(++++) THE TENDRILS OF DARKNESS

Darkside, Book I. By Tom Becker. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

The Midnight Library, Volume VIII: The Deadly Catch. By Damien Graves. Scholastic. $5.99.

      There have been many tales of the dark side of life, of places where evil runs rampant, where everyday lives are as steeped in depravity as more-familiar everyday lives are filled with pleasantries. The whole idea of darkness existing alongside the good is as familiar as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But if split personalities are nothing new, Tom Becker’s Darkside is nevertheless a book that feels new, because it is about the split personality of a city, not a person. “Many years ago, during the reign of that hag Victoria, the authorities decided to clean up the streets [of London],” one character explains. “Their gleaming city was too good for the likes of us. So they rounded up our grandparents – all the freaks, lowlifes, and criminals they could find – and herded them into this one area. We’re their descendants. Everyone in Darkside has evil in their veins – some just have more than others.” Now that’s a neat setup – but the book would not work if it focused only on Darkside and those who live there. Becker knows enough about plotting to create a young hero with whom readers can identify – his name is Jonathan Starling – and give him a mysterious connection to Darkside that has placed him in great danger, forcing him to find his way to this evil place in order to unravel the twisted skein of his own identity and family background. This is scarcely a new plot device, but Becker handles it well and parcels out the revelations skillfully. Darkside doesn’t appear on maps and is outside the consciousness of everyday “Lightside” Londoners, but there is more to it than that: “To come to Darkside you’ve got to think differently. There’s so much evil in the air that you’ve got to open your mind to it all, or it’ll drive you insane.” Easier said than done for decidedly non-evil Jonathan – who, it soon turns out, is being sought by one of the most evil Darksiders of all, a man with the singularly appropriate name of Vendetta. In a neat twist, Vendetta hires a foul and much-feared detective to find Jonathan – but that detective has actually become Jonathan’s protector. And there are additional twists throughout the book, both in Darkside and in Lightside (after Jonathan gets back in a mundane but surprising way). Becker ends the book satisfactorily, too, not forcing readers to wait for the coming sequel, Lifeblood, to get answers to a number of questions. But readers will want that sequel by the time they go through all the excitement of this initial story.

      The Midnight Library is now in its eighth volume, offering far more formulaic horror than Darkside provides. These are reliable, mildly spooky books written under the pseudonym Damien Graves by a number of authors. In the case of The Deadly Catch, which gets a (+++) rating, the stories are by Allan Frewin Jones, who has contributed to this series before and handles its basics well. The title story here is about two boys who go kayaking, get into mysterious trouble involving something in the water, think they have been rescued by a passing boat, but find out otherwise. “The Trap” is a rather silly piece about what would happen if mice became intelligent, banded together and turned the tables on humans – nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. “Sticks and Stones” has been done before, too: girl buys something in a mysterious store that has disappeared when she goes back; that something (lip gloss, in this case) turns out to have magical powers; but the powers involve hurting people; and eventually they are turned on the girl herself. As always in The Midnight Library, it is not enough to be a basically good kid – something bad’s gonna get ya anyway. That’s the main chill factor in The Deadly Catch and its predecessors. It’s not much, but young readers looking for a touch of a scare that arrives quickly and can easily be forgotten will find this latest book as effective as the earlier ones.

(+++) SPEAKING FREELY

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment. By Anthony Lewis. Basic Books. $25.

      Now that we are well into presidential-campaign silly season, with candidates making promises they know they cannot keep and making statements whose only intent is to sway whatever audience the statements are addressed to, it seems a good time to consider the whole issue of free speech in the United States. That is what longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has done in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate. Lewis goes back to the adoption of the First Amendment, the guarantor of free speech, in 1791, and points out that the Supreme Court did not really begin to enforce free-speech rights until 1919 – since which time the pendulum has swung back and forth toward more or fewer restrictions on what may be said, when, where, and by whom.

      Lewis makes an interesting point for constitutional scholars: he argues that judges led the way toward greater free-speech rights, simultaneously guiding the public and responding to the tenor of their times. Lewis particularly lauds Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Justice Louis D. Brandeis, whose views on free speech – often expressed in dissents – helped pave the way for a more expansive view of free-speech rights in the United States than in nations to which the U.S. is otherwise close, such as Great Britain and Canada.

      Lewis has some strong words for his fellow journalists, especially those who have tended over the years to get too cozy with the powerful: “The American press has been given extraordinary freedom by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the First Amendment. In return, it owes society courage. It must resist the lure of obeisance to power. …Only then can [reporters and editors] perform the press’s patriotic function of holding government to account.”

      All this is extremely high-minded and of great concern to press barons, journalists, scholars of constitutional law, and others of like mind and like intellect. But Lewis does a poorer job of showing why people who live in less rarefied strata of society should care about constitutional freedom of speech. The ways in which most people’s everyday lives are affected may be free-speech matters to opinion makers but “who cares?” moments to others, as Lewis seems intermittently to be aware: “The Federal Communications Commission stuck doggedly to its role as nanny, imposing heavy fines on broadcasters who televised the 2004 Superbowl game in which Janet Jackson, in a halftime show, unexpectedly exposed a breast. But most Americans probably couldn’t care less.” So what should most Americans care about when it comes to this basic constitutional issue?

      This is the question that Lewis does not answer, or even pose. He writes effectively and stylishly for a jury of his peers, admonishing some and praising others, comparing U.S. free speech to versions of the same right elsewhere, parsing legal case after legal case for the nuggets of wisdom – or piles of foolishness – to be found therein. Lewis proclaims as self-evidently true that “citizens in a free society must have courage – the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but [also] novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.” This is a noble aim that will no doubt lead Lewis’ fellow opinion-shapers to nod their heads in sage agreement. But someone other than Lewis will have to make the connection between these lofty ideals and the everyday lives of ill-informed and unconcerned people who, on Election Day, get exactly the same number of votes per person as do Lewis and the intelligentsia.

(+++) WHAT OIL THE FUSS IS ABOUT

Oil! By Upton Sinclair. Penguin. $15.

      Penguin has reissued Upton Sinclair’s sprawling 80-year-old muckraking book about the California oil industry as a 550-page paperback for the good and sufficient reason that the well-reviewed film There Will Be Blood was based on part of the book – so maybe fans of the movie will want to know more. If they do, they will find themselves by turns enthralled and appalled both by Sinclair’s subject matter and by his writing style and political convictions.

      Sinclair is best known for The Jungle, a dreary and unendingly bleak exposé of the meatpacking industry whose publication led to substantial reforms. It is an important book, but far from an easy one to read: Sinclair is given to repetition upon repetition, to black-and-white painting of the evils of capitalism and the marvels of socialism, and to a style that can charitably be described as heavy-handed. On all those bases, Oil! (whose original subtitle was used as the name of the new movie) is identifiably Sinclair’s – but it is in some ways an easier book to read, and it is certainly a richer experience (after you slog all the way through it) than the film.

      The story was loosely inspired by the 1923 Teapot Dome scandal that occurred during Warren Harding’s administration and was revealed only after Harding’s death: corrupt officials close to Harding were profiting hugely by selling off government oil reserves in Wyoming. Sinclair sets his story in California, where Harding died, and focuses it on Daniel Plainview and his son, John, known as Bunny (a nickname that is probably intended to be symbolic but that tends just to seem silly). Daniel buys land near the California-Mexico border to take advantage of the migration patterns of the time, but after his death, Bunny strikes oil on the land, and Big Oil (as it existed at the time) finds out and starts buying up everything nearby. Bunny cannot be bought off by Big Oil, and this creates predictable problems. In addition, there is the separate but related story of the region’s growing population and its fascination with religious revivalism in the person of a preacher named Eli Sunday, to whom Bunny becomes close.

      This bare outline shows only a little of the rich tapestry that, in the hands of a more skillful stylist, could have resulted in a fast-paced and utterly fascinating period piece (Nathanael West would have handled the story superbly and in much less space). But Sinclair is interested first and foremost in exposing the evils of capitalism, so his characters tend to be types and his sentences go on and on and on; as a result, even when he deals with issues that continue to resonate today, he does so in dated and dull prose: “Bunny went back to Southern Pacific, and just as he was finishing his year’s work, the convention of the Republican party met in Chicago, a thousand delegates and as many alternates, and as many newspaper correspondents and special writers, to tell the world about this mighty historic event.” Sinclair has a good ear for Jazz Age slang, and his descriptions of some of the workings of the early movie industry are historically interesting and occasionally amusing, as when he imagines a tabloid headline reading, “Star Races Nude Oil Red!” But the dialogue is hopelessly dated: “’It was a reaction from her life with her husband; he was a profligate, and so she’s a miser.’” And although readers will certainly care about Bunny and certainly come to despise the forces arrayed against him, the manipulative nature of Sinclair’s narrative in the service of his political views ends up making Oil! seem less a novel than a very lengthy tract. Still, there are pockets of excitement here, and plots and subplots far beyond what was (or could be) shown on a movie screen in a limited time frame. So this new edition of Oil! does have the potential to fascinate some moviegoers – although it is unlikely to result in their developing substantial enthusiasm for Sinclair’s work in general.

(++++) LESSER GEMS, BUT THEY SPARKLE

Sibelius: Scènes historiques I and II; King Christian II Suite. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen. Naxos. $8.99.

Anderson: Orchestral Music, Volume 1—Bugler’s Holiday; Blue Tango; The First Day of Spring; Belle of the Ball; Governor Bradford March; Clarinet Candy; The Captains and the Kings; The Golden Years; Chicken Reel; Fiddle-Faddle; The Classical Jukebox; China Doll; Balladette; Arietta; Piano Concerto in C Major. BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin; Jeffrey Biegel, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

      There may be no great music on either of these CDs, but there is plenty of very good music, including much that is infrequently heard and that provides new insight into two very different composers. The Sibelius disc showcases the two three-movement suites called Scènes historiques, based on music Sibelius had written in 1899. The first suite was published in 1911 and the second just a year later, but there is quite a contrast between them. The 1899 music was written specifically for political reasons after a clampdown on press freedoms by Russia, which at the time controlled Finland. The final piece written by Sibelius for this purpose – and not part of either suite – was none other than Finlandia. The first of the suites features mostly traditional rhythms and harmonies and a generally upbeat, assertive manner. The second suite develops the 1899 material quite differently and sounds more “Sibelian.” Its first movement features horns heard as if through mist; its second uses muted and divided violas; and its third opens with a pizzicato section that is reminiscent of his symphonies. The suites are very well played by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Pietari Inkinen: the ensemble lacks the complete cohesion of the very best orchestras, but its sections are well balanced and its members play with strength and sensitivity. They do a find job with the King Christian II Suite, too. This work dates to 1898 and is based on incidental music for a play about a Scandinavian king who loves a Dutch commoner; the woman is poisoned by an unsuccessful suitor, and the king exacts a bloody revenge. The five-movement suite is mostly tender until the concluding movement. Its first two movements are an extended Nocturne – a love scene – and an Elégie for strings alone. The third and fourth movements are played at moderate tempos, and it is only in the finale, representing the king’s rage, that the music becomes speedy and hectic. None of these works is among Sibelius’ best, but all contain glimmers of his unique handling of orchestral forces and his skillful tone painting – and all are worth hearing.

      In contrast to the serious Sibelius, Leroy Anderson is forever identified as a composer of light music – and so, in the main, he was. But the first CD in a new Naxos series of all Anderson’s orchestral music contains a surprise: a full-scale piano concerto, written in 1953, that is skillfully crafted and filled with the tunefulness that marks Anderson’s briefer pieces. The work is not an unqualified success, but its finale is delightful, featuring an unmistakably Andersonian second theme that bubbles with good will. Jeffrey Biegel plays the concerto with verve and apparent ease, and the BBC Concert Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin provides first-rate accompaniment – and seems to have as much fun with the concerto as with the shorter pieces that make up the remainder of the disc. There are some surprises among those brief works: in addition to the highly familiar ones, such as Bugler’s Holiday and Fiddle Faddle, there are some sendups (Chicken Reel, The Classical Jukebox), a previously unrecorded work (Governor Bradford March, which sounds more like Sousa than Anderson), and a few less-known pieces that are more introspective than most Anderson miniatures (such as Balladette and Arietta). Most Anderson works run four minutes or less – he wrote them to fit on a single side of a 78-rpm record or, later, a 45-rpm vinyl single – but they often perk through multiple moods in their short running time, almost like miniature tone poems; and, although scarcely masterpieces, they retain a considerable amount of charm.

(++++) ADVENTURES BEYOND THE COMICS

Bone, Book Seven: Ghost Circles. By Jeff Smith. Graphix/Scholastic. $19.99 (hardcover); $9.99 (paperback).

Ordinary Basil: Attack of the Volcano Monkeys. By Wiley Miller. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $14.99.

      There have been very few comic-book-based works that genuinely deserve to be called epic. The 10-book Bone saga is one of them, and among the very best. Although the original black-and-white comic-book version is still available, the new Graphix/Scholastic books are better, thanks in large part to the coloring of Steve Hamaker, who by Book Seven is contributing nearly as much to the atmosphere of dread and fear as does Jeff Smith’s own art. This is the darkest Bone book yet, as the story turns into a harrowing tale of war and an attempt by two groups of refugees to reach some haven of safety – however temporary it may prove to be – despite the incipient rise of the Lord of the Locusts. Ghost Circles is a story of hardship, of hairbreadth escapes, and of considerable danger, as the human characters – notably Princess Thorn, Gran’ma Ben and Lucius – are portrayed more craggily and with more deeply etched lines and expressions of weariness than ever before. The book’s title refers to mysterious pockets of nothingness that swallow up and destroy living beings and can be negotiated only with the aid of a sort of second sight that Thorn possesses. The passages in which Thorn and Fone Bone must deliberately enter a ghost circle to seek food are genuinely scary – and so are the dramatic scenes of widespread devastation, of the chaos of war, and of an attempt to cross a bridge over a forbidden dragon realm. There is very little “comic” in this book, although pockets of lightness remain, such as the temporary transformation of Fone Bone and his cousins, Phoney and Smiley, into characters from Moby-Dick, and Thorn’s amusement when Fone Bone (who harbors an unrequited love for her) inadvertently calls her “my girl” at a moment of high tension. Interestingly, the visual distinction between the solid white, puffy Bones and the carefully drawn humans with whom they interact has by now become quite irrelevant; even a sort of interspecies romance seems barely plausible. Most of what happens in Ghost Circles, though, is quite grim, with the forces of darkness visibly rising as the remnants of humanity (including the Bones, despite their not appearing human) flee powers too strong for direct confrontation. Rarely has a work born as a comic book emerged with this much power and intensity.

      The second Ordinary Basil book by Wiley Miller, creator of the wonderful Non Sequitur comic strip, functions at a far less intense level – by design. Attack of the Volcano Monkeys is intended as a children’s book, following the pattern of the kids’ books by Berkeley Breathed, whose Bloom County and subsequent strips tackle very adult issues but whose children’s books are altogether milder. But this is not to say that Attack of the Volcano Monkeys is placid – quite the opposite. It is a better book than its predecessor, The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil, to which it is a sequel. Its superiority rests in Miller’s willingness to let Basil develop some self-confidence and more of a personality than in the earlier book, in which he was barely more than insipid. Now he participates fully in a truly extraordinary adventure that involves a moving island (driven by machinery), super-intelligent monkeys split into factions, giant owls, and the reappearance of the evil Von Röttweil – who turns out to have created the island and smart monkeys as an experiment that even he admits has failed. Tranquilizer darts (“the tips are rubbed on the back of a Hallucifrog,” one character helpfully explains), a flute that can open chains, and the timely appearance of Beatrice – faithful pterodactyl mount of Basil’s super-smart friend, Louise – are but some of the elements in this fast-paced book, which also features more interesting drawings than the earlier one: monkeys escaping a cage and climbing a rope, Basil steering a strange metal ship while towing the unconscious Von Röttweil in a rowboat, monkeys helping the island’s caretaker operate machinery, and many more. There are more Basil books to come, too: Miller recently presented parts of a new one in his vertical-format Sunday comic strips, and the text of Attack of the Volcano Monkeys makes it clear that Basil, unknown to himself, is an important connection between the world of 19^th-century Earth and that of the skybuilt city of Helios. There is more mystery, more wonder and more Basil ahead. Count on it – and look forward to it.

(++++) PRINCESSES OLD AND NEW

The Silk Princess. By Charles Santore. Random House. $17.99.

Princess Baby. By Karen Katz. Schwartz & Wade. $14.99.

      The only thing puzzling about The Silk Princess is its age target of 3-7. Charles Santore’s book is too sophisticated for most children in that age range (certainly at the lower end of it), and his gorgeous illustrations may not be fully appreciated by kids under the 8-12 age range. This is a dreamlike story about a crucial occurrence in ancient China: the discovery of silk, one of the great secrets that China withheld from the rest of the world for millennia. Santore explains the tale’s origins in an Author’s Note at the end of the book, but kids (and parents) won’t need to read the explanation to be enchanted by the story. It involves Emperor Huang-Ti, Empress Lei-Tsu and their daughter, Hsi-Ling Chi, “whom he [the emperor] hardly noticed.” Hsi-Ling Chi, however, does notice things – specifically a cream-colored cocoon that falls into her mother’s teacup one day and then starts to unravel. Fascinated by the object, Hsi-Ling Chi ties the thread to her waist and takes a walk to see how far it will go. The result is a journey outside the palace, across a bridge guarded by a dragon, and into the Holy Mountains, where the princess meets a man with a loom who knows her name and has been waiting for her. The story follows the pattern of many myths – did it really happen to the princess, or did she dream it all? Either way, the adventure leads to the discovery of silk, which makes such fine clothing that the emperor notices his daughter at last. What readers will notice long before the end is the extraordinarily beautiful detail of Santore’s illustrations, which are very heavily influenced by Chinese art. The characters’ oversize heads, the poses of their bodies, the way Hsi-Ling Chi points with her right hand while holding flowers in her left as a butterfly hovers nearby, the looming exterior palace walls whose tops soar off the page, the mist-shrouded path to the bridge, the fine detail of every scale on the orange-eyed dragon – these and many more pleasures are there to be seen, as Santore weaves a tale of wonder as surely as the master weaver of Hsi-Ling Chi’s adventure weaves garments. This is a beautiful book to look at as well as a charming one to read.

      Princess Baby is charming, too, but in a different way. Intended for very young children, ages 1-5, it is the cute and simple story of a baby who objects to being called by all the usual endearments that adults use when addressing her. She is not a buttercup, cupcake or little lamb, she says, and Karen Katz’s adorable illustrations of these and other things that she is not are irresistible. The baby insists that people call her by her “real” name – which is, of course, Princess Baby. Decked out in sparkly gold crown and shoes, wearing a fancy dress and a cape, Princess Baby needs to “make sure that everyone in my kingdom is happy” by giving bottles to all her dolls and stuffed animals; and all is well until her parents come to her room and start calling her the wrong things: Creamsicle, Peanut, Missy Muffin. “Please call me by my real name!” says Princess Baby – and when her parents do just that, everything ends happily. This is the first book of a planned series, which has the potential to offer heaping helpings of cuteness if Katz continues it as she has begun it.

(++++) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING GEEKY

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them. By David Anderegg, Ph.D. Tarcher/Penguin. $24.95.

      By the time the movie Revenge of the Nerds came along in, fittingly, 1984, nerds were more than 160 years overdue for some sort of vengeance. Psychology professor and private psychotherapist David Anderegg shows how Washington Irving’s 1820 tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” first created for Americans the notion of a bookish, intelligent but socially inept character who is frightened out of his wits and overcome by a decidedly thick bully. Indeed, 35 years before Revenge of the Nerds, Ichabod Crane was terrified and chased out of town by Brom Bones very effectively in a Disney animated feature called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which undoubtedly seemed harmless to adults in 1949 but which surely had a chilling effect on budding young booklovers.

      This sort of thing helps explain why Anderegg suggests, quite seriously, that Irving’s story should not be taught until college – it could do too much damage to younger, more impressionable students.

      This is an arguable point – Irving’s style alone takes some of the edge off the story for modern readers – but it is certainly true that nerds have not gotten much respect for a very long time (the three film sequels to Revenge of the Nerds and the TV version notwithstanding). Nerd attacks – psychologically, perhaps often resulting from nerd envy – stem from a deep-seated anti-intellectualism in American life, and unfortunately have even been fueled by some people smart enough to have known better: Anderegg points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 speech, “The American Scholar,” was an academic affirmation of the notion that the value of Americans lies in being people of action, not thoughtfulness.

      This prejudice – and it is most decidedly a prejudice – persists today, and causes severe emotional trouble for some young people, including the ones Anderegg has seen in his private practice in Massachusetts. Kids as young as age five or six can be excluded from the “in” crowd by virtue of their interests (math, technology), appearance (eyeglasses alone may be enough), and failure to do what everyone else does (team sports, for example). The ostracism can be traumatic for sensitive children – and it has troubling societal implications as well as personal ones. Anderegg suggests that the 19^th-century stereotype of nerds as inferior to brawny men of action, which could actually have made a certain kind of sense during the days of Manifest Destiny and the push westward, persists today from a feeling of discomfiture. It is true that big-time sports figures who are known for brawn but decidedly not for brains make lots of money – the National Football League fields 22 millionaires at every game – but the power in society has moved decidedly in the direction of nerds, most notably in the person of Bill Gates, the world’s richest man. Thus, the disdain for nerdiness – specifically, for immersion in math, science, technology and other “unsexy” subjects – has significant negative consequences for U.S. society. After all, we now live in a world where knowledge really is power, and if companies cannot get the brain power they need within the United States, they will find it elsewhere. Anderegg’s note that U.S colleges graduated more sports-exercise majors in 2004 than electrical engineers is sobering.

      What can be done? It’s not enough to delay teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In fact, dislike of nerds now seems to be only part of the deep anti-intellectual strain in the United States, where a vast number of people – perhaps half the population – believes humans were created fewer than 10,000 years ago and evolution is bunk. Anderegg has no simple solutions, which means (in practical terms) that he has none at all. “Changing popular culture is not easy. It requires, first, a recognition on the part of a majority of people that the popular culture needs to be changed.” This is the culture that currently vilifies nerds and, indeed, is often contemptuous of education in general (kids who focus on books are labeled “uncool” at exactly the ages when being cool is the most important thing in life). Anderegg eventually says that change needs to begin at home, and offers some modest ways in which it can. They are good ideas, but they are not enough. Anti-intellectualism, of which anti-nerd sentiment is an element, is alive and well in the U.S. today. The ultimate revenge of at least some nerds may have to involve taking their brains and skills somewhere else.

(+++) HISTORICAL COMING-OF-AGE TALES

Gemma Doyle Trilogy #3: The Sweet Far Thing. By Libba Bray. Delacorte Press. $17.99.

Hattie Big Sky. By Kirby Larson. Delacorte Press. $8.99.

      Books can be predictable award winners, predictable candidates for best-seller lists, and can nevertheless be, at bottom, predictable – as these two are. This is not to take away from their emotional impact or their finely wrought descriptions of time and place – Libba Bray’s of an alternative Victorian England, Kirby Larson’s of Montana during World War I. Readers looking for emotions pushed hither and thither, perhaps even a good cry, will find that both these books deliver on that promise. But readers seeking something more out-of-the-ordinary than the umpteenth coming-of-age story about a strong young woman confronting hardships aplenty may find themselves somewhat disappointed by both books, their sales and awards notwithstanding.

      The Sweet Far Thing is a long, long read, at 75 chapters and more than 800 pages, as Bray interweaves all the tales she has told in A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels into this finale of her trilogy. The first book began in 1895, with 16-year-old Gemma Dole shipped away from the life she has known in India to Spence Academy, a very proper and very old-fashioned boarding school in England where secrets seem to lie within every room. Gemma, already distressed by the recurring visions she has – which keep coming true – is further disconcerted to find she has been followed by a mysterious young Indian man whose motives are unknown. In the second book, more is learned about Kartik, and Gemma is fast friends with Ann and Felicity, and the beauties and dangers of the magical place known as the realms begin to become clearer. And now, in the trilogy’s lengthy and often meandering conclusion, everything points toward the girls’ debut season in London, and change is coming to the realms as well. Gemma has bound powerful magic to herself, and become enmeshed in an intense struggle between the Order (the group to which her mother once belonged) and the Rakshana. While Gemma’s friends focus on more mundane matters – Felicity must behave herself or lose her inheritance, while Ann may have to give up her dream of a life on the stage – Gemma herself must unravel darker mysteries. Many involve Pippa, the three girls’ friend, whom they meet again in the realms but who may face great danger – or be a great danger. But even more mysteries involve Gemma herself, who (in true coming-of-age style) must figure out where she stands, who she is, and what sort of person (mundane and magical) she will become. The wrapup of the trilogy is wholly satisfactory, both in magic and in the everyday world, and fans of the first two novels will surely be just as enraptured by the third…for all that tales of this type have been so frequently told and retold.

      Hattie Big Sky wears its Newbery Honor medal proudly on the cover of the new paperback edition, and tells its real-world story briskly, in under 300 pages. Based largely on Larson’s own family history, it is an affecting tale of hardship and a 16-year-old girl’s attempt to build a solid homesteading life in Montana – partly with the help of German immigrants who are increasingly reviled as the “War to End War” drags on. The book is partly an epistolary novel, with Hattie exchanging letters with her friend Charlie, who is on the front lines in France. Indeed, Hattie is quite a writer, although she never finished high school: she creates a newspaper column about the homesteading life as she struggles to “prove up” her late uncle’s claim so she will finally have a place she can really call home. Hattie’s trials and tribulations are mostly predictable and worryingly familiar – rich rancher trying to push her out, disadvantages because of her age and gender, all sorts of weather trouble, and the deadly flu epidemic of 1918 are all in the book, presented in spare and forthright prose that never quite conceals the feeling of having read of just these perils (or ones very like them) many times before. Hattie’s pluck and optimism are not enough to overcome all her problems, but she – of course – comes of age, realizes what she has won despite a number of losses, and heads at the end toward what seems sure to be a better tomorrow. Sensitive and caring, Hattie Big Sky is the sort of book that is sure-fire for school reading lists (with classroom discussion easily started by the questions and author interview at the end of the paperback). Yet the more books readers age 12 and up have already read, the more likely it is that they will have encountered heroines very like Hattie – and Gemma – quite a few times already.

(+++) SEX: GOOD OR EVIL?

Sexy in 6: Sculpt Your Body with the 6 Minute Quick-Blast Workout. By Tracey Mallett. Da Capo. $26.

Good Sex Illustrated. By Tony Duvert. Translated by Bruce Benderson. Semiotext(e). $14.95.

      Now here’s a shocker of a revelation: sex still sells! And apparently it sells whether you’re enthusiastically endorsing it (Tracey Mallett) or equally enthusiastically condemning it (Tony Duvert).

      Actually, the biggest problem with Mallett’s book – the latest of innumerable exercise-and-diet tomes by people who look far, far better than their readers ever will, largely because it is their full-time job to exercise and look great – is that there is not enough sex in it. Mallett, a Pilates instructor, sports nutritionist, personal trainer, fitness instructor, TV fitness guru and featured fitness expert in many magazines and on the Web, looks absolutely fantastic in a clean-cut, wholesome way; the fact that her entire career is built on looking the way she does helps explain how she has time to develop the appearance that she shows off on the book’s cover and within its pages. But the “sexy” part of the book doesn’t show up until Chapter 9, which is nearly 200 pages in, and lasts only a few pages (a truly sex-focused exercise book, if done with the same winsome charm and slight hint of naughtiness that Mallett offers, really would be something different in this overcrowded field). So yes, there are illustrated “Solo Sexercises” here, plus unillustrated “Partner Sexercises” (“my husband’s a little camera shy, and in this case, so am I”). And Mallett includes some research on the health benefits of sex, plus a testimonial from a member of “Team Mallett” (ordinary people who follow the author’s approach) that leads Mallett herself to write, in the breathless style she employs throughout the book, “Robin is hot, hot, hot! When I saw her final picture I nearly fell off my chair – I was so amazed at how fabulous she looked.” But when you get right down to it – and “it” is exercise, not sex – Mallett’s exercise recommendations are nothing special. The best things about her book are, first, those testimonials from real-world people to whose bodies readers may actually be able to relate (as they cannot possibly relate to Mallett’s); and, second, the copious illustrations throughout the book showing exactly what the various exercises look like and just how, in simple terms, to do them. Mallett’s focus is the word “quick,” as in “Quick Upper-Body Blast” and “Quick Abs Blast,” which means she deemphasizes the fact that an individual set of exercises may be fast, but weight loss and body toning require doing a large number of routines over a long period of time. There is nothing wrong with any of this – anything that gets people motivated to move and work out is a good thing, and this book’s willingness to show photos (although not exercise photos) of women with less-than-perfect bodies is a point in its favor. If the bonus DVD, recipes, motivation journal and even the too-cute title encourage more people to get moving, then brava to Mallett. But readers should not expect to end up looking like her – not in six minutes, not in six years, and in most cases, not ever.

      Sex is not celebrated but bemoaned in the strange, even peculiar Good Sex Illustrated, a new edition of a 1973 rant against bourgeois sex education. The book, in approach and in its very existence, is quintessentially French, written by a gay Frenchman who strongly advocates the unpoliced and uninhibited exploration of sexuality by children. Duvert spends more than 200 pages attacking a now-30+-year-old family-oriented sex-education manual for daring to promote sex in the context of male-female relationships and the breeding of children. Talking of “the profound cruelty of medical reasoning” and denigrating orgasm as the tool of a “voracious profit machine,” Duvert – as translated by Bruce Benderson – finds nothing to admire in sex education that occurs in a heterosexual context and promotes what Americans would call “family values.” Indeed, one of the very few things Duvert does consider praiseworthy is the recent Danish decision (recent when the book was written) to lower the age of consent to 14 – something that the author hoped would be the harbinger of a sexually liberating trend (it wasn’t). The prose here is almost laughably overheated, even in translation, as when Duvert attacks a photo of an older man and young boy “because it personifies Evil, Sex and the Other. I’d believed that this trinity of a god-demon was dead – but yet again, what the priests have abandoned, medicine hangs on to.” This book gets no more than a (++) rating, and gets even that only because it is such a curiosity that it is worthwhile to study by those seeking to understand the gulf that exists between some elements of French society and some of American; between some elements of gay society and some of heterosexual life; and between some writers who are determined to proclaim themselves avant-garde with “look at me!” fervor – and those who prefer to be rational.

(++++) PIANOS, LOUD AND CLEAR

Stravinsky: Piano Music—Piano-Rag-Music (1919); Circus Polka (1941-2); Piano Sonata (1924); Serenade in A (1925); Tango (1940); Four Etudes, Op. 7 (1908); Scherzo (1902); Piano Sonata in F sharp minor (1903-4). Victor Sangiorgio, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

Tchaikovsky: Ballet Suites for Piano Four Hands—The Sleeping Beauty; Swan Lake; The Nutcracker. Aurora Duo: Julia Severus and Alina Luschtschizkaja, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

      The new Naxos CD of Stravinsky’s piano music – actually a re-release of a Collins Classics CD from 1993 – provides a fine opportunity to survey the composer’s output for the instrument on which he worked incessantly while composing his orchestral works. The piano was crucial to Stravinsky’s compositional method, but he did not write much solo music for it; and there is little of the stylistic development in the solo piano works that is evident in his works for orchestra. Perhaps for this reason, Stravinsky’s piano music is not played very frequently – but Victor Sangiorgio does play it often (it is one of his specialties), and he has clearly mastered its tremendous complexities, which include pure virtuosity, frequent rhythmic changes, and the two hands playing in different (and changing) meters for long stretches of notes. Because Sangiorgio has such a good technique for this music, he makes it easy to focus on what Stravinsky had to say rather than on how he said it. And if it turns out that Stravinsky had less to say in these works than in ones for larger forces, it is nevertheless quite interesting to hear this less-known side of the composer. The best way to present this CD would have been chronologically, making it easy (without shuffling the tracks) to hear what development there was in the music. Unfortunately, the random arrangement of the pieces reflects no apparent rationale, and leads to a CD that concludes with one of Stravinsky’s weakest works, the large-scale, four-movement Piano Sonata of 1903-4, whose outer movements are bombastic and derivative (although its inner ones show some cleverness and charm). The latest work here, Circus Polka, would have made a fine encore: commissioned by Barnum and Bailey, and including a brief and wholly unexpected touch of the Radetzky March, it is a delightful trifle. Piano-Rag-Music is a trifle, too, but an interesting one for the way it deconstructs ragtime rather than participating in it; while the 1940 Tango is moody rather than dancelike. The 1924 Piano Sonata has much cleaner and clearer lines than the earlier one and even includes a two-part invention. The Serenade of 1925 is not so much in A as around A, and each of its four movements was written to fit on a 78-rpm record – a restriction that did not hamper Stravinsky’s creativity at all. The Four Etudes are mostly reminiscent of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, but the fourth perks along in a more purely Stravinskian manner. The earliest work here, the Scherzo of 1902, sounds a bit like Tchaikovsky – and in fact, many of these piano pieces sound like or deliberately pay tribute to works by other composers. Stravinsky was not a great solo-piano composer, but the unusual and interesting nature of these pieces, and Sangiorgio’s excellent playing of them, certainly earn the CD its (++++) rating.

      The Tchaikovsky CD is harder to rate. For sheer pianism, for beauty of tone and agility of finger work, Julia Severus and Alina Luschtschizkaja definitely deserve (++++). But it is difficult to give the music more than a (+++) rating. Because Tchaikovsky’s three ballets are now so well known, it is impossible not to hear the lush melodies, the gorgeous strings, the warm winds and brass, while listening to these four-hand transcriptions – which, as a result, sound like pale imitations of the real thing. This is not altogether fair – reductions like these were commonly made to bring music into the home in pre-electronic days, and Tchaikovsky himself especially wanted the Swan Lake transcription made in order to prevent the ballet from falling into obscurity after its disastrous debut. Still, listening to this CD will likely tempt people familiar with the ballets to get out an orchestral recording of them or their suites instead. Those looking for something offbeat in their Tchaikovsky won’t go wrong with this CD, though. The Swan Lake transcription is by pianist Edouard Langer, a colleague of Tchaikovsky, and that of The Nutcracker is by Stepan Esipoff. The genesis of the Sleeping Beauty transcription is the most interesting: Tchaikovsky had it done by Rachmaninoff, who was 18 at the time, at the recommendation of pianist Alexander Ziloti, who also had a hand in the work; and then Tchaikovsky himself made final revisions. Whatever their purview, the three suites all lie well on the piano and all faithfully reproduce many of the loveliest pieces from the ballets. But that does not stop them from sounding like rather pallid reductions of brightly colored originals.

(++++) FIRST BOOKS FOR FUN AND MORE

Fisher-Price Infant Books: All About My Day—Baby’s First Scrapbook; Ears, Nose & Toes!—Discovering Me & My Friends!; The World Around Me—Colors, Numbers and More!; Who Lives in the Rainforest? Discovering Animals. HarperFestival. $6.99 each (My Day; Who Lives); $4.99 (Ears); $7.99 (World).

      Board books are common – usually as short versions of longer kids’ books or as spinoffs, in simplified fashion, of the adventures of popular characters from books for older children. The new Fisher-Price Infant Books series, though, is something different, designed from the ground up by a group of educators who are also firmly ensconced in the commercial world – and have a good sense both of what will appeal to adults and kids, on the one hand, and what will sell, on the other.

When a toy company (Fisher-Price is part of Mattel) gets involved in any project, there is always the danger that it will do so primarily as a marketing ploy, using apparent educational value to gets kids interested in owning a lot of decidedly non-educational playthings. Happily, that is not the case with these books, except perhaps in some very subtle ways, such as the prominence of the bright white-on-red Fisher-Price logo on all the books and the fact that these board books’ covers tie them into the trademarked Fisher-Price brands “Laugh, Smile & Learn” and “Animals of the Rainforest.”

For most parents and all infants, these commercial considerations really won’t matter, because the books are such straightforward fun – and are so well made, in age-appropriate designs. All About My Day—Baby’s First Scrapbook, for ages newborn and up, can be easily carried with the cut-out handle at the top, and is designed for insertion of baby photos on every two-page spread. This should make it nearly irresistible to parents as well as educational for infants, who love seeing themselves and develop their identity partly through perception of “self” and “other” and the eventual understanding that a picture of “me” is not “me” but a representation. No big words in this book, though, and no overt education, either – just left-hand-page observations and places to insert photos on right-hand pages. For example, “I like to splash in my bath!” (spoken by a smiling frog on the left)…“This is me at bath time” with a place for a photo on the right. Ending the book with a mirror was a wonderful idea, encouraging infants to play peek-a-boo with themselves.

Ears, Nose & Toes! is an even smaller book for the same age range. It comes with a sturdy stroller strap so it is easy to take anywhere, and it helps infants’ self-identification by juxtaposing amusing drawings of cartoon animals with photos of children. This means, for example, “two ears” on a smiling blue elephant on the left, and the same words with a smiling child on the right.

Very slightly older babies, from about six months of age, are the intended audience for the other two books in this set of new releases. The World Around Me features cleverly designed, unusually sturdy wheels that a parent (and later a growing child) can turn to find things out. For example, on a page showing a cutaway view of a piggy bank, the question is, “What color are my coins?” Turning the wheel reveals yellow, red or blue coins – with the color spelled out elsewhere on the page (a useful arrangement as kids get older). Similarly, a page shows cookies in different shapes, and turning the wheel reveals a star, circle and triangle. Who Lives in the Rainforest? uses flaps instead of wheels – in equally clever ways. A left-hand page tells a child that elephants have big, floppy ears; on the right is the question, “Do you see big, floppy ears behind the bushes?” – and they are in fact visible. Open the flap and…there’s the whole elephant! Tigers’ stripes, bright butterfly colors and more – all are first hinted at, then revealed by opening a flap. This is a very clever, highly involving approach that can help babies develop hand-eye coordination (to turn wheels or pull flaps) while teaching them about everyday items and about animals. There are lots more books like these to come – 50 are planned – and if they are all of this quality and are this lacking in overt commercialism, they have the potential to become superb entry points to reading for a whole new generation.

(++++) REAL-WORLD WEIRDNESS

Everything but the Kitchen Sink: Weird Stuff You Didn’t Know about Food. By Frieda Wishinsky and Elizabeth MacLeod. Illustrated by Travis King. Scholastic. $7.99.

The Greedy Triangle. By Marilyn Burns. Illustrated by Gordon Silveria. Scholastic. $6.99.

      Look at real-life stuff from the right angles and it’s just as strange as anything in fiction. Everything but the Kitchen Sink explains why you might enjoy eating a dessert that grunts (it’s a Canadian pudding that makes a grunting sort of sound while being steamed) and feasting on mudbugs (that is what crawfish – which are not bugs at all – are called in Louisiana). This delicious compendium of little-known food facts explains what 19^th-century cowboys ate (mostly beef, beans and potatoes); how much cereal kids eat (an average of 15 pounds a year); why people in Scotland always store unsliced bread with the rounded side up (a superstition says that storing it with the rounded side down means someone will die or have trouble at sea); and when potato chips were invented (in 1853 in Saratoga Springs, New York, by a chef who was trying to get potatoes to taste bad to get rid of a complaining customer). The book’s chapters focus on specific aspects of eating – snack foods, foods around the world, food-related inventions, food names and expressions, and so on – but it’s fun simply to open Everything but the Kitchen Sink at random and read whatever you find. You might, for example, come upon a quiz asking how popular food expressions started (“chew the fat,” for example, comes from the Inuit people, who used whale blubber as kids now use chewing gum). Or you might happen upon a “breakfast brainteaser” puzzle in which you match countries with breakfasts that people eat there. Or you could learn about a South African dish called biltong, made from strips of animal buttocks that have been covered in salt, dipped in vinegar, sprinkled with pepper and coriander, then dried. One thing is for sure: you’ll learn some stuff about food that you never knew before. Whether that expands your appetite or makes you lose it altogether may depend on just where you open Frieda Wishinsky and Elizabeth MacLeod’s book.

      Speaking of looking at life from a certain angle, that’s just what Marilyn Burns does in The Greedy Triangle, which is all about a three-sided character, with big eyes and a bright smile, who gets tired of doing all the thing that triangles do: making music in an orchestra, holding up roofs, catching the wind for sailboats, and so on. Gordon Silveria’s amusing illustrations show triangular elements of life clearly and simply – and continue showing what happens after the triangle, to overcome boredom, asks a helpful “shapeshifter” for an extra side and angle to make life “more interesting.” Now a quadrilateral, the ex-triangle can become a TV or computer screen, a picture frame, a book or many other things – until, growing bored again, our friend returns to the shapeshifter for another side and angle. Now the quadrilateral is a pentagon and can become U.S. military headquarters or a section of a soccer ball. But then…well, the shapeshifter is kept busy supplying the onetime triangle with new sides and angles, until eventually something happens that leads the shape to want to become a triangle again – and to be happy about it. This is a charming math fable that never really seems like an educational book, but most definitely is one. Two end-of-book pages for adults can help turn the book into a useful teaching aid – but in fact, The Greedy Triangle teaches a great deal without any grown-up assistance. For it is not only about math but also about learning to be satisfied with what you are – and that’s a lesson that’s always in great shape.

(++++) HOW CUTENESS CHANGES

Not a Stick. By Antoinette Portis. HarperCollins. $12.99.

Snowed In. By Rachel Hawthorne. HarperTeen. $5.99.

Babymouse #8: Puppy Love. By Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm. Random House. $5.99.

      Cuteness seems destined to become cloying at some point in children’s lives. The line will be drawn at different places for different kids, but it seems pretty clear that there will almost always come a point at which cuteness mutates into – well, something else.

      For young children, up to age six, Not a Stick is certain to be cute. Antoinette Portis, whose Not a Box celebrated young children’s imagination by showing all the things a cardboard box could be thought to be, delivers the same message in Not a Stick. Here, the adorable piglet carrying what any adult or older child would call a stick repeatedly says that is what it is not. For example, one simply drawn page shows the piglet marching along, all alone, while being told, “Look where you’re going with that stick”; the next page shows a much more elaborate drawing of the piglet in a uniform, followed by a drummer, clearly leading a marching band with an elaborate baton while innocently asking, “What stick?” The pattern continues throughout the book: “Watch where you point that stick,” with the piglet doing just that, is transformed on the next page into “This is not a stick” – it is an artist’s brush, and the easel in front of it holds Van Gogh’s masterpiece, “The Starry Night.” Like the stick itself, the story here is simple in the extreme; like the piglet, it is very, very cute; yet it has a useful lesson to teach about the power and importance of imagining things to be different from what hey seem to be in everyday terms – and much more special.

      Fast-forward to the teen years, and what’s cute about Rachel Hawthorne’s Snowed In is the generalized adorableness of the premise – as in, “Aww, that’s so cute!” The story is about 17-year-old Ashleigh, who dates guys briefly but has never had a real boyfriend; her mom, who is moving the two of them from Texas to a snowy island in the middle of Lake Michigan, just in time for winter; and a handyman and his son, who (so cute!) end up attracted to, respectively, Ashleigh’s mother and Ashleigh herself. But, see, the boy already has a girlfriend, who always calls him “my boyfriend” instead of using his name (cute?); and Ashleigh’s mother has what might be called an Ozzie-and-Harriet divorce from her father (they just got married too young, at 18, and grew in different directions, but really really really still care a lot for each other – cute?); and it turns out that Josh Wynter (cute name for a boy in a book called Snowed In, right?) is only a boyfriend because this girl, Nathalie, wrote him a note asking him when they were, like, 12 (cute!); and there’s also a guy, Shaun, who likes Nathalie but can’t do anything because she’s been Josh’s girlfriend, like, forever…and by the end Josh and Ashleigh are paired off, and so are Shaun and Nathalie, and everyone’s friends with everyone, and the only violence is a snowball fight, and even though Josh and Ashleigh get snowed in for, like, days in a blizzard, they don’t even think of doing anything physical but kiss and snuggle a little… Cute, cute, cute….cloying, cloying, cloying. There’s a line crossed here – and then crossed again and again, in fact. Snowed In gets a (+++) rating for really young teens or preteens (although it’s officially recommended for ages 14 and up). Older teens – say, around Ashleigh’s age – won’t need to rate it, because they won’t want to read it. For them it will be well past the point of cuteness.

      For kids between the Not a Stick and Snowed In ages – that is, for ages 7-10 – the Babymouse books by sister and brother Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm always offer a reliable dose of cuteness. They have moved a bit more in the direction of real-world issues lately, but in the case of Puppy Love, perhaps they have gone a touch too far. Although the book deserves a (+++) rating for its usual blend of sassiness and adorableness, it may well upset some fans of Babymouse by being the only book about her to have a genuinely unhappy ending. The story this time is about Babymouse and pets, starting as she lets a succession of goldfish die and continuing as her indulgent mom buys her a variety of other animals: hamster, turtle, ferret, hermit crab – but everything gets out of cages and escapes, even (improbably) a plant (a Venus fly trap) and a hermit crab. The book shows the animals having a great time while hidden in Babymouse’s bedroom, so kids don’t worry that they all died, but the irresponsibility of Babymouse toward living things is troubling. Then Babymouse finds a stray dog – and after many false starts (and some of her trademark unrealistic daydreaming), Babymouse actually learns responsibility and does a fine job. But then the dog’s owner returns and takes it away, leaving Babymouse with nothing – and likely leaving young readers who love animals upset. Parts of the story are cute, and Babymouse herself always is, but the book as a whole contains more upsetting ideas than in earlier entries in the series.

(++++) IT’S ABOUT TIME

The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity. By Stefan Klein. Marlowe & Company/Da Capo. $25.

Sleep Deprived No More. By Jodi A. Mindell, Ph.D. Marlowe & Company/Da Capo. $14.95.

      Americans are quite familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s famous comment, “Time is money.” They are less familiar with composer Hector Berlioz’ wry remark, “Time is a great teacher; unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.” Even less known is a straightforward but pithy Hindu statement, “Time is holy.” So what is time? Clearly, it depends on who and where you are and what you are doing; it also depends, as science journalist Stefan Klein points out in The Secret Pulse of Time, on when you are: “As the pace of our lives speeds up, our perception follows suit.” Klein’s very wide-ranging look at experiential time delves into what it means to perceive the passage of time, what happens in the brain that connects us to event sequences, and what unexpected correlations there are between time perception and everyday activities. For example, he writes that people concentrate better by drinking coffee because “coffee heightens the effect of noradrenaline in the brain, which results in the release of more dopamine. … People who suffer from attention deficit disorder…are among the most habitual coffee drinkers, because this disorder is caused by a weak executive function, and caffeine can compensate temporarily for this deficiency.” Klein writes with surety and finesse, and is fond of using unexpected juxtapositions to intrigue readers, as when he calls one section of a chapter “Thelma, Louise, and the Rocket.” He points out the realities of time management (“no day has more than 86,400 seconds, and we cannot focus on two things at once during any one of them”) while also exploring the oddities of time perception and management (“moving clocks run more slowly”). This is a discursive book, easily able to accommodate a Marcel Duchamp painting, a scene from the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film Rope, and an explanation of transcendence: “Paradoxically, we find ourselves able to experience the smallest possible unit of time this intensely because we feel that we are being carried beyond the limits of time and space.” Klein manages to explain how time can be money, a teacher and holy all at once, through a combination of its objective existence (however perceived) and our subjective experience of it.

The Secret Pulse of Time is an intellectually bracing book, but only occasionally a practical one. Sleep Deprived No More is far less elegantly written and far more matter-of-fact in what it seeks to accomplish – and will, at least in sections, be far more welcomed by women who are pregnant or have infants. The book’s intent is spelled out in its subtitle: “From Pregnancy to Early Motherhood – Helping You & Your Baby Sleep Through the Night.” Jodi Mindell, associate director of the Sleep Center at Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia, and author of several books on sleep difficulties in families, here spends almost 300 pages on a single aspect of sleep in a book intended for people who are quite unlikely to have sufficient time and energy to read it. The sleep tips and bullet-point reminders at the ends of chapters are useful and easy to absorb, but the chapters themselves tend to get more detailed than many women will find useful – so the book gets a (+++) rating. For example, a four-page Progressive Muscle Relaxation Script lists 12 muscle groups and corresponding tensing exercises, then goes through every element of what a woman should do to follow the script – including exactly how many seconds to wait between script elements. In other places, Mindell is less than helpful and less than realistic: during the third trimester, “Even just the [baby’s] usual stretching of limbs and bending of elbows can keep you awake at night. What you can do: Honestly, nothing. There is no way to settle an active baby down when you are trying to sleep. Instead, enjoy it. This is the best part of pregnancy.” (It is?) Mindell has a number of good ideas, but ferreting them out may take more time (there’s that “time” element again) than a mother or mother-to-be can spare. Stick to the end-of-chapter summations and suggestions, though, and you’ll find a lot of solid information in short, easily digestible, timely form.

(++++) BEST “MAHAGONNY” IN A WEILL

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Audra McDonald (Jenny Smith); Patti LuPone (Leocadia Begbick); Anthony Dean Griffey (Jimmy McIntyre); Robert Wörle (Fatty the Bookkeeper); Donnie Ray Albert (Trinity Moses); Mel Ulrich (Bank Account Bill); Steven Humes (Alaska Wolf Joe); Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by James Conlon. EuroArts. $29.99 (DVD).

      There is no way to create a perfect Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, since the work itself is so deeply imperfect. Dark, dour and almost entirely emotionless, lacking sympathetic characters and with few memorable tunes, it gains its power from the blatancy of its kick-or-be-kicked worldview and its unremitting attack on the excesses of capitalism. It is inevitably compared, to its detriment, with The Threepenny Opera, written at almost exactly the same time during Germany’s Weimar Republic: parts of Mahagonny predate Threepenny and parts postdate it.

      But Mahagonny does have power and a kind of surrealistic charm, and the Los Angeles Opera has put together about as effective a version of it as audiences are likely to see for some time. The key here is the realization that Brecht/Weill theater is neither opera nor musical show, but something in between – and to cast Mahagonny accordingly. Thus, musical stars (and Tony Award winners) Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone handle the primary female roles, while opera singers Anthony Dean Griffey, Robert Wörle and Donnie Ray Albert sing the principal male parts. This works splendidly, not only because the performers are so good but also because their vocal qualities are so different. They don’t quite fit together – and that is exactly right in a performance of Mahagonny.

      The work is presented essentially intact, and many potentially awkward elements of the presentation – such as a voice (Jamieson K. Price’s) announcing the opening of most scenes – flow quite smoothly indeed. The time scheme of the production is exceedingly clever, starting more or less in the 1920s and moving ahead until, at the end, we are in a modern Las Vegas-style setting, where credit cards have replaced cash and where the final placards called for in the libretto are not carried but are displayed above the stage as digital signboards. There are some misfirings – for example, the emphasis on Mahagonny’s flag (a rag in the broken-down truck seen at the beginning) works well, until there is suddenly a folded American flag jarringly used as a major prop at the work’s end. But by and large, the staging is excellent.

      So is the singing. In the role of the prostitute, Jenny Smith, created by Lotte Lenya (who was herself a prostitute before she became Weill’s wife), Audra McDonald is wonderfully sly, active and determined, and looks great in costumes that leave little to the imagination. Her voice is perhaps a shade too smooth for this role, but she uses it (and her body) so well that she becomes the work’s focus whenever she is on stage. The English translation of Brecht’s libretto by Michael Feingold is only so-so, missing out on some of the original’s bitter intensity, and some intentional oddities of Mahagonny are inevitably lost in any English-language production – notably Jenny’s “Alabama Song,” deliberately written in pidgin English to stick out in what is otherwise a German libretto. But McDonald’s way with this song and with her paean to self-reliance (that’s the “kick or be kicked” number) simply bubbles over with cynicism.

      Her naïve foil is Anthony Dean Griffey as Jimmy McIntyre (changed for some inexplicable reason from Jim Mahoney in the original). Griffey inhabits this part fully and is nearly ideal, in both looks and voice, as a man in far over his head in a world where only money matters – and where, fatally, he runs out of it. He is excellent in the one genuinely emotional number in the entire two hours, in which he implores the sun not to rise.

      Patti LuPone as the “widow Begbick” makes a perfect schemer, whether plotting to found Mahagonny in the first place or pronouncing sentence as its chief judge. Her two cohorts in venality, Robert Wörle and especially Donnie Ray Albert, have very strong voices and fine acting ability as well. James Conlon conducts without a trace of sentimentality – there is none in Mahagonny – and with strong emphasis on the score’s angular rhythms and music-hall vulgarity. It’s never exactly a pleasure to see or hear Mahagonny – it’s both unremittingly dark and packed with abrupt mood changes that cause it to lurch back and forth unsettlingly. And the idea that capitalism does evil things by caring only about money, not about people, is both banal and obvious (and was even when the work was written). Still, Mahagonny has power; and, when it is as well sung and presented as it is here, it makes for a splendid stage presentation that pulls you in intellectually even if it never fully engages you emotionally.

(++++) WAR AND PIECES

Welcome to the Nerd Farm! A “Doonesbury” Book. By G.B. Trudeau. Andrews McMeel. $18.95.

Doonesbury.com’s The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Edited by David Stanford. Andrews McMeel. $16.95.

      Garry Trudeau may have found his calling at last – or found another one – as the outlet for the voices of American military personnel deployed in distant lands. This may surprise people who think of Trudeau only as the reliably liberal voice of the Doonesbury comic strip, which has been around for almost four decades. But Trudeau is full of surprises when you look at him and his work as a totality. He is not unquestioningly liberal: he portrayed President Bill Clinton as a waffle dripping with butter and syrup (what icon would he create for a President Hillary Clinton, one wonders?). And he is by no means anti-military – he is anti-war, which is not the same thing. Plenty of members of the military are anti-war, too, including many who are fighting.

      Life is complex, and Doonesbury is complex to the extent that it reflects life. Trudeau does not love his characters – he has said that he looks to the right characters to make whatever point he wants to make, even if that means a character dies or becomes gravely ill. The characters are a means to an end – even Michael Doonesbury, titular “star” of the strip, who (like Walt Kelly’s Pogo in the strip of the same name, which heavily influenced Trudeau) is less interesting than many of those around him. Kelly once explained that by saying of Pogo, “He’s the glue.” And so is Mike.

      The bits of life that Mike glues together in Welcome to the Nerd Farm! include the adventures of his daughter, Alex, at MIT; the emergence of perpetual bad-boy Duke from a comatose state into a new career as a Washington lobbyist; the slow recovery of B.D. from the emotional stress of war, which has cost him a leg; the breakup of the gay relationship of Mark and Chase, who were “married” by a TWA flight attendant; the move of Mike’s mother from Oklahoma, which she loves, to Mike’s home in Seattle, which she loathes; and more. Trudeau follows each piece of his many stories for a while – a week or two in newspaper time – and then shifts his focus elsewhere. He may not be attached to his characters, but it is the character-oriented tales that work best in this collection, whether they involve adjusting to college or to a move far from one’s home in one’s later years. The strictly political stuff – and there is plenty of it – just doesn’t wear well; in many cases, it is tied so closely to events of the day that it is now hard to figure out what Trudeau was talking about. Unless political cartoonists are exceptional artists – Thomas Nast in the 19^th century and Pat Oliphant today come to mind – there is little interest in their work once its points are made. Trudeau is simply not at the Nast/Oliphant level (and even their works are not really effective in collections, from the point of view of content).

      One cartoon in Welcome to the Nerd Farm! has taken on a special life of its own: a Sunday page from October 2006 that announced the creation of “The Sandbox,” an online location at which troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – and their families back home – could post their feelings about what they were going through. The idea was to take military blogging outside the military itself, bringing a broader, civilian audience into the day-to-day world of the people fighting for the United States in wars far from home. This is a wonderful, tremendously sensitive idea that entitles Trudeau and Doonesbury to at least a footnote in the history of U.S. warfare. It is not, however, an idea that works especially well in book form, which is why Doonesbury.com’s The Sandbox gets a (+++) rating. The difficulty is not the humaneness of the book but its mundaneness. Reading just a few entries, or parts of entries, is enough to show that U.S. soldiers and their families are just like other Americans and their families: doing their jobs, worrying about everyday details, concerned about today and tomorrow. Obviously, there is greater urgency and drama in war than in commuting to a desk job, and the horrors of war are certainly apparent in some of the Sandbox postings. But what comes through most clearly – again and again, for more than 300 pages – is that these fighters are simply people, and young ones at that. “Some of us believe in the political machines that nudge entire nations into war, and some of us just believe in ourselves and each other and doing the duty we raised our hand and swore to do.” “If anyone back home reads this: If you’re too far right to make any sense, leave me alone, and if you’re too far left to make any sense, leave me alone.” “Something dark and twisted comes into view, lying in the middle of the street, which is dirtier and more cluttered than usual.” “We walk and share our experiences and the wonderment of being in an alien place for a strange celebration, and we discuss the way that buildings and pavement and glass only make a setting.” This is incredibly powerful material – in small doses. The awful ordinariness of day-to-day war emerges, again and again, with striking clarity. But the repetitive nature of the experiences soon dulls the reader, as it must dull so many of the fighters. Doonesbury.com’s The Sandbox is simply too much, even when sampled in small doses – and few readers who do sample it here and there are likely to want to go back to it later. As well-intentioned and important as the book is, it is ultimately less effective than reading the ongoing saga of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as posted at Doonesbury.com itself.