Ms. Plum’s supply closet (think of Mary Poppins’ carpet bag) and return there after accomplishing whatever they set out to do. Bonnie Becker’s book is loosely knit (each chapter is essentially independent of the others) and clearly very derivative, but it is certainly fun to read and deserves a (+++) rating because – well, just because.

     The Fairy Godmother Academy #1: Birdie’s Book gets a (+++) rating, too, but kids should be forewarned that not everyone will care for the premise. This book is part of a multimedia approach designed for preteen girls, in which the printed volume itself carries over to what is intended as an online community plus a series of real-life challenges. The basic idea of The Fairy Godmother Academy series – in which three books are due to be released per year – is that fairy godmothers are really humans with magical abilities that are to be used to make the world a better place. Each book will focus on a girl of a different “lineage,” who will discover her true calling and decide how to use her newfound powers. Twelve-year-old Birdie Bright, the first protagonist, is of the Arbor Lineage (birds go with trees, see?). Birdie’s Book focuses on Birdie’s quest for the Singing Stone, her family’s talisman, which has been broken. She picks up a helper named Kerka (who will be featured in the next book) in the search for the missing half of the stone; eventually, Birdie must repair not only the stone itself but also the relationship between her mother and grandmother. The themes here are highly familiar and the magical incidents mostly expected (there are mermaids, of course); the bound-in Wisdom Card, which is used at the Web site associated with this series, is a typical enhancement of a printed book for this age group. In short, there is nothing especially creative about the approach or story here; but girls with a taste for magic and for a mixture of printed and computer-based mild adventure will find The Fairy Godmother Academy a pleasant enough diversion.

(+++) CURSE OF THE FOUR ESSES

Dark Days: #1, Nightwalker; #2, Dayhunter; #3, Dawnbreaker. By Jocelynn Drake. Eos. $7.99 each.

     In a world preoccupied with vampires and their many depredations, focused nearly incessantly on variations on the vampire legend and mystique – that would be our world – there are certain characteristics that vampiric protagonists inevitably possess. Call them the three S adjectives: sinister, sleek and sexy. It’s a good thing that Jocelynn Drake has a couple of S words of her own – steady self-improvement as a writer – because, unfortunately, her central vampire character, Mira, has a fourth S that does her no good at all: stupidity.

     Mira is supposed to be more than 600 years old (although she looks 25, having become a vampire at that age). But from the start of Nightwalker, she is put off her game with such ease that it is simply not believable that she has survived so long and risen to a position of significant power. Just drawing her attention to something disturbing is enough to send her into a thoroughly unbecoming tizzy. Furthermore, throughout the first three Dark Days books, Mira consistently makes rash decisions that imperil her existence and cost others their lives; and although she attributes many of her problems to bad luck, readers will notice that she makes a lot of that bad luck for herself by doing things that just don’t make sense (and then has enough good luck to survive). Drake shows how Mira gets away with making errors time after time, turning these books into modern-day “Perils of Pauline” stories (with bloodsucking); and taken one at a time, Mira’s escapes do indeed make sense. “Most of my decisions were made on the fly,” she comments at one point in her first-person narrative, “and the fact that I was still alive was testament to my own stupid luck.” Or, as she comments elsewhere, “No matter what I did, I kept wading deeper and deeper into the mire until there was simply no escape.” Six hundred years of this? Even in the urban-fantasy genre, that’s stretching credulity.

     Luckily for Drake, she writes more stylishly than many other novelists in this genre, and has some interesting plot twists as well. That makes the Dark Days novels highly readable despite their many frustrating logical flaws. (Not to mention less-than-adequate editing: the books are filled with typos and errors, some of which create unintended hilarity: “No one had ever anyone vocally sworn to protect me.” “His laugh caused my eyes to open my eyes and focus on his handsome face again.”) In Drake’s world, there are humans, vampires (nightwalkers), werewolves (lycans), witches, warlocks, and two older, mysterious “guardian” races that “the gods created…to maintain the balance. The naturi were guardians of the earth, while the bori were guardians of all souls. The naturi existed in five clans – water, earth, animal, wind, and light.” Well, all right – except that the naturi, it turns out, are pure evil, because…well, just because Drake needs Mira to have super-powerful enemies: “They were horrid creatures whose only goal was to destroy anything that was not of their kind.” The first novel in this series, Nightwalker, is mostly about Mira’s discovery of the extent of her powers and the limits on them (again, after 600 years); the initial attempts of the naturi to return to the world after having been banished to another; and the deepening mystery of a man (or part-man) named Danaus, a vampire hunter who tends to steal scenes from Mira because he is in many ways a more interesting character than she is. Mira and Danaus develop an uneasy truce and (of course) turn out to be powerful allies – although just how powerful is revealed only in the second and third novels. Unfortunately, Drake returns repeatedly and increasingly unbelievably to the notion that Mira and Danaus have every intention of fighting to the death once the whole business with the naturi is concluded – despite their obvious compatibility and growing attraction to each other (unconsummated: these books are surprisingly light on sex for their genre, with Mira having only one brief fling). As Mira and Danaus save each other’s lives again and again, only to return to the notion that one day each will try to kill the other, it becomes harder and harder to accept the underlying eternal-enemies premise (which Drake will hopefully drop soon).

     One thing Drake has going for her is the ability to set scenes effectively. When Mira is forced to go to England at one point, she muses about the difficulties her kind and other with extrasensory powers have with their usual perceptual abilities in Great Britain: “There was too much old magic in these lands. Too many old gods had been born and died on this island; too many powerful warlocks had stretched their arms here. Magic doesn’t just die – it fades into the air and seeps into the earth. After centuries, this ground was saturated.” And, to Drake’s credit, she does not make Mira a completely sympathetic character – certainly not when pushed to her limits: “A part of me was aching for a fight. A couple of naturi to deal with, something to rip apart; their flesh squishing warmly between my fingers and collecting under my fingernails. …I craved just the sight of blood. I wanted to see it splashed across the skin and soaking into torn and shredded clothing. I needed the violence, an outlet for the frustration and the fear. In the brief moment when you are struggling to stay alive, you convince yourself that you’re actually in control of your life and destiny. And when you kill that which was trying to kill you, you bask in a moment of true power.”

     Purple prose, to be sure; but effective. Dark Days is, at this point, essentially a single long novel, with the second and third books picking up where the first and second, respectively, leave off. By the end of Dawnbreaker, Drake has thoroughly mixed and remixed her characters’ loyalties, created tensions between individuals and among groups, and given Mira the opportunity to stop the return of the naturi once and for all – but has then, rather unbelievably, snatched that chance away. That’s too bad, because it means that the fourth book in this series will likely be yet more of what has gone before. Since the books are becoming increasingly stylish and better-plotted as they go along, Drake may soon have the self-confidence to make more of Mira and take the Dark Days plots in new and more interesting (rather than merely more complicated) directions. She does not need to do this – in our current vampire-fascinated milieu, Dark Days already contains everything needed to mount the best-seller lists. But there are signs in these books that Drake can write something more than effective potboilers – if she decides that she wants to.

(+++) FIRED UP

The Hunger Games, Book 2: Catching Fire. By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic. $17.99.

Century Quartet, Book I: Ring of Fire. By P.D. Baccalario. Translated by Leah D. Janeczko. Random House. $16.99.

     The first book of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy – simply called The Hunger Games – established an ugly, violent, terrifying world in which young people from each of 12 Districts are forced to fight to the death by a controlling entity called the Capitol. This is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the former United States has dissolved in chaos, leaving behind a loose confederation called Panem. There was once a District 13, but the Capitol wiped it off the face of the earth after a failed rebellion. The Hunger Games told the story of District 12’s Katniss Everdeen, whose name was not picked in the games’ deadly lottery but whose sister’s name was – so Katniss volunteered to take her place, eventually winning (along with her teammate, Peeta) after a great deal of blood and some genuinely scary scenes. Catching Fire shows the aftermath of that hollow victory. Katniss and Peeta are now expected to tour together and eventually marry – but Katniss does not love Peeta and wants to be with another boy, Gale. The seeds of rebellion are being sown again, with consequences sure to be disastrous – in one scene, a grandfather who makes a mild show of nonconformity is shot through the head – and Katniss finds herself torn between trying to protect those she loves and wanting to help fan the flames of dissent. In fact, Katniss herself is becoming a symbol of defiance, against her will and initially without her knowledge. This is a particularly significant time for the Games: the third Quarter Quell is about to begin – these are special Games held every 25 years. The last time there was a Quell was the last time someone from District 12 won: Haymitch, a recording of whose victory Katniss and Peeta need to watch – which means watching Haymitch, mortally wounded, struggling to hold his intestines in until he comes up with a maneuver that results in the death of the only other remaining competitor. Collins is as relentless throughout this book as in the previous one, as people close to Katniss keep being brutalized, snatched from her sight, maimed in horrible ways, or killed. Katniss and Peeta themselves must take part in the Quarter Quell, because this Game is “a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of the Capitol.” There are twists and turns aplenty here, but the unrelenting sadism of the Gamekeepers and the rulers of the Capitol becomes a lot to take after a while; and for all the nobility and self-sacrifice of Katniss and those who care about her, Catching Fire finally seems to revel a little too enthusiastically in the blood and gore that Collins conjures up. There is, in the end, something faintly distasteful about the book, which is undeniably exciting but just as undeniably exploitative.

     Ring of Fire is far less violent and far more concerned with unraveling an ancient mystery. This first of a four-book series, originally written in Italian by P.D. (Pierdomenico) Baccalario, includes a bound-in color section of clues that readers can follow as they read the story of four 12-year-olds in search of objects of power representing the old notion of four elements – fire, earth, air and water. The protagonists were all born on February 29 and do not have much individualized personality beyond the fact that they come from different parts of the world: Elettra from Rome, where the first book takes place; Harvey from New York City, where the second book will be set; Mistral from Paris; and Sheng from Shanghai. The four initially meet by chance (or is it by chance?), and receive a briefcase from a strange man who is soon murdered. The briefcase contains the first clue to the Ring of Fire, which is said to be responsible for the Roman Emperor Nero’s destruction of the city: “As though he were a god, he destroyed the very thing that gave him power.” The book tends to bend over rather far backwards to tie into the ethos that has made Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and his other religio-historical mysteries such big hits. For instance, the narrative is interrupted four times by a mysterious page called a “stasimon” (staisima were choral odes within ancient Greek plays, but will readers of this book know that, or relate to the quotations from Seneca sprinkled within the narrative?). There is even a Gypsy woman who warns Elettra to “speak softly. There are…shadows…listening. Shadows that make the river howl.” In short, the plotting and prose are, respectively, overcomplicated and overwrought; but the mystery is often fascinating to follow, and its twists and turns will likely be attractive to many preteen and young teenage readers.

(++++) MINGLING FUN WITH SERIOUSNESS

Ives: Decoration Day; The Fourth of July; Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day; The General Slocum; Overture in G Minor; Yale-Princeton Football Game; Postlude in F. Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Chorus conducted by James Sinclair. Naxos. $8.99.

Beatles Go Baroque. Peter Breiner and His Chamber Orchestra. Naxos. $8.99.

     Charles Ives’ music was always a mixture of high art and low, even crude humor, drawing its expressiveness from highly complex rhythms and multitonality on the one hand and from the extremely simple harmonies of hymns on the other. Indeed, Ives often seems to be more than one composer inhabiting the same musical mind – as is clear in the very well played but rather oddly assorted works on a new Naxos CD in which Swedish forces are led by one of the top American Ives scholars and conductors, James Sinclair. The major piece here – three-quarters of it, anyway – is the Holidays Symphony. Therein lies the CD’s oddity. The symphony’s first movement is absent (Sinclair previously recorded it for Naxos with the Northern Sinfonia). Its second, third and fourth movements – Decoration Day, The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day – are given in order here, but not one after the other; they are separated by mostly shorter works that serve as what might be called punctuation points. The Holidays Symphony was never a musically unified piece; this disc’s arrangement treats it as separate tone poems, which is pretty much correct from a musical standpoint but is also a bit different from what Ives intended. All the movements are, in any case, played with considerable skill and, in the case of Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day, with the warmth that this piece – built by Ives from two of his early organ works – requires. As for the additional works here, The General Slocum portrays in music a horrendous 1904 explosion on an excursion boat – a disaster in which more than a thousand people died. The explosion itself resounds with considerable power and terror after Ives juxtaposes upbeat popular tunes of the day with ominous forebodings. Overture in G Minor is an early work that Ives wrote while studying music at Yale University. It sounds a bit like Tchaikovsky and other late Romantics, although even here, Ives’ unusual ideas about rhythm peek through. Postlude in F is an even earlier work – Ives wrote it for organ at age 15 and then orchestrated it while at Yale – and also quite a Romantic one, showing the influence of Wagner. Yale-Princeton Football Game is “low” Ives all the way, commemorating a famous 1897 game by re-creating the cheers, referee’s whistle and general enthusiasm. It originated as a piano improvisation, and even in Ives’ later, orchestrated version, it zips by quickly with a thoroughly uninhibited feel.

     The issue of high and low art – to the extent that it is an issue – is scarcely confined to Ives’ music. Beatles Go Baroque mixes things up to a quite delightful degree. This is scarcely the first time the Beatles’ songs have been recast in the form of older music – decades ago, there was even an LP called The Baroque Beatles Book. But the new Naxos CD, arranged and conducted by Peter Breiner, does not simply take Beatles tunes and set them in Baroque overture and dance formats. Instead, Breiner creates four works, each called a “Beatles Concerto Grosso” and each in the style of a different composer: Handel, Vivaldi, Bach and Corelli. The first, Handelian work includes “She Loves You,” “Lady Madonna,” “Fool on the Hill” and two other songs. The second piece, in Vivaldi’s style and also in five movements, starts with “A Hard Day’s Night” and ends with “Help,” and its use of violins – both solo and as a group – does indeed reflect Vivaldi’s approach. The third work, in the style of Bach, is more in the form of a Baroque suite than in that of a Concerto Grosso, opening with an Overture (“The Long and Winding Road”), continuing with four songs set in dance forms (including “Hey Jude” as a Polonaise!), and concluding with “Yellow Submarine.” The final piece on the CD, a four-movement work, is not specifically labeled as being in anyone’s style, but it reflects Corelli in its use of solo cello and violin and the overall feel of its arrangement. Beatles Go Baroque is not intended to be anything more than fun – Naxos even labels it as one of its “Light Classics” – but it offers an interesting melding of the structure of “serious” music with the catchy tunes and overall lightness of the popular-music world.

(++++) OH, THE ADVENTURES!

Henry and the Crazed Chicken Pirates. By Carolyn Crimi. Illustrated by John Manders. Candlewick Press. $15.99.

Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies. By Carolyn Crimi. Illustrated by John Manders. Candlewick Press. $6.99.

Where’s My Mummy? By Carolyn Crimi. Illustrated by John Manders. Candlewick Press. $7.99.

“Shwatsit!” No One Knows Just What It Means. By Christin Ditchfield. Illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw. Golden Books. $15.99.

The Yellow Tutu. By Kirsten Bramsen. Illustrated by Carin Bramsen. Random House. $15.99.

     Oh, the places you’ll go, as Dr. Seuss might have said (and, actually, did say). These books for preschoolers through third-graders (roughly ages 4-8) represent wonderful journeys to places exotic, spooky, or just like the home next door. Carolyn Crimi and John Manders are a particularly happy pairing of writer and illustrator for books targeting this age range: their books’ stories are simple (but not too simple), the pacing quick, the pictures very clever, and the overall effect delightful. In Henry and the Crazed Chicken Pirates, the young rabbit Henry finds a threatening note from an unknown enemy of the Buccaneer Bunnies and worries about disruption of their idyllic lifestyle (check out the very first illustration, showing the bunnies having fun by shooting each other out of cannons and swinging from their ship’s masts). No one else takes the note seriously, so Henry decides to write a book about what to do if the threat in the note comes true. Despite being derided by the Buccaneer Bunnies, he keeps thinking and writing – and when an airborne pirate ship full of crazed chicken pirates finally does appear, it is of course Henry who (hilariously) saves the day. And so he decides that it is time to write another book – one he will call Henry and the Crazed Chicken Pirates. That perfect circle of self-reference is typical of the amusements throughout this Crimi-Manders delight.

     This is not Henry’s first appearance but his second. His debut, Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies, is now available in paperback, and is just as delightful as it was when originally released in 2005. This is the book in which readers learn just who Henry is: the son of Barnacle Black Ear, pirate captain and “the baddest bunny brute of all time.” The book-loving Henry is a real disappointment to his dad – why, Henry won’t even keep a parrot on his shoulder until he reads about proper parrot care. But Henry’s book learning soon comes in mighty handy – not when a huge storm wrecks the pirates’ ship (they all ignored Henry’s warnings), but when the shipwrecked crew is fed, housed and clothed by Henry, using knowledge he gained from books. The message about the importance of reading and learning is clear here – and the way it is presented (particularly in a picture of the pirates decked out in elegant Henry-made costumes) is absolutely hilarious.

     For an equally funny but very different sort of book, there is Where’s My Mummy? This one is about Little Baby Mummy, who insists on playing just one more game of “Hide and Shriek” before bed – only to find himself separated from Big Mama Mummy. So he searches for her, encountering plenty of weird sounds and such creatures of the night as Bones, Glob and Drac – each of them warning Little Baby Mummy about the really scary things he may run into at night. Manders’ drawings of the monstrous creatures are wonderfully funny – Drac’s bat-covered pajamas and bedroom slippers are simply hysterical. But eventually, Little Baby Mummy does encounter something really scary – only to be rescued, just in time, by Big Mama Mummy, who takes him home and puts him peacefully to sleep. This is a very offbeat bedtime story indeed, and a thoroughly enjoyable one from start to finish.

     The amusement in “Shwatsit!” is summed up in the second part of the title: no one knows just what the baby means when saying the same nonsense word over and over again. There is nothing special about the setting here; the story could happen in anyone’s home. Christin Ditchfield keeps readers focused on the mystery of the incomprehensible word, while Rosalind Beardshaw’s pleasantly homey illustrations show all the things the word could mean and all the family’s attempts to figure it out. This book is a good vocabulary builder as well as a gently amusing story: kids will enjoy finding all the items in each illustration to which “shwatsit” could refer. Eventually, the family figures out what the word is really all about – and the solution is enough of a surprise to justify the big smiles on the faces of everyone (parents and three kids in addition to the baby). This is a sweetly told story that will be particularly appealing to families whose youngest children spend a lot of time trying to communicate, not always successfully.

     Sisters Kirsten and Carin Bramsen communicate very clearly indeed in The Yellow Tutu. Their message is to be yourself, see things your own way, and bond with like-minded people. Those are a lot of potentially heavy-handed lessons to learn from a single birthday present – the tutu of the book’s title – but they are communicated in a decidedly non-instructional way. It happens that Margo gets her birthday tutu on a school day, so she just has to wear it to school – on her head. Why there? Because the bright yellow makes her feel like sunshine. Margo’s sheer joy in her tutu comes through clearly in both words and pictures, as she heads for school wondering whether her sunniness will make flowers grow, birds sing happily and bees buzz more loudly. Unfortunately, Margo’s school friends are more down-to-earth about her costume, mocking and teasing her for wearing the yellow tutu on her head. Margo’s glistening eyes as she tries unsuccessfully to understand her friends’ reaction are heartbreaking. But one friend, Pearl, speaks up for Margo, saying she looks just like a sunflower (and we see Margo as a sunflower)…and Margo chimes in that she may look more like a lion (and we see her with a yellow-tutu mane, letting go with a really loud roar). So “Margo and Pearl skipped away from the other kids.” Later, they have an after-school tea party at which they both wear tutus on their heads (Pearl’s is pink). They imagine themselves as roses – and the final picture, showing two tutu-topped girls amid yellow and pink roses galore, is a gem. In fact, the entire book sparkles.

(++++) COMIC ART LIKE NO OTHER

The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek: The Complete Sunday Comics 1903-1905. Edited by Peter Maresca. Sunday Press Books. $60.

     In the earliest years of newspaper comic strips, through the 1910s and even beyond, no one quite knew what to make of them. The result was an era of extraordinary inventiveness and exploration, with publishers allowing many artists to take up full Sunday newspaper pages – or at least half pages – for forays into everything from domestic strips to works so surrealistic that they might as well have sprung from the mind of René Magritte. The vast majority of the very early strips soon fell by the wayside and are virtually unknown today. Very few remember Harry Grant Dart’s weird “The Explorigator,” Herbert Crowley’s peculiarly poetic “The Wiggle Much,” Raymond Crawford Ewer and Stanley Armstrong’s strange slapstick “Slim Jim,” or Charles Forbell’s never-the-same-layout-twice “Naughty Pete.” Yet this era also included one of the very greatest strips of all time, Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” And it produced one of the most inventive and strange, Gustave Verbeek’s “The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo.”

     The inventiveness of Verbeek’s strip can scarcely be overstated. It was a six-panel work that was read in the usual way, then turned over and continued for an additional six panels of narrative – using the same art, but now upside-down. The notion of requiring newspaper readers to turn their paper the other way around in order to keep reading was revolutionary enough. The ability to create characters that would be inversions of each other – and a total of more than 60 stories whose narrative would work in this format – was nothing short of extraordinary. But that is just what Verbeek did during this strip’s run, from 1903 to 1905.

     Sunday Press Books, which has established itself as the preeminent restorer and reprinter of early comic-strip art, has now added The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek to a catalogue that already includes collections of Winsor McCay (not only “Little Nemo” but also his less-known but almost equally delightful “Little Sammy Sneeze”) and Frank King (Sunday “Gasoline Alley” strips). Gorgeously produced in large enough pages to allow Verbeek’s comics to be restored to their original size, The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek includes all the Lovekins/Muffaroo strips as well as a sampling of Verbeek’s other work. More than a century after Verbeek (1867-1937) drew these strips, their creativity remains astonishing – even after a reader looks carefully at them and discovers the many tricks Verbeek used to make the format work (including panels showing reflections, such as a lake; backgrounds such as brick walls; and characters with potato-shaped heads). What Verbeek did so well was to pull the artistic elements together to create a series of adventures – for these are adventure strips, despite their many amusing elements. In one, Lovekins and Muffaroo encounter a tiger and huge snake; in another, a “bad tramp” is a threat; an ostrich, a lion and an ogre are dangers elsewhere. Most of the strips lack dialogue, but when there is some, Verbeek letters it so it works upside-down in the second half of the strip – an amazing feat in itself. And there is an occasional panel that is hysterically funny, such as one in which Muffaroo and Lovekins try to grab a fish and end up in a three-character spinning wheel filled with hands, eyes and faces. The Upside-Downs really have to be seen to be believed.

     And it is doubly fascinating to see the strip in the context of Verbeek’s other work. This book includes some of Verbeek’s book illustrations, plus cartoons he drew for Judge magazine and, in Paris, for Le Chat Noir (including a hilarious sequence – risqué by U.S. standards – in which a naked man and woman paint bathing suits onto each other before going swimming in an area where nude bathing is not allowed). Verbeek’s later strips are represented, too: “The Loony Lyrics of Lulu” (1910), in which a girl and her father encounter weird creatures about which the girl writes limericks; and “The Terrors of the Tiny Tads” (1905-1914), Verbeek’s longest-running strip, in which four boys discover all sorts of weird creatures with portmanteau names: Hippopautomobile, Pantaloonatics, Flaminghost, Tamalligator (an alligator’s head with a tamale body!), a Dodoughnut and many more. The wordplay and clever drawings of these strips help explain their longevity and their popularity, for a time, as advertising vehicles (and, by the way, the cartoonist spelled his name “Verbeck” for this series).

     The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek also includes essays that put Verbeek and his work into perspective; an amusing newspaper article about the artist becoming a U.S. citizen (he was of Dutch ancestry but was born in Nagasaki and, because of an oddity in law, was considered a Japanese citizen – at a time when Japanese were ineligible for U.S. citizenship); and many more tidbits that make the book endlessly and delightfully fascinating. The world may have turned upside-down in the century since Verbeek drew his upside-down strips, but his version of an upside-down world remains as enthralling today as it did in those heady early days of newspaper comics.

(++++) CATS AND OTHER CREATURES

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. By T.S. Eliot. Illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Harcourt. $16.

Cat Dreams. By Ursula K. Le Guin. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

Epossumondas Plays Possum. By Colleen Salley. Illustrated by Janet Stevens. Harcourt. $16.

The Two of Us: Why I’m Nuts about You. By Bob Elsdale. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     There is something about the silence, the slinkiness, the inherent mystery of cats, that makes them fascinating, at least on the page, even to many people who are not cat lovers in the everyday world. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was a source of delight long, long before it became the basis for the musical Cats. T.S. Eliot did his own cover illustrations for the first (1939) edition, and the entire book has been illustrated by Nicolas Bentley (1940) and Edward Gorey (1982). The whimsicality rather than some of the slightly more serious elements of Eliot’s poems comes to the forefront in the wonderful new illustrations by Axel Scheffler; and, happily, this new edition keeps the poetry intact, even if that may confuse some young 21^st-century readers unfamiliar with “caviare, or Strassburg Pie,/ Some potted grouse, or salmon paste.” All 15 of Eliot’s cat poems are here, including “Cat Morgan Introduces Himself,” which was added to the original set in 1952. The cats’ names roll off the tongue as elegantly as ever: Growltiger, the Rum Tum Tugger, Mr. Mistoffeles, Macavity, Bustopher Jones and all the rest. And the creativity of the verse makes this book as much fun to read aloud as silently: “I have a Gumble Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;/ Her equal would be hard to find, she likes the warm and sunny spots.” Eliot was as superb a versifier in these lighter poems as in The Waste Land and his other far more intense and serious works. Scheffler’s illustrations are a joy, too: Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer talking to a friendly policeman, old Gus the Theatre Cat looking bemused as smiling rats play around and even on him, Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat supervising “the bagmen playing cards” – all these and more are as lively as the words they support.

     S.D. Schindler enlivens Ursula K. Le Guin’s very simple but evocative text in Cat Dreams with a series of dreamlike but realistically drawn depictions of things that a cat just might enjoy while asleep: a rain of mice, a fountain spouting cream, a catnip tree. The animals here, including the cats and birds in the dream, are beautifully rendered, and there is a sense of spaciousness in the pictures that belies the reality of the cat asleep inside an ordinary house. But when the dream turns briefly (and not very frighteningly) nightmarish, the cat wakes up and realizes, “I need a lap” rather than a pillow to lie on, and climbs over to its human companion: “Her lap is the best, best place for a nap” – to fall purringly, peacefully asleep again, perchance to dream once more.

     There’s a cat in Epossumondas Plays Possum, too, but this one is “a ferocious, terrifying ol’ critter-eating swamp cat” that leaves Epossumondas alone when the possum plays dead – saying, “I don’t eat no dead meat.” The hero here is of course Epossumondas himself. He is an animal variant on the character Epaminondas, once popular in the tale Epaminondas and his Auntie but no longer well known because Epaminondas, like Little Black Sambo, was a stereotypical black character. Colleen Salley’s transformation of the human into the possum (abetted by Janet Stevens’ delightfully humorous illustrations) works quite well, since the essential naïveté and tendency to get into trouble are preserved without any hint of what would nowadays be considered racist overtones. The original tale’s “you ain't got the sense you was born with,” for example, is transformed into: “He’s not a naughty possum. But he is a forgetful possum.” In Epossumondas Plays Possum, the possum forgets the warning he has been given against wandering into the scary swamp, where the terrifying loup-garou (a sort of werewolf) is thought to roam. Epossumondas, following a butterfly, goes where he shouldn’t, gets lost, and responds by “playing possum” whenever he hears a sound. And it works – not only with the swamp cat but also with a snake and a swamp hog. But the fourth time Epossumondas plays dead, he almost gets into real trouble. He escapes, though – thanks to being ticklish – and his human mama finds her “clever little patootie,” and all ends happily. This is the fourth Epossumondas book, and it is every bit as enjoyable as the first three.

     There have been who-knows-how-many books comparing humans to animals, and the small-size, hardcover gift book called The Two of Us: Why I’m Nuts about You continues the trend. With that title, you might think the featured animals are squirrels, but no – they are chimpanzees, which are so closely related to humans genetically that their human-like behavior is scarcely a surprise. For that reason, and because some of the pictures do not quite match the text, Bob Elsdale’s book gets a (+++) rating. It will still be fun to give to a lover or really good friend, because some pictures are wonderful: the serious face that goes with “but you also think deep thoughts”; the wide-open-arms photo for “unabashedly affectionate”; the heartfelt hug for “fiercely protective.” The descriptions of the recipient’s positive qualities are always well chosen, even if it is hard to see what “an unwavering sense of right and wrong” has to do with a chimp on a sofa offering ones of its hands to its companion. But it’s hard not to like the final closeup of two chimp hands clasped tightly together – a single photo encapsulating what a close relationship, both human and almost-human, is all about.

(+++) ANDREW, CALVIN, ROLAND, ABBY AND NICK

Andrew North Blows Up the World. By Adam Selzer. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

Calvin Coconut: The Zippy Fix. By Graham Salisbury. Illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers. Wendy Lamb Books. $12.99.

Roland Wright: Future Knight. By Tony Davis. Illustrated by Gregory Rogers. Delacorte Press. $12.99.

The Georges and the Jewels. By Jane Smiley. Illustrations by Elaine Clayton. Knopf. $16.99.

Nick of Time: The Adventure Through Time. By Ted Bell. Square Fish. $7.99.

     There are lighthearted tales aplenty out there for readers from first through sixth or seventh grade – pick your type of protagonist and you can find something entertaining from just that character’s angle. Andrew North Blows Up the World is for fans of the Spy Kids films and other offbeat, amusing adventures. Andrew is a third-grader who is sure his father and brother are spies – a suspicion confirmed, Andrew thinks, when he finds that his brother’s graphing calculator says SIN and COS on it. Never stopping to look up the abbreviations for sine and cosine, Andrew starts punching entries into the calculator – and happens to enter one that will blow up the world. Well. Then the calculator is confiscated (Andrew has been playing with it in school) and taken to a mysterious place called Storage Room B that no one has ever entered or been able to look into. And then things get complicated. Yes, Adam Selzer’s book is vastly overdone, especially in the “Agent North” chapter openings, in which Selzer writes in bad spy-novel prose to show how Andrew thinks of himself – as “Thaddeus Arthur III, heir to the Arthur Badminton Equipment fortune” and sworn enemy of the evil Dr. Cringe. And of course, everything that Andrew thinks is nefarious turns out to have a perfectly ordinary explanation – although Selzer deliberately hints at the end that something just may be afoot after all, opening the way for a sequel. This novel is 100% froth – fun in a thoroughly mindless way.

     Calvin Coconut: The Zippy Fix at least has an exotic setting going for it: the island of Oahu, Hawaii. This is Calvin’s second appearance – the first, Calvin Coconut: Trouble Magnet, came out last year – and focuses on nine-year-old Calvin’s relationship with his 15-year-old babysitter, Stella. She is bossy and teases Calvin, so he gets even by taking advantage of her allergy to cats: he puts the neighbor’s cat, Zippy, in Stella’s bed, and Stella breaks out in hives and cannot go on the first big date on which she has been invited since moving to Oahu from Texas. Realizing that he overdid things, Calvin decides to fix the mess by getting Stella a nice birthday present. But he doesn’t have any money. So he has to earn some. How? Well, it takes some help from Calvin’s friends and his little sister, Darci – collecting cans, pulling weeds, even finding loose change around the house – but eventually Calvin is able to buy something special for Stella and help make her 16^th birthday a real celebration. This is a family-focused, heartwarming story, thin on plot and characterization but pleasant enough to pass the time, with illustrations by Jacqueline Rogers that nicely reflect the events.

     The time in which Roland Wright lives is the age of knights (specifically, the year 1409), but the 10-year-old hero of Roland Wright: Future Knight is not the son of a nobleman – his father is a blacksmith – and therefore can never become a knight. Not under normal circumstances, anyway. But there would be no story in this first book of a planned series if matters ended there. So it turns out that Roland’s father’s armor saves the king’s life, and the king decrees that one of the blacksmith’s sons may be trained as a page and eventually, if he proves worthy, be knighted. Roland’s problem is that his older brother, Shelby, decides that he wants to become a page. So their father has to devise a series of competitions to determine which of them will go to the king’s castle and which one will be trained as an armorer. Roland has one unfailing supporter, but he is merely a pet mouse named Nudge, who sleeps in a box by Roland’s bed. Nudge functions as a sort of conscience: Roland looks at him and repeatedly responds to setbacks in a noble and forgiving way instead of taking advantage of situations, as Shelby does. The outcome of the contests is a foregone conclusion – otherwise, why the book’s title? And that robs Tony Davis’ work of some of its potential drama. But the book is written more in a lighthearted vein than a dramatic one – including illustrations by Gregory Rogers that are mostly on the amusing side – and becomes an enjoyable ride into a not-quite-realistic past, a pleasant fantasy of times long gone.

     The time in which Abby Lovitt’s adventure occurs is the 1960s – not so long ago for adults, but the far distant past for today’s young readers. Abby is a seventh grader, and although she is the only protagonist in these five books whose name does not appear in the title, she is very much the focus of Jane Smiley’s novel. As befits a book aimed at a slightly older audience than the other three, The Georges and the Jewels is a bit more serious and a bit more grounded in the everyday real world – or at least the world of a California horse ranch of half a century ago. The novel’s title refers to the horses: Abby’s father wants to prevent Abby from becoming attached to any particular horse, so he names all the geldings George and all the mares Jewel. But there would be no story without some form of attachment – especially in light of the fact that Amy is feeling isolated both at school (where a four-girl group of former friends is bullying her) and at home (where she no longer can spend time with her older brother, Danny, who left after a big fight with their father). The attachment comes in the form of a horse that Abby calls Ornery George – an individualized name after all! – that bucks Abby off whenever he can. So of course Abby’s father insists that Abby get back on and take responsibility for training Ornery George. And that leads, not unexpectedly, to concurrent lessons in relationships with horses and human beings, and with Abby growing stronger and surer of herself than she had ever thought possible. Except for its equine focus, this is not a very original plot, and some aspects, such as the school bullying, seem formulaic. But young horse lovers will enjoy the many details that Smiley provides about raising horses; and the book’s message about growing up, if scarcely a new one, will resonate with girls today despite the novel’s setting in a different time. Readers will also enjoy Elaine Clayton’s illustrations of horse-and-ranch equipment, which are finely rendered and highly realistic.

     And speaking of earlier times, Nick of Time is set not in one but in several of them. Ted Bell’s debut novel for young readers – Bell has written several books for adults – is for the same age range as The Georges and the Jewels but is more of an old-style adventure for boys. It starts out in 1939 – again, not so long ago from an adult perspective, but as distant a time as the Middle Ages for today’s young readers – and then zips back in time in a wonder-filled (if thoroughly unbelievable) adventure that involves bad guys from Nazis to pirates. Nicholas McIver and Kate, his younger sister, live with their father in a lighthouse on the smallest Channel Island; they help their dad provide information to the British government about the circling U-boats that portend an invasion of England. Then Nick discovers a hidden sea chest, which contains not the gold doubloons of a tale by Robert Louis Stevenson (which Nick of Time somewhat resembles) but a time machine – which is used by a pirate named Captain Billy Blood to travel through time to capture children and hold them for ransom. This is utter nonsense, as is the help that Nick and Kate receive through an alliance with Lord Hawke – a nobleman whose children Blood has abducted. But it is highly enjoyable nonsense. There is a brief, experimental trip to April 1, 2079, but the years that really matter here are 1939 and 1805, the latter being the date of an earlier McIver’s encounter with the pirate Blood. Bell must have had great fun writing some of the 1805 dialogue: “Damn it all, Ben! Half-dead sailors drownin’ here on me floor and wild porkers terrorizing the sickbay! Stowaways in the pig locker!” And young readers who are fond of swashbuckling verbal style and a see-saw narrative filled with cliffhanging temporal changes will enjoy the back-and-forth action here, even if Bell does lay things on a bit too thickly at times. The book is a lot of fun in an old-fashioned sort of way – and the new paperback edition includes an interview with Bell (not a very informative one, though), plus an excerpt from the upcoming second Nick McIver adventure, The Time Pirate.

(++++) VIRTUOSITY, FLASHY AND QUIET

Sarasate: Virtuoso Violin Works. Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, violins; Akira Eguchi, piano; Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León conducted by Alejandro Posada. Canary Classics. $16.99.

Liszt: Organ Works, Volume 2. Martin Haselböck, organ. NCA. $24.99 (SACD).

     Spectacular playing is not always at the service of music: sometimes it overwhelms what the composer is trying to communicate. In other cases, though, it is the virtuosity itself that is a big part of what the composer wants to put across, and this is the case with the works of Pablo de Sarasate, one of the great violinists of the 19^th and early 20^th century. Like many other virtuosi, Sarasate wrote pieces for himself to play, designing them to show off his tremendous technical skills as well as, to a lesser extent, his qualities of expressiveness. Sarasate’s works are mostly surface-level showpieces; they remain as effective for violinistic display today as they were when he wrote them. Gil Shaham and his wife, Adele Anthony, play a dozen of these pieces with tremendous flair on the latest CD from Shaham’s own label, Canary Classics. Self-indulgent? Yes, but that goes with the territory of being a virtuoso. And the CD really is splendid to hear, from a technical viewpoint. The four works with orchestra – Carmen Fantasy, Zortzico “Adiós Montaňas Mías,” Zigeunerweisen and Navarra for Two Violins – are live recordings, and the audience’s palpable enthusiasm after each one ends is entirely understandable. The first three of these pieces are played by Shaham, the last by Shaham and Anthony together. The eight other works are studio recordings with piano. Shaham brings a bold, sweeping style to Habanera, Zapateado, Romanza Andaluza, Capricho Vasco and Gavota de Mignon, while Anthony offers somewhat more delicate but equally virtuosic playing in Song of the Nightingale, Airs Écossais and Introduction and Tarantella. The best-known works here – Carmen Fantasy and Zigeunerweisen – are the most effective, but there are charms aplenty in the others, and a certain amount of parlor-room emotionalism as well. It would be a mistake to read too much into these pieces, which are effectively constructed and filled with the colorations of the areas to which they refer (including the Basque region, Scotland, and of course Spain), but which were never intended as deeply meditative. Shaham and Anthony have here produced what is essentially a CD of encores; and very effective encores they are.

     Martin Haselböck uses virtuosity in a very different way in his recordings of Liszt’s organ music. Liszt himself was not above producing pure display pieces – on one level, he was the champion of piano virtuosity for its own sake. But there were many levels to Liszt, and his organ works have depth that many of his piano pieces do not. There are five works on the new Haselböck release: the famous Präludium und Fuge über B-A-C-H (1870 version), Orpheus (1854/60), “Les Morts” – Oraison (1860), “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (1862), and “Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine” (1862). The B-A-C-H prelude and fugue is Liszt’s most popular organ work, and Haselböck’s finely tempered performance shows why: this is a piece of great depth, filled with a learned understanding of the forms of Bach’s time but filtering those forms through Liszt’s own sensibilities. It is a simultaneous tribute to Bach and to Liszt himself; its considerable difficulties are clearly in the service of fulfilling a deeply committed musical vision. Regarding the other four works here, Haselböck’s own remarks (made about “Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine” but applicable to much of Liszt’s organ output) are worth noting: “In a manner that is unique to Liszt the boundaries between transcription, paraphrase and composition appear to have been done away with.” Thus, Orpheus started as a prelude to a Gluck opera; the organ version was created by Robert Schaab; Liszt was unsatisfied with it, but instead of revising it he thoroughly transformed it, adding new elements and altering the conclusion significantly. Liszt could not keep up with the demand for his works and often had students and friends make arrangements for him – but he then tinkered with what others had done, even (as in this case) making substantial changes, before finally signing off on a piece as his own. What ultimately matters is the effectiveness of the final work, not its provenance; and Orpheus is a fine example of Romantic (and romantic) organ music. The three other works on this SACD are all mourning music, tied to various family tragedies in Liszt’s life. All are perhaps best seen as coping mechanisms for Liszt, who expressed himself musically with a level of emotion absent from the letters he wrote in times of inner turmoil. Each of the works is very effective in its own way; all of them (but especially “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”) make for depressing listening, especially for anyone who plays the disc straight through. The religiously focused music stands in striking contrast to the B-A-C-H prelude and fugue; but in all these very different pieces, technical virtuosity is necessary but not sufficient to give the works their full effect.

(+++) LESSER OPERATIC LIGHTS

Florian Leopold Gassmann: Opera Overtures—La notte critica; Gli uccellatori; Filosofia ed amore; La casa di campagna; La contessina; Il viaggiatore ridiculo; Il filosofo innamorato; L’amore artigiano; Un pazzo ne fa cento; Le pescatrici. Eclipse Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sylvia Alimena. Naxos. $8.99.

Richard Strauss: Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier”; Symphonic Fantasy on “Die Frau ohne Schatten”; Symphonic Fragment from “Josephs-Legende.” Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $8.99.

     Sometimes the sheer joy of superb playing is almost enough to make a CD an unqualified success. Almost. That is the case with the new Naxos disc of 10 overtures by Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729-1774), played with tremendous style and élan by the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra under Sylvia Alimena. This is a small orchestra whose members are drawn from the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.), and the group plays as if everyone is a virtuoso and everyone is having tremendous fun. The ensemble work is so good that the works here have the give-and-take of fine chamber music, as if a quartet has outgrown the confines of its size and emerged larger but equally well integrated. Unfortunately, all this wonderful playing is at the service of some rather pedestrian music. There is nothing wrong with Gassmann’s opera overtures, but a full CD of them is a bit much to take – even a CD that is not especially lengthy (64 minutes). Each of these 10 overtures is in the same old-fashioned fast-slow-fast form. All feature bright and lively outer sections sandwiching some lovely lyricism in the middle. Three of the overtures are to operas that were quite popular in their day: Il viaggiatore ridiculo (“The Ridiculous Traveler”), L’amore artigiano (“Love in the Workplace”) and La contessina (“The Young Countess”). But there is nothing in the overtures themselves to distinguish these works from other pleasantly titled ones such as Gli uccellatori (“The Birdcatchers”), Il filosofo innamorato (“The Philosopher in Love”) and Un pazzo ne fa cento (“One Madman Makes Many”). Alimena and the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra are to be commended for going beyond the standard 18^th-century repertoire to dig up some worthy music by a composer who is now little known. But “worthy” does not mean the same thing as “distinctive.” Gassmann’s overtures are well-wrought and pleasant, but a relatively small amount of this music goes a long way.

     Unlike Gassmann, Richard Strauss is a very well-known and popular opera composer: Elektra, Salome, and of course Der Rosenkavalier are staples of the repertoire, and Ariadne auf Naxos and Capriccio are heard from time to time. But other works by Strauss have largely fallen by the wayside – and this was true even during his own lifetime. Therefore, to draw attention to some of his less-often-performed works, Strauss decided near the end of his life to create what are in effect symphonic poems based on them. Hence we have Symphonic Fantasy on “Die Frau ohne Schatten” and Symphonic Fragment from “Josephs-Legende,” the latter based not on an opera but on one of the composer’s two ballets. JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic play these suites – as well as the familiar one from Der Rosenkavalier – with spirit and enthusiasm. The music is clearly Straussian, filled with sweep and power and very lush orchestration, always a Strauss hallmark. The music from Die Frau ohne Schatten is somewhat less effective in this form than the opulent score taken from Josephs-Legende, which is based on the Biblical story of Joseph’s attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife. The ballet music simply flows more naturally on its own. But all this music is interesting and worth hearing – although it could use somewhat warmer brass than the Buffalo Philharmonic displays here. Falletta’s conducting is propulsive but perhaps more straightforward than insightful: she keeps everything together well but does not really pull listeners into the music. Die Frau ohne Schatten, in particular, seems a trifle cool and distant. This is nevertheless a very interesting mixture of some familiar Strauss music with some that most listeners will not have heard before.

(++++) TREASURY TIME

Liō’s Astonishing Tales from the Haunted Crypt of Unknown Horrors. By Mark Tatulli. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Pearls Sells Out: A “Pearls Before Swine” Treasury. By Stephan Pastis. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     There was a time, not so long ago, when the oversize Andrews McMeel “Treasury” volumes presented a real quandary for comics fans. They were simply reprints of strips already issued by the company in smaller-size books – with the Sunday strips offered in color, although cartoonists do not always pick their Sunday colors themselves. This made it tough to decide whether or not to buy the “Treasury” volumes if you already had all the strips in smaller books. Was the color alone worth it? Was the bigger size of the “Treasury” books an advantage (greater heft) or disadvantage (harder to carry around to read while on the go)? Unless your smaller-size collections were falling apart, it was hard to justify buying the “Treasury” books.

     But that was then; this is now. Whether by brilliant planning or by stumbling onto a very good idea, Andrews McMeel now has a genuine value-added proposition in its “Treasury” collections: substantial commentary by the cartoonists. This has been around in hit-or-miss fashion for some time – in many Scott Adams Dilbert “Treasury” books, for example – but as it becomes a more important feature of the “Treasury” collections, it differentiates them significantly from the smaller-size collections of strips and lets readers see those strips in a new light. This may not make the “Treasury” books indispensable, but it’s a big step in that direction. It’s an especially welcome approach in a strip as dark and unusual as Mark Tatulli’s pantomime, Liō, which springs from the same mind that created the far more conventional and cutesy (if slightly offbeat) Heart of the City. Tatulli’s Liō is a boy with an extremely active fantasy life – he would be right at home in the wonderful old E.C. horror comics that were destroyed in the 1950s when the Comics Code was created. And lo and behold, Tatulli’s “Treasury” has a title that is a portmanteau of several E.C. comics – this cartoonist knows whence his work comes. The cover here is enormously clever, looking as weathered and damaged as a 50-plus-year-old comic book would (but don’t expect to pay 12¢ for this volume, no matter what the cover says). The back cover is Tatulli’s update of the old “art school” ads from comics of yore – and the inside front and back covers reproduce actual ads from the old comics, completing a very clever blend of past and present. Tatulli’s discussions of specific strips are revelatory of his thinking process and really do show how carefully Liō is constructed – although we never learn, for example, why the name “Liō” is spelled that way, why Liō has no mother, and why his father almost always has one of his big toes sticking through one of the socks he perpetually wears. Still, when it comes to a strip in which Liō raises a huge reptilian beast that becomes too much for him to handle, and tearfully has to let the creature go to his destiny of destroying a city, Tatulli explains that “for all its horror of the tortured souls in that city, I think this strip is sort of sad. I’m much too wrapped up in the human/animal relationship to care about the burning city.” Tatulli also explains which strips he used to pitch Liō to Universal Press Syndicate, and which ones angered readers and nearly cost the strip newspapers: “Lesson learned! Don’t even think about suggesting cute little puppies get fed to snakes! Very, very bad!” Well, okay – but what makes Liō so special is not only the absence of dialogue but also Tatulli’s willingness to explore the dark depths of a child’s soul, not to mention occasional forays into Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens. Tatulli tells what strips he thinks worked (and why), which didn’t (and why not), and how his own childhood is reflected in some of the strips – from the hair sported by a girl character to Tatulli’s memory of ripping off a mattress tag and fearing arrest. We also get plenty of insights into what Tatulli finds funny: “I love platypuses. They are goofy and cool at the same time.” All this, plus more than 200 pages of Liō cartoons – what a deal!

     You get a similar deal from Stephan Pastis in the latest “Treasury” volume of Pearls Before Swine, but here the commentary is more snide and sarcastic, as befits the strip and the fact that Pastis has done other “Treasury” volumes, while Tatulli has not. Pastis makes comments on one page and retracts them on a later one – for instance, explaining that he stopped bringing the Danny Donkey character into the strip’s “real” world, then noticing that he didn’t stop, then saying he’s too lazy to go back and correct his erroneous comment. He remarks on the frequency with which he draws caricatures of himself in the strip (at least one hopes they are caricatures); he explains which drawings he likes so much that he made them into covers of calendars (no subtlety to the self-plugging there); and he creates verbal juxtapositions that are as much fun as his drawings. On one page, for instance, after an unusually tender strip about Junior (a young crocodile) saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Joy (a young zebra), Pastis says this sort of work “shows that the strip is not always acerbic or about death.” Then, on the very next page, he writes, “Oops. Spoke too soon. One day after being so touching, I decided to throw a lawyer off a cliff. So much for the touchy-feely stuff.” The recurring theme of Pastis’ commentary is, “It remains impossible for me to predict which [strips] will resonate with people.” He tells us of all sorts of misjudgments – ones he thought would do better than they did and others that he thought ordinary but that readers really liked. Along the way, he offers some insight into how he works on the strips: often while wearing only boxers (maybe too much information there); and, as a general rule, “many months in advance, and when they finally appear in newspapers, they do not appear in the order in which I drew them.” This is highly unusual – few cartoonists get far ahead of their deadlines – but it lets Pastis throw out strips he considers weak (some of which, however, appear in a special section of this book), put others on Saturday (the lowest-circulation day for newspapers), and otherwise try to manage his output and his readership. Does it work? There are more than 260 pages of Pearls Before Swine in this “Treasury,” which should be plenty for anyone to decide whether the strip – and Pastis’ approach to it and to humor – are a breath of fresh air or of fetid gas. Opinion remains divided. Buy the book and feel free to form your own.

(++++) ON BEYOND SEUSS

What Was I Scared Of? A Glow-in-the-Dark Encounter. By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $11.99.

Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $4.99.

The Big Green Book of Beginner Books. By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $15.99.

There’s No Place Like Space! All About Our Solar System. By Tish Rabe. Illustrated by Aristides Ruiz. Random House. $8.99.

Find My Feet! By Salina Yoon. Robin Corey Books. $6.99.

     Theodor Seuss Geisel died in 1991, but young readers would never know it from the continuing flood of his work, which has been packaged, repackaged, altered, reconstituted and otherwise re-released – without ever being improved. The Dr. Seuss books are among the genuine treasures of children’s literature, and they are so good that they can not only survive but also thrive in multiple formats and under many circumstances. Thus, a single one of the tales from The Sneetches and Other Stories has now been turned into a book of its own, What Was I Scared Of? A Glow-in-the-Dark Encounter. This was a strange story from the start, involving the encounter between one of those uniquely human/animal Seuss hybrids and a pair of pants – pants that floated along, unoccupied, yet that were quite capable of rowing a boat or riding a bike. Add in the fact that most of the story takes place at night and you have a recipe for something weird: this is one of the oddest Seuss tales of all. But as with many of his stories, it is about more than what its narrative indicates: it has to do with accepting and then confronting your fears, thus finding out that they are not so scary after all. By the end of the book, when the narrator and the pants breezily wave “hi” to each other (and we are told that both smile, although how pants can smile is a subject for philosophers), the scariness is gone but the oddity remains. We never do learn what the pants are all about or how they came to be wandering, empty, throughout those Seussian landscapes. The new book adds one highly appropriate element to the original tale: a coating that makes both the narrator and the pants glow in the dark after only brief exposure to light. This gives the story an extra level of spookiness that it scarcely needs but that certainly highlights the narrative effectively.

     The new version of Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! does not add anything – in fact, it leaves out some of the original. But that is all right, because while the tale of the spooky pants is for ages 6-9, this book is for the youngest kids of all – up to age two. It is a small board book, just right for barely-there attention spans, filled with a sampling of the original Dr. Seuss illustrations and several pages of the original words – just not all of them. Fun in and of itself, it is also likely to whet a young child’s appetite for more of the same – which adults will be able to provide by reading the complete original book.

     The Big Green Book of Beginner Books contains not one but six complete Seuss works – but not ones that he illustrated. The good doctor wrote them under the name Theo. LeSieg – a pen name that abbreviates his real first name (hence the period) and then spells “Geisel” backwards. This is how he identified books for which he wrote the words but for which others did the drawing – the six in this collection being illustrated by Quentin Blake (Great Day for Up), Roy McKie (Would You Rather Be a Bullfrog?), B. Tobey (I Wish That I Had Duck Feet), George Booth (Wacky Wednesday), Michael J. Smollin (Maybe You Should Fly a Jet! Maybe You Should Be a Vet!), and James Stevenson (I Am NOT Going to Get Up Today!). None of these illustrators can hold a candle to Dr. Seuss himself – and in truth, Dr. Seuss’ words in these books do not flow with the same exuberance as in the books that he both wrote and illustrated. He seems to have been a one-man multimedia factory, most at home when thinking verbally and visually at the same time. Nevertheless, these easy-to-read books are often a lot of fun, and kids ages 5-8 – the target age range for the collection – will likely enjoy them for their mildly amusing narratives. They are not Seuss at his best, but they are pretty darned good as straightforward books for young readers.

     The Seuss connection is more tenuous in There’s No Place Like Space! This book – also for ages 5-8 – prominently features the Cat in the Hat on the cover and throughout the pages; it is part of a series called “The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library.” If the beloved cat character attracts readers to the book so they learn about the solar system, that is a good thing. But the fact is that anyone expecting anything remotely Seussian here will be disappointed: Dr. Seuss did not conceptualize this series and neither wrote nor illustrated the book. This is actually a revised version of There’s No Place Like Space! – Pluto has been dropped from the list of planets. There is a clever mnemonic for remembering the planets’ names, and it is a highlight of the book; but by and large, the rhymes are nowhere near those of Dr. Seuss. For instance, “There are colors in space./ I will show some to you./ Neptune, planet eight,/ Is a beautiful blue.” This forces the accent in the planet’s name onto the second syllable rather than the first, where it belongs – a Seussian no-no that could easily have been overcome: “The eighth planet, Neptune’s/ a beautiful blue.” The basic information here – presented in part by the Cat and in part by Thing One and Thing Two – is solid, much better than the poetry, which repeatedly requires those incorrect accents to scan properly: “It’s star dot-to-dot/ Use your imaginations,/ and you’ll see big pictures/ we call constellations!” There’s No Place Like Space! gets a (+++) rating, which is perhaps a tad generous; but it’s hard not to like the creative use of the beloved Seuss characters in what is, after all, a good educational cause.

     And Find My Feet! gets a (++++) rating without having any direct connection to Dr. Seuss except the cleverness of its concept. This is another board book, and it is the sort of thing that will make parents realize how much creativity some children’s-book authors can offer even now that Ted Geisel is no longer among us. This is a match-the-feet-to-the-body book: each page has a picture of an animal; the bottom of the book has a cutout in the shape of half an egg; and within that half-egg, there is an easy-to-rotate wheel displaying the feet of a kitten, duck, cow, frog and horse. Salina Yoon’s idea is to have babies – or, at first, their parents – rotate the wheel to match the feet with the rest of each drawing. This is a lot of fun – the drawings are adorable, and are distinguished by color as well as shape. And as kids get a little bit older, they will quickly discover humorous ways to mismatch feet and bodies. That too is part of the fun of this book, making it a worthy successor to the unduplicatable humor of the ever-wonderful Dr. Seuss.

(++++) GHOSTIES AND GHOULIES

43 Old Cemetery Road, Book Two: Over My Dead Body. By Kate Klise. Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. Harcourt. $15.

Nation. By Terry Pratchett. Harper. $8.99.

The Other Side: A Teen’s Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal. By Marley Gibson, Patrick Burns, and Dave Schrader. Graphia. $10.99.

Ghost Huntress, Book 2: The Guidance. By Marley Gibson. Graphia. $8.99.

Gifted, Book 3: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Kingfisher. $7.99.

     Things don’t merely go bump in the night in the best of these books about the paranormal – they communicate quite clearly, sometimes to humorous effect and sometimes in the service of more serious matters. Humor is paramount in the second book of the Klise sisters’ new series, 43 Old Cemetery Road, and it’s a good thing there is so much amusement here, since the plot has more holes than in the first book, Dying to Meet You. That volume introduced the town of Ghastly, Illinois; the old mansion whose address forms the title of the series; the spirit of Olive C. Spence, builder of the house and, in her day, an unsuccessful writer; Ignatius B. Grumpley, a successful modern author suffering from writer’s block and a bad case of grumpiness; and Seymour Hope, preteen son of the money-grubbing Les and Diane Hope, who abandoned him in Ghastly for travels in Europe to peddle their book debunking ghosts. All those characters reappear in Over My Dead Body, and new ones are thrown into the mix, notably a singularly unpleasant anti-ghost and anti-Halloween crusader named Dick Tater, a librarian named M. Balm, and a sympathetic judge named Claire Voyant. You’ve got to love those punny Klise names, and it’s hard not to love their convoluted plots and wonderful illustrations, too. This book does strain credulity in suggesting that Dick Tater and his organization, IMSPOOKY (International Movement for the Safety & Protection Of Our Kids & Youth), have the power to stop all Halloween celebrations and compel people to burn all books of ghost stories. But the overstatement makes for a good cautionary tale, in which even many self-proclaimed lovers of the stories say they will go ahead and burn the books – a gentle but effective warning about overweening moral authority. Over My Dead Body moves smartly along through the usual Klise mixture of pictures, letters, computer-screen communication (ghost Olive’s favored approach), and newspaper pages, and its eventual triumph of goodness over badness (including, again rather unbelievably, having Seymour taken from his parents and adopted by Grumpley) is a fitting conclusion that guarantees more adventures ahead.

     Nation is a very different sort of adventure, although ghosts – specifically, ancestral spirits – play a large part here, too. Terry Pratchett (now Sir Terry after being knighted earlier this year) has here created one of the best modern versions of a Robinson Crusoe story. Deservedly a bestseller in hardcover, Nation is now available in paperback and will hopefully find its way to many more bookshelves in this less-costly version. Supposedly a book for teenagers (it is recommended for ages 12 and up), Nation tackles very adult themes indeed, including politics, religion, the relationship between men and women, the role of violence in nation-building, and much more. It is an alternative-history tale in which the daughter of the heir apparent to the British throne is shipwrecked by a tsunami that also wipes out an entire group of island people except one: a boy named Mau, who was on another island when the wave hit. It falls to Mau and this girl from another place – Ermintrude, but she prefers to be called Daphne – to reestablish Mau’s nation, with a little help and a lot of interference from its spirits, and using the motley collection of tsunami survivors that washes ashore here and there. The book is filled with subplots, high and low humor, and characters in whom one cannot literally believe but about whom one comes to care deeply. And it has a spectacular conclusion whose daring and sheer sweep are breathtaking even after repeated readings. This is in part, but only in part, a ghost story; it is, above all, a human story, and a brilliantly realized one.

     Back in the real world, there really are ghosts among us, at least according to Marley Gibson, a self-proclaimed ghost huntress who approaches spirits in books written both as fiction and nonfiction. The Other Side is seriously intended as a guide for teenage ghost hunters, explaining the tools of the trade while trying to keep the narrative on the light side: a chapter on electronic voice phenomena is called “What is an EVP, and can it cause embarrassing stains?” – and one on the translucent spheres that sometimes show up in photos is called “What are orbs? (Hint: Not a techno band.)” Gibson devotes some time to phony mediums and well-meaning but mistaken people who believe they have seen and even photographed ghosts; but she is quite convinced that spirits do walk among us, to the point of warning teens to practice “safe hex” when searching for them. (To this end, she includes a lot of Biblical prayers but nothing from, say, Confucianism.) Gibson says skepticism about spirits is justified but cynicism is not, and she defines cynics as people who “believe that if something cannot be reproduced, it must be dismissed.” Not coincidentally, that is the definition of a scientist. Teens who want to believe there are huntable spirits out there will give this book a (+++) rating; scientifically oriented readers will not rate it at all – and that is obviously fine with Gibson and her coauthors.

     Gibson is actually more interesting in the thinly fictionalized Ghost Huntress series, in the first book of which the central character proclaimed, “I am Kendall Moorhead. Psychic. Intuitive. Sensitive. Ghost huntress. No more wigging out.” That book, The Awakening, was about Kendall’s move from Chicago to a small town in Georgia, where she discovered her powers after her father bought a white-noise machine and Kendall heard a voice coming out of it. The second book, The Guidance, is more of the same but with additional, typical teen angst thrown in – in the form of Courtney Langdon, a rival at school who decides to distract attention from Kendall by doing her own dabbling in the supernatural. Bad move. Kendall is not exactly nice to Courtney, at one point arranging for her to become physically ill during a fetal-pig dissection – after which Kendall remarks, “Well, that couldn’t have gone more perfectly. I know it’s not exactly the classiest thing I’ve ever done, but the beeyotch had it coming…” But what Courtney doesn’t deserve is being possessed by the spirit of a Civil War soldier that “uses its powers in a cruel or unjust way, weighing down a human’s body or mind for the spirit’s own enjoyment or purpose.” And then there is Kendall’s guiding spirit: a pretty young girl, about whom Kendall’s mother knows more than she is letting on. There is also some help here from the church, in the person of the singularly poorly named Father Mass. Visitations, broken glass and mirrors, and other sorts of manifestations lead first to a climax involving the soldier and then to some frightening implications for Kendall’s future – to be explored in the next book of the series. The Guidance is well enough written and quickly enough paced to get a (+++) rating for fans of the genre; but Gibson’s final disclaimer, in which she tries to connect the fiction directly with real-world experiences, may best be taken with a dose of skepticism, if not cynicism.

     The Gifted series covers some of the same territory, but it is not strictly ghost-focused and never pretends to be more than light entertainment – a fact that stands in its favor. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow follows Out of Sight, Out of Mind and Better Late Than Never in this saga based on a clever underlying idea: what if “gifted” students weren’t necessarily smart but were actually, you know, gifted with unusual powers? There are nine “gifted” students of this type at Meadowbrook Middle School, making it possible that this series will be going on for some time. It is Emily, who can see into the future, who is the focus of Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Like all the gifts of the “gifted,” Emily’s is imperfect: she cannot tell when something will happen, just that it will occur. And this spells trouble at Meadowbrook, where Emily’s fellow students are starting to disappear, one by one. Marilyn Kaye does not seem to take these books too seriously, which helps them get a (+++) rating even though much of what goes on is formulaic. In the current volume, video games and basketball turn into distractions (or maybe clues); there is a planned bank robbery in which the talents of the “gifted” are called upon; and certain of the “gifted” end up manipulating others for purposes of their own. There’s dirty work afoot here that goes well beyond the school: Madame, who teaches the “gifted,” says, “I’m worried for the world.” She apparently says this with a straight face, but it is impossible to take the Gifted series entirely seriously. Still, as a venture into escapist paranormality, it can be a lot of fun.

(+++) THE LATEST ODDITIES

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2010. Scholastic. $15.99.

Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids: Facts, Figures, & Stats. Scholastic. $13.99.

     Apparently facts need lots of dressing up if they are going to interest young readers. In the case of the latest Ripley’s Believe It or Not! volume, they apparently also need a really weird 3-C cover to get people interested in obtaining information from an old-fashioned book rather than online. In truth, the franchise developed more than 90 years ago by Robert Ripley was always presented with an eye toward the bizarre and outré. The man was quite an entrepreneur, being the force behind a nationwide radio show and a series of museums – there are now 30 of them – called Odditoriums. The Ripley’s franchise has changed quite a bit in recent years, moving from its original focus on odd customs and people – a sort of expansion of what used to be called a freak show – into matters that are simply offbeat. The 2010 book includes a cornflake shaped like the state of Illinois (sold on eBay for $1,350); a house made entirely from empty plastic bottles; a 100-year-old paraglider; a blind teenager who finds his way around using echolocation; an 18-inch-high robot with the vocabulary of a five-year-old child; a piece of art made from the small stickers affixed to supermarket produce; a Mud Day celebration at a town in Michigan; and so on. There is very little here that a modern young reader is likely to find unbelievable – even the Dalmatian that rides a bike and the cart-pulling rooster just seem like the animals readily found on YouTube. And of course Web videos have action that no traditional book can reproduce. There is something a trifle old-fashioned and a little sad in the persistence of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in a world where so many almost-unbelievable things can be found on the computer with such ease – and for free. This is a nicely put together book, but perhaps the time for this sort of display has passed.

     There is always time for lists, though, and the Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids is full of them: the six systems of the human body, the 10 most visited U.S. national parks, the five largest world religions, all 195 independent countries in the world, and more. There are chapters here on animals, the environment, inventors, math, plants, space, sports, weather, world history and more – nothing in depth, but lots of once-over-lightly facts. This is a place to go to see the flag of Bhutan, find out the length of the Mississippi River, learn common words in Egyptian Arabic, discover how many miles are in a light year, learn which countries have the most cell phones per 100 people (the United States is not even in the top 10), and get the names of all U.S. vice presidents. For all the attempted coolness of the book’s presentation – lots of color, lots of pictures, a jazzy layout – it is at bottom a geek’s delight, of greatest interest to people who find facts interesting just because they’re cool. There are some useful tie-ins to the Web – for instance, you can find out which 10 countries produce the most carbon dioxide, then check your local air quality at www.airnow.gov. But the main purpose of the Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids is simply to present a series of more-or-less-random facts in an entertaining, easily accessible way. There’s nothing wrong with that – but it does mean that the book will be of interest only to readers who want to know the 10 top-grossing movies of 2008 or the five highest U.S. mountains, and who would rather have the information in book form than look it up on a computer.

(++++) SYMPHONIES THOUGHT AND RETHOUGHT

Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus ex Machina for Piano and Orchestra. Terrence Wilson, piano; Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. $8.99.

Franz Schmidt: Symphony No. 2; Fuga Solemnis for organ, sixteen wind instruments and percussion. Anders Johnsson, organ; Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vassily Sinaisky. Naxos. $8.99.

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 6. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $24.99 (2 CDs).

     There have been many obituaries written for the symphony – dating back to the years when Beethoven’s were considered unsurpassable (and his Ninth was deemed virtually unplayable). But the form is so attractive to so many composers that even those for whom Beethoven’s shadow seemed longest (think Brahms) eventually overcame their misgivings and tried their own essays in symphonic form. The pattern continues even today: what more can there possibly be to say in a symphony? Yet the form’s inherent adaptability, added to the thoughtfulness of some composers in redefining and expanding what the term can mean, has led to startlingly varied symphonic productions throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st. One of the cleverest recent approaches to the symphony is Michael Daugherty’s – although purists will argue, with some justification, that his Metropolis Symphony is really a suite, its movements related in concept but not musically. Indeed, Daugherty himself says the five movements can be played independently. Matters of definition aside, Metropolis Symphony is a work of appealing sound, interesting instrumentation, and cleverly interconnected themes (not musical themes but programmatic ones); and it is great fun to listen to – a statement that cannot always be made about 20^th-century symphonies. The work is a non-meditative meditation on the Superman ethos. Daugherty started composing it in 1988 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the iconic comic-book hero; he completed it in 1993; and it was first performed in 1994. It has received a number of performances since, and it deserves to: this is appealing music that speaks to a peculiarly American cultural icon using a firm grasp of compositional techniques and keeping one eye (or ears) always on pleasing the audience. Quite an accomplishment. The styles of the five movements vary widely: “Lex” (for archvillain Lex Luthor) features perpetuum mobile triplets on a solo violin (well played here by Mary Kathryn Van Osdale) ; “Krypton” (Superman’s home planet) combines eerie glissandi with increasingly ominous fire bells; “MXYZPTLK” (for the fifth-dimensional imp who troubles Superman periodically) includes antiphonally placed flute soloists and an emphasis on all the instruments’ higher registers; “Oh, Lois!” is a virtuosic and very funny tribute to Superman’s many rescues of Lois Lane; and “Red Cape Tango,” inspired by Superman’s death (and later resurrection), sounds like a stylized fight with interpolations of the Medieval Dies irae. Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony really go to town with this music – hearing it is an exhilarating experience. The symphony is paired with a sort-of piano concerto, written in 2007, called Deus ex Machina. This is Daugherty’s three-movement tribute to the world of trains, from the future they once seemed to represent (first movement) to their funereal role (second movement, which recalls the train that carried assassinated President Lincoln’s body home for burial) to the end of the steam-locomotive era (third movement). The sound pictures here are lovingly painted, the piano writing is forthright and clever, and the work as a whole is appealing both as entertainment and as an extended meditation on a once-crucial form of transportation that has largely fallen by the wayside in the United States (although scarcely so in other countries).

     Franz Schmidt had his own ideas about creating something new in symphonic form – less radical than Daugherty’s, but then, Schmidt’s Second Symphony dates to 1911-13, a post-Mahler, pre-World War I era in which musical radicalism was different. Schmidt, a fine but neglected composer, builds the symphony around a single basic theme that is stated by violins and clarinets at the start and subsequently varied, pulled apart, upended and turned inside out and every which way for nearly 50 minutes. Schmidt was fond of large orchestras, and his Symphony No. 2 uses a very big one indeed, including eight horns, a contrabass tuba, four timpani (plus bass drum and side drum), lots of percussion, and winds and strings galore. The work is in three movements – the typical form of a piano sonata, which is what Schmidt originally conceived it to be – and includes a highly impressive set of variations in the middle. This is a big work in every sense, sprawling and intense, thoroughly Romantic in sensibility, and very difficult to play (especially for the strings). The Malmö Symphony Orchestra is perhaps not ideally suited for something quite this large and complicated, but Vassily Sinaisky conducts stylishly and the players sound ardent, if occasionally a bit strained. Also on this CD is one of the works that explains Schmidt’s modern-day neglect. Fuga Solemnis is, on its face, a fascinating piece, requiring very considerable dexterity by the organist (Anders Johnsson does a fine job) and a conductor’s ability to balance a highly unusual array of instruments: six trumpets, six horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani and tam-tam. This was Schmidt’s last organ work, completed in 1937, and shows a sure mastery of form and orchestration. Hearing it in a strictly musical context is a highly involving experience. But many people cannot hear it that way, for Fuga Solemnis was reworked under Nazism into an interlude in a cantata called Deutsche Auferstehung (“German Resurrection”), using words by one of Schmidt’s pupils. The cantata was not performed in Schmidt’s lifetime, but its association with the Third Reich – and, by extension, the association of Schmidt’s music in general with the Nazi era – makes this very talented composer a very tough sell for some audiences, even today.

     In contrast, one of the easiest composers to “sell” to modern audiences is Tchaikovsky, whose six symphonies were thoroughly Romantic but very, very different from each other. The new London Philharmonic set of performances of Nos. 1 and 6 gets a (+++) rating – a low one – despite its excellent playing and very fine sound (the performances were recorded live). The reason it does not rate higher is that Vladimir Jurowski falls into a common trap of conductors performing well-known symphonies: he feels he has to do something with them. In No. 6, the “Pathétique,” this means toning down the heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of the work; taking the last part of the third movement so quickly that even as fine an orchestra as the LPO can barely keep up; and making the gong stroke near the end of the finale much too loud for its context. In No. 1 (“Winter Dreams”), Jurowski tears at the fabric of the music to even more disappointing effect, most unfortunately in the finale, where he speeds up the Andante lugubre introduction tremendously as it ends so he can slow down the opening of the Allegro maestoso main section, and where the speedup toward the very end of the movement (followed by a huge slowdown for the concluding chords) is so breathtakingly wrongheaded that it is hard to remember that Jurowski is Russian by birth. The LPO sound is a little thin for this velvety music, although listeners who want a “clean” sound in Tchaikovsky and are tired of overly lush, overwrought performances will enjoy it. And when Jurowski lets the music flow as the composer intended, there are many lovely moments here. But for most listeners, there will be far too many quirks to make this two-CD set a worthwhile purchase.

(+++) SOUNDS OF THE PAST

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4; Gluck: Overture to “Iphigenie in Aulis.” Leon Fleisher, piano; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Hans Rosbaud (Concerto No. 2) and Otto Klemperer (Concerto No. 4; Gluck). Medici Arts. $16.99.

Richard Strauss: Don Quixote; Also Sprach Zarathustra. Alwin Bauer, cello; Paul Schroer, viola; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Medici Arts. $16.99.

Ireland: A London Overture; Piano Concerto; The Forgotten Rite—Prelude; These Things Shall Be. Eileen Joyce, piano; Redvers Llewellyn, baritone; Luton Choral Society and London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. LPO. $16.99.

     There are many archival recordings now being released in CD form, and fans of particular performers – or particular performances – will be delighted to have them in a modern format. But, for the most part, only such committed fans will be strongly attracted to CDs such as these two, because as good as the remastering and production are, monophonic recordings from 50 to 60 years ago are simply not what most listeners today expect to (or will be pleased to) hear.

     For those who are familiar with Leon Fleisher’s performances before his decades-long absence from the concert stage in works for both hands (because of focal dystonia in his right hand), any recording of Fleisher performing Beethoven or Brahms piano concertos is cause for celebration: he was particularly well known for these works, and always approached them with grace, finesse and extraordinary understanding. Fleisher’s recordings of the Beethoven piano concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra are classics in every sense, near-perfect meldings of pianistic and orchestral sound and style. Next to them, the Medici Arts CD featuring the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester (now known as WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln) are a touch on the pale side. In No. 2, recorded in 1957, Fleisher is as light and Mozartean as can be, with Hans Rosbaud conducting in workmanlike fashion that supports the pianist but does not seem in full partnership with him. Otto Klemperer’s conducting in No. 4 and the Gluck overture – these performances date to 1956 – is more supple and effective. Later Klemperer recordings often suffered from heavy-handedness and overly slow tempos, but here the accompaniment is finely proportioned and the orchestra really takes part in a dialogue with the soloist (especially important in the give and take of the concerto’s second movement). These are solid if not spectacular performances, well recorded for their time, and certainly worth having for fans of Fleisher in his younger days: he was not yet 30 when these recordings were made.

     Equally solid and equally intriguing are Dimitri Mitropoulos’ Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester performances of two Richard Strauss tone poems, recorded in 1959 – the year before the conductor’s death. Mitropoulos was an early champion of the works of Gustav Mahler, but it was left to his protégé Leonard Bernstein (who took over the New York Philharmonic from Mitropoulos in 1957) to begin the great surge in Mahler’s popularity that has persisted to the present. The Strauss recordings show a conductor fully at home with the same sort of large orchestral forces and complex structures that Mahler championed. These are finely crafted performances that treat the works’ individual sections (13 in Don Quixote, 11 in Also Sprach Zarathustra) as independent but interrelated segments, while also providing the works with dramatic unity through well-chosen tempos and sensitive orchestral balance. That balance does not always come off as well as it might in the recording, though, and the very lush sound that makes Strauss so effective is missing here. The solo cello and viola in Don Quixote do stand out well, but neither of these works has the fullness of the Strauss sound at its most opulent. Still, these are very worthy performances that will be a treat for fans of Mitropoulos, who was a thoughtful and highly skilled conductor.

     The new LPO disc of music by John Ireland dates back even further than the two Medici Arts CDs, to 1949, and it wears its sonic age only moderately well. This is a live recording of a 70^th-birthday concert for Ireland (1879-1962), including his only piano concerto – indeed, his only concerto of any type – as well as his sole work for chorus and orchestra, These Things Shall Be. The concerto, written in 1930, was first recorded by Eileen Joyce in 1942 with the Hallé Orchestra under Leslie Heward. Joyce’s celebratory 1949 performance became her second recording of the work, which she plays with understanding and sensitivity. In fact, she makes a good case for more-frequent hearings of this often-jazzy concerto, with its hints of Prokofiev and Gershwin. These Things Shall Be, for baritone, chorus and orchestra, whose première was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in 1937, is performed with enthusiasm but seems rather overblown. A London Overture – a 1936 expansion of Ireland’s 1934 A Comedy Overture for brass band – is an effective curtain-raiser; and The Forgotten Rite, a “prelude for orchestra” completed in 1918, is pleasantly atmospheric if not especially distinguished. Ireland’s sensibilities were essentially Impressionist, and much of his music tends to sound dated today, but certainly Boult gave it his all in celebrating the composer’s birthday. The art of live recording was not as advanced as that of studio recording in the 1940s, and the works as heard here seem rather flattened and constricted. The CD is an interesting historical document and will be worthwhile for those with an existing interest in Ireland’s music, but it is scarcely the most effective gateway to this composer’s works for those who are not already familiar with them.

(++++) DELIGHTS FOR PRESCHOOL AND UP

Lights Out, Night’s Out. By William Boniface. Illustrated by Milena Kirkova. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $17.99.

Dark Night. By Dorothée de Monfried. Random House. $14.99.

Princess and Fairy. By Anna Pignataro. Knopf. $14.99.

Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated. By Florence Parry Heide. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

The Little Dump Truck. By Margery Cuyler. Illustrated by Bob Kolar. Christy Ottaviano Books. $12.99.

Chief Rhino to the Rescue. By Sam Lloyd. Henry Holt. $14.99.

     Kids ages 3-8 – roughly, preschoolers through first-graders – will have a great time with all these books, each of which is quite different from the others. The illustrations are the most fascinating part of Lights Out, Night’s Out, the third book in a series called AniMotion. This is Accord Publishing’s version of the increasingly popular lenticular animation, which makes still pictures – or, in this case, parts of still pictures – seem to move. The rhymed story here is simple enough: it is about nocturnal creatures, from owl and hedgehog to cricket and firefly. William Boniface gives eight well-rhymed lines to each creature: “The spider spins/ Her silky web,/ As evening breezes/ Flow and ebb./ She flits along/ That silken track,/ Just waiting for/ A midnight snack!” Milena Kirkova creates pictures that partake of cartoon simplification but also highlight real-life elements: a close-up view of a baby raccoon, for instance, or of the head of a wolf. And within each picture, something moves as the reader starts to turn the page. Two bats fly; the lights of fireflies flicker in the night sky; a jaguar’s tail moves from side to side; a hippopotamus’ head rises from the water. Boniface and Kirkova cleverly end the book by moving from the exotic to the mundane: the final scene shows a child’s bedroom with a hamster – a nocturnal pet – running in its wheel. The inside back cover offers additional information on all 12 of the creatures in the book (that hamster may run five miles in a single night!), giving Lights Out, Night’s Out an educational element to complement its very entertaining presentation.

     Another nighttime tale – and one that is especially well-plotted – is Dark Night, in which a little boy named Felix is walking home through some scary woods when he hears a loud sound and runs to hide in a hollow tree. Sure enough, a wolf shows up, builds a fire and sits down to warm his front paws – only to be scared off himself by a tiger – which is frightened away by a huge crocodile. Felix shrinks back in the tree and discovers a doorknob, which opens a door that leads to a stairway that leads to the under-tree home of a friendly rabbit who comes up with a very clever way of helping Felix get home safely. In fact, Felix and the rabbit end up scaring the wolf, tiger and crocodile so much that all three of them come to Felix’s house looking for help – so Felix and the rabbit have to scare them again to get them to run away “as fast as their feet could carry them.” The simple story and amusingly cartoonish illustrations keep Dorothée de Monfried’s book from itself being scary for young children, and in fact make it a wonderful way for parents to help kids overcome their nighttime fears: just imagine being rescued by that helpful bunny.

     Princess and Fairy has a more straightforward story but is put together in a particularly interesting way – and it has not one but two bunnies, namely the ones of the title. Princess and Fairy are best friends who share everything: “Midnight treats and secret wishes,/ Toadstool dancing and fairy swishes,/ Hide-and-seek at Ladybird Bend,/ Best of friends to the fairy end!” They get a letter from the Queen inviting them to a party – and this is where Anna Pignataro’s design gets clever. The envelope, which includes a small piece of paper saying “an invitation from the Queen,” is a three-dimensional element of a left-hand-page illustration, while the list the friends make of things they will need for the party is attached to the facing right-hand page. Then, when Princess and Fairy go shopping, every stall at the Three Wishes Market has its own sign and offerings, from purple pineapples to “Never Burn Pots ‘n’ Pans.” Part of the fun here is trying to find specific objects in Pignataro’s elaborate drawings – a pair of cherries and a yellow rose at the market, a blue purse and more at Three Penny Lane (which features “Trillions of dresses in all the right hues,/ Hats and tiaras and sparkly shoes”), and so on. The friends go to Fairyland Fairground and elsewhere as they search for items on their list, eventually getting so dirty that they show up at the party in “freckled frocks and grubby shoes” – but the Fairy Queen is enchanted by their smiles, and everything ends happily. Little girls will love the outfits and the book’s color scheme, which is largely pink. And Pignataro’s use of glitter makes the illustrations shine particularly brightly.

     There is a princess in Princess Hyacinth as well, but unlike a flying, winged fairy princess, she looks like an ordinary everyday little girl: “She had two eyes, with a nose between them and a mouth under that – you know, the usual things in the usual arrangement.” But Princess Hyacinth is anything but usual. She floats. There’s no particular reason for it – she’s just immune to gravity. Of course, she can’t go outside, because she would float away. And even in the palace, there are dangers – unless she is wearing weights sewn into her clothes and the heaviest crown in the kingdom. Then “she didn’t float at all. In fact, she could hardly move.” Florence Parry Heide makes this delightfully offbeat story into a real page-turner, and Lane Smith’s illustrations – showing the princess looking so small in the huge palace, whether weighed down by her clothing or floating in her royal underwear while asleep – add an additional just-right whimsical touch. And there are neat plot twists, too. First, the Princess almost manages to make friends with a boy named Boy, who flies his kite (adorned with a crown) just outside the palace. Then, the Princess – weighed down and dragging herself through the park – orders a balloon man to tie a string to her, takes off her weighty clothes, and floats happily like a balloon….until a dog startles the man and he lets go of the string. Princess Hyacinth ends up having a simply marvelous time in the air, except that she can’t get down – until Boy comes unwittingly to her rescue. Add the way that happens to what happens next and you have a delightful conclusion to a story that does not quite end the way fairy tales usually do – although there is a sort of happily-ever-after to it.

     The happiness is of a different kind, and is decidedly more boy-oriented, in The Little Dump Truck, in which Margery Cuyler’s rhymes chronicle a day in the life of a helpful truck and its driver, Hard Hat Pete. The first line on each page is the same – for example, “I’m a little dump truck/ hauling stones and rocks,/ bumping, bouncing, thumping,/ crossing city blocks.” Some of Cuyler’s rhymes are especially neatly turned: “I’m a little dump truck/ waiting for debris./ Excavator scoops—/ drops dirt into me!” Bob Kolar’s illustrations are enjoyable, too, showing the construction equipment (and all the other vehicles in the city) with bumpers that look like mouths and with headlight “eyes” that glance around and sometimes reflect personalities: one truck has rectangular rather than round eyes, with a focused expression; a limousine looks intensely ahead as its driver navigates through traffic. The dump truck works in the city, then heads onto the highway “to another state,” stopping for fuel along the way, and finally gets to a new workplace to comment, “I love my job – Hooray!”

     Chief Rhino loves his job, too, but in Chief Rhino to the Rescue he loves it a bit too much. Sam Lloyd’s amusing story of Whoops-a-Daisy World (which Lloyd previously visited in Doctor Meow’s Big Emergency) follows the pattern of well-meaning characters making honest mistakes that turn out just fine in the end. After we meet Chief Rhino and find out how strong and brave he is, we watch him searching the town for fires and spying one – to which he promptly races, saying, “It’s time for me to save the day!” But when the chief and his fellow firefighters get to Number One House Row and determinedly get their gear together so Chief Rhino can spray water on the fire, things turn out to be not quite what they seemed – or not quite what Chief Rhino thought they were, anyway. The misunderstanding turns out to be funny – and there is no harm done even though Chief Rhino says, “Instead of saving the day, I’ve ruined it!” But everything ends happily with a big party and some mighty silly drawings to go with the sort of amusing mistake that lies at the heart of Whoops-a-Daisy World stories.

(++++) AN EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition. By Robert Franek, Tom Meltzer, Christopher Maier, Erik Olson, Julie Doherty, and Eric Owens. Princeton Review/Random House. $22.99.

     The silliest thing about this otherwise serious college guide is the implied precision of its title. The number 371 could as easily be, say, 402, or 247, or anything else. Using a number that suggests there is a college No. 372 that somehow didn’t make the grade is as sensible as reading an airline schedule and really believing that a flight will take off at precisely 9:51 and land at exactly 11:13. The precise number is at odds with the Princeton Review’s own statement, “At the end of the day, it’s what YOU think about the schools that matters most.”

     Still, the basic approach of this book makes it an extraordinarily useful guide for high-school students looking for the best match for their individual interests and talents. Yes, the authors provide lists of “great schools for 15 of the most popular undergraduate majors,” and yes, there are lists showing colleges with most-accessible and least-accessible professors, best and worst college libraries, best career services, most-beautiful and least-attractive campuses, and more. But these lists are mere starting points, because the meat of this book is in the form of comments by the schools’ own students – plus a wide variety of statistics that range from the useful (percentage of students admitted from wait list, percentage of professors who teach undergraduates) to the politically correct (“green rating,” which includes such factors as the percentage of food expenditures directed toward “local, organic, or otherwise environmentally preferable food” and whether the school “employs a dedicated full-time [or full-time equivalent] sustainability officer”).

     The best thing to do with The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition, is to use it not as a starting point but as the second step in a college search. That is, after making a preliminary list of colleges that seem attractive because of geography, reputation, majors, cost and whatever other factors you want to consider – using your high school’s college counselor as a primary resource – turn to this book for an excellent overview of each college’s statistics and the opinions of its students. So you will find out that students at Hampshire College (Massachusetts) say they “are normally very good at entertaining” themselves; that “getting involved in the community is second nature” to most students at Ithaca College (New York); that “the party scene at Miami [University of Ohio] is top-notch…[with] tons of bars and off-campus houses devoted solely to us”; that Purdue University (Indiana) is “a place for anyone to completely blend in or stand out”; and so on. And these comments are simply from the section of each listing called “Life.” There are also sections on “Academics” and “Student Body,” plus comments by the Princeton Review on admissions and financial aid, plus remarks by each school’s admissions office. Of particular value is a section called “The Inside Word,” where students attracted by the “Life” description of Purdue, for example, will find out that “the fact that Purdue holds class rank as one of its most important considerations in the admission of candidates is troublesome”; that Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology’s “relatively high acceptance rate is somewhat deceiving because the applicant pool is largely self-selecting”; that “it won’t be long before the academic strength found at Oglethorpe [University in Georgia] attracts wider attention and more applicants.”

     Accompanying the two-page narrative about each school are statistics on selectivity, deadlines, financial aid, academics, most popular majors and more; cost information on tuition, room and board, fees, and books and supplies; the school’s environment; its overall quality of life; and on and on. In fact, the two pages accorded each college in The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition provide far more useful, easier-to-access data – in an easy-to-compare format – than students will find by visiting the schools’ Web sites, whose quality and design diverge widely. Ultimately, of course, no book, including this one, can pick the best school for any individual; Princeton Review in fact strongly advocates campus visits as a way for potential students to get a “feel” for each college in which they think they are interested. There really is a good college match out there for anyone who wants to attend, but the decision on which college that is varies as widely as do students themselves. The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition cannot provide a definitive answer as to which college is best for any individual, but it can and does give everyone plenty of easy-to-understand information to make this highly personal decision as easy (or at least nontraumatic) as it can possibly be.

(+++) KIDS IN THE LIMELIGHT

Slumgirl Dreaming: Rubina’s Journey to the Stars. By Rubina Ali in collaboration with Anne Berthod and Divya Dugar. Delacorte Press. $9.99.

First Kids: The True Stories of All the Presidents’ Children. By Noah McCullough. Scholastic. $7.99.

     It would be unkind to suggest that these books attempt shamelessly to exploit a young star of Slumdog Millionaire and the popularity of President Barack Obama’s children, respectively. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the books are cashing in on the 15 minutes of fame usually accorded to celebrities – young and old alike. But despite a certain cynicism in the books’ presentations, they contain a lot of interesting information and some material that will make readers really think about their subjects.

     Slumgirl Dreaming, in which the story of Rubina Ali – who at age nine played the youngest version of Latika in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire – is told by French journalist Anne Berthod and Indian journalist Divya Dugar, lets Rubina speak in her own voice in ways that are not typical in biographies of child stars. “I found Nicole Kidman strange but also very charming,” we learn at one point. “Everything was done on the set according to her desires and mood.” We never quite learn what the strangeness was, but the openness of Rubina’s comments shines through. “As for my biological mother, I hate her more than ever,” Rubina says after the woman accuses Rubina’s father of trying to sell Rubina to a sheik from Dubai. Also, “Americans eat different food to [sic] us. There was no dal, no chawal or chicken masala, but odd, strange-tasting things. It was all so tasteless.” This sort of fish-out-of-water comment typifies Slumgirl Dreaming, and can stand for the topic of the book as a whole. The reality is that “life hasn’t changed much for me except that now I’m aware of a world much more beautiful than my slum,” Rubina explains. Despite many offers to relocate the family, Rubina’s father, her beloved aba, refuses to leave the slum, because that is where he works as a carpenter and where he has all his contacts. “I want to become a great actress,” says Rubina. “If not an actress, I would like to be an astronaut.” That juxtaposition is typical of the charming naïveté that permeates Slumgirl Dreaming, in which the stories about stars known to Americans – Kidman, Danny Boyle and others – really are secondary to the tale of a young girl raised to heights of which most people worldwide can barely dream, only to find herself afterwards neither here nor there: living again in the slum where she has always been, but well aware now (as she was not before) of how big a world is out there beyond the boundaries of the poorest parts of Mumbai. Rubina’s world is reflected in her entire outlook on life. For instance, once, on the set, “someone was closing the toilet door and my finger got in the way. But there was a doctor on the set who bandaged it. In the slums, kids keep falling and getting hurt so it didn’t bother me that much.” This, not the glories of an award-winning film, is the reality of Rubina’s life.

     Things are considerably more upbeat for the Obama children, but as First Kids makes clear, many stories of presidential offspring can be as tragic as anything in Rubina Ali’s world. Noah McCullough, a 14-year-old author and political junkie, is entirely matter-of-fact in recounting what happened to some presidential children. “Edward Garfield was born on Christmas Day in 1874. He didn’t get to know his new family very well because he died on October 25, 1876, of whooping cough, just twenty-two months after his birth.” “William Lewis Arthur was born while his dad was in the military on December 10, 1860. He died of convulsions at the age of two, on July 7, 1863.” McCullough includes some interesting trivia in “Fast Facts” sections about each presidential family. “The [Rutherford B.] Hayes family had the very first Siamese cat in America.” “The [Millard] Fillmores were the first White House family to enjoy a bathtub. It was made of mahogany and lined with zinc.” “President Benjamin Harrison once hosted a birthday party for his grandson Baby McKee, who was turning four years old. …The menu was ground-up food (biscuits and bouillon), cake, and ice cream. The Marine band supplied the music.” In fact, the entire book is a trivia feast, simply organized by chronology (Washington through Obama) and with plenty of photos to supplement the text. A more seasoned author could do a great deal more with any number of the stories that McCullough tells in a few words. For example, “Tazewell Tyler…served in the medical corps for the Confederacy. After the war, he practiced medicine in three different states: Virginia, Maryland and California. …He later died of alcoholism at the age of forty-three on January 8, 1874.” But the once-over-lightly approach of this book does have advantages: it lets young readers skim through a lot of presidential family history easily, and avoids going too deeply into matters of politics and policy. Perhaps the book will even inspire some readers to find out more information than McCullough includes. For example, there is surely a story worth exploring in the life of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who “requested not to be buried with his famous first family upon his death” and who was in Washington not only when his father was assassinated but also when Presidents Garfield and McKinley were killed.

(+++) PAPERBACK WRITERS

Magic Pickle and the Creature from the Black Legume. By Scott Morse. Graphix/Scholastic. $5.99.

Shiver Me Letters: A Pirate ABC. By June Sobel. Illustrated by Henry Cole. Sandpiper. $5.99.

Transformers Animated: Clash of the Constructicons; Starscream Flies Again. By Annie Auerbach. HarperFestival. $3.99 each.

     These books are testimony to the versatility of the redoubtable paperback format. One is more or less a graphic novel – fifth in what has the potential to be a never-ending series; one is a short, oversize and amusing alphabet book; and two are picture-heavy, text-light stories based on a television show.

     Scott Morse’s Magic Pickle series continues its punny and often funny ways in Magic Pickle and the Creature from the Black Legume, which actually has an educational element in explaining – repeatedly – that peanuts are not nuts but legumes. The difference even proves important in defeating the evil creature. Like the previous Magic Pickle books, this one has elements of a graphic novel (page after page told in comic-book style), but also has a good deal of straight narrative (to the extent that anything is “straight” in this always skewed series). The main setting this time is a factory called Pete’s Perfect Peanuts, to which Jo Jo (Magic Pickle’s sidekick and helper) is going on a field trip with her class. A black peanut (“black legume,” see?) hatches a dastardly peanut-butter-powered villain, and the rest is history, and sometimes hysterical. There is also a videogame connection here, involving a game called SCHNOZOLA! with the bad-guy Nostrillain and good-guy Handker Chief. It’s almost too silly for words; hence all the pictures. Fans of the series will especially enjoy the post-story story, which brings the conclusion to a real conclusion.

     It’s obvious where Shiver Me Letters will begin and end – at A and Z, respectively. What is not obvious is the clever way author June Sobel and illustrator Henry Cole get from here to there. The pirate animals – led by a hook-handed crocodile captain who repeatedly roars, “R!” – set sail in search of all the letters of the alphabet, and find them in unexpected places: “They dug for doubloons and scooped up a D.” “From out of the jungle, J jumped sky-high.” “A mysterious map with an M soon appeared.” And so it goes throughout the rhymed adventure – until the exhausted crew delivers a Y and the captain says that is not enough: “Be off with ye, mates./ Go rob me a Z.” So the crew members retire to their bunks and, of course, snore “zillions of Z’s.” Originally published in 2006, Shiver Me Letters is as charming in its new paperback incarnation as it was originally.

     And speaking of incarnations: the whole point of Transformers is that they have multiple ones. That is, they can be one thing for a time, then something else (in case that wasn’t obvious from their name and last summer’s big-budget movie). Transformers can in fact be transformed not only from toys into films but also from toys into animated television series, and it is the Transformers of the animated series that star in two paperback adaptations by Annie Auerbach. Clash of the Constructicons, based on a TV episode called Rise of the Constructicons, is about two construction machines called Mixmaster and Scrapper that come into contact with “the AllSpark, the source of life for all Transformers,” and find themselves torn between friendship with the good-guy Autobots and bad-guy Decepticons. Starscream Flies Again, from a TV episode called A Fistful of Energon, features bad-guy Starscream delivering dialogue such as this: “You’re going to regret the day you were protoformed!” None of this material is to be taken the slightest bit seriously, but there is plenty of action to be imagined in looking at the scenes from the TV series, and writing that will appeal to existing fans of the Transformers in their many multimedia guises.

(++++) CONCERTOS IN RARE FORM

Beethoven: Violin Concerto; Romances Nos. 1 and 2; Fragment of Violin Concerto, WoO 5. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Orchestre des Champs-Élysées conducted by Philippe Herreweghe. Naïve. $16.99.

Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto; Piano Trio; Romances for Violin and Piano. Veronica Jochum, piano; Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Joseph Silverstein (Concerto); Veronica Jochum, piano; Joseph Silverstein, violin; Colin Carr, cello (Trio); Joseph Silverstein, violin; Veronica Jochum, piano (Romances). Tudor. $19.99.

Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras: Fantasia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra; Samuel Zyman: Cello Concerto; Ricardo Castro: Cello Concerto. Carlos Prieto, cello; Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa conducted by Miguel Prieto (Heras); Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional conducted by Enrique Diemecke (Zyman); Orquesta Sinfónica de Berlin conducted by Jorge Velazco (Castro). Urtext. $14.99.

     Although Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was not especially successful during the composer’s lifetime, it is impossible nowadays to think of it as a rarity. Nevertheless, the new performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées under Philippe Herreweghe makes the work seem particularly fresh, partly because of the tempos chosen (which are intended to approximate the ones Beethoven wanted, to the extent that those are known); partly because of the use of period instruments, whose sonic world is different from that of modern ones; and partly because Kopatchinskaja – using a Giovanni Pressenda violin made in 1834 – not only plays with a light (pre-Romantic) touch but also uses variants of some passages included in Beethoven’s autography score. Add to this the soloist’s use of her own arrangements of Beethoven’s arrangements of cadenzas originally written for the piano version of this concerto – a possibility only in a recording, since overdubbing was needed to reproduce the full piano part on the violin – and you have a very unusual performance that enlivens the music while largely returning it to a version of its original form. And to continue the fascinations of this CD, there is a seven-minute fragment of an early Beethoven Violin Concerto, in C, which itself exhibits some very creative elements, such as the use of divided violas. Only the exposition and start of the development of the work’s first movement survive; hearing them makes for interesting speculation about what might have been, since there is evidence that at least the work’s first movement was completed. This CD is actually entitled “Beethoven: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra,” and is rounded out with the two Romances, which receive lovely, lyrical but not overdone performances.

     Lyricism is only one element that stands out in Clara Schumann’s sole surviving orchestral work, her Piano Concerto – which remains a rarity, although it is not quite as uncommonly heard today as it as a few decades ago. There is an interesting parallel between this concerto and that of Clara’s husband, Robert Schumann: in each, the longest movement (Robert’s first, Clara’s third) was finished first and originally performed on its own, with the other two movements added later. Clara’s concerto does not sound much like Robert’s, having a style all its own that the composer surely intended to reflect her own considerable virtuosity as a performer. There is, not surprisingly, a sense of youthful liveliness here: the concerto was first performed when its composer was only 16, and was conducted at the time by Mendelssohn – whose friendship with Robert played a significant role in both composers’ works. The other Clara Schumann works on this CD show her compositional skill as well. The four-movement Piano Trio has poise and classical balance but retains a Romantic-era sensibility, while the three short Romances for violin and piano – which make an interesting contrast with Beethoven’s two for violin and orchestra – are warm and pleasant pieces of parlor music, musically attractive if not particularly deep. The performances date to 1988, and the CD itself is a re-release of one from 1992. Both the musicality and the sound have held up very well indeed.

     Even more of a rarity than Clara Schumann’s works are the three for cello and orchestra by Mexican composers, presented on a CD called “Three Centuries.” The title is slightly misleading: Ricardo Castro’s Cello Concerto was first performed in 1903, although apparently written around 1895. It is one of the better-known works by Mexico’s first symphonist and the first composer of a Mexican opera written in Spanish (Atzimba), but it is not particularly Mexican in sound despite the use of some Mexican thematic material. It is an effective, very lyrical work with passages of considerable beauty, showing Castro’s familiarity with European Romantic compositional style rather than moving in a distinctive direction of its own. Its warmth and expressiveness, especially as played by the excellent Carlos Prieto, are immediately appealing. Prieto was personally involved in the creation of the other two works on this CD: Zyman’s, first performed in 1990, was written for him, and Heras’, from 2005, is dedicated to him. Zyman’s is a big work, the longest on this recording, and shows a strong command of the orchestra as well as some influence of Zyman’s teachers, Roger Sessions and David Diamond. It uses 20^th-century compositional techniques effectively, but is not bound or limited by them, and has emotional as well as intellectual impact. Heras’ fantasia, in contrast, is short and somewhat drier than the other pieces here, requiring plenty of virtuosity and good cooperation between soloist and orchestra. Prieto plays very effectively with all three orchestras and all three conductors heard on this disc, the CD as a whole being as much a tribute to his considerable abilities as it is a chance to hear some less-known works of the modern and Romantic cello repertoire.

(++++) LYRICISM UNLEASHED

Mendelssohn: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Symphony No. 5, “Reformation.” Louis Lortie, piano and conducting Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 2 and 5; Capriccio in E minor; Fugue in E flat major. New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello). Naxos. $8.99.

Spohr: Double Quartets Nos. 1 and 2. Forde Ensemble. Naxos. $8.99.

Schubert: Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Volume 1. Julia Fischer, violin; Martin Helmchen, piano. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     Canadian pianist Louis Lortie shows himself to be a skilled interpreter of Mendelssohn – both at the keyboard and on the podium – on a new CD with an interestingly varied program. The pairing of Mendelssohn’s two mature piano concertos (from 1831 and 1837, respectively) is nothing new, but adding the “Reformation” symphony gives this disc unexpected depth. The symphony, begun in 1829 with the intention of having it played in 1830 for the 300^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Augsburg Confession, was not actually heard until 1832 – and was so controversial (because of Mendelssohn’s family’s conversion from Judaism to Protestantism) that Mendelssohn came to hate it. Yet the work has remarkable richness and sobriety, as well as an exuberant finale based on the chorale Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott. When played with warmth and lyrical sensitivity, on the one hand, and with a light touch and lively tempos, on the other – as the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec performs it – the symphony is wonderfully effective. So, in Lortie’s hands, are the concertos. The more outgoing No. 1 sparkles in this bright, fast-paced reading, while the seriousness of No. 2 (especially its first movement) gets its full due here. All this music is familiar, but not in this combination, and Lortie makes a strong case for everything – including his own skill in the dual pianist/conductor role.

     The New Zealand String Quartet also continues to show warmth and skill aplenty in its second volume of Mendelssohn’s String Quartets. The standout here is Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13, a Beethoven-influenced work (drawing on his Op. 95 and Op. 132 quartets) that nevertheless shows Mendelssohn developing his own voice in this medium. The fluidity of the playing, and the ease with which each player hands off material to the next, give the performance fine flow and a strong sense of thematic as well as instrumental unity. In Quartet No. 5 in E flat, Op. 44, No. 3, the scherzo’s fugue and double fugato are well handled, and the energetic finale comes across particularly well. Accompanying the quartets are two movements from a set of four published posthumously as Mendelssohn’s Op. 81: a Capriccio from 1843 and a Fugue from 1827. They are sometimes played as the third and fourth movements of a posthumous quartet, although in fact the work does not hang together particularly well in that form. Here, the New Zealand String Quartet treats them as individual pieces, focusing on the grace and lightness of the Capriccio and the rather staid formality of the Fugue. The top-notch ensemble work on this CD is what makes these performances stand out.

     An equally strong sense of ensemble is an absolute necessity for performing Louis Spohr’s four Double Quartets, the first two of which the Forde Ensemble handles with aplomb. These Spohr works are unique in chamber-music literature: the eight players are treated not as a small string ensemble but as two independent but interconnected groups of four. Thus, the ensemble breaks down into Quartet I (violinists Janice Graham and Helena Wood, violist Andriy Viytovych and cellist Caroline Dale) and Quartet II (violinists Nicole Wilson and Alison Dodds, violist Alexander Zemtsov and cellist Julia Graham). The Double Quartets – No. 1 from 1823 and No. 2 from 1827 – require players to interact both within their respective four-member groups and as members of a larger one. For example, the first work opens with a unison for all eight instruments; then the ensemble splits into two quartets, which enter one bar apart. Spohr was a skilled quartet composer – he wrote 36 regular string quartets in addition to the four double ones – and does a fine job exploiting the sonorities of individual instruments in addition to playing the two quartets against each other. What is less than distinctive, though, especially in the first double quartet, is the musical material itself. The first work pays considerable homage to Mozart, whom Spohr greatly admired and during whose lifetime Spohr was born (in 1784). This double quartet not only follows classical form but also invokes compositional techniques of both Mozart and Haydn, the result being a sonically very pleasing work but one that breaks no new musical ground. The second double quartet is more interesting in this regard. Its second movement, marked Menuetto, is more creative – with its strong contrast between the main section and the Trio – than the corresponding movement of the first double quartet, which is marked Scherzo. The second double quartet’s slow movement also has more heft than the earlier work offers, and the finale is particularly tuneful and catchy. Both these double quartets are in the final analysis of more interest for their form than for their substance, but the Forde Ensemble certainly makes a very good case for them, and this CD provides a fine opportunity to enjoy some little-known and very engaging chamber music. Hopefully a Naxos CD of the Forde Ensemble playing Spohr’s other double quartets is forthcoming.

     Another good case for not-quite-first-class music is made by Julia Fischer and Martin Helmchen in the first volume of a planned two-disc set of all of Schubert’s works for violin and piano. The pieces here are melodiously lyrical, frequently virtuosic and occasionally harmonically adventurous – yet they have understandably been overshadowed by Schubert’s more-innovative accomplishments in other forms, and also by the violin-and-piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. Fischer and Helmchen do not try to make this music larger or more significant than it is, playing it with straightforward beauty and very little grandstanding – an attractive approach to attractive, if minor, Schubertiana. Most of this SACD – whose sound, as usual from PentaTone, is superb – is taken up by the three Sonatas (Sonatinas), Op. 137, Nos. 1-3 (D. 384, 385 and 408). The double designation of these works’ form is in line with their neither-quite-here-nor-quite-there construction: the first, a very Mozartean three-movement piece in D, is lovely but slight; the second, a four-movement A minor work, is the longest and most substantial of the three; the third, also in four movements and in a minor key (G minor), has tinges of melancholy but lacks significant emotional depth. Schubert was 19 when he wrote these works, and they are certainly pleasant and tuneful enough. But the fourth work offered here, the Rondo Brillant in B minor, Op. 70 (D. 895), is of a different order. The composer created this piece 10 years later, only two years before his death, as a virtuoso showpiece for the Bohemian violinist Josef Slavik. This extended rondo – longer than all of D. 384 – has more Romantic sweep and far more display opportunities for the violin than do the earlier works. Fischer and Helmchen make it sing – without, however, overloading it with overbearing technique. This disc’s interest lies in exposing listeners to one of the less-known sides of a composer, many of whose works have become very familiar indeed.

(++++) TO AUTUMN AND BEYOND

Applesauce Season. By Eden Ross Lipson. Illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. Roaring Brook Press. $17.99.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story adapted by Wren Maysen. Illustrations by Gail de Marcken. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $18.99.

     In early fall, when kids are just adjusting to the rhythm of a new school year but the weather has not yet turned nippy, when the days seem to get shorter with increasing rapidity (although, in fact, they have been getting shorter since the first day of summer), when thoughts are just starting to turn from swimming and beaches and shorts and flip-flops to pumpkins and Halloween – this is Applesauce Season. Eden Ross Lipson, children’s book editor of The New York Times from 1984 to 2005, has left behind a wonderful story of apples, applesauce and family traditions – “left behind” because Lipson died of pancreatic cancer in May. This lovely book is all about the different types of apples available to city dwellers: “There are no apple trees, but there are farmers’ markets where there are lots of apples,” says the boy narrator. And then kids ages 4-8 learn all about making applesauce, watching as Mom cuts apples into quarters while Grandma cuts them into sixths (“I don’t know why”); discover the many different types of apples, and how using them changes the flavor of the applesauce; and find out about cinnamon sugar and other additives – a bit of butter, a touch of salt. And when the homemade treat is done, “We eat applesauce plain, or with ice cream, or cottage cheese, or gingerbread, or cookies, or sliced bananas.” And as autumn moves toward winter and the apple varieties change, “the color and the thickness and the taste of the sauce changes every single week,” all the way to Thanksgiving and afterwards – and all the way to an applesauce recipe at the end of the book. Applesauce Season is a simply delightful (and delicious) story – but Lipson’s words are not enough to make it so good. Mordicai Gerstein’s homey, charming illustrations add a great deal to what is already a wonderful book – especially on the inside front and back covers, which show 24 illustrations of different kinds of apples and, drawn the same size and in similar style, the boy narrator’s face and those of his family members. Yum.

     Autumnal stories point toward winter, and few tales are more associated with the season of cold and Christmas than The Nutcracker. But very few readers today know the real story of The Nutcracker, as it was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann nearly 200 years ago. Hoffmann wrote scary, fairy-tale-like stories, and they were intended for adults, not children, so it is no surprise that his Nutcracker tale was Bowdlerized in the 19^th century and became best known in the utterly delightful but (by comparison) very juvenile version used by Tchaikovsky as the basis of his Nutcracker ballet. Really, there are two Nutcracker stories – the one practically everyone knows, which has its own place in seasonal celebrations, and the one Hoffmann wrote, which uses the Christmas season simply as a device to tell a tale of love, loss, cruelty and hope. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is a real rarity: a children’s version of the original Hoffmann story. Wren Maysen has toned it down and rearranged the events, and Gail de Marcken’s excellent illustrations are far too opulent to communicate the frightening aspects of the tale in more than a gauzy, distant way. But still, this book restores some of the power of what Hoffmann wrote – and some of the mystery – and the happy ending (a fairy-tale wedding, not a little girl awakening from a lovely dream). As Maysen and de Marcken re-create the story, it starts with the familiar Christmas scenes, the gifts, the wonders of Godfather Drosselmeier’s mechanical creations, and the affection Marie holds for her Nutcracker even after her brother, Fritz, breaks it. And so it goes, through the battle between the Nutcracker and his toy troops and the mice, led by the Mouse King – shown with seven heads, as Hoffmann intended, although the heads are more cute than scary here. But after the battle, things get really interesting, as Drosselmeier recounts the story of how the Nutcracker came to be a nutcracker, which is the tale of a gorgeous princess named Pirlipat, the demanding Dame Mouserink, and a hard nut called Crackatook. Kids and adults alike will marvel at the depths of this story, which has far more to it than the simplified version of The Nutcracker. Yes, there is a journey to Sweetmeatburgh in the land that the Nutcracker rules, but this is no mere diversion, for it is part of a growing-up story that eventually brings the real-world prince – a relative of none other than Drosselmeier – before a more-mature Marie, who becomes his bride. It is a marvelous story that need not displace the more-familiar The Nutcracker but that surely deserves to be known just as well. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King does Hoffmann proud – and makes Christmas, or any season, a little more wonderful and wonder-filled.

(++++) GET GOING!

Watch Me Go! Text by Rebecca Young. Illustrations by Von Glitschka. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $12.99.

Move! By Steve Jenkins & Robin Page. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

Star Wars: Spaceships. Lucas Books/Scholastic. $7.99.

     Von Glitschka’s amazing lenticular animation – a process that makes still pictures appear to move realistically – gets better all the time. His previous collaboration with Rebecca Young – Watch Me Hop! – showed animals in motion. Now he has moved on to machines in Watch Me Go! And the results are fascinating. There are just eight illustrations in the new book – the lenticular-animation process is expensive and requires double-thick pages – but each is amazing to see again and again. A dump truck pours its load at a construction site; a race car speeds around the track, appearing to get closer to the reader as the page is moved; a diesel-engine train also moves closer, its headlight seeming to shine right into the reader’s eyes; a fire engine raises its ladder to help put out a blaze. Young’s text is very simple, suitable for the youngest readers or for parents reading to toddlers: “I’m a digger. My treads go around. Watch me GO move the ground!” But the illustrations are the big attraction here – parents should expect kids to ask how they can possibly move like that, and will probably have the same question themselves.

     A similar but less sophisticated movement effect adorns the cover of Move! A rabbit seems to leap from left to right, pushing the “M” of the title off toward the left as a result. This is cute, but it is not the main point of this book, which focuses more on text than pictures and has more to do with education than with the sheer wonder of illustrations. In fact, except for the cover, Move! is illustrated simply with collages of cut and torn paper. The pictures show animals that move in different ways – and the text connects each animal to the next. A gibbon swings, for example – and also walks on its back legs. Next, a bird called a lily trotter walks on floating lily pads – and then dives to catch a fish. After this, a blue whale makes a deep dive – and swims in the ocean depths. Through the illustrations and the brief interconnected comments, Steve Jenkins and Robin Page give behavioral information on animals from the roadrunner to the jumping spider to the penguin – and suggest, at the end, that human children can move in all the ways that these animals do. That is an interesting observation and a fine conclusion to a book that is thoughtful as well as clever.

     Star Wars: Spaceships is not quite at the level of the other books – it gets a (+++) rating – but it certainly has plenty of (implied) movement. There is actually a spaceship in Watch Me Go! – a real-world design – but Star Wars: Spaceships is a board book devoted entirely to fantasy. Every page has lovingly rendered versions of ships from the Star Wars universe, including the Millennium Falcon, TIE fighter, X-Wing and more. And every page contains a comic-book-style action word: “Zoom!” “Zip!” “Zap!” “Boom!” The motion here is implied, as is the action; clearly, the book is aimed at young fans of George Lucas’ Star Wars films. For them, it will be fun for a while. But they are more likely to tire of it quickly than to become bored with books that present motion in more interesting ways or use it as a basis for some gentle education.

(+++) SERIES HEROINES

Babymouse #11: Dragonslayer. By Jennifer L. Holm & Matthew Holm. Random House. $5.99.

Piper Reed Gets a Job. By Kimberly Willis Holt. Illustrated by Christine Davenier. Christy Ottaviano Books. $14.99.

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing the Piano (but she does love being in recitals). By Peggy Gifford. Photographs by Valorie Fisher. Schwartz & Wade. $12.99.

     Girls ages 7-11 have plenty of literary role models to emulate – or choose not to emulate – these days, whether a reader’s tastes run more to comics and graphic novels or to old-fashioned tales told primarily in prose. The Babymouse series is now at its 11^th volume, if these small books can be called “volumes,” and Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm (who are sister and brother) have settled into a pleasant familiarity with the title character and her world. It is a world in which fantasy and reality repeatedly intersect, usually in amusingly unsettling ways. And it is a world in which the narrative voice, typical in comics and graphic novels, takes part in the story, as when Babymouse proclaims that her latest adventure is destined “for glory! For everlasting greatness!” – and a line beneath the panel says, “Yeah, good luck with that, Babymouse.” The story in Dragonslayer is a little weaker than most in this series: Babymouse is doing so badly in math that her teacher assigns her to join the “Mathletes,” math whizzes who are about to compete in a tournament. In the real world, that just doesn’t happen – math teams and math competitors are always drawn from top students in the subject, not ones who get an F-. Even in Babymouse’s “real” world, this is a stretch. Of course, fans know Babymouse will eventually come out on top, and that is exactly what happens, with the usual forays into fantasy – here, skewed versions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings. The eventual Math Olympics – where the prize is, of all things, the “Golden Slide Rule,” or “regula calculanda aurea,” as its pedestal says (which is poor Latin but suitably impressive to Babymouse) – is only moderately amusing, but Babymouse lovers will no doubt be delighted as she once again saves the day (and her math team).

     Piper Reed’s “team,” so to speak, is the Gypsy Club, and in the third Piper Reed novel, the sweet-but-saucy fifth-grader starts a party-planning business to raise money so the Gypsy Club can get its own clubhouse. This sounds like a plot out of 1950s television, which it pretty much is. Kimberly Willis Holt’s stories are nothing if not wholesome, with the biggest issues for Piper and her two sisters involving whether a neighbor should pay double or triple if Tori babysits her triplets, and whether Samantha (Sam) can call herself an author if she is writing but has not had anything published. In addition to trying to raise money for her club, Piper has to do a research paper on Cyrus McCormick, who invented the reaper to cut grain: “Maybe Cyrus McCormick was like spinach. Maybe knowing about him was good for you.” Piper, as usual, soon finds herself overwhelmed, between doing illustrations for Sam’s book and the need to do her own homework – plus babysitting, party planning and more. Everything becomes a big mess, and Piper learns the inevitable lesson, “It’s better to do one job well than three jobs poorly.” Piper will bounce back, of course, and she and the other Gypsy Club members are already looking forward to more adventures at the book’s end. Piper seems a bit like an updated Eleanor Estes character – although Christine Davenier’s illustrations, old-fashioned though they are, don’t look much like those of the Moffats. Piper has a certain not-quite-up-to-date charm that comes through even when she uses Post-It notes and does research on the Internet.

     Moxy Maxwell has charm, too, and also has a little more inherent mischievousness than does Piper. Moxy does not love writing thank-you notes and does not love Stuart Little, as we know from titles of Peggy Gifford’s previous Moxy books. The neat thing about the Moxy books is that you can figure out almost everything that happens by just reading the chapter titles: “What Mrs. Maxwell Really Said Next or The Amazing Mind of a Tired Mother Who Is Not Too Tired to Focus.” “In Which Moxy Tries to Remember Where She Put the Note.” “In Which the Word ‘Intermission’ Is Explained.” “In Which ‘Heart and Soul’ Begins and Ends.” And so on – and on and on. It’s a good thing the chapter titles are so useful, because they are often nearly as long as the chapters themselves (86 chapters in 175 pages – wow!). The plot here focuses on Moxy’s upcoming piano recital, during which she plans to wear a crown and for which she is making fake ermine trim for her cape (one of many matters shown in Valorie Fisher’s photo illustrations). Moxy has also practiced her bow – a lot. What she hasn’t practiced is the piece she is supposed to play. The typesetting can be as much fun here as the narrative. Chapter 49, “The Part of the Story in Which Mrs. Maxwell Begins to Climb Slooooowly Up the Stairs to Find Out Why Moxy Hasn’t Started the Big Dress Rehearsal,” for example, offers the word “slowly” with a nearly uncountable number of “o’s” (all right, there are 129 of them) and then has the words “by step” repeated, stepwise, up the next page. Eventually, after a bout of stage fright and the timely intercession of Aunt Susan Standish, a self-proclaimed Mistake Expert, everything works out just fine – of course. Moxy’s adventures are a little too frantic and a touch too contrived for all tastes, but she is certainly spunky enough – and amusingly self-involved enough – to build an ever-growing fan base.

(++++) A QUARTET THAT “AMES” HIGH

The Ames Piano Quartet, 1989-2009: Piano Quartets by Dvořák, Fauré, Richard Strauss, Charles-Marie Widor, Schumann, Brahms, Paul Juon, Sergei Taneyev, Borodin, Joseph Suk, Vitězslav Novák, Martinů, Chausson and Saint-Saëns. Mahlon Darlington, violin; Lawrence Bulkhalter and Jonathan Sturm, viola; George Work, cello; William David, piano. Dorian Sono Luminus. $49.99 (8 CDs).

     It would be unfair to characterize string quartets as a dime a dozen, especially in light of the cost of the instruments they play. But they are certainly common – in contrast to piano quartets, which are not common at all. Playing the great piano-quartet literature usually means adding a pianist to an existing trio or removing a violinist from an existing string quartet and inserting a piano player. The results can be quite wonderful, but they are not to be compared with what happens when a piano quartet is formed specifically as a piano quartet and plays together, time after time, year after year. When that happens – which, again, it rarely does – the music-making can be truly special, as it is in this wonderful 20-year retrospective of recordings by the Ames Piano Quartet.

     The Ames is the resident chamber-music ensemble at Iowa State University – located in Ames, Iowa; hence the quartet’s name. The players have been together for many years: Jonathan Sturm recently assumed the viola role previously held by Lawrence Bulkhalter, but violinist Mahlon Darlington, cellist George Work and pianist William David have been together through the entire 20-year time span covered by this new release. Unfortunately, Dorian Sono Luminus does not give dates for the recordings, but in fact they are more or less chronological through the first seven CDs, the disc of Dvořák’