(+++) EXPRESSIONS, INSTRUMENTAL AND VOCAL

Moto Perpetuo: Works for Cello by Andrew March, Greg Bartholomew, Alan Beeler, Bill Sherrill, Arthur Gottschalk, and Nicholas Anthony Ascioti. Ovidiu Marinescu, cello. Navona. $16.99.

Anthony Piccolo: Imaginary Symphony No. 1; Sonata for Cello Solo; Fever Time—Seven Songs on Words by Susan Kander; Flûtes de suite for Multi-Flute Soloist; Fanfare-Sonatina for Four Horns. Navona. $16.99.

Sophie Dunér and the Callino Quartet: The City of My Soul. Big Round Records. $16.99.

Henry Wolking: Gone Playin’; The Old Gypsy; James Scott Balentine: Dùn Èideann Blogh. Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronský. Navona. $14.99.

Bach: Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, BWV 199; Brandenburg Concerto No 4. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Kahane. Yarlung Records. $19.99.

     The modern string instrument with the widest range is the cello, and that is true as a range of expressiveness, not just in terms of the notes it can produce. If there is one work that showed beyond a doubt just how much the cello could do, it was Dvořák’s monumental concerto, whose communicative powers remain unmatched more than a century later – but not for lack of trying. Many composers today, including the six on the new Navona CD called Moto Perpetuo, are fully aware of the cello’s capabilities and are determined to plumb them. They do so with varying success. Andrew March’s Three Pieces for Solo Cello is primarily interested in the instrument’s dusky hue and its capabilities of communicating thoughtfulness, especially in the last and longest piece, “To Reflect in a Quiet Spot.” Greg Bartholomew’s brief Beneath the Apple Tree mixes Ovidiu Marinescu’s cello with Kim Trolier’s flute in a pleasant combination of contrasting sonorities. Alan Beeler contributes three works here and shows himself as a miniaturist: Dance Suite for Violin and Cello and One Good Turn Deserves Another each contain four movements, with none of them lasting as much as two minutes and both groupings being more lighthearted than cello music often tends to be. Variations on Re-Do-Mi is equally tied into traditional musical forms and, at three-and-a-half minutes, comparatively substantial. Bill Sherrill’s Divertimento for Strings places the cello in the context of all other modern orchestral string instruments, complementing it with violins (Sylvia Ahramjian and Dana Weiderhold), viola (Scott Wagner) and double bass (Charles J. Muench). Warmth within an overlay of gloom is communicated by Arthur Gottschalk’s Sonata for Cello and Piano: In Memoriam, a substantial work in which Marinescu and pianist Janet Ahlquist explore the depths of their respective instruments. The two are joined by violinist Ahramjian for the final work on the CD, Nicholas Anthony Ascioti’s Adirondack Meditation, which returns the mood to that of the disc’s beginning and reestablishes the cello’s meditative soulfulness as one of its most salient characteristics.

     Anthony Piccolo writes for solo cello, too, and his Sonata for Cello Solo is also a showcase for emotion more than pure virtuosity as performed by Petr Nouzovský. Indeed, Piccolo clearly enjoys exploring the sonic delights offered by various instruments’ timbres and capabilities. Flûtes de suite (a pun on touts de suite, “right now” or “immediately”) features Marta Talábová adapting to four instruments in four movements: flute, alto flute, piccolo and bass flute. The music is on the superficial side, but the contrasting sounds of the instruments are fascinating. And then there is Fanfare-Sonatina for Four Horns, a short two-movement work (played by Zuzana Rzounková, Martin Paulik, Martin Sokol, and Jaroslav Hubek, conducted by Vít Mužík) that is nicely constructed but breaks no new ground – as did, for example, Schumann’s Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra back in 1849.  In fact, the most interesting pieces on this CD are not the three that explore specific instruments but the two that largely rely on the human voice – specifically the voices of children – for their impact. Imaginary Symphony No. 1, in which the Campanella Children’s Chorus and Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra are conducted by Petr Vronský, is an appealingly straightforward work whose three movements (“Lady-Bug’s Rain Song,” “Explore” and “Dream”) neatly encapsulate several elements of a child’s world while being presented in effective orchestral garb. And Fever Time—Seven Songs on Words by Susan Kander combines Piccolo’s skill with voices with his interest in the sound of specific instruments. It features the Hamelin Children’s Chorus conducted by Piccolo himself, with Ladislav Bilan on percussion and Lucie Kaucká on celesta, and provides, in seven short movements, an interesting musical perspective on words that Kander wrote about a real-life fever.

     The vocal communication is of a different sort, and is decidedly adult, in a CD collaboration between Sophie Dunér and the Callino Quartet called The City of My Soul. Despite the presence of a classical ensemble, this 19-track disc is by no means classical, and does not really pretend to be. Dunér is a jazz singer of the smoky-and-intense sort, writing her own music and delivering it with feeling but without significant differentiation from song to song. The Callino Quartet (Sarah Sexton and Fenella Humphreys, violins; Rebecca Jones, viola; Sarah McMahon, cello) is a good ensemble with a strong commitment to contemporary music, and is clearly comfortable with Dunér’s milieu – having often performed in musical crossover mode before. There is no “title tune” here, although there is a song called “The City of My Dreams,” and there is plenty of bittersweet thinking and emoting in songs such as “Marionettes,” “The Singer from Hell,” “Dizcharmed,” “Captain Crunch” and “You.”  The word “fusion” is much heard in classical-music circles these days, and it is a good noun to describe many composers’ attempts to incorporate elements of jazz, rock, pop, Eastern music and other nontraditional classical elements into their work. The City of My Soul, though, feels less like a case of fusion than like one of old-fashioned jazz (with modern-style and occasionally quirky lyrics) accompanied very nicely by classical musicians whose fine playing does not, however, provide any substantial connection to a world beyond Dunér’s own. It would have been interesting and clever – just to choose one possibility – if Dunér and the quartet had together performed the old Irish air, “Cailin cois tSuir a me” (“The Girl by the River Suir”), from which the quartet takes its name. But the CD is really about Dunér, and the Callino Quartet stays mostly in the background.

     There is a Scottish connection, not an Irish one, in the new Navona CD of music by Henry Wolking and James Scott Balentine: the latter’s Dùn Èideann Blogh is a kind of musical portrait of Edinburgh, the title being the city’s Gaelic name. Featuring Robert Walzel on clarinet, Eric Stomberg on bassoon and the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra under Petr Vronský, this three-movement suite is nicely scored but does not seem especially evocative of the locale to which it pays tribute, although its primary intent of recalling family and friends from times past is reasonably well communicated. The two works by Wolking – both are also suites – are somewhat more effective. Gone Playin’ is an interesting attempt to make music from epitaphs, a purely instrumental work intended to showcase three forms of connection between life and death: “Gone Fishin’,” “Gone Sleepin’” and “Gone Dancin’.” The movements, which feature Walzel with the Moravian Philharmonic Strings under Vronský, are nicely contrasted, and the second, which is labeled a “jazz lullaby,” is particularly interesting. Wolking’s The Old Gypsy draws on a more-traditional source, the music of Hungary, presenting this influence not orchestrally but through a string quartet (Vit Mužík and Igor Kopyt, violins; Dominika Mužíková, viola; Marian Pavlik, cello). A waltz movement and a finale whose title is the same as that of the entire piece show their provenance particularly clearly, but all four movements manage to bespeak elements of Hungary without ever falling directly into simplistic folksong quotation or otherwise being overly obvious. This CD has a number of appealing elements, but it is short – less than 50 minutes – and will therefore likely be of interest primarily to listeners already familiar with and enamored of Wolking’s and Balentine’s works.

     Listeners’ main interest in a new Bach vocal-and-instrumental CD featuring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is almost sure to be in the singer, whose September 2003 performance of the cantata Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut here becomes an in memoriam presentation: Lieberson died of breast cancer in 2006. This live recording of the cantata, which also features Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra principal oboist Allan Vogel and principal violist Roland Kato, is on another very short CD, lasting not much more than 40 minutes, but listeners enamored of Lieberson’s mellow and expressive mezzo-soprano voice will surely want to have it. The cantata, written for the 11^th Sunday after Trinity, is a particularly anguished one: “My heart swims in blood, since the offspring of my sins in God’s holy eyes make me a monster. …For me my sins can be nothing but the hangmen of Hell.”  From this opening, the cantata moves steadily toward redemption and light, and the final aria, “How joyful is my heart, for God is appeased,” truly sounds like a triumph after severe internal struggles. Lieberson’s knowing, well-paced and emotionally telling handling of this mostly dark cantata is revelatory, and even listeners not familiar with Lieberson’s life and her death at age 52 will surely relate to the struggle and eventual triumph that Bach portrayed so movingly in 1714. The cantata is coupled with a nicely handled performance of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in a live recording from 2011. The contrast between the mood of the instrumental work and that of the vocal one is obvious. The two do not go especially well together, but both pieces are very well performed, and listeners seeking some respite from the cantata can easily turn to the concerto – although they will have to program their players to do so, since the Brandenburg appears first on the CD.

(++++) BEYOND THE DAILY COMIC GRIND

Making Ends Meet: “For Better or For Worse” 3^rd Treasury. By Lynn Johnston. Andrews McMeel. $22.99.

Jasotron: 2012—A “FoxTrot” Collection. By Bill Amend. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Friends Should Know When They’re Not Wanted: A Sociopath’s Guide to Friendship. By Stephan Pastis. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     At some point, even the best comic-strip artists have had enough. Sometimes they quit (Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, Cathy Guisewite). Sometimes they die and their strips are continued by others (too many to list – unfortunately). But sometimes they get really creative. Lynn Johnston both quit and did not quit after bringing For Better or For Worse to what she considered a reasonable ending. She stopped producing new strips, but began running some of her originals – interspersing some with new strips, rewriting others, and generally revisiting places where she had gone before, and then eventually moving into out-and-out reruns, and...well, things did a get a mite confusing out there, but since the strip had been around so long, that was probably inevitable. Reruns would reach people who knew nothing about the strip’s early events from decades in the past – but also were less likely to be reading newspaper comic strips at all, since the newspaper business itself changed so much in both the U.S and Canada (where Johnston lives) in the many years that Johnston was producing the strip. One thing that Johnston has done since the strip’s sort-of-conclusion is to produce some wonderful hardcover “Treasury” books, of which Making Ends Meet is the third. These books bring back many (although not all) of her cartoons that were collected in earlier years. And the strips come with highly insightful explanatory commentary from Johnston, who does not just write a line or two here and there – she really explains how certain strips came to be and why, and tells readers about the underlying thinking that informs the entire world of For Better or For Worse. For example, in connection with a strip in which mom Elly and daughter Elizabeth watch boys playing make-believe war outdoors, Johnston writes, “I have always wondered what it is that makes boys and men want to run around shooting each other, when a really good, moderated argument would resolve almost anything.”  Beneath a strip about a typical household accident of spilled varnish, Johnston writes, “We would never identify the good times as being good if we didn’t have crap to compare them with.”  And after a strip in which Elizabeth drops a lot of her food on the floor and calls it “leftunders,” Johnston comments that “Charles Schulz [creator of Peanuts] told me that this punch line was one of his favourites.”  And again and again, Johnston explains what was happening in her real life that she modified or reported nearly verbatim in For Better or For Worse.  The strip itself is quite marvelous, whether seen for the first time or being viewed again after many years – and Johnston’s commentary is a simply wonderful addition to it, showing how a true artist, comic-strip or otherwise, adapts and adopts real life into a self-created world that is so much like the real one, but funnier and more amenable to being observed in three-to-four-panel sequences.

     When Bill Amend had had enough, he too did not quite end his popular strip, FoxTrot.  He decided to keep it going as a Sunday-only strip, which is a much harder sell to newspapers but which has worked out in his case because of the huge fan base he built up over the 19 years of doing the strip seven days a week.  The strip is no longer seen nearly as much as it used to be, not only because its frequency has been reduced by six-sevenths but also because there just aren’t as many newspapers carrying the Sunday-only version as carried the all-week one. That makes collections such as Jasotron: 2012 all the more welcome. There is no commentary here, and you do have to know the characters and their “back story” before opening the book, since it will otherwise make no sense.  But for those who have missed seeing FoxTrot day after day, this book will provide a nice dose (144 pages) of the Sunday strips that Amend has continued to do.  The characters have frozen into place – geeky 10-year-old Jason, boy-and-clothes-crazy 14-year-old Paige, ever-eating and ever-self-involved 16-year-old Peter, health-food-addicted mom Andy, and typically feckless dad Roger.  But the strip’s stories have not frozen: Amend has always enjoyed picking up on real-world events and pulling them into the strip with an amusing twist. Thus, Jason invents a smartphone that uses both the iOS and Android operating systems (both badly, though), and has a dream (now rather dated) based on the movie Avatar.  Paige becomes a fan of the TV show Glee and spends too much time on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Peter discusses blogging and plays World of Warquest (as, of course, does Jason). And Amend also keeps up his habit of occasionally poking fun at other comic strips: at one point, he arranges for a Jason/Peter exchange that parallels the many bad-pun Sunday strips created by Stephan Pastis in Pearls Before Swine, and then specifically has Peter tell Jason to remind him to start hiding Jason’s Pearls Before Swine books. Jasotron: 2012 is no substitute for having FoxTrot back on a seven-day-a-week basis, but since there is no sign that that will ever happen, fans at least have this much of the strip left to enjoy.

     And speaking of the Pearls Before Swine creator: he is still very much involved in his seven-day-a-week creation, but he too has found a way to move beyond it – yes, already.  Friends Should Know When They’re Not Wanted has nothing of the strip in it except the snarky humor that is Pastis’ trademark. Instead, this book is a parody of all the “love” and “friendship” gift books out there, using the sorts of photos typically seen in those books but coupling them not with inspirational messages but with Pastis’ warped sense of what is funny.  For example, a scene of a deserted street in the middle of the night, with a full moon overhead, gets these words: “A friend is someone who can call you at 4 a.m. Which is why you should turn off your phone at night.”  A picture of two couples laughing together gets: “True friends last a lifetime. So does chronic back pain.”  An all-too-typical picture of a gorgeous rainbow goes with this: “Friendships are like rainbows. They go away.”  And a picture of five people smiling and happily mugging for the camera gets: “You can’t put a price on a friend. Which is too bad. I’d like to sell mine.”  Presumably the price of Pastis as a friend is down to around two cents and plummeting because of this book, but since this is one of those laugh-all-the-way-to-the-bank creations, it is hard to imagine that Pastis would care.  Besides, when Pearls Before Swine finally becomes too much for Pastis to handle, maybe he can create a whole series of these books instead. And he won’t have to draw anything or even go out anywhere with a camera: every single picture in the book comes from istockphoto.com.

(++++) DEEPER AND DEEPER

Heck Series No. 5: Snivel—The Fifth Circle of Heck. By Dale E. Basye. Illustrations by Bob Dob. Random House. $16.99.

Heck Series No. 6: Precocia—The Sixth Circle of Heck. By Dale E. Basye. Illustrations by Bob Dob. Random House. $16.99.

     Anyone who thinks the phrase “when Hell freezes over” refers to some impossibly distant time has forgotten or never read Dante. Dante’s Inferno is already frozen over: the ninth and last circle is solid ice and is reserved for Satan and the three ultimate sinners in Dante’s cosmos—Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  But if Hell has already frozen over, and many people are unaware of it, then who is to say that there isn’t an almost-Hell out there of which people are equally unaware? In other words, who has the certainty to deny the existence of Heck, a lesser version of “h-e-double-hockey-sticks,” as the really bad place is called in Dale E. Basye’s Heck series?  Certainly not Milton and Marlo Fauster (echoes of Faust definitely intended): they have been trapped in one or another of Heck’s various circles for about five years now, Earth time, that being how long Basye has been chronicling Heck and its depressing depredations.  Heck is a place for pre-adults to languish, maybe forever and maybe not, but no one seems entirely sure, certainly not the Powers That Be (they know but aren’t telling) or the Powers That Be Evil (they don’t seem to know, but they’re evil, so it’s hard to be certain).  Not everyone in Heck belongs there: we have known since the first book that Milton is a pawn in a much larger game, and in the book about Snivel (“Where the Whiny Kids Go”), he has some inkling of this himself: “Milton felt like he and Marlo were at the center of something big. ...But, still, here he and his sister were, side by side, in another dismal destination...”  Basye does keep dropping hints about the huge game in which Milton and Marlo are mere playing pieces – in fact, when Milton discovers what seems to be something video-game-like in Snivel, readers are likely to wonder if it is a microcosm of the macrocosmic game being played by the various great powers (some of which, including some of the benevolent ones, are not so great).

     Or maybe readers will simply sit back and enjoy the joyride (joyless ride for Milton and Marlo) as Basye spins an unending stream of puns and creates an unending series of weird characters – or re-creates real-world ones in a Heckish context (for instance, real and mythic figures including Orpheus, Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh, Nikola Tesla and Baron Samedi show up in supervisory roles in Snivel, not entirely logically, but what the Heck; and Precocia features Madame Curie, B.F. Skinner, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Cleopatra and Saint Nicholas).  Basye’s punning will zoom right past some of his intended readers, as when he talks about a foiled plot to evict “all humanity from its temperate blue marble of a planet to some dreadful beige rock halfway across the galaxy in the Sirius Lelayme system” (“seriously lame,” get it?).  But many other puns and descriptions hit the target very well, such as the Grin Reaper, who, yes, reaps (harvests) grins (and other forms of amusement, although he doesn’t much care for sarcastic laughs).  “The only thought in Milton Fauster’s baffled head that seemed to make any sense at all was that nothing around him made any sense at all,” readers find out at the start of Precocia (“Where the Smartypants Kids Go”), and on one level, nothing in Heck makes any sense – but on another, it all makes a weird kind of sense, as did Alice in Wonderland.  Just as Dante devised supernatural punishments suitable for various forms of human malfeasance (lust, for example, is punished in his second circle by souls being blown eternally about by intense winds, which represent sinners’ stormy and illicit passions), so Basye comes up with circles of Heck that suit the pre-adults trapped in them: the whiners in Snivel are “unhappy campers” in a place where the lake is kept filled by tears and the rain is constant, and it rains up; the proto-adults in Precocia are forced to act, dress and talk just like adults, attending classes that are structured like jobs, complete with time clocks – if students do not punch in on time, the clock punches back.  Basye is negotiating these twisted worlds with increasing skill, while also making it abundantly clear that something is not right, beyond what is supposed to be not right.  For example, a bright and sunshine-y girl named Sara clearly does not belong in Snivel, but she happens to be conjoined with Sam, who clearly does, and the two together are known as Sam/Sara, the word “samsara” being the Buddhist term for death and rebirth – oh yes, there is actually some depth here beyond the notion that Milton and Marlo are going deeper and deeper into the bowels (or other innards) of Heck with each book, even to the point of Basye creating  a genuine dystopia in Precocia.

     However, to be sure things don’t get too dark, there is plenty of self-referential silliness here as well, since one element of the “meta-story” of Heck is that Basye, who himself appears periodically as a character, was given the idea for the whole series by another character (a very unpleasant one) and has simply been adapting that character’s “real” work. “It was a travesty of a story relying far too much on puns and cleverness and not enough on a compelling plot and believable characterization. But it had possessed a certain irreverent charm about it, and Dale…desperately needed something original to plagiarize until it was his own.”  Well, umm, yes.

     Abetting Basye’s linguistic perturbations are some marvelous illustrations by Bob Dob, showing some of the books’ scenes and many of their bizarre characters – although, unfortunately, the drawings do not always relate to the events of the specific chapters where they appear, and some characters’ visual portrayals are not quite the same as their written descriptions.  This scarcely matters, though, because the drawings themselves are a hoot, especially those of the various demons and other odd denizens of Heck.  The books fall into a clear pattern in which Milton and Marlo start off together in some new miserable place, get separated, get back together after various adventures and misadventures, and accomplish some sort of something that results in bad things happening to each circle (as opposed to bad things happening within each circle, which is what is supposed to happen in Heck) – after which Milton and Marlo get shunted off to their next destination.  The overall schema in which these events take place is gradually, very gradually, becoming clear.  It is not entirely certain that Basye himself has figured the whole thing out yet, but then, if he is following Dante, he has three further circles to go.  Will Basye stop after the ninth, or is he planning to carry Milton and Marlo onward to Purgatorio and Paradiso? Hopefully not – Basye’s punderful plotting would likely meet its match in an attempt to portray pure (shudder) goodness.

(++++) MANY DOLLARS AND SOME SENSE

The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition: The 150 Best-Buy Schools and What It Takes to Get In. By Robert Franek, Laura Braswell, David Soto, and the Staff of The Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Random House. $21.99.

     The lesson of Princeton Review’s annual The Best Value Colleges book is that it is better, when it comes to higher education, to be very rich or at least moderately poor. That is how you get the best possible education with the smallest impact on the rest of your life.  That is not the intended lesson of this well-researched, plainly written book, which explores factors including academics, cost and financial aid at 650 colleges and selects 150 among them as offering the best value.  But reading only a little bit between the lines of these nearly 500 pages makes it clear that colleges get to be among the best in part because of the generosity of their financial-aid packages – “need-blind admissions” and all that.  The ability to allow children from families of modest means, or even out-and-out poverty, to get a top-quality college education is a major accomplishment for many of these schools and a major strength of the higher-education system in the United States.  And of course, families with considerable wealth can simply pay what it costs for their children to attend the schools – a $60,000-a-year cost may seem modest to them, especially in light of all the doors that a top-of-the-line college education can open.

     Left out of all this – in the book and in society in general – is what happens to families that scrimp and save diligently for 18 years after a child is born, managing to piece together enough money to pay for the child’s college education at a modestly priced school, but not enough to afford one of the absolute top-tier ones.  These families are the forgotten middle, because they cannot pay retail prices for these schools but also do not qualify – because of income, assets or both – for the extremely generous subsidies that the top schools offer to people who have done a poor job, or none at all, of saving for college.  As in some of the nation’s most-expensive cities, the very rich can afford the cost of living and the poor are well subsidized so they too can live there, but the vast and struggling middle group gets no help and little attention, much less sympathy.

     Someone should write a book about the best colleges for the children of those families, but that book is not this one.  This is a book for families that want the best education their money can buy – or the best that other people’s money can buy for them. As such, The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition is a highly valuable resource, although it is primarily a quantitative one: it does include numerous comments from students on what they like about their schools, but those comments tend to become repetitious after a while, indicating only that top schools generally have pretty satisfied students attending and also require a considerable amount of hard work.  The old and admittedly now archaic (if not obsolete) idea that college should “complete” a person, turning him or her into a more fully aware human being, is missing here, being unmeasurable. But costs, SAT scores, academic rankings, lists of most-popular majors and special study options, numbers indicating selectivity – all those and more are here, page after page and school after school.

     The Princeton Review (which is not, by the way, affiliated with Princeton University) has this year anointed Swarthmore College as the No. 1 value among private colleges in the country, followed by Harvard, Williams, Princeton, Pomona, Yale, Rice, Hamilton, Claremont McKenna and Grinnell.  A typical comment in the book is this, about Pomona: “The financial aid program here is exceedingly generous and goes beyond just covering tuition, room and board, and fees, for which Pomona can and does meet, [sic] 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need.”  That “demonstrated financial need” phrase occurs again and again, in multiple guises – so families should be sure they can demonstrate financial need (don’t have jobs that are too good or do too well at saving or investing!) to take advantage of aid that, in Pomona’s case, more than covers the $56,000-a-year cost.  Or consider the top 10 public universities, if you qualify for aid or live in those schools’ states and therefore are eligible for the comparatively modest in-state tuition costs.  The University of Virginia is No. 1 for 2013, followed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New College of Florida, College of William and Mary (another Virginia school), UCLA, North Carolina State, University of Wisconsin-Madison, State University of New York at Binghamton, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Georgia.  The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at these schools can be as much as $100,000 over four years, so some enterprising families may want to think about relocating if the parents’ work makes that possible – not that this book recommends that, but when it comes to college planning, anything creative is worth considering.  That includes thinking about the 10 tuition-free colleges discussed in this book: the five U.S. military academies plus Berea College, College of the Ozarks, Deep Springs College, Cooper Union and Webb Institute.  These are scarcely practical for the vast majority of people: the schools get vast numbers of applicants and have very specific orientations.  For example, Berea will not admit students whose parents can afford to send them elsewhere; Deep Springs has only 28 undergraduates; Webb is only for students of naval architecture and marine engineering, and has just 81 undergraduate students.  Still, learning about these colleges is interesting, and they will clearly be right for some people.

     And that is ultimately the best takeaway from The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition.  Many of these colleges will be out of reach, academically or financially, for many families, but they do show a cross-section of the very best educational opportunities to be found in the United States.  Even families that cannot aspire to the schools in this book – because they have not enough money or have too much to get the colleges’ generous financial-aid packages – can find out here what makes these colleges so special, and can use that information to help track down other, more-affordable or otherwise more-practical colleges that will also provide an excellent education. The reality is that, a few years after college ends, the specific college that someone attended ceases to matter except at networking events or when the development office comes calling to seek large donations to fund those super-generous financial-aid packages. There are many, many places to get a good, even a top-notch, college education today; and in fact there is no real consensus about how to determine the lifetime value of attending college, and therefore how to figure out what “best value” really means.  So The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition represents only one approach to the whole college search – a very well researched one that is very well presented, to be sure, but still only one way to look at the subject.  Figuring out how your family wants to look at the issue is ultimately what matters. This book can help, but it cannot make that decision for you, any more than it can help you pick which specific one of these colleges it would be best to attend – if any.

(+++) REAL AND IMAGINED

Hide and Seek. By Kate Messner. Scholastic. $16.99.

Seven Wonders No. 1: The Colossus Rises. By Peter Lerangis. Harper. $17.99.

Never Say Die. By Will Hobbs. Harper. $16.99.

     Preteen adventure novels often start in the real world and twist things one way or another. Hide and Seek, the first book in a new series by Kate Messner, is set realistically in the rain forests of Costa Rica, where protagonists Anna, Henry and José encounter a number of real-world animals and see various sights that any visitor can see for himself or herself: narrow, swaying river bridges, gigantic trees in which howler monkeys and birds make a racket, snakes both harmless and deadly, and of course torrential rains.  But the plot itself is beyond the ordinary. The three young adventurers are junior members of a group called the Silver Jaguar Society, whose mission is to protect the world’s important artifacts – such as the society’s own Jaguar Cup, which it turns out has been replaced by a forgery. This discovery is what sets Anna, Henry and José off to Costa Rica and to all the usual questions endemic to so many adventure novels. Who is really on their side? How do they find trusted allies in unfamiliar terrain? And is there a traitor in their group?  Good guys and bad guys alike are something less than fully formed characters here – the exotic setting is more interesting than the people placed in it: José “spotted another lump of old fruit with a  dead leaf resting on top and stretched out his foot to give that one a good boot, too. But before he kicked, the dead leaf took off with jerky, fluttering wings – blue wings.”  That leads to this: “It was like the glass frog, camouflaged against its own eggs, the giant iguanas with skin like bark, draped invisibly over tree limbs. The owl in the moonlit forest. All hiding in plain sight.”  And of course, that is a clue to the mystery – courtesy of the place where the search is taking place.  Other clues come from a misidentified bird and a baby monkey.  The bad guy here, Vincent Goosen (“this awful man – this thug”), does not get away with his nefarious scheme, but of course he does get away, so he can mastermind another plot in the next book, Manhunt.

     The real-world element is even thinner in The Colossus Rises, first book of a seven-book sequence  by Peter Lerangis, who is probably best known to preteen readers for the two books he wrote in The 39 Clues sequence and the one he wrote for The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers. Lerangis is actually a very prolific author, for adults as well as young readers, and he certainly knows how to pace a formulaic thriller, which is what The Colossus Rises is. There is a secret organization in this book, as in Messner’s, but here, at first, there is just one protagonist: Jack McKinley, who is 13 and has only six months to live – because of a genetic anomaly that is, however, capable of being handled if he goes on a suitable quest. This involves Jack joining three other young adventurers – Marco, Aly and Cass – in a search for seven magical objects that have been lost for thousands of years at the sites of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  These objects, called Loculi, need to be found and returned to...well...Atlantis (so much for the real world).  And the search needs to be completed before the four friends’ abilities destroy them. Yes, abilities – not diseases. The rare genetic abnormality inherited from a long-dead prince (apparently after skipping a few hundred generations but losing none of its potency) actually gives those born with it superior abilities, but it provides them too quickly, and the young people’s bodies cannot handle the changes.  This is the gimmick. Well, lots of gimmicks – the plot is nothing if not gimmicky.  It is also written in what is clearly an adult’s version of how young teenagers talk and think: “‘Well, excuse me for living.’ …I felt like a total jerk. I hadn’t meant to sound so sarcastic. Things were too tense. I was letting my nerves get the better of me.”  There are the usual mysterious clues to follow, the usual dangers to overcome, the usual relationship issues (mild ones), and the usual worries about the people supposedly helping the four protagonists: “We had to humor him like a kindergartner – while Cass was in the talons of a flesh-eating beast.”  Speaking of humor, most of it, like that juxtaposition, is unintentional.  The climactic eventual awakening of the Colossus will surprise no one familiar with teen-oriented adventure novels; nor will anyone be surprised that things do not quite work out for the central characters, who after all have six more books to get through.

     Nick Thrasher is lucky to get through one book. He is the protagonist of Will Hobbs’ Never Say Die. Fifteen years old and already an accomplished hunter among his Inuit people, Nick loses the caribou he has brought down to a most unusual creature: a “grolar” bear, so called because it appears to be a cross between a grizzly and a polar bear. This is not, as it happens, an unrealistic part of the book, because grolar bears do exist, both in captivity and in the wild. A wild one was identified in 2006, and a second-generation one (product of a female grolar bear and male grizzly) was confirmed in 2010.  What pushes Never Say Die beyond realism is a common trope of stories about large and dangerous animals (just think of Jaws): this grolar bear seems to be hunting Nick.  What happens is that Nick gets a letter from a half-brother he has never met, a former river guide who is now a famous wildlife photographer. This half-brother, Ryan Powers, wants to get pictures of migrating caribou, and to do so intends to raft the Firth River, near Nick’s home. Ryan also wants to learn about climate change in the Arctic – this is a book with a significant ecological subtext.  The quest in this book is interrupted soon after it begins, though, when Nick and Ryan are thrown into the frigid river beneath solid ice. The book quickly changes from one of exploration to one of survival: “By now I was coming out of the immediate shock, enough to get a grasp on the situation – complete disaster. …No more than two miles down the river, we’d lost everything. Everything!”  Soon Nick and Ryan are in the midst of mosquitoes, wolves, grizzlies and a distinctly hostile natural environment.  They make it through the worst of all that and resume their caribou hunt, but become increasingly worried about the grolar bear, “a creature of climate change,” in a scientist’s opinion, and a very dangerous animal, in the opinion of Nick and Ryan.  The two also have time to discuss issues such as the possibility of offshore oil platforms in the far North, whose presence, Nick points out, “would bring jobs and better houses and things to buy, but it might hurt the fishing and the sealing and the whaling.”  The grolar bear turns out to be a man-eater, but Hobbs finds a way to minimize that, having Ryan say that “the climate has become a beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”  The inevitable final confrontation with the bear is certainly exciting, but Hobbs really wants the point of the book to be larger than that of a standard adventure tale, and that fact drags at the narrative throughout. The story raises some significant issues, but the real-world elements and the invented-adventure ones end up as an uneasy mixture, not an especially effective blend.    

(++++) INNOVATORS

Berlioz: Overtures—Le Corsaire, “Béatrice et Benedict,” “Les Francs-juges,” Le Carnival romain, Waverley, Le Roi Lear, “Benvenuto Cellini.” Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. Chandos. $19.99 (SACD).

Alkan: Recueils de Chants Nos. 1-3; Une fusée—Introduction et Impromptu. Stephanie McCallum, piano. Toccata Classics. $12.99.

James Adler & Friends: Music of Leo Ornstein, James Adler, Paul Turok, Seth Bedford and Franz Liszt. James Adler, piano. Ravello. $15.99

Hope Wechkin: Music for Voice and Violin. Hope Wechkin, voice and violin. Ravello. $13.99.

Richard Cornell: New Fantasias; Tracer; Images; Acqua Alta. Boston Musica Viva conducted by Richard Pittman; Peter Zazofsky, solo violin. Ravello. $16.99.

     Berlioz’ music is so mainstream nowadays that it is easy to forget just how much it stretched listeners’ ears when he wrote it. One of classical music’s most-skilled orchestrators, Berlioz was perhaps the most Romantic of the Romantics, and his approach to form and style was so different from others’ that few listeners today even realize that he wrote four symphonies – none of which bears a number. The four are the Symphonie Fantastique of 1830, Harold in Italy (essentially a symphony with viola obbligato) of 1834, the choral Roméo et Juliette of 1839, and the ceremonial and rather backward-looking Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale of 1840 (written originally for 200 winds – talk about innovation!).  Listening to seven Berlioz overtures, both concert and pre-opera, in the splendid performances by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis, is an effective reminder of just how unusual Berlioz’ approach to musical structure and sound was.  Like Rossini’s, Berlioz’ overtures often – but not always – fall into the same pattern: in Berlioz’ case, a strong and quick opening followed by a broad, yearning and very beautiful theme, and then expansion and development coupled with the introduction and use of other thematic material.  Davis manages to make the similarities of several of these overtures a strength, because one thing Berlioz did not do was orchestrate them the same way – allowing Davis, thanks in part to Chandos’ superb SACD sound, to bring out some wonderful touches, from a delicate emergence of flutes in Le Corsaire to some really remarkable use of timpani in Les Francs-juges, which also contains one of the most meltingly beautiful melodies that Berlioz ever wrote.  Whether portraying an idealized Roman carnival, plumbing the emotional depths of Shakespeare’s King Lear (which Berlioz never saw on stage), or introducing operas such as Béatrice et Benedict and Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz unerringly combined melodiousness with emotional impact and packaged the result in apt and frequently stunning instrumental garb.  Later excellent orchestrators, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, owe a great deal to the effects that Berlioz thought of first.

     Charles-Valentin Alkan is now acknowledged as a major innovator in piano music, but his reputation lay fallow for nearly a century after his death in 1888 and is only now flowering again – as more pianists attempt to scale the technical heights of his exceptionally difficult music.  Alkan’s best-known works are stunningly original, but even his pieces that are not among his most innovative are remarkable in many ways. The five books called Recueils de Chants (“Collections of Songs”), which Stephanie McCallum is in the process of recording, are a perfect example. These are “songs without words” in the Mendelssohn mode, and are in fact based very directly and unapologetically on Mendelssohn’s first book of such pieces (his Op. 19b).  Alkan’s Recueils de Chants contain six pieces each, using the same key sequence: E, A minor, A, A again, F-sharp minor, and G minor – the last piece always being a gentle and simple Barcarolle.  But within this self-selected set of constraints (probably a deliberate homage to Mendelssohn, who was just four years older than Alkan), Alkan’s inventiveness flows freely and often quite astonishingly.  McCallum is a marvelous interpreter of this music, sensitive to its nuances and comfortable with its very considerable difficulties.  She brings out the “dog barks” in the third piece of Book I, the very difficult whirling left-hand accompaniment in the fifth piece of that book, the insistent dissonance of the second piece in Book II and the swaggering of the third, the amazing perpetual-pianissimo second piece of Book III, and much more.  And she fully understands the care with which Alkan produced an occasional programmatic miniature in these collections, as in the remarkable fifth piece of Book III, Horace et Lydie, a syllabic setting of an ode by Horace – with, remember, no words.  In addition to the first three Recueils de Chants, McCallum’s Toccata Classics CD includes the first-ever recording of Une fusée—Introduction et Impromptu, a kind of spinning song gone mad and a very impressive piece in its own right. Alkan was one of the great piano virtuosi in an era packed with them. Thanks to modern virtuosi such as McCallum, his tremendous inventiveness is now being appreciated once again.

     All 19^th-century virtuosi do tend to take a back seat to Franz Liszt, though, and James Adler’s performance of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 on a new Ravello CD shows why. Unlike Berlioz, Liszt was no master orchestrator – in fact, he often turned to Joachim Raff for help – but in piano works, Liszt made his instrument encompass and sound like an orchestra, and Adler plays this piece for all it is worth (which, in strictly virtuosic terms, is quite a lot).  The Liszt is an interesting counterbalance to the two pieces on the CD immediately preceding it, both by Adler himself: Fantasy Grotesque on a Medieval Theme and Piano Fantasy on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” both dating to 2011 (the Liszt dates to 1859-62). The Adler pieces are very much of the 21^st century, but in spirit they hark back to the 19^th and the celebration of pianistic splendor as much for its own sake as for any other reason.  The remaining works on this CD, though, are not at this same high-interest level. Adler’s Passacaglia for Piano (1974) certainly shows an understanding of the form, and two “piano-plus” pieces by him are nicely put together if not entirely convincing: Reverie, Interrupted (2009) for tenor saxophone and piano, with Jordan P. Smith, and A Song of the Road (2010) for lyric baritone and piano, based on a poem by James Whitcomb Riley and featuring Malcolm J. Merriweather. These are well-made works but not especially memorable ones. So are the remaining pieces on this disc: the straightforward Scherzino (1918) by Leo Ornstein, a very long-lived composer (1893 or 1894-2002) and the earliest significant exponent of tone clusters – yes, before Henry Cowell; Tango for James Adler (2011) and Passacaglia (1977) by Paul Turok; and Christopher Street Rag (2011) by Seth Bedford. The music is interesting in varying degrees and is all very well performed, but the CD, although it certainly has some top-notch elements, is not particularly consistent either in sequence or musical quality, so it gets a (+++) rating – although a high one.

     The (+++) rating is on the lower side for Hope Wechkin’s debut Ravello disc, where the solo instrument, the violin, is not quite a solo instrument, because Wechkin sings along with it – hence the “music for voice and violin” subtitle of a CD called “Leaning Toward the Fiddler.”  The innovation here seems more deliberate and self-conscious than that of James Adler or Leo Ornstein, with Wechkin taking a combinatorial musical approach – as many modern composers do – that involves her original pieces, arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs, the voice-and-violin mixture, a blended-genres approach that is common nowadays, and a deliberate “world music” orientation that is perfectly all right but not really very different from the explorations of many other modern composers. Wechkin essays a number of different styles and themes in the 11 short works on this CD, from warmth and longing to a lover’s feud to responses to nature; and while her performance, both vocally and on the violin, is fine, the emotional connectivity that she clearly wants somehow does not quite come off as clearly as she wishes – as if she is trying so hard to make a connection that a certain level of wished-for genuineness never quite emerges.

     The solo violin work by Peter Zazofsky is more impressive in Acqua Alta, the concluding piece on a Ravello CD of music by Richard Cornell. Computer-mediated music is Cornell’s forte, but his innovative approach lies not so much in that area – which has been thoroughly explored by many composers since the mid-20^th century – as in his interest in the way performers and musical creator interact, consciously or not, in bringing music to an audience. The pieces on this CD were all recorded live, and the disc’s enhanced content – an unusual feature of many Ravello and Navona releases and in this case a particularly welcome one – provides a visual version of Tracer that gives a good sense of how Cornell sees his creations as being not only re-created but also created in the first place by the way performers handle them and put them across to an audience.  (For that matter, the audience’s own participation influences or even creates a work, as composers have clearly understood since John Cage’s 4’33” – which dates to 1952.)  The (+++) CD itself, strictly on an audio basis, does not come across as well as does the visual Tracer. Yes, Zazofsky’s playing is quite good, but Acqua Alta does not seem particularly tied to Venice, to which it is supposed to be a tribute. Images is based on birds’ quarrels and is certainly dense enough in scoring and performance, but it is not particularly interesting to hear. And New Fantasias, a four-movement chamber-orchestra piece, has expressive movement titles (“Travels in the Landscape,” “In Dark Night,” “Dance” and “Playing with Fire”) that are at best imperfectly reflected in the music itself. It is certainly true that modern composers continue to look for ways to go beyond what has been done before in music, and certainly their reaching out to computers, non-Western musical traditions, and in other directions represents innovation of a sort. But the ultimate test of music remains whether it communicates effectively to an audience beyond the composer himself or herself, and beyond the composer’s friends – a level of reaching out to which most composers aspire, but one that their often-elaborate productions frequently fail to attain.

(++++) RARE AND WELL DONE

Lehár: Der Göttergatte; Vocal and Orchestral Works from the German Radio Archive, 1933-1949. Liesl Andergast, Henny Herze, Anton Dermota, Franz Borsos, Fred Liewehr, Lizzi Holzschuh; Wiener Rundfunkchor und Orchester conducted by Max Schönherr. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

     Despite all the ways in which this release is flawed – and it would be easy to make a long list – it is an extraordinary audio document that will be a must-have for devotees of Franz Lehár’s music. For one thing, there are exactly two Lehár operettas whose librettists were Victor Léon and Leo Stein: Die Lustige Witwe and Der Göttergatte. For another, these operettas appeared not quite two years apart, Der Göttergatte (the composer’s third completed operetta) in January 1904 and Die Lustige Witwe in December 1905. For still another, Der Göttergatte shows Lehár treading, somewhat uneasily, into Offenbach’s territory, a fact for which this operetta was condemned in some quarters and one that led the composer later to recast it as Die Ideale Gattin in 1913, and then to revise the revision as Die Tangokönigin in 1921. And for yet another, this performance of Der Göttergatte preserves some of the last vestiges of an age in which singers and actors jointly performed roles and the delivery of many of the arias was closer to that of cabaret songs than to that of grand opera.

     This recording dates to March 15, 1945, in the last days of World War II, and the mere fact that it was made in Vienna at a time when the Third Reich still existed may prevent some people from buying or even listening to it. That may be an understandable reaction, at least in some quarters, but it is also, on a purely musical basis, a most unfortunate one.  Chances to hear Der Göttergatte are almost nonexistent, and this is the only chance anyone today will have to hear it conducted by Max Schönherr (1903-1984), a great expert in the dance music of Vienna’s Golden Age who is best known today for his rather overwrought completions and updatings of music by the Strauss family, Lanner and others – which he accomplished by “modernizing” the instrumentation in ways that would be wholly unacceptable today. But if Schönherr was a man of his time in making his “improvements,” he was also very much in tune with the spirit of Lehár, who was still alive when this recording was made. And Schönherr does an excellent job with this nearly complete radio version of Der Göttergatte (one of the flaws here is that two numbers from the score, No.9 and No. 17, are omitted, not by CPO but in the original recording).

     The quality of the singing here is variable, from very fine to rather screechy, and some of that is connected with the quality of the recording, which CPO has cleaned up nicely but which is still, after all, nearly 70 years old, complete with tape hiss, cut-off high notes and overall sound compression. What is truly amazing, though, is how little any of this matters, because the music is filled with delights and can justly be called a “find,” or at least a rediscovery.  The opera’s title means “The God-Husband” and also puns on the notion of “The Lord and Master.”  The plot – which, in a flaw that does lie with CPO, is not given in the booklet; and of course a libretto is far too much to hope for – is a twisted version of the tale of Alcmene, whom Jupiter seduced by taking the shape of her husband, Alcibiades. When Offenbach brings up this conquest in Orphée aux Enfers, he has Minerva sarcastically remark that she knows plenty of women on whom the husband disguise would not have worked. But Léon and Stein play the mortals’ love straight. Their change to the story has Juno become suspicious of the goings-on and disguise herself as Alcmene, so Jupiter ends up seducing his own wife (and preserving Victorian notions of sexual propriety). It is easy to see here the same hands that will shape Die Lustige Witwe in the near future. It is easy to see the composer’s predilections, too. Der Göttergatte is in a prologue and two acts, and the end of its first act – comparable to the end of the second act in the three-act Die Lustige Witwe – sounds very much the same musically and in staging. There are many little touches that look ahead: for instance, the musical interlude between the first and second acts here is very similar to that between the second and third of Die Lustige Witwe. And there is a delightful pre-Merry-Widow-Waltz humming passage in Jeder Mann glaubt seiner Frau, and another in a Trinklied that also contains a “hopla hopla” refrain that will have listeners thinking of the Reitermann duet in Die Lustige Witwe.

     There are places here where Lehár channels other composers, too. He was at times accused of being a “poor man’s Puccini,” and one passage in the duettino Ich harre dein is nearly identical to one in La Bohème. And there are flickers of cabaret-style Kurt Weill as well, in the finale to the first scene of the first act and in the terzett Du hast mich doch betrogen. These instances do not, however, come across as if Lehár is groping for his own style: it seems almost completely formed already, although his typical extended yearning passages on solo violin are absent here. Instead, what comes across in Der Göttergatte is an attempt to superimpose the Lehár style on subject matter to which it adheres imperfectly – and indeed, the composer never again used a classical-times setting of this sort. But there is so much here that is delightful and unknown to modern listeners that this recording of Der Göttergatte is a simply wonderful one to have.

     And it comes with bonuses, too – eight of them, often in genuinely execrable sound but providing marvelous insights into Lehár and his music between 1933 and 1949. The composer himself conducts the Orientalischer Marsch (a 1941 recording) and one of the few pieces he wrote during the Third Reich years: Wien, du bist das Herz der Welt, with soprano Ester Réthy (1942).  One of Richard Tauber’s last recordings before he fled Germany in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry is here: Du und ich sind füreinander bestimmt. And there is another song, An der Saar und am Rein, featuring tenor Herbert Ernst Groh (1939).  There are also three instrumental works conducted by Otto Dobrindt: Pikanterien-Walzer (1943), Stadtparkschönheiten (also 1943), and Serenade for Violin and Orchestra, with soloist Ferdinand Meysel (1949). Finally, Max Schönherr appears as conductor, with Willi Uhlenhut as solo violinist, in a 1943 recording of Lehár’s very early (1897) Ungarische Tanzfantasie. This entire CPO release shines considerable light on less-known Lehár works as they were performed and recorded in a dark, dark time in history – to which, at least retrospectively, they bring a certain amount of reflected light.

(++++) ECO-FABLES

Little Sweet Potato. By Amy Beth Bloom. Illustrated by Noah Z. Jones. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Emeraldalicious. By Victoria Kann. Harper. $17.99.

The Berenstain Bears Go Green. By Jan & Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $3.99.

     Protecting and interacting with the natural world has become a common theme of children’s books in recent years, with authors taking angles on environmental matters ranging from the soft-pedaled to the overtly instructive. Little Sweet Potato is decidedly in the soft-pedaled school, being as much about belonging and kindness as it is about anything ecological. The book is Amy Beth Bloom’s simple story of a particularly mobile little sweet potato – drawn amazingly endearingly, with huge eyes and three hairlike fibers on top, by Noah Z. Jones – who is accidentally uprooted by a tractor, falls over the edge of his home patch, and ends up rolling down the road looking for his home or somewhere else where he belongs.  Unfortunately, he runs into some distinctly unpleasant vegetables in his search: carrots that “fluffed their leafy green tops and wiggled their long orange bodies” while critiquing him for being “lumpy, dumpy, and...bumpy”; eggplants that consider themselves “handsome and purple with skin like satin” and have no room in their patch for someone who is “dumpy, bumpy, and kinda lumpy”; flowers that look beautiful but scarcely act that way toward Little Sweet Potato; and so forth.  This being the vegetable version of a fairy tale, Little Sweet Potato winds up in the rain as “one big tear rolled down his dear bumpy-sweet-potato face.”  But since this is a fairy tale, soon after he hits bottom, Little Sweet Potato hits the jackpot, finding a mixed rather than segregated garden, where carrots, eggplants, flowers and produce of all kinds can flourish – complete with a fence proclaiming “world peas” and “the leek shall inherit the earth.”  OK, this could be pretty overdone, but neither Bloom nor Jones lays it on too thickly, with the result that Little Sweet Potato simply absorbs the message that, while “some just like their own kind…we’re the kind that like all kinds.”  This is less an ecological message than a let’s-all-get-along one, but really, what’s wrong with that? Certainly nothing from the perspective of Little Sweet Potato, who dozes off happily at the end of the book with thoughts of how wonderful it is to be home – a straightforwardly pleasant conclusion that makes the book a fine bedtime story, as well as one that can be enjoyed anytime by any child who has ever felt left out and been comforted by knowing that home is the best possible place to be.

     Victoria Kann’s Emeraldalicious is a more overtly ecological tale, although here too the fact that it stops short of too-intense preachiness is what makes it effective.  The title is a variation on the name of Kann’s Pinkalicious character, whose fans will immediately recognize her on the cover – dressed in her usual pink, but with green mixed in and surrounding her. The story features Pinkalicious and her little brother, Peter, strolling in the park and suddenly coming upon a huge pile of garbage – a dump that appears to be within or adjacent to the park (never mind why; this is important to the story, if not logical).  Using a magic wand that Pinkalicious and Peter have conveniently created just before discovering the messy and smelly area, Pinkalicious spontaneously creates a thronelike chair for herself by inventing and reciting a poem that causes some thrown-away items to arrange themselves symmetrically (and apparently cleanly) into the right shape.  Sitting on the chair, Pinkalicious discovers that she can make flowers grow among the trash by saying the word “love,” and then she and Peter figure out that they can do all sorts of delightful things by using love and poetry together – for example, creating birds whose bodies show musical notes, numbers, and words such as “peace,” “laugh,” “happy” and “blessed.”  The siblings continue to have fun with the wand and the trash, cleaning up while creating playthings from a castle to a “boat mobile.”  Then Pinkalicious decides it is time to clean up the whole dump, and she uses the wand to transform it into “a greentastic garden” with an entrance banner that reads, “Emeraldalicious Garden.”  But of course, if environmental cleanup were that easy, there would be no lesson here – so at the end, the wind carries the magic wand away and breaks it into “sparkly seeds,” and Pinkalicious and Peter realize that they can use the seeds and  “a little love” to “make the entire world EMERALDALICIOUS!”  A pleasant combination of entertainment and advocacy, using a character whose familiarity makes the lesson easier to absorb, Emeraldalicious can be an attractive way to introduce young children to the idea that it is good to clean up and beautify the natural world whenever possible – even without the help of a magic wand.

     The instructional element is, as usual, paramount in the latest Berenstain Bears book, The Berenstain Bears Go Green, in which fans of the always-upbeat Bear family get to see the usual utopia of Bear Country (which has “green rolling hills and wide river valleys…cool shady woods and bright sunny fields” – and lots of smiling wildlife) and then discover that not everything is perfect. A pleasant family rowboat trip changes character when the Bear family encounters a bad smell and “a streak of dark, gunky-looking stuff” coming from the Bear Country Dump.  The dump is a mess, and the gunk comes from leaky old oil drums, so Mama decides to attend a town meeting to complain – but before she can speak, someone else does, and the mayor, who “did not know about that,” asks for volunteers to do a cleanup. This being a Berenstain Bears book, every single person at the meeting volunteers to help: “Everyone pitched in to clean up the trash and junk.”  There is no perfect solution here – the oil drums are simply “put in a safer spot far from the creek” – but there is the usual highly positive spin on the story, with Sister and Brother thinking of various ways beyond the dump cleanup that they can “make Bear Country clean and green.”  The typical preachy tone and overly simplistic approach to a difficult subject make this a (+++) book whose heart is in the right place but whose solutions are by no means as clear and easy as Jan and Mike Berenstain suggest. Even the clever idea of erecting a windmill in no way runs afoul of zoning ordinances or the opposition of animal-focused groups that, in the real world, worry about windmills’ effects on birds, or objections from organizations that favor wind power as long as it does not have to be created using heavy machinery and is located in such a way that it does not spoil anyone’s view of or access to anything.  Parents who read this book with their children, or who buy it for them to encourage their kids to read it themselves for the sake of ecological awareness, will have to be ready to supply some real-world corrective information to explain why human life is not as simple and tidy as the lives of the Berenstain Bears.

(++++) FORMAT WARS

The Stinking: A “Get Fuzzy” Treasury. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Masters of the Nonsenseverse: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Survival of the Filthiest: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     Here at last is the definitive answer to the question of how best to purchase collections of comic strips published by Andrews McMeel, as smaller-size “Collection” books or larger “Treasury” volumes. And the definitive answer is:  it depends.

     This is not quite as wishy-washy as it sounds.  The “Collection” books always appear first, and nowadays they include Sunday strips in color, which used to be a feature only of the larger “Treasury” volumes.  “Collection” books cost less, but two of them together cost more than a single “Treasury” volume – and the “Treasury” does indeed contain two “Collection” volumes.  The size of the “Treasury” allows all the strips, daily as well as Sunday, to be reproduced in a larger size, which makes them look better as long as the art is even reasonably good (and Darby Conley’s in Get Fuzzy is more-than-reasonably good).  The cover of a “Treasury” is different from the cover of either of the two “Collection” books included in it, which means that if you want as many covers from an artist as you can get – Conley covers, in this case – you have to buy all three books.  So “Collection” volumes win for timeliness and because you get two covers by buying two of them. “Treasury” volumes win for price, for size, and for containing two “Collection” books in a single place.  Probably the best solution is to get the “Collection” books when they come out and read them so many times that they disintegrate. Keep the covers, and then get the “Treasury” so you have a third cover and pristine copies of all the strips included in the two previous “Collection” books.  How’s that?

     Somewhere out there, cartoonists are cheering this notion, as is Andrews McMeel, since this approach guarantees the publisher the sale of more books and increases whatever royalty pittance the cartoonists get. Everyone wins, including any buyer who enjoys a particular strip, such as Get Fuzzy, enough to keep making investments in it.

     Actually, Get Fuzzy is worth investing in, increasingly so these days.  Although mild-mannered advertising executive Rob Wilco is still a dull character and often drawn without appropriate expressions (when he has any at all), Conley’s really important characters, buck-toothed Siamese cat Bucky and put-upon mixed-breed pooch Satchel, have become more finely honed and much more fun to observe over time.  They would not be fun to live with, which is why it is good that they live with Rob rather than with Get Fuzzy readers, but any cat person or dog person will recognize just enough of real-life canines and felines in Satchel and Bucky to be grateful that these are cartoon versions only.  The Stinking has a marvelous cover taking off from Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Stephen King’s The Shining, showing Satchel looking nervously behind him as he rides a kiddie car with the license plate “Satc-Hell” along the film’s famous hallway – right toward oddly attired Bucky and other Get Fuzzy characters. But the two “Collection” books included in the “Treasury” volume have wonderful covers, too, especially Masters of the Nonsenseverse, which features a compendium of fish bones, armor, fur, a volcano, a deranged-looking Rob appearing as a wizard and carrying a rugby ball atop his staff while wearing a “Property of Evil” hoodie, and so forth.  Survival of the Filthiest offers a caveman-times cover, with another volcano and with Bucky about to club Satchel on the head.  As for the strips inside these various books, they include the now-usual antics revolving mostly around Bucky’s constant scheming: the anti-ferret petition, the bad poetry, the insistence on using dialogue from “Dust Bowl Willy” (a nonexistent Depression-era comic strip), the possessed litter box (with attempted exorcism), the declaration and eventual demise of the state of Buckyvania (located in the closet where Bucky lives), the attempted ghostbusting by the Atlantic Research of Supernatural Entities Group, the feline cable-access psychic – no surprises here, just a series of ordinary days in a home shared by a cat, a dog and a wimp.  At least this particular cat, dog and wimp.

           

     And what is the best way to buy into this fractured fairy tale of a world?  Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice.  Or you pays more of your money and you takes your choices, plural. These “Collection” and “Treasury” volumes are equally worth collecting and treasuring.