(+++) DEATH, BE PROUD

The Postmortal. By Drew Magary. Penguin. $15.

     A dystopian novel with a number of predictable plot points mixed with some genuinely unexpected ones, Drew Magary’s first book is a fast-paced, blog-and-twittererized story about what might happen if a cure for death were discovered. Magary is not talking about immortality or Superman stuff but about genetic engineering: what if it turned out (because of a scientist’s fortuitous bungling of an experiment) that the aging process is not controlled by a multitude of factors but by a single, apparently innocuous genetic component? This does not mean people could not die or be killed – disease, accidents, murder and suicide would still exist – but it would mean that people would simply stop aging once they took “the cure.” Then what?

     Then a number of things happen, narrated by John Farrell, who is the Winston Smith in this Orwellian perhaps-apocalyptic book. We know from the “frame” presented at the start that a mysterious and ominous agency called the Department of Containment has abridged and edited Farrell’s writings and is presenting them to bolster its argument that “the cure for aging must never again be legalized.” By the book’s second page, we know there has been some sort of collapse of the United States – and not too far into the narrative, we find out about the frightening elements of the Department of Containment when it apparently arises in China as some sort of super-population-control overseer.

     But the primary narrative is Farrell’s. A lawyer who takes “the cure” when it is still illegal, he lives a rather dilettantish life after his girlfriend is killed when she too tries to obtain the cure – dying not because of the procedure itself but because of coordinated terrorist attacks against doctors performing it. After the cure is legalized, Farrell meanders through his potentially eternal life, offering short chapters such as “afternoon link roundup” to go with discussions about his father (who, despite being considered too old to take the cure, does take it – and regrets doing so), the son he fathers with a woman who leaves him when he explains unapologetically why he will not marry her, and various political and religious interpositions. The politics surrounding the cure get rather short shrift, which is a shame, and the religious elements tend to be predictable – the Pope declares the cure an excommunicable offense against God’s will, and the fast-growing “Church of Man” uses it as the basis for creating what one character calls “a goddamn hippie day camp” in which people worship (or at least celebrate) humanity and give each other lots of hugs.

     What is most interesting in The Postmortal is the creeping (and somewhat creepy) sensation that the no-more-aging discovery is anything but an anodyne. Something is fundamentally wrong, not scientifically and not in traditional religious or ethical terms, but structurally, in terms of the human mind and (perhaps) soul, with the notion of cutting the aging process short. There is eventually a wholesale breakdown of just about everything, as nuclear explosions erupt, but not in the context of a war between countries, and mild-mannered and (in truth) rather dull Farrell finds himself inexorably drawn into becoming, not to put too fine a point on it, a murderer. One of the later chapter titles, “There Is Nothing Left to Lose,” sums up the direction the book takes, as Magary’s extension of reality becomes increasingly far-fetched but nevertheless retains a certain level of twisted logic within his narrative flow. It is inevitable – indeed, it has been clear from the very first page – that things will turn out badly, so the interest here is not in what happens but in how it happens. Despite some obviousness and stylistic inelegance, how it happens is believably (again, in context), and with enough drama to make readers wonder – well, wonder what, exactly? There is a disappointing lack of analysis and implication in The Postmortal, some of whose plot twists are clunky, some of whose futurism falls flat (as in the assumption that E-mail. blogs and hip-hop will still be important in 2059), and some of whose attempts at verisimilitude misfire (as in the misnaming of Old Dominion Drive, a major thoroughfare in northern Virginia, as Old Dominion Road).

     As a whole, The Postmortal is neither more nor less than a well-paced adventure tale (don’t be surprised if it becomes a movie). But it is not ultimately a thought-provoking book. Unlike 1984, to which it bears a number of superficial resemblances, it does not leave readers contemplating society vs. the individual, or the limits of propaganda, or the great questions of love and duty, or the eternal imbalance between good and evil. It is simply a story – a pretty good one, generally well told, attuned to the low 21^st-century tolerance for nuance and ambiguity, but ultimately just a story. It could have been more: the importance of aging to human sensibility and productivity is a fascinating topic. But Magary is content to wring drama (and a not-insignificant amount of melodrama) out of his plot, and it has to be said that he does so very effectively, if not ultimately very meaningfully.

(+++) FROM A CHILD’S VIEW

Keeping Your Child in Mind: Overcoming Defiance, Tantrums, and Other Everyday Behavior Problems by Seeing the World through Your Child’s Eyes. By Claudia M. Gold, M.D. Da Capo. $15.

     This is a valuable and clinically interesting book that is not especially easy to read and may not be simple for parents to use in their everyday lives – although that is Claudia Gold’s intent. A practitioner of behavioral pediatrics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Gold couples an understanding of recent scientific and medical research with insights into parent-child relationships gleaned from her own work: “Over my twenty years of pediatric practice, I grew to understand that it was not either the child or the parent, but rather the relationship that was my patient. The relationship is the place where the child’s experience, and the qualities she brings into the world, meet the parent’s experience.” This is a moderately complex formulation, certainly different from and more difficult than that offered in most “parenting” books, which tend to deal with specific elements of children’s behavior and offer parents ways to cope with them.

     Coping is not the point here. Gold does not wish to tell parents what to do – she wants to show them how to connect with, to stay attuned to, their children. This goes beyond seeing things from a child’s point of view, which is not really a possibility (except in a general sense) when a child is newborn or very young. Gold builds in large part on the work of D.W. Winnicott, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst who first observed that children develop a strong sense of self when those close to them accept their feelings and help them manage their emotions. Connectedness is the point here.

     This sounds a bit abstruse, and in some ways it is. Getting into the practical side of connecting may not be easy for stressed parents. For example, in discussing colicky infants – among the most challenging of all parental issues – Gold writes, “Rather than think about ‘what to do’ for a colicky baby and how to make it stop, I help parents to ‘be’ with a colicky baby. …He needs his parents to help him regulate and contain his feelings. When his mother mirrors his feelings, this does not mean that when the baby is screaming, his mother screams, too. It is more that she shows recognition and acknowledgment of the baby’s distress, reflecting back his experience, but in a way that contains it and makes it endurable.” An admirable idea, but anyone who has ever had to deal with colic may be forgiven for feeling that this is all rather dry and reserved, compared with the reality of a tiny child shrieking uncontrollably for hours (or what seems like hours) at the exact pitch needed to jangle every nerve in a parent’s body.

     Gold tends to sound somewhat removed from the fray of everyday parental activities. Her successes in therapeutic sessions are well described and certainly indicate that she understands the issues involved and knows ways to assist parents with them. She remarks at one point that when dealing with a parent and child, she often feels like a grandparent, in effect providing the parent with someone to lean on so that the parent can, in turn, be there for the child. But translating this in-office experience into an in-home one, amid all the stresses and time pressures of daily life, is another matter. Likewise, some of Gold’s well-intentioned advocacy is difficult to put into practice: “It is important for schools to recognize that not all problems with paying attention are due to ADHD. Teachers can be important allies for parents in the task of holding a child in mind, especially in helping parents understand a child’s level of development.” These are the same tremendously overworked, under-supported teachers who have too many kids in their classes, too much paperwork to do, too many tests to teach to, and too little time even to discipline the few genuinely difficult students in their classes adequately.

     Gold makes her basic point early in the book and returns to it frequently, in multiple contexts: “Holding a child in mind can be understood narrowly as an ability to think about your child’s behavior in terms of his underlying feelings and motivations. But on a broader level, it is a crucial human skill with long-term effects. Parents who develop this skill are helping a growing child regulate intense emotions.” This is a clear formulation and a useful one, and Gold’s examples of families with which her approach has worked are helpful. But she offers the sort of help that is difficult to lift from a therapeutic setting with an intelligent and strongly committed behavioral expert and place in the mundane context of simply making it through another day of ordinary but emotionally very trying parental challenges.

(++++) SUBSTANTIAL SYMPHONIES?

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6; Hamlet Fantasy-Overture. Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern conducted by Christoph Poppen. Oehms. $16.99.

Spohr: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 6; Concert Overture in C minor, Op. 12. NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover conducted by Howard Griffiths. CPO. $16.99 (SACD).

     The German “radio orchestras” play with consistent excellence and considerable style under all conductors and in just about all repertoire, both the familiar and the less so. The awkwardly named but very fine Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern gives Christoph Poppen everything a conductor could want in the new Oehms recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony. The strings are silky-smooth, the brass warm and prominent, the woodwinds just piquant enough for this music. Poppen, for his part, is at some pains to make it clear that this is a “Pathétique” work rather than a “Tragique,” as Modest Tchaikovsky first suggested his brother call it. There is no swooning here. The first movement emerges from the bassoon depths feelingly, but more with elegance than with a sense of impending doom, and as the orchestral introduction gives way to the movement’s main theme, the playing is clean, the lines clear and the orchestral balance excellent. There is no sense of trying to delve deeply into despair here – if anything, the movement is a trifle cool, which is an unusual approach. The rhythmically odd waltz of the second movement is likewise handled straightforwardly, its 5/4 meter never seeming halting or peculiar – a touch disturbing, perhaps, but not intensely so. Yet Poppen is equally careful to avoid overdoing the apparent triumphalism of the third movement: the pacing is deliberate, the march rhythm presented with clarity, and the eventual climax rendered with considerable strength without any over-the-top emotionalism. It is therefore no surprise that the finale, although played very effectively, also fails to plumb the depths that many conductors find in it. “Fails” is not really the right word, since it does not sound as if Poppen is seeking something that neither he nor the orchestra finds. What seems to happen in this live recording is that Poppen is looking for something new to say about this warhorse of the symphonic repertoire, and has come up with the notion of performing the symphony in accordance with its title rather than its provenance (Tchaikovsky died nine days after the first performance). Tchaikovsky’s themes come through with great beauty and considerable subtlety in this reading; what is absent is intense, heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalism. Many listeners will not miss it at all. And Oehms couples the symphony with a fine Poppen performance (also a live recording) of the Hamlet fantasy-overture – a work that really is, at its core, tragic. But it is also dramatic, and it is the drama on which Poppen focuses. The work is episodic, and Poppen gives each portion its due, focusing on the individual themes and Tchaikovsky’s handling of them, then eventually pulling everything together into a strong and very well-played climax. Both these readings are Tchaikovsky shorn of some of the overindulgence of which he has often been accused, and which many conductors seem only too eager to bring out. The performances are all the better for being somewhat more emotionally restrained than is the norm.

     There is no “norm” in the performance of Louis Spohr’s symphonies, which were once very highly regarded but nowadays languish in near-total obscurity. It is likely that Howard Griffiths’ cycle will be the standard for years to come, and it is good news that CPO has now brought out the third entry in the series after a three-year hiatus (Griffiths’ earlier recordings included Symphonies Nos. 2 and 8 on one CD and Nos. 3 and 10 on another). Spohr was a skilled craftsman and a more-than-adept orchestrator, but not an especially innovative composer. The new CD features two symphonies that look distinctly back in time. No. 1 (1811) is closely based on Mozart’s Symphony No. 39: it is in the same key, and the first two movements parallel those of Mozart quite closely. Spohr has a fine sense of detail, and the distinctions between his work and Mozart’s were surely intended by him to showcase his different handling of the material. For example, both Mozart’s second movement and Spohr’s are in A-flat major and 2/4 time, but Mozart’s is marked Andante con moto and Spohr’s Larghetto con moto. And the third and fourth movements of Spohr’s symphony follow the Mozart model less closely. Nevertheless, the impression of the symphony is of a throwback, a reaction against (for example) Beethoven’s quick and dramatic modulations in favor of the careful balance and cautious preparation for key changes more typical of earlier composers. The work is pleasant enough (although its finale does not fit very well with the first three movements); but it is not particularly memorable. Symphony No. 6, on the other hand, is memorable, but whether in a positive or negative way will depend upon the listener. Spohr called this work Historical Symphony in the Style and Taste of Four Different Periods. The first movement is based on the music of Bach and Handel; the second, the works of Haydn and Mozart; the third, the music of Beethoven; and the fourth, that of the “moderns” of 1840, the year of the symphony’s first performance. Unlike, say, Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 4 (“Mozartiana”), Spohr’s symphony is not designed to showcase specific music of earlier composers or recast it in accord with audience preference of Spohr’s own time. Spohr simply applies his compositional methods to forms that dominated the various times – a sonata form with dotted eighths and sixteenths in the “Mozart” movement, for example. In the finale, he uses more percussion than is his usual wont, along with diminished-seventh chords that give the work a rather Romantic flavor. This symphony was controversial in Spohr’s time (and not particularly popular), one reason being that audiences were not sure whether Spohr was trying to imitate or outdo earlier composers – and another being that listeners were not quite sure whether the finale was intended as parody. Today the symphony seems like rather mild stuff, more like warmed-over versions of earlier music than any strong commentary on anything. The NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover plays both the symphonies very well, and Griffiths is an attentive and well-focused conductor who gives these works their full due. He also handles Spohr’s early and short Concert Overture in C minor quite well, although the piece itself is of little consequence. This CD gets a (+++) rating, not because of any lack in the presentation – like the other German “radio orchestras,” the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover is very fine indeed – but simply because the music itself is too slight to have wide appeal. The more of Spohr’s symphonies Griffiths offers on CPO, the clearer it becomes that Spohr was a good composer who fell far short of the greatness attributed to him by many listeners in his own time.

(++++) MUSICAL PAINTINGS, LARGE AND SMALL

Mahler: Symphony No. 3. Mihoko Fujimura, contralto; Knaben des Bamberger Domchores, Damen des Chores der Bamberger Symphoniker and Bamberger Symphoniker – Bayerische Staatsphilharmonie conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $29.99 (2 SACDs).

Peter Schickele: A Year in the Catskills; Gardens; What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House?; Dream Dances; Diversions. Blair Woodwind Quintet (Jane Kirchner, flute; Jared Hauser, oboe; Cassandra Lee, clarinet; Cynthia Estill, bassoon; Leslie Norton, horn); Felix Wang, cello; Melissa Rose, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

     There is no larger canvas in music than Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and no work that so effectively encompasses as much of the world – which was just what Mahler intended this symphony to do. Despite Leonard Bernstein’s famous statement that music does not mean anything, that there is no absolute correspondence between what the composer creates and a specific set of pictures or a specific story, Mahler’s Third stands as an exemplary piece of storytelling from an extremely personal perspective. The gigantic six-movement work (originally intended to have seven: the planned finale became the last movement of the Fourth) takes listeners from the sounds of nature, through a series of intermediate stages, to a broad and beautiful finale that Mahler originally called “What love tells me” (he suppressed the movements’ descriptions but then let them be known as general guides). The astonishing thing about this gigantic 100-minute symphony is that it is simultaneously a deeply personal statement by Mahler and a work into which each listener can read what he or she wishes…or, rather, what he or she feels. It is a tremendously moving work when it is performed with the care and sensitivity that it receives from Jonathan Nott and the Bamberger Symphoniker – Bayerische Staatsphilharmonie. Nott lets the enormous first movement (which lasts longer than most complete Mozart symphonies) build gradually to a series of climaxes, each more intense than the last: listeners not exhausted by the building and rebuilding of the musical structure will be tremendously exhilarated by the process. The excellent SACD sound helps make the contrast of the gentle second movement more effective than usual, and Nott actually produces a minuet-like rhythm – which Mahler calls for but which is often not clear in performances. The third movement has bite as well as beauty and sounds more scherzo-like under Nott than it often does under other conductors. The vocal movements – the fourth and fifth of the symphony – are well differentiated here, since Nott uses a true contralto, Mihoko Fujimura, for the Nietzsche poem, where other conductors often use mezzo-sopranos. Fujimura’s dark vocal tone imbues the poem with added depth and personal anguish, providing a strong and highly effective contrast to the bright choral movement that follows. But interestingly, Nott makes this a more serious movement than most other conductors do: there is joy from the children’s chorus here, but it is muted rather than ebullient. This maintains a serious tone to bridge to the finale, the crown of this work. And the picture Mahler paints here is heartfelt indeed – with Nott pacing the movement judiciously, so it moves rather than stagnates (as it sometimes can), yet still delves deeply into the composer’s emotions and therefore those of the audience. As a whole, this is a beautifully played and very warm performance of the symphony, one that is well attuned to the work’s many moods and the many large-scale portraits of nature, humanity and the ineffable that Mahler paints within it.

     There is tone painting on a much smaller scale in the new CD of chamber music by Peter Schickele, who is best known as the creator of “P.D.Q. Bach” but here appears in more-serious guise. This is not to say that Schickele lacks humor: this music, largely tonal, often has mildly amusing elements. But it is not parodistic music in “P.D.Q. Bach” mode, nor is it deliberately imitative in the way Schickele has long been as part of his “P.D.Q. Bach” offerings – for example, by stringing together other composers’ themes into incongruous combinations that he then claims as his own. This disc shows Schickele (born 1935) as a serious musician with a fine grasp of chamber-music writing and a predilection for miniatures: with the exception of one movement that runs seven minutes, none on this CD lasts more than five, and most of the movements are quite a bit shorter (usually a minute or two). Schickele strings these short pieces together into works intended to evoke a particular time, place or mood. A Year in the Catskills (2009) goes through the four seasons and then concludes with a fifth movement called “Fast Driving” that is designed to dispel any melancholy from the previous “Winter: Lament,” which is actually more thoughtful than sorrowful and is certainly not tragic. Gardens (1968), for oboe and piano, has three movements simply labeled “Morning,” “Noon” and “Night,” and is an impressionistic piece with somewhat updated harmonies. What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House? (1988) is a sort of “childhood reminiscence” for horn and piano, its final boogie-woogie being its most interesting element. Dream Dances (also 1988), for flute, oboe and cello, starts with a most un-Haydnesque minuet and progresses through a jitterbug, waltz, galop and finally a sarabande, with all the movements showing strong jazz influences and most bearing only a passing resemblance to their usual form. The concluding sarabande has some of the hymnal qualities of Ives. Diversions (1963) – written for oboe, clarinet and bassoon – is a bit Ivesian, too, especially in its final movement, which intends to evoke a New York City bar: Ives did the same thing (considerably more raucously) in Central Park in the Dark. The performers, all faculty members at Vanderbilt University, approach the works with affection and enjoyment, and clearly relish compositions that give each instrument a chance to shine while combining the voices in pleasant if not very aurally challenging ways. Schickele’s experiments with sonority – his uses of unusual instrumental combinations – are the most interesting thing here; they and the fine performances earn the CD a (+++) rating even though the music itself, while well-made, is not particularly distinguished. These are small tone pictures, never pretending to be more significant than they are; and Schickele keeps his well-honed sense of humor rather too successfully suppressed in most of them. The result is works that are pleasant enough and appear enjoyable to perform, but that, in terms of listening pleasure, are a bit on the pale side.

(++++) HISTORIES, A BIT OFFBEAT

Big Wig: A Little History of Hair. By Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Peter Malone. Arthur A.Levine/Scholastic. $18.99.

Profiles: One Event, Six Bios—World War II. By Aaron Rosenberg. Scholastic. $6.99.

      Kathleen Krull’s hair history may be “little” in page count and paragraph length, as the title indicates, but it is so packed with interesting, unusual and just-plain-strange hair information that young readers and adults will likely compete to determine who gets to read it first. And reread it first, for that matter. “The Yoruba-speaking people [in what is now Nigeria] think of hairstyles as an art form” about 5,000 years ago, Krull explains at one point. “Children born with knotted hair are considered lucky and allowed to keep their hair uncut, forming dreadlocks.” A few pages later: “Rubbing goat pee on his head. That’s how the wise philosopher Aristotle thinks he will cure his baldness. But Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, prefers his own brews, which include opium, wine, green olive oil, horseradish, and pigeon poop.” Things change later, for example in Europe during the Dark Ages: “Hair becomes boring. Church leaders decree short and simple for men, long and covered for women.” But nothing stays boring for long in this wonderful book. Krull talks about the “rat” (a several-foot-high wire form) used by women at court in Versailles in the 18^thcentury; about “long haired music,” which is what classical music was called because so many composers wore their hair unfashionably long; and, as time marches onward, about Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair Grower (1882), about the first celebrity hairdresser (1924), and about the world’s most expensive haircut (2007: $16,300, including lunch). Everything here is once-over-lightly, but the lightness is a big part of the enjoyment, and the oddball facts that Krull has dug up — coupled with Peter Malone illustrations that range from realistic to interpretative to peculiar — make Big Wig a big hit.

      History is far more serious, and far more seriously handled, in Aaron Rosenberg’s six-biography story of World War II. This entry in Scholastic’s Profiles series discusses Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Emperor Hirohito, all in brief and in straightforward language. The narrative is sometimes written a bit sloppily: “In the [Versailles] treaty, Germany took full responsibility for starting the war [World War I]. That meant they had to disarm their soldiers, disband most of their army, and pay the other affected countries for the damage the war had caused.” Who is the “they”? The German people? Members of the government? Weimar Republic staff? The lack of clarity undercuts the really remarkable information elsewhere in the same paragraph, where it is noted that war reparations were the equivalent of $400,000,000,000 today. This book gets a (+++) rating for the strength of its concise biographies, despite the inelegance with which they tend to be presented. It is punctuated with photos, some of them highly interesting (Churchill as a Harrow schoolboy and a picture of Stalin’s mother, for example). The information is sometimes skimmed a bit too thinly — it would be nice, for instance, to know why it was a problem for Roosevelt to accept help from Tammany Hall in his 1930 bid for reelection as governor of New York. But the basic stories of the individuals, and the paths that intersected among them in World War II, are well presented, with plenty of fascinating historical elements (such as General Douglas MacArthur’s backing of Emperor Hirohito after the war). This is not a substantive or substantial book, but it is a well-presented one that will give young readers some background that they can readily use for further exploration of one of the defining events of the 20^th century.

(+++) MUCH ADO ABOUT SIBS

The Sibling Effect: Brothers,Sisters, and the Bonds that Define Us. By Jeffrey Kluger. Riverhead.$26.95.

      Be prepared to learn everything you wanted to know and probably a lot you did not care about knowing about siblings from Jeffrey Kluger’s book. Kluger, a senior editor and writer at Time magazine, packs it full of research, commentary, opinion, analysis, thought, flippancy, judgments, concepts, conceits and imagination, tossing everything about willy-nilly in an attempt to pin down the importance of the psychological interactions among brothers and sisters.

      Add a second storyline running in parallel with the first — that of Kluger’s own family, which includes his three brothers, a half-brother, a half-sister, and for a time included two stepsisters as well — and you have a book that is part science, part memoir, and part self-indulgence. This is one of those exhaustive treatments of a subject that flops quickly over into exhausting for those not enamored of the material and/or the style in which it is presented. For those who have always wondered about scientific studies of siblings, though, it will be a treat.

      What sort of treat? Well, on some levels Kluger is resoundingly politically correct. He condemns Sir Francis Galton, 19^th-century British anthropologist and deviser of the theory of eugenics, after half-heartedly saying Galton should not be blamed for the evil that others later did with his concept. Yet he then talks about “all this hooey” in Galton’s work, and then tells readers, “Hold your nose at Galton if you like — and indeed you should.” Re-traversing long-known paths of condemnation so as to take cheap shots at someone who, bound by the strictures of his society, evolved a theory that, if erroneous, was nevertheless designed to be neutral and scientific, is not a very good use of a reader’s time, or a writer’s. Kluger could have made his point much more quickly by noting that Galton, long condemned because of what others did with his eugenics theory, nevertheless stumbled on the interesting fact that the scientists he studied were much more likely to be firstborns or only children (who are, in effect, firstborns) than to appear elsewhere in a family’s birth order.

      Birth order is only part of what Kluger discusses. Firstborns do tend to be measurably smarter than later children, he explains, with IQs dropping steadily for three or four children and then leveling off (but why accept IQs as valid when they themselves have been judged by some to be politically incorrect sorting tools?). Kluger is equally interested in other sibling matters, although his comments on them tend to be more mundane than the science itself: “The first thing parents need to do when faced with brawling kids is to determine what’s a real fight and what isn’t.” Kluger also discusses siblings during divorce: “Like all litter mates in such a situation, the sibs will switch into a sort of emotional survival mode, turning on one another in order to grab what little nurturing there is to be had.” Well, yes. And it is unexceptionable, but hardly surprising, to read that “children with particular emotional, behavioral, or even health problems do place added strains on a marriage,” but “the parents, as stewards of their own union, bear the sole responsibility for what happens to it.”

      There is so much that seems obvious in The Sibling Effect that the book’s pretenses to in-depth analysis are mostly just that: pretenses. Yet there is something entertaining and intriguing about having so much information about siblings between the covers of a single book. “The experts strongly counsel candor in all things” when a blended family is about to be created, Kluger writes at one point. “Kids who may still be getting over the upheaval of divorce and the loss of a noncustodial parent may not always react well when they’re told that Mom or Dad has found a replacement mate and that a swarm of stranger sibs will be part of the mix. Still, honesty beats secrecy, and as soon as possible, children need to be told what’s ahead.” It is this style, rather than the content, that repeatedly rescues The Sibling Effect from blandness and the occasional temptation to say “so what?” But some of the content is very interesting indeed, such as the reasons siblings are generally not sexually attracted to each other and a sib may not even notice that another one is a “hottie.” The discussion of identical twins is quite something, too: identicals tend to live longer than fraternal twins, who in turn live longer (statistically) than Americans as a whole; but when triplets are born, if they include identical twins plus a fraternal child, that one may always feel somewhat left out for reasons that are literally congenital. Whether the inclusion of so much autobiographical material amid the science, analysis and opinion helps the book or hurts it will be up to each reader to decide — at times, it would be nice to hear more about sibling relationships in Kluger’s own life, but at others, the use of his personal experience seems gratuitous. The Sibling Effect tends to sprawl — as, indeed, do sibling relationships themselves — and if that means it has a tendency to lack coherence, it also means the book itself tends in some ways to mirror the impossible-to-pin-down emotional aspects of siblings’ everyday lives. So deep-seated are some elements of complexity in sibling relationships that they seem even to have reached the book’s subtitle, which is given one way on the title and copyright pages but appears differently on the book jacket — as “What the Bonds among Brothers and Sisters Reveal about Us.” One thing they apparently reveal is the need for more-consistent editing.

(+++) THE SPORTING LIFE CONTINUES

Football Genius #4: The Big Time. By Tim Green. Harper. $6.99.

Football Genius #5: Deep Zone. By Tim Green. Harper. $16.99.

      Tim Green continues his mythologizing of the nobility of organized sports in the latest Football Genius novel, Deep Zone, which is being made available at the same time as the paperback version of the previous book in the series, The Big Time. The whole notion of combining “football” with“genius” shows pretty clearly what Green is trying to do: show his readers (the books target ages 8-12) that sports are a high calling, not just a form of entertainment — and never, never to be regarded as simply some sort of organized gladiatorial combat in which millionaires wearing heavy padding attempt to outrun and (especially) outhit other millionaires. That may be the reality of professional football in the United States, but it is not the way things are in Green’s universe, despite the purported realism of the Football Genius sequence.

      In The Big Time, Green tries to showcase conflicts between family matters and football ambition, as Troy White — who is helping his team make the playoffs and is already being recruited by numerous agents — is suddenly confronted by a lawyer who says he is Troy’s father. Troy has wanted to find and be with his father for years, but now that desire may be in conflict with the tremendous importance of football. It turns out that Troy’s dad, like Troy, had ambitions to be in the NFL, but a serious injury (“another eighth of an inch and I wouldn’t be walking”) got in the way. Troy’s father initially proves supportive, and Troy’s team wins the state championship, but there are (understandably) significant conflicts between Troy’s father and mother, and Troy even has to decide whether to help the FBI when it turns out that his father’s activities could land Dad in jail for up to 10 years. Family matters end up going badly — very badly indeed — but football matters go quite well for Troy, and Green suggests that that somehow makes up for everything else.

      Intermingled pasts are an important element of Deep Zone as well. Here Troy meets and plays against Ty Lewis, who showed up in an earlier Green book called Football Hero — in which Ty was chased by the Mafia but still managed to make the important plays. Ty has a brother, Thane, who is a star in the NFL, and Ty is always trying to prove himself Thane’s equal. For his part, Troy is one of a kind, a quarterback able to predict a football play before it happens (a rather creaky plot device, but a crucial one in Green’s series). Troy and Ty are rivals in a 7-on-7 tournament, and each wonders about himself and about the other. Troy, for example, is not sure why Ty seems to have an interest in Troy’s friend, Tate (for some reason, Green’s novels are packed with names that start with T). Ty, more introspective because of the shadow of Thane, knows he has exceptional speed but is not sure that will be enough to overcome Troy’s smart playing (not to mention his apparent ability to see the football future). The dialogue here, and what passes for advice, will be appealing only to strongly committed sports fans: “The only statistic that matters is wins and loses. Never forget that. No one gives you credit for breaking up an interception, not like they do when you catch a touchdown pass, but breaking up an interception is every bit as important as scoring a touchdown. When that cornerback gets his hands on the ball? Remember this: It’s your ball. It belongs to you. You go get that thing like some punk stole your lunch money. You hear me?” Yes, Ty hears Thane, who is dispensing this bit of older-brother wisdom, and Green’s readers hear all this and presumably accept it as truth and reality. And so it may be within the extremely narrow world of professional football: “There’s only one team in the whole country that gets to go home a winner, and that’s gonna be us,” says one coach, and so much for any notion that “how you play the game” is the slightest bit relevant. The FBI and Mafia elements that reappear here are never very effectively integrated into the football heroics, although Green certainly tries hard enough. The problem is that he just isn’t very interested in anything off the field, so when he twists and turns things to inveigle a happy ending, it simply isn’t very convincing. Dedicated football fans and players may very well agree with the way Green has things come out. But anyone else who picks up the Football Genius books is likely to put them down, at the end if not before, with a very sour taste in his or her mouth.

(+++) ANIMAL TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

Floors, Book I. By Patrick Carman. Scholastic. $16.99.

Ravenwood. By Andrew Peters. Chicken House/Scholastic. $16.99.

Poison Apple Book: Curiosity Killed the Cat. By Sierra Harimann. Scholastic. $5.99.

      From birds to bird hunters, animals are central to these adventure stories, which run the gamut from amusing to intense. The new Floors series by Patrick Carman, creator of The Land of Elyon and other books and sequences, is a mostly amusing, lightweight gathering of happenstances set in a highly unusual hotel, where every room is different and pretty much anything can happen…and often does. Floors tries a bit too hard and is a bit too much like other “wonderland” books — who knows what opening this or that door will do? But Carman’s fine sense of pacing and amusing (if scarcely original) characters prevent the book from bogging down or turning entirely into formula. The Whippet Hotel is where it all takes place — an establishment run by Merganzer Whippet, whose dying business-tycoon father long ago told him that he would “prosper in the field of wacky inventions,” a statement that Merganzer did not realize was but one in a series of communications that were no more than gibberish. The Whippet Hotel is weird in the extreme, but Merganzer is worrisomely absent as the book begins, and the focus quickly shifts to 10-year-old Leo Fillmore, janitor’s son and the perfect foil for readers who want to explore the peculiarities of the hotel through the eyes of someone who can go anywhere in it. Well, almost anywhere. There is plenty of oddity to go around here, and Carman spends much of the early part of the book promising more of it: “Captain Rickenbacker had fallen head over heels for the hotel from the moment he’d stepped foot into the lobby. He loved the Whippet Hotel. It made him happy. It made him content. And so he had stayed — two years running — on the third floor, in one of the oddest rooms in the hotel.” Being odd is a specialty of the building and the story. The ducks are part of it: “Betty and the other ducks were like dogs, really — if they had a good long walk every day and they got fed, they were happy on the roof. But if they were left alone for too long, they grew restless and irritable. They’d fly down to the lobby and start biting people.” But it soon — by page 17 — turns out that there is not enough strangeness in the hotel, because “Leo’s life was about to change forever” as four mysterious boxes are left for him, evildoers and their evil plans are afoot, the hotel starts to fall apart, Leo finds a friend in another young hotel worker named Remi, and the building’s strangeness turns into a series of plot points: “Every guest room had a red ball hanging from a red rope. On the wall near the ball was a red button. To send a distress signal, a guest had to grab the ball and pull the cord while simultaneously pressing the red button. …Apparently…all the guests in the hotel were pulling their rip cords and pressing the buttons in their rooms at the same time, over and over again.” And why? What exactly is going on? Well, that would be telling — and would deprive readers of “the slug cave…in the Haunted Room,” the notes from missing Merganzer, and the holes that pursue Leo and Remi and almost catch them. This all leads to a happy ending that is far from a conclusion — the series has the potential to go on for quite a while, since it is made clear that there is much about the hotel that has yet to be revealed.

      The revelations are more serious in Ravenwood, and the birds are, too. Andrew Peters’ book is a straightforward adventure/fantasy about a forest kingdom nestled high in the trees, threatened by a mechanistic enemy, and possibly to be saved by a young boy who, like Leo and Remi, does not at first seem equal to the task. Ark is, in fact, quite a bit like Leo, being something of a janitor himself: a plumber boy, whose main job is unclogging toilets. But Ark is older — he is 14 — and his story is darker than Leo’s and more fraught with peril. The book is filled with vaguely religious messages and implications: “Diana was also enraged once. The Wood-Book talks about how She laid low the temple of the honeylenders! Trust that which lies within you!” And this Diana, if she (or She) is what some believe her (or Her) to be, is served by ravens that are anything but reassuring. Inevitably, Ark will meet these creatures after he overhears the plot by the aptly named land of Maw to swallow up Arborium — and subsequently has to flee for his life and attempt to save his world. Peters likes to present atmospheric scenes, as when Ark meets (perhaps) Diana. “Could this really be Her? Impossible! Stories didn’t come to life,” thinks Ark. But he is soon explaining himself: “‘My name is Arktorious Malikum, a plumber’s apprentice, son of Mr. Malikum.’ And here, up high in this strange tree, he was out of place. …‘Your words cover up truth. You are a sewage worker, a delver in dark places. I thought I could smell something foul. …My curiosity is dulled. You are a thin snack with too much gristle. Sometimes my birds bring me treasure. Sometimes they don’t. …I have found you wanting, and the conversation tedious. My children are welcome to you.’ …There were more ravens than he had seen in a lifetime, a city of feathered monsters. …The birds clacked their beaks, screeching their dawn chorus as they prepared for a feast.” The plot is a standard one of good, nature-loving and nature-living people vs. evil technology-driven ones, the latter being thoroughly unidimensional: “Them scientists went right down to the molecular level and made this stuff superstrong. That’s why our shining cities tower over your tiny trees. This material is the future.” But those who believe that “the future truly was golden” are of course due for their comeuppance, and (also of course) it will come through Ark, who becomes “a true child of nature, tooth and claw,” and others like him. The defeat of evil by good is, as usual, suitably satisfying, and if Ravenwood offers little that is new, Peters at least presents the plot forthrightly and with considerable skill in the pacing.

      Neither pacing nor plot is a strong point of the Poison Apple books, which are intended to provide mild and quickly forgettable chills to preteen girls. Curiosity Killed the Cat does just what it needs to do, no more and no less. It includes a maybe-for-real ghost cat, a real cat named Icky that disappears mysteriously, and a setting close to a graveyard. What Hannah, the book’s protagonist, is doing in that setting is living with her father and his new family, which includes a stepsister named Madison who is, like, so totally mean. Hannah has the usual seventh-grader adjustments to make, some involving school and boys, but the focus here, as in other books in this series, is on the eerie things that may or may not indicate that something supernatural is going on. The thing that scares Hannah the most is a scratching noise at her door every night — with nothing there when she opens the door. The question of ghost cat and Icky the cat gets mixed up, and of course there is a climax at (when else?) Halloween, when Hannah and Madison find themselves together in the cemetery in the dark with the scratching sound and…well, nothing awful happens (the Poison Apple books are about chills, not real terror), but the stepsisters become friends, other social matters work out nicely, and even the Halloween party costumes turn out to be appreciated by everyone. Easy to read, not too scary, and easy to forget — Curiosity Killed the Cat is a typical entry in its series, and should be just as appealing to its target audience as the previous Poison Apple books.

(++++) THE USES OF HISTORY

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volumes 9 and 10: Berlioz—Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, arranged by Franz Liszt. Idil Biret, piano; Ruşen Güneş, viola. IBA. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Weill: Songs and instrumental arrangements from “The Threepenny Opera,” “Mahagonny,” “Happy End,” “Silbersee” and others. Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, Ernst Busch, Theo Mackeben, Otto Klemperer and others. Capriccio. $16.99 (2 CDs).

      The most interesting release yet in the Idil Biret Archives edition of the Turkish pianist’s performances from the 1970s until today, the two-CD compilation of Biret’s rendition of two Liszt arrangements of works by Berlioz is fascinating on almost every level. There are multiple layers of history here. Berlioz and Liszt met in 1830 and were longtime supporters of each other’s music: Berlioz dedicated his Damnation of Faust to Liszt, and Liszt dedicated his Faust Symphony to Berlioz. Liszt was also determined to bring Berlioz’ music to a wider audience — the orchestral effects and coloration for which Berlioz is justly admired today, and his stretching of older forms into something entirely new, did not always go over well with concert audiences; and putting on orchestral performances was more difficult and costly than making music available in piano transcriptions. Liszt transcribed the Symphonie fantastique for solo piano in 1833, and transcribed Harold in Italy not once but twice — in 1833 for solo piano and in 1836 for piano and viola. The transcriptions are exceptionally difficult to play, but like Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies, they are not virtuoso showpieces for their own sake. Rather, they elucidate elements of the orchestral music in remarkable ways — although they are not as completely true to Berlioz as Liszt was to Beethoven, Liszt here being somewhat more inclined to produce some excellent pianistic effects that are not grounded in the original works. Biret has her own history here: Symphonie fantastique was recorded in 1978 and originally released on the short-lived Finnadar label, while Harold in Italy is a brand-new recording made in January of this year. The 33 years between the recordings have led to no deterioration of Biret’s formidable technique or the formidable intellect behind it — indeed, to the extent that there is anything to criticize in these readings, it is that they somewhat lack a feeling of abandon in the finales (the “dream of a witches’ Sabbath” and “orgy of brigands”). Biret is remarkably in control, perhaps a touch too much so in the final movements; likewise, in the waltz of Symphonie fantastique, a little more rhythmic swing would have been welcome. But these are minor matters in an overall recording that is exemplary. Biret brings out Berlioz’ themes and rhythms to fine effect, and even though the orchestral color so crucial to Symphonie fantastique is missing, there are some ways in which the piano treatment (which Biret has slightly modified from Liszt’s in some places) makes the structure of Symphonie fantastique even clearer than does the original version. The entire achievement is a remarkable one, both musically and in terms of pianistic virtuosity: Biret’s performance is worth hearing again and again, no matter how familiar the listener already is with Berlioz’ original. And her reading of Harold in Italy is almost as good. The Liszt adaptation here is a particularly interesting one because Liszt, who created little in the way of chamber music, includes the solo viola for which Berlioz calls in the original work. Ruşen Güneş gives a finely tailored performance of music that Liszt sometimes lifted essentially intact from Berlioz, sometimes modified slightly to bring out one effect or another. Interestingly, the viola, which can tend to be subsumed into the orchestra in most Harold in Italy performances (because the work is not really a concerto but a symphonic piece with viola obbligato), comes through more clearly here, its role in the story more forthright and Berlioz’ writing for it more transparent with only the piano accompanying it. This Harold in Italy never really sounds like chamber music — the piano is the lead instrument throughout — but the balance between Biret and Güneş is admirably handled, both players are well in tune with both Berlioz and Liszt, and the overall effect of hearing Harold in Italy in this form is nothing less than exhilarating.

      The exhilaration is more emotional than strictly musical in the new Capriccio release of music by Kurt Weill as performed by many of the original singers and players of the works. Here the historical element of the recordings is their primary reason for being and their main value, and anyone hoping for musical continuity or high-quality sound will be disappointed. These are recordings originally made for 78-rpm discs, which could hold about three minutes of music per side; and they constitute something of a “greatest hits” compilation as interpreted by performers from Weimar Germany and elsewhere in Europe. There is a great deal of music here, nearly two-and-a-half hours, and a great deal of repetition: three complete versions of “Pirate Jenny,” three of the “Moritat” and four of the “Kanonensong” from The Threepenny Opera, for example, plus arrangements that are sometimes vocal, sometimes instrumental, sometimes combined with other music from the same work. There are dance arrangements and woodwind arrangements as well as varying vocal stylings, with Lotte Lenya’s being in retrospect the most authentic but certainly not the only ones worth hearing. The entire first CD is devoted to The Threepenny Opera, but the second disc is equally interesting. It includes, among other things, no fewer than five versions of “Surabaya-Johnny” from Happy End, one of them featuring Lenya singing as Weill himself plays a piano arrangement that he made of this and five other songs. These six songs were recorded in 1942, when Lenya’s voice was in a rarely heard register: neither as high as in her earlier recordings nor as low and harsh as in her later ones. There are other rarities on this CD as well, including two songs Weill wrote to further the Allies’ war effort against the Nazis and several excerpts, including a medley, from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. There are no texts provided for any of the vocal elements, which is unfortunate, especially since the words cannot always be clearly heard and in some cases (such as those of the World War II songs) are scarcely easy to find. But in a certain sense, the words are not the point here: these CDs provide an opportunity, “through a glass darkly” (as it were), to hear Weill’s music, well-known and less-known, performed when it was fresh rather than established, under Weill’s own auspices or with his overt or tacit approval. These discs are a window into the distant past — more than 80 years in some cases — and as such cannot and should not be held to the quality standards of modern recordings. Rather, they should be seen and heard as important documentation of significant 20^th-century music — performances against which it is quite fair to compare more-modern, better-sounding ones that may have fewer rough edges but cannot possibly match these for authenticity.

(++++) ANIMALS, FABLES, AND ANIMAL FABLES

My Rhinoceros. By Jon Agee. Michael di Capua/Scholastic. $16.95.

Bailey. By Harry Bliss. Scholastic. $16.99.

Mouse & Lion. Retold by Rand Burkert. Pictures by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. Michael di Capua/Scholastic. $17.95.

Tom Thumb: Grimms’ Tales Retold and Illustrated by Eric Carle. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.

     With varying degrees of humor and educational or informational intent, these new stories and retellings of old ones neatly meld charm with attractive illustrations. The silliest of them is My Rhinoceros, which is simply the story of a boy who buys a rhino at a shop called “Exotic Pets,” only to be disappointed when he discovers that his rhino will not chase a ball or stick, or roll over, or do much of anything. A rhinoceros expert explains to the boy that rhinos “only do two things. Pop balloons and poke holes in kites.” But the boy’s rhino doesn’t even do those things – until, on one notable day, the boy spots two bank robbers, one escaping in a balloon and the other getting away by using a kite. And then, at the boy’s command, the rhino shows what he can really do. Jon Agee keeps the super-silly story thoroughly unbelievable from start to finish (and the finish is a huge and funny surprise). The book has no meaning beyond itself and does not try to teach anything – it is a romp, plain and simple, and fun from beginning to end.

     Bailey is filled with fun, too. The title character is less exotic than a rhinoceros – he is simply a dog – but what a dog. Bailey goes to school, and not obedience school, either. He attends Champlain Elementary and is the only dog in his class. Harry Bliss follows Bailey through a typical school day, subtly providing a message for schoolchildren about the right and wrong ways to behave during school hours by showing them Bailey’s adventures. Bailey brushes his fur 100 times in the morning, for example, because “good grooming is very important,” and then chooses what to wear so he will “look cool” – in Bailey’s case, by picking a particular dog-collar color. Easily distracted on the way to the bus (by a “good-looking stick”), Bailey almost misses it, but does get picked up – and rides with his head out the window, as dogs do, while kids on the bus have their own human thoughts. Bailey fits seamlessly into school, from kids wanting to eat lunch with him to the principal asking him not to lick anyone to Bailey not having his homework because the dog ate it (that is, he ate it himself, a fact that brings him to the school nurse “with a tummy ache”). Actually, Bailey both fits in and stands out: he does not talk, but still makes it clear when he wants to trade lunches; and he enjoys rooting through lunchroom trash for added treats. He gets messy in art, becomes frightened at the top of the playground slide, and does work deemed “impressive” when he reports on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dog, Fala. He also enjoys reading, although a book about business puts him to sleep. Bailey has surreal elements, to be sure, but it is told with as realistic a touch as Bliss can give it, as if every school just happens to have one canine student who does his best to fit in and whose differences from the other students make daily learning more fun. For kids who aren’t quite sure where they fit in, Bailey’s story will be more than just the tale of a student who happens to have a tail.

     The moral and teaching intent are much clearer in Aesop’s fables, including the one about the tiny mouse whose life a lion spares – with the result that the mouse is able to save the lion’s life at a later time. The mouse is the main actor in the story, which is why Rand Burkert calls his retelling Mouse & Lion. It is an exceptionally attractive recasting of the tale, with lovely illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert that complement and enhance the mood throughout. Set in a specific region of Africa and featuring a four-striped African grass mouse rather than the more usually illustrated white one common that is in laboratories and as a house pet, the book has a feeling both exotic (from the settings) and familiar (from the story). The drawings are exceptionally beautiful, especially at the very end, when the dreaming lion, rescued from a hunter’s net trap by the mouse’s sharp teeth, has his mind filled with gorgeously depicted little creatures (bat, butterfly, turtle, chameleon and others) because “that day, such small things made him happy!” This is Aesop and is not: there is no officially, formally stated moral, yet the interaction between lion and mouse makes it clear that the story is about how all things, both great and small, have value in their own time, and it is best that we learn to appreciate each of them; for who knows when we may have need of some creature that we have carelessly or cruelly neglected or harmed?

     Eric Carle’s retellings of four tales collected by the brothers Grimm contain some lessons, some animals and some sheer exuberance. Three of the stories are quite well known: “Tom Thumb,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” and “Hans in Luck.” The fourth, “The Seven Swabians,” a very short tale and one of the Grimms’ funniest, is not nearly as popular, probably because it makes fun of a particular ethnic group. Carle’s narratives are straightforward, following the Grimms’ märchen collections closely. What the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar brings to these stories is his immediately recognizable illustrative style, which turns these offbeat and frequently amusing tales into delightful pastimes. The four stories in this new edition were originally extracted in 1988 from a seven-story Carle collection first published in 1976, but the tales and their art are as enjoyable today as they were three decades ago – or, for that matter, when the Grimms collected them in the 19^th century. Carle portrays tiny Tom Thumb perched between the ears of a distinctly annoyed-looking horse, then cuddled comfortably in a snail shell; he shows the fisherman whose wife always demands more with several different expressions of befuddlement and amazement; and he draws Hans, who happily trades his possessions for ones worth less and less, until he eventually has nothing at all and is at the peak of happiness because he is unburdened, in a series of amusing interactions with horse, cow, pig and humans who only think they have gotten the better of his unfailing good nature. As for “The Seven Swabians,” the very short story features a hilarious two-page drawing of the characters meekly surrendering to a rabbit that they believe is a vicious monster. Carle’s collection is all in good fun from a modern perspective, and his drawings add an extra fillip of enjoyment to stories that have already stood the test of time.

(+++) SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Does a Bear Sh*t in the Woods? Answers to Rhetorical Questions. By Caroline Taggart. Plume. $13.

     In the long-ago heyday of Mad magazine, artist and writer Al Jaffee (who is now 90 and still drawing for Mad) produced a recurring feature called “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” He offered a series of drawings of mundane situations – for example, a car that has obviously just smashed into something, with crumpled front end and angry-looking driver. Then he put a typical question in the mouth of someone nearby, such as a passerby: “Have an accident?” And he offered several suggested responses, such as, “No thanks. I just had one.”

     Caroline Taggart’s book is essentially an updated, prose-intensive version of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, except that the answers are not nearly as much fun as the ones in Mad and the drawings aren’t nearly as good. For example, “Do one-legged ducks swim in circles?” The answer – accompanied by a picture of a duck with one leg and a toy shovel replacing the other – is, “Probably not, actually. A duck with one leg would simply use its weight to compensate for any loss of balance, and might well employ its good leg as a sort of fin, allowing it to swim perfectly happily in straight lines. But have you ever seen a one-legged duck? No, I thought not.” This is one of the shorter entries – Taggart tends to go on at some length in others. But you get the idea.

     The concept here is a good one: even though rhetorical questions are, by their nature, not intended to elicit responses, what would those responses be if the questions were taken seriously? The problem is that Taggart takes them too seriously. Thus, “Can the leopard change his spots?” (a question from the biblical book of Jeremiah) gets a full-page explanation that includes, among other remarks, “The answer all depends on how long you give the leopard to achieve its transformation,” followed by a discussion of evolution. The Vietnam War chant, “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” garners a note on who Lyndon Baines Johnson was, followed by an estimate of 24. Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” elicits the remark, “The answer to this depends on your attitude to the person asking the question.” And so on.

     Actually, and so on and on and on. This is a thin book (160 pages) that seems longer because, after a fairly short time, Taggart’s discussions and attempts at humor start to pall. Quite a bit. This is not to say that they always fall short – some are humorous just because they take themselves so seriously. The answer to the question in the book’s title, for example, amounts to, “Well, not polar bears: where they live, there are no forests.” And when Taggart lets her own likes and dislikes show, coupling them with a fact here and there, she actually approaches wittiness: “Are you going to Scarborough Fair?” gets the following explanation, in its entirety: “Unlikely, as it hasn’t existed since 1788, but it was a big thing in its day. It ran from the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (August 15) to Michaelmas Day (September 29) – that’s quite a party. Anyone who hates the Simon and Garfunkel version of the song of that title as much as any right-thinking person must should try listening to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash duetting on ‘Girl from the North Country,’ a variant of the song.”

     Taggart’s book is intermittently amusing, but does not sustain well even over its modest length. She is often unsure whether she wants to be funny or factual. For example, “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” elicits the initial comment, “As many as he likes, as long as he doesn’t ask for directions,” which is funny enough. But then the rest of the page is an analysis of how many miles people probably do walk annually, plus a warning against walking down a road rather than on the pavement. Taggart is certainly no Al Jaffee. Is a rhetorical-question journey with her really necessary? Feel free to answer as you wish; or don’t.

(+++) HOW TOUCHING IS IT?

Microsoft Explorer Touch Mouse. Windows 7, Vista or XP (excluding XP 64-bit) or Mac OS X v.10.4-10.7. Microsoft. $49.95.

     Microsoft may have reached a point of over-differentiating its hardware. It now has three mice in its “Touch” series, with the Explorer Touch Mouse the newest and least expensive entry. But aside from that cost advantage and a much longer promised battery life than its “Touch” siblings have (18 months, which really would be impressive), the Microsoft Explorer Touch Mouse has little to distinguish it from the others in the same group.

     Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since the features of these wireless, nano-transceiver-powered Microsoft Hardware offerings are impressive. The Touch Mouse, which works only with Windows 7 and is expensive at $79.95, has some genuine innovations: simply placing one, two or three fingers in particular locations lets users scroll, pan, reveal specific windows or all windows, or see the desktop. The system takes some getting used to, but is efficient once adopted. Arc Touch Mouse, which costs $59.95, is an unusually clever design that shuts off when flattened, then turns on when its strong hinge is folded to give the mouse a more-familiar, humped shape. It is about the size of a cell phone when flat, and is especially easy to carry. And now there is the Explorer Touch Mouse, which works both on Windows computers and on Macs and has five customizable buttons – including the three “button areas” built into the touch strip. The strip is well designed and lets users scroll both vertically and horizontally, at a wide variety of speeds. You can go line-by-line through the first page of a document, for example, then easily switch to super-fast scanning of a hundred pages or more.

     Explorer Touch Mouse also comes in four colors, of which the shiny “coal black” is distinctly ordinary (although certainly appropriate for business), while “storm gray,” “sangria red” and “rust red” all have more character.

     The most likely effect of the release of the Microsoft Explorer Touch Mouse will be to cannibalize sales of the Touch Mouse. There is certainly not $30 more of value in the Touch Mouse, and the fact that Explorer Touch Mouse works on Macs and on PCs that run Windows operating systems predating Windows 7 gives the new mouse some distinct advantages. The five programmable buttons are a nice-to-have feature rather than a need-to-have one, but they are certainly useful; and the available colors allow purchasers of the Microsoft Explorer Touch Mouse to find some attractive ways to personalize their work (or play) environment – an increasingly important element in personal computing today.

     Computer mice are commodities nowadays – easy to buy for as little as $10 or so, which makes it tempting to purchase them, use them for a while and then throw them out (or, hopefully, recycle them through Craigslist or Freecycle). Microsoft’s mice are more feature-rich, more expensive, often sturdier and frequently easier to use than lower-priced mice: they tend to be more comfortable over long periods, and they track more easily on more surfaces. The question for users is how much the Microsoft improvements and enhancements are worth at time of purchase. Microsoft Explorer Touch Mouse is a top-notch product that incorporates some new elements of mouse use and offers a promise of excellent battery life plus an unusual degree of programmability. It is a better product, overall, than the Touch Mouse, which is simply overpriced. Arc Touch Mouse has enough special features to be a fine niche player. But in a sense, all these mice are in a particular niche in terms of cost and function, and it is reasonable to ask whether that niche is big enough to sustain sales for all three of them. Computer users will, of course, decide. You won’t go wrong with any of the mice in this series, but whether they are right for you will depend largely on how much you are willing to invest in this particular form of input device.

(++++) THE UN-VANISHING VIOLA

Carl Philipp Stamitz: Viola Concerto No. 1; Franz Anton Hoffmeister: Viola Concertos in D and B-flat. Victoria Chiang, viola; Baltimore Chamber Orchestra conducted by Markand Thakar. Naxos. $9.99.

Alexander Winkler: Sonata for Viola and Piano; Two Pieces for Viola and Piano; Varvara Gaigerova: Suite for Viola and Piano; Paul Juon: Sonata for Viola and Piano. Eliesha Nelson, viola; Glen Inanga, piano. Sono Luminus. $16.99.

     The longstanding neglect of the viola as a solo instrument shows many signs of ending. Modern violists are not content to be relegated to accompaniment roles and center-of-the-orchestra modesty, and producers in search of interesting new repertoire – and interesting new soloists – are discovering that there is a great deal of unexplored material for the viola out there…and not only from composers influenced by that towering 20^th-century figure, Lionel Tertis (1876-1975). It turns out that even in the Classical era, there was some very interesting music written for viola soloists to play; and in more modern times, there is something of a treasure trove (still being mined) of viola works not influenced by Tertis. On the 18^th-century front, the concertos by Carl Philipp Stamitz (son of the famed Johann, leader of the Mannheim court orchestra) and Franz Anton Hoffmeister (best known today as a music publisher – of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, Pleyel and others) provide a fine opportunity for Victoria Chiang to excel in the solo role, with Markand Thakar and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra offering balanced and attractively buoyant backup. The Stamitz concerto is the most interesting of the three and the most “violistic,” emphasizing the solo instrument’s warmth and glow in an unusually orchestrated work that includes divisi violas plus clarinets rather than oboes – the clarinet’s range and sound world being closer to that of the viola. The virtuosity that this concerto demands is substantial, including harmonics and left-hand pizzicati that make it sound in some ways like a 19^th-century work rather than one written around 1774. The Hoffmeister concertos are also well made, but they are more ordinary in sound and approach. Both are elegant enough in their first movements and cheerful enough in their finales, and both have slow movements that are wistful rather than profound. Hoffmeister’s orchestration is more traditional than that of Stamitz, and Hoffmeister emphasizes the viola’s upper range to a greater degree, creating works that are certainly pleasant but ultimately not terribly distinguished – even from each other. Nevertheless, they are filled with lovely moments and are quite well played on this CD.

     The viola-and-piano music performed by Eliesha Nelson and Glen Inanga on a CD called “Russian Viola Sonatas” is almost all unfamiliar: every piece here except the sonata by Paul Juon (1872-1940) is a world première recording. The Juon is an interesting blend of Brahmsian elements and Russian folk music, structured in the traditional three movements and featuring some interesting approaches to an uneven meter. In scale, though, it does not approach the sonata by Alexander Winkler (1865-1935), a massive work that lasts over half an hour and concludes with a movement called “Variations sur un air Breton” – and has all four movements in the same key, C minor. This is a dark piece, as the key indicates, and one in which stormy elements are nicely set against calmer major-key ones in which, at times, the piano leads the music and the viola becomes the accompanist. The concluding variations, which even include a fugue immediately before the coda, are impressively sure-handed and provide both players with opportunities to shine as virtuosi. Winker’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano is a smaller and much shorter work that nicely contrasts a meditative first movement with a Scherzino that amusingly portrays children playing with a spinning top. But none of these works seems as completely Russian as the suite by Varvara Gaigerova (1903-1944), which consists of four short movements reflecting folk idioms not only of Russia itself but also of some of the minority Soviet nationalities whose songs Gaigerova transcribed (Uzbek, Tatar, Kazakh and others). There is considerable chromaticism in Gaigerova’s suite, with the opening and final movements conveying a feeling of desolation while the two middle ones are more good-hearted. Nelson and Inanga have clearly studied these works carefully and internalized their salient elements: the performances not only sound very good but also seem quite idiomatic, even though neither performer is even a bit Russian – Nelson comes from Alaska and Inanga from England. Taken together, the Russian disc and that featuring 18^th-century concertos show to just how great an extent the neglect of the viola has turned into an appreciation of its unique and very beautiful sound.