Open Ice. By Pat Hughes. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.95.
Ball Don’t Lie. By Matt de la Peňa. Delacorte Press. $16.95.
There is something vaguely unpleasant about making sports the be-all and end-all of teenage life. Kids ages 14 and up – the intended audience for both these books – often dream of untold riches obtained easily (they think) by simply playing games they would play for free. In truth, similar dreams are not unusual for anyone who feels deeply connected to something done for pleasure – art, music, writing. But the inherent competitiveness of sports, to the point of violence, lends a deeply disturbing element to sports-focused get-rich-quick schemes and dreams. Nevertheless, those are dreams many teens, especially teenage boys, seem to share. And many of them will therefore gravitate to these two books, at least until they encounter the intense physical and emotional pain that the authors make an integral part of the stories.
Hockey players expect the physical sort of pain. Pat Hughes’ Open Ice is the story of Nick Taglio, a high-school sophomore and top hockey player for whom occasional concussions are simply part of the game. He has one at the start of the book, but feels so good that he starts making out with his girlfriend while in his hospital bed – until the nurse puts a stop to that sort of playing. Then it turns out that the repeated concussions are going to put a stop to the other sort of playing – the hockey that means more to Nick than sex, more than life itself. That, of course, is exactly the point: responsible adults see that Nick would truly be taking his life in his hands if he resumed playing his particularly rough brand of hockey. Nick sees only that he must play: it’s what he does; it defines who and what he is. Yet Nick has been diagnosed with “mild traumatic brain injury with postconcussion syndrome,” and he has to find out what there is to his personality and his life beyond hockey. A “diversity project,” a deeply troubling discovery involving his girlfriend, and a variety of medical and school-related events leave him wiser and perhaps on the road to greater maturity – but still with hockey always in his dreams.
Similar sports-related missteps on the road to adulthood characterize Ball Don’t Lie, the first novel by Matt de la Peňa. Here the protagonist is a bitter foster child named Sticky Richard, who connects with people only by playing basketball (the author went to college on a basketball scholarship). A girl figures in Sticky’s life, of course, but the intensity here is reserved for Sticky’s relationship with his past more than his feelings for others. Gradually, through a series of scenes in gritty urban settings, Sticky gains street smarts he never knew he still had to learn. And he endures some serious violence – which unlocks in him the ability to look within and reveal some of the worst events of his past to himself. He eventually even finds himself able to cry, and realizes, “This feels more than good, it feels like life.” And life contains basketball but is not contained by it – a good lesson for sports-obsessed teens everywhere, if they will only learn it.
January 19, 2006
(++++) COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE PAST
Busoni: Fantasia Contrappuntistica; Improvisation on the Bach Chorale “Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seele”; Fantasie für eine Orgelwalze; Duettino Concertante nach Mozart. Allan Schiller and John Humphreys, pianos. Naxos. $7.99.
Schoenberg: Six A Cappella Mixed Choruses; String Quartet No. 2; Suite in G for String Orchestra. Robert Craft directing Simon Joly Singers (Choruses); Fred Sherry String Quartet with Jennifer Welch-Babidge, soprano (Quartet); Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble (Suite). Naxos. $7.99.
The deeply ambivalent feelings of 20th-century composers for earlier music are strongly in evidence on those exceptionally well-performed CDs. Both Ferruccio Busoni and Arnold Schoenberg professed great respect for past composers and the forms they employed, but both found those forms unreasonably constricting of their own talents – and Schoenberg, of course, ended up discarding harmony, the basis of all that had gone before, altogether.
Yet neither composer ever fully escaped the past, and it is hard not to believe that neither really wanted to. Busoni sought to internalize and modify what had gone before; Schoenberg, to rise above it and create a new musical language. After hearing these CDs, listeners will have a good opportunity to decide for themselves the extent to which each composer succeeded.
Busoni’s huge Fantasia Contrappuntistica sounds better in the two-piano version from 1922 – the composer’s final iteration of this often-revised work – than in any earlier version. Allan Schiller and John Humphreys have played together for 30 years, and it shows: their interrelationship sounds almost magical (which means it results from a considerable amount of hard work). This is dense, complex music that can easily become turgid – but not in this performance, which is limpid and filled with understanding. Busoni’s incorporation and reinterpretation of Bach comes across as a monumental work on its own terms and in its own right.
The other works on this CD are more straightforward and of somewhat less interest – though still enjoyable to hear. The Improvisation combines elements of Bach’s chorale with variations Busoni originally composed for a violin sonata. It seems neither wholly Bach nor wholly Busoni – a transitional work for the latter’s evolving style. The two pieces based on Mozart are lighter still. Orgelwalze means “barrel-organ,” and Busoni’s piece is based on a late and rather serious fantasy for that instrument (K. 608). It is less effective than Mozart’s original and does not add much to it. The Duettino Concertante adds even less to its source – the finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 – but comes across better. This is Busoni at his most unassuming, free of the intellectual pretension that tends to intrude into much of his work. It is more arrangement than interpretation – and, as such, is effectively pianistic and pleasant to hear.
Unlike Busoni, Schoenberg seems always to have found a way to make the past his own, even when the resulting music is less “Schoenbergian” than most of his works. The Six A Cappella Mixed Choruses, three from 1928 and three from 1948, are remarkably tonal and polyphonic for mature works by Schoenberg. All are based on 16th-century folk songs and pay homage to that time. Yet Schoenberg’s hand is ever-present and ever-clear, in subtleties of balance, use of different voice ranges, and unusual contrasts – such as that between the 1928 and 1948 settings of the same song, “Two Good Maiden Friends.”
The Suite in G – yes, it has a key signature – is also mature Schoenberg (1934) and also beholden to olden times. It was the first piece Schoenberg wrote in America and was intended for student performance – but is so difficult that even professionals have trouble with it (though the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble seems not to). Cast as a Baroque suite – Overture, Adagio, Minuet, Gavotte and Gigue – Schoenberg’s work combines the bare outlines of old forms with highly modern approaches to harmony, counterpoint and rhythm. Its elegance, for instance in the contrasts between legato and pizzicato sections, is decidedly of a 20th-century kind.
The only work on this CD not tied directly to the past is Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, here given in its original form: two purely instrumental movements and two with soprano. The piece is tonal (F-sharp minor) and clearly reaching out in new directions: it dates to 1907, when Schoenberg was still finding his way into history. Its motto could be the soprano’s first line from the final movement: Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten – “I feel the breeze from another planet.” There is something otherworldly about the work as a whole.
This CD is the latest in Naxos’ superb Robert Craft Collection – a series showcasing much little-heard music with unerring style and skill.
Schoenberg: Six A Cappella Mixed Choruses; String Quartet No. 2; Suite in G for String Orchestra. Robert Craft directing Simon Joly Singers (Choruses); Fred Sherry String Quartet with Jennifer Welch-Babidge, soprano (Quartet); Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble (Suite). Naxos. $7.99.
The deeply ambivalent feelings of 20th-century composers for earlier music are strongly in evidence on those exceptionally well-performed CDs. Both Ferruccio Busoni and Arnold Schoenberg professed great respect for past composers and the forms they employed, but both found those forms unreasonably constricting of their own talents – and Schoenberg, of course, ended up discarding harmony, the basis of all that had gone before, altogether.
Yet neither composer ever fully escaped the past, and it is hard not to believe that neither really wanted to. Busoni sought to internalize and modify what had gone before; Schoenberg, to rise above it and create a new musical language. After hearing these CDs, listeners will have a good opportunity to decide for themselves the extent to which each composer succeeded.
Busoni’s huge Fantasia Contrappuntistica sounds better in the two-piano version from 1922 – the composer’s final iteration of this often-revised work – than in any earlier version. Allan Schiller and John Humphreys have played together for 30 years, and it shows: their interrelationship sounds almost magical (which means it results from a considerable amount of hard work). This is dense, complex music that can easily become turgid – but not in this performance, which is limpid and filled with understanding. Busoni’s incorporation and reinterpretation of Bach comes across as a monumental work on its own terms and in its own right.
The other works on this CD are more straightforward and of somewhat less interest – though still enjoyable to hear. The Improvisation combines elements of Bach’s chorale with variations Busoni originally composed for a violin sonata. It seems neither wholly Bach nor wholly Busoni – a transitional work for the latter’s evolving style. The two pieces based on Mozart are lighter still. Orgelwalze means “barrel-organ,” and Busoni’s piece is based on a late and rather serious fantasy for that instrument (K. 608). It is less effective than Mozart’s original and does not add much to it. The Duettino Concertante adds even less to its source – the finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 – but comes across better. This is Busoni at his most unassuming, free of the intellectual pretension that tends to intrude into much of his work. It is more arrangement than interpretation – and, as such, is effectively pianistic and pleasant to hear.
Unlike Busoni, Schoenberg seems always to have found a way to make the past his own, even when the resulting music is less “Schoenbergian” than most of his works. The Six A Cappella Mixed Choruses, three from 1928 and three from 1948, are remarkably tonal and polyphonic for mature works by Schoenberg. All are based on 16th-century folk songs and pay homage to that time. Yet Schoenberg’s hand is ever-present and ever-clear, in subtleties of balance, use of different voice ranges, and unusual contrasts – such as that between the 1928 and 1948 settings of the same song, “Two Good Maiden Friends.”
The Suite in G – yes, it has a key signature – is also mature Schoenberg (1934) and also beholden to olden times. It was the first piece Schoenberg wrote in America and was intended for student performance – but is so difficult that even professionals have trouble with it (though the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble seems not to). Cast as a Baroque suite – Overture, Adagio, Minuet, Gavotte and Gigue – Schoenberg’s work combines the bare outlines of old forms with highly modern approaches to harmony, counterpoint and rhythm. Its elegance, for instance in the contrasts between legato and pizzicato sections, is decidedly of a 20th-century kind.
The only work on this CD not tied directly to the past is Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, here given in its original form: two purely instrumental movements and two with soprano. The piece is tonal (F-sharp minor) and clearly reaching out in new directions: it dates to 1907, when Schoenberg was still finding his way into history. Its motto could be the soprano’s first line from the final movement: Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten – “I feel the breeze from another planet.” There is something otherworldly about the work as a whole.
This CD is the latest in Naxos’ superb Robert Craft Collection – a series showcasing much little-heard music with unerring style and skill.
January 12, 2006
(++++) FILM RITES AND WRONGS
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2006. By Roger Ebert. Andrews McMeel. $22.95.
Years after you have forgotten the mostly forgettable movies about which Roger Ebert writes – years after you have decided that you don’t want to waste two hours of your life on this one or that one – you can still turn to Ebert’s writing itself for a much better time than you would likely have had with those unwatched films.
No one but Ebert and other movie critics is going to watch (or have watched) every film Ebert discusses in his latest annual wrapup: there are some 700 here. No one, perhaps even including Ebert, would want to watch all these films: Catwoman is “tired and dated,” Scary Movie 3 “understands the concept of a spoof but not the concept of a satire,” the cast of Masked and Anonymous “wanders bewildered through shapeless scenes,” and so on. Say what you will about Ebert: you always know where he stands.
The consistency of Ebert’s reviews makes it easy to use them to choose a film to rent or buy. Whether you like his approach or hate it, he applies the same standards to everything he sees. So if you find yourself disagreeing with his evaluation of one type of movie – say, Quentin Tarantino films, about which he never seems to have anything bad to say – then you can make your view-or-not decision just as easily as if you agree with everything Ebert writes.
True, Ebert does sometimes get a little too far into the “in” side of the film world. His review of The Brown Bunny is all about Cannes, Venice and Toronto film festivals; the cutting-room floor; long takes, “especially by Ozu”; and Ebert’s own weight loss. It’s self-referential as all getout. Also true, Ebert is too much a part of the Hollywood “in” crowd to see the gaping holes in such anti-Bush-administration films as the three-star The Day After Tomorrow: “Of the science in this movie I have no opinion. I am sure global warming is real” – which apparently means he takes it on faith. And Ebert’s three-and-a-half star review of Michael Moore’s overt propaganda piece, Fahrenheit 9/11, seems to have been written in a world where Moore’s frequent camera tricks and misleading editing have never been discovered: Ebert calls Moore “a populist rabble-rouser, humorous and effective,” though the John Kerry supporters who had such hopes for Fahrenheit 9/11 may respectfully disagree.
But if Ebert has his blind spots, so do all movie reviewers – and viewers, for that matter. Because Ebert consistently puts his out in the open for all to read, he is entertaining as well as informative. He spins a mean phrase (sometimes literally). He also spins some exceedingly clever ones: “One of the fundamental philosophical questions of our time is why Goofy is a person and Pluto is a dog.” “Every genre has its cadre of moviegoers who think they dislike it.” “The jolly reds, yellows and blues of the classic Superman and Spiderman have been replaced in these grim days with black and gunmetal gray.” It is writing like this that makes Ebert more than a fine guide to films. It also makes him so enjoyable to read that you may decide to skip the movie and spend a few hours with this book instead.
Years after you have forgotten the mostly forgettable movies about which Roger Ebert writes – years after you have decided that you don’t want to waste two hours of your life on this one or that one – you can still turn to Ebert’s writing itself for a much better time than you would likely have had with those unwatched films.
No one but Ebert and other movie critics is going to watch (or have watched) every film Ebert discusses in his latest annual wrapup: there are some 700 here. No one, perhaps even including Ebert, would want to watch all these films: Catwoman is “tired and dated,” Scary Movie 3 “understands the concept of a spoof but not the concept of a satire,” the cast of Masked and Anonymous “wanders bewildered through shapeless scenes,” and so on. Say what you will about Ebert: you always know where he stands.
The consistency of Ebert’s reviews makes it easy to use them to choose a film to rent or buy. Whether you like his approach or hate it, he applies the same standards to everything he sees. So if you find yourself disagreeing with his evaluation of one type of movie – say, Quentin Tarantino films, about which he never seems to have anything bad to say – then you can make your view-or-not decision just as easily as if you agree with everything Ebert writes.
True, Ebert does sometimes get a little too far into the “in” side of the film world. His review of The Brown Bunny is all about Cannes, Venice and Toronto film festivals; the cutting-room floor; long takes, “especially by Ozu”; and Ebert’s own weight loss. It’s self-referential as all getout. Also true, Ebert is too much a part of the Hollywood “in” crowd to see the gaping holes in such anti-Bush-administration films as the three-star The Day After Tomorrow: “Of the science in this movie I have no opinion. I am sure global warming is real” – which apparently means he takes it on faith. And Ebert’s three-and-a-half star review of Michael Moore’s overt propaganda piece, Fahrenheit 9/11, seems to have been written in a world where Moore’s frequent camera tricks and misleading editing have never been discovered: Ebert calls Moore “a populist rabble-rouser, humorous and effective,” though the John Kerry supporters who had such hopes for Fahrenheit 9/11 may respectfully disagree.
But if Ebert has his blind spots, so do all movie reviewers – and viewers, for that matter. Because Ebert consistently puts his out in the open for all to read, he is entertaining as well as informative. He spins a mean phrase (sometimes literally). He also spins some exceedingly clever ones: “One of the fundamental philosophical questions of our time is why Goofy is a person and Pluto is a dog.” “Every genre has its cadre of moviegoers who think they dislike it.” “The jolly reds, yellows and blues of the classic Superman and Spiderman have been replaced in these grim days with black and gunmetal gray.” It is writing like this that makes Ebert more than a fine guide to films. It also makes him so enjoyable to read that you may decide to skip the movie and spend a few hours with this book instead.
(++++) BOPPIN' WITH BOYNTON
Dog Train. Songs and illustrations by Sandra Boynton. Workman. $17.95.
Hooray! Boynton’s back! Not that she has ever really been away – but everything new from Boynton is a cause for at least an itty-bitty celebration. In the case of Dog Train, make it a biggy-wiggy one.
This is the third book-and-music production from Boynton, after Rhinoceros Tap (originally a book and audiocassette, later reissued as book and CD) and Philadelphia Chickens. The Boynton humor and charm remain intact in this self-described “wild ride on the rock-and-roll side.” If Rhinoceros represented a Boyntonian reinterpretation of traditional kids’ songs and Philadelphia her look at Broadway musicals, Dog Train is Boynton’s take on the commercial music business. It even features some of the well-known denizens of that business: Hootie & the Blowfish, Kate Winslet, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, and many more.
The songs’ words are presented in a “Deluxe Illustrated Lyrics Book of the Unpredictable Rock-and-Roll Journey.” The title song, for instance, begins, “Along about midnight when it’s dark, dark, dark,/there’s a long, low whistle and a faraway bark.” The illustration of dogs leaning out train windows is pure Boynton, as is the pig-filled one for “(Don’t Give Me That) Broccoli,” with its stirring words, “Yes, I know I’ve never tried it, but it doesn’t look right.” Equally wonderful are the lyrics to “Boring Song” (sung antiphonally by Lawrence and Gorme): “This song is so boring/and I’m boring, too./Won’t you let me be boring/so boring for you?”
There is not even the pretense of a plot here, although “Cow Planet” (sung by Billy J. Kramer) comes in parts one, two and three, and there’s a brief and portentous opening number, lasting all of 40 seconds, called “Thus Quacked Zarathustra.” Boynton’s illustration for this one shows ducks singing with cow backup, while bemused dogs look on saying, “Beats me!” “I have no idea.” “Strauss?” It’s adorable, but no more so than “Penguin Lament,” whose chorus goes, “I’m a little too cute./Oh, yes, I know./I’m all dressed up,/but I’ve got no place to go.”
The music is well done and more mainstream than you would expect the fringes of rock-and-roll to be – but of course what’s “fringe” here is the Boynton humor, not the notes to which it is set. All the performers seem to have a wonderful time delivering the lines (and who wouldn’t love singing such words as, “My old sneakers are friends of mine—you can’t trust any shoes that shine”?). The tunes are given in a “sing and play along” section toward the back of the book, and if you absolutely insist on something reasonably serious here, there is a final section called “About the Artists” with actual photos of the singers, on none of whom Boynton has drawn even a single mustache. What restraint! Thankfully, it’s about the only restraint shown in this otherwise unrestrained series of odes to the many aspects of musical ridiculousness. Dog Train is a treat indeed – perfect for, as the book itself says, “children and vintage children.”
Hooray! Boynton’s back! Not that she has ever really been away – but everything new from Boynton is a cause for at least an itty-bitty celebration. In the case of Dog Train, make it a biggy-wiggy one.
This is the third book-and-music production from Boynton, after Rhinoceros Tap (originally a book and audiocassette, later reissued as book and CD) and Philadelphia Chickens. The Boynton humor and charm remain intact in this self-described “wild ride on the rock-and-roll side.” If Rhinoceros represented a Boyntonian reinterpretation of traditional kids’ songs and Philadelphia her look at Broadway musicals, Dog Train is Boynton’s take on the commercial music business. It even features some of the well-known denizens of that business: Hootie & the Blowfish, Kate Winslet, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, and many more.
The songs’ words are presented in a “Deluxe Illustrated Lyrics Book of the Unpredictable Rock-and-Roll Journey.” The title song, for instance, begins, “Along about midnight when it’s dark, dark, dark,/there’s a long, low whistle and a faraway bark.” The illustration of dogs leaning out train windows is pure Boynton, as is the pig-filled one for “(Don’t Give Me That) Broccoli,” with its stirring words, “Yes, I know I’ve never tried it, but it doesn’t look right.” Equally wonderful are the lyrics to “Boring Song” (sung antiphonally by Lawrence and Gorme): “This song is so boring/and I’m boring, too./Won’t you let me be boring/so boring for you?”
There is not even the pretense of a plot here, although “Cow Planet” (sung by Billy J. Kramer) comes in parts one, two and three, and there’s a brief and portentous opening number, lasting all of 40 seconds, called “Thus Quacked Zarathustra.” Boynton’s illustration for this one shows ducks singing with cow backup, while bemused dogs look on saying, “Beats me!” “I have no idea.” “Strauss?” It’s adorable, but no more so than “Penguin Lament,” whose chorus goes, “I’m a little too cute./Oh, yes, I know./I’m all dressed up,/but I’ve got no place to go.”
The music is well done and more mainstream than you would expect the fringes of rock-and-roll to be – but of course what’s “fringe” here is the Boynton humor, not the notes to which it is set. All the performers seem to have a wonderful time delivering the lines (and who wouldn’t love singing such words as, “My old sneakers are friends of mine—you can’t trust any shoes that shine”?). The tunes are given in a “sing and play along” section toward the back of the book, and if you absolutely insist on something reasonably serious here, there is a final section called “About the Artists” with actual photos of the singers, on none of whom Boynton has drawn even a single mustache. What restraint! Thankfully, it’s about the only restraint shown in this otherwise unrestrained series of odes to the many aspects of musical ridiculousness. Dog Train is a treat indeed – perfect for, as the book itself says, “children and vintage children.”
(+++) THE BUSINESS OF DISCIPLINE
The Discipline Miracle: The Clinically Proven System for Raising Happy, Healthy, and Well-Behaved Kids. By Linda Pearson, DNSc, with L.A. Stamford. AMACOM. $14.95.
It seems a little strange for AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association, to be producing a book about disciplining children. It also seems a little strange to find out that business techniques are the best way to run a family. Yet such techniques are essentially what Linda Pearson recommends.
This is, in many ways, an attractive proposition. It somehow recalls the way Mickey Mouse used to ask TV’s original Mouseketeers, “Everybody neat and pretty? Then on with the show!” Yet Pearson, a family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, is not naïve. She knows kids cause problems and can be difficult for parents to handle, and she approaches that parental task in a straightforward manner. Her ideas may not be miraculous, but they’ve got a lot of common sense behind them.
Pearson reduces child discipline to three fundamental principles: 1) Give your child a sense of security by always being dependable and emotionally available. 2) Act like a good corporate boss by insisting children follow rules that will make them feel safe while teaching them self-control. 3) Give kids what they will need for the real world – boundaries, rules, consequences – instead of always giving them what they want.
Stated this way, Pearson’s approach sounds a bit soulless. That is the problem many parents are likely to have with this book: it calls on them to have strong emotional connections with their children, but it has none itself. It is more a training manual, both for parents and for kids, than a set of recommendations for loving enforcement of necessary family rules and restrictions.
Its somewhat off-putting style aside, The Discipline Miracle is filled with good ideas and clearly written examples. After stating her three principles, each in its own chapter, Pearson follows up with separate chapters on putting each principle to work (that corporate approach again). The application chapters mix excellent advice with more problematic comments. For example, it is very good to know that certain fears are normal in children of certain ages, but it is far more difficult, as a practical matter, to follow this advice: “If you suspect that your child has modeled her fear of something by watching an important person in her life react with an intense emotion…allow her to watch you deal calmly with a similar event or thing.”
On balance, Pearson’s principles are sound, though not as easy to follow as she suggests. And she takes things a bit too far in later chapters by suggesting that her three principles can lessen the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (maybe in some cases, but surely not as a general rule) and that they can mitigate especially difficult family circumstances, such as divorce (again, perhaps in some cases, but not all). Pearson’s book is best used as a guide to techniques that make intellectual sense but may not have the right emotional connection for all families. If you find a largely businesslike implementation of structural principles a sound way to manage discipline issues, you will find Pearson an excellent guide. But her ideas are certainly no “miracle.”
It seems a little strange for AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association, to be producing a book about disciplining children. It also seems a little strange to find out that business techniques are the best way to run a family. Yet such techniques are essentially what Linda Pearson recommends.
This is, in many ways, an attractive proposition. It somehow recalls the way Mickey Mouse used to ask TV’s original Mouseketeers, “Everybody neat and pretty? Then on with the show!” Yet Pearson, a family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, is not naïve. She knows kids cause problems and can be difficult for parents to handle, and she approaches that parental task in a straightforward manner. Her ideas may not be miraculous, but they’ve got a lot of common sense behind them.
Pearson reduces child discipline to three fundamental principles: 1) Give your child a sense of security by always being dependable and emotionally available. 2) Act like a good corporate boss by insisting children follow rules that will make them feel safe while teaching them self-control. 3) Give kids what they will need for the real world – boundaries, rules, consequences – instead of always giving them what they want.
Stated this way, Pearson’s approach sounds a bit soulless. That is the problem many parents are likely to have with this book: it calls on them to have strong emotional connections with their children, but it has none itself. It is more a training manual, both for parents and for kids, than a set of recommendations for loving enforcement of necessary family rules and restrictions.
Its somewhat off-putting style aside, The Discipline Miracle is filled with good ideas and clearly written examples. After stating her three principles, each in its own chapter, Pearson follows up with separate chapters on putting each principle to work (that corporate approach again). The application chapters mix excellent advice with more problematic comments. For example, it is very good to know that certain fears are normal in children of certain ages, but it is far more difficult, as a practical matter, to follow this advice: “If you suspect that your child has modeled her fear of something by watching an important person in her life react with an intense emotion…allow her to watch you deal calmly with a similar event or thing.”
On balance, Pearson’s principles are sound, though not as easy to follow as she suggests. And she takes things a bit too far in later chapters by suggesting that her three principles can lessen the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (maybe in some cases, but surely not as a general rule) and that they can mitigate especially difficult family circumstances, such as divorce (again, perhaps in some cases, but not all). Pearson’s book is best used as a guide to techniques that make intellectual sense but may not have the right emotional connection for all families. If you find a largely businesslike implementation of structural principles a sound way to manage discipline issues, you will find Pearson an excellent guide. But her ideas are certainly no “miracle.”
(+++) PICTURING THE CHARMS OF YESTERYEAR
Eloise Wilkin Stories. Stories and poems illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. Golden Books. $10.95.
Eloise Wilkin (1904-1987) was a children’s book illustrator, doll designer, and homemaker and mother of four. Most of her illustration work was for Little Golden Books, originally published by Simon and Schuster. Random House, which now handles the line, has combined a number of works written between 1948 and 1962 for this treasury collection, and added an introduction, remembrance of Wilkin, and illustration from a posthumously published book of poems. The result is a lovely tribute – but, it must be said, not necessarily a book that modern-day parents and children will find attractive.
Wilkin’s strength in a certain illustrative style may be her undoing for 21st-century readers, because that style is one that seems at least quaint, at most old-fashioned and out-of-date today. In the end-of-book “Remembrance of Eloise Wilkin,” written in 1987 after Wilkin’s death, Jane Werner Watson says “she has left us, only slightly idealized, rich reminders of a lovely time not very long ago.” In the ensuing two decades, though, that “lovely time” has come to seem very, very long ago indeed.
Some children will no doubt still find these mid-20th-century books charming. The oldest, Busy Timmy by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, is simply a series of pictures of a charming towheaded toddler going through everyday play. Guess Who Lives Here (1949) by Louise Woodcock has a cute premise: showing objects associated with a home’s residents and asking young children to guess whose things they are. But the apron-wearing housewife (not “homemaker,” which is a modern term) and trench-coated, briefcase-toting father seem like relics of olden times. My Little Golden Book about God (1956) by Jane Werner Watson offers some unusually interesting illustrations – a two-page extreme closeup of a child bending over to look at an insect on a flower is exceptional – and will likely please traditionalists who want their children to see the hand of a Western, paternalistic deity in everything. But it may make many families uncomfortable with its simplistic approach and implication that everyone sees God the same way (would a book like this even be published today by a mainstream company?). And so it goes: lovely pictures of idealized children living an idealized life in idealized settings, no matter what the subject matter. Even Wilkin’s illustrations of nursery rhymes and Robert Louis Stevenson poems have the same slight otherworldly flavor.
From a certain angle, there is tremendous charm here, and parents who themselves grew up with Little Golden Books may want this treasury as a keepsake as well as something to share with their own children. From another point of view, Wilkin’s pictures sugarcoat a world that never really existed – and now, decades after she made them, contain more of curiosity than of easily accepted beauty. Wilkin was a talented artist, and her work is certainly heartfelt. But it may be harder for her pictures to touch 21st-century hearts than the hearts of those for whom it was originally intended.
Eloise Wilkin (1904-1987) was a children’s book illustrator, doll designer, and homemaker and mother of four. Most of her illustration work was for Little Golden Books, originally published by Simon and Schuster. Random House, which now handles the line, has combined a number of works written between 1948 and 1962 for this treasury collection, and added an introduction, remembrance of Wilkin, and illustration from a posthumously published book of poems. The result is a lovely tribute – but, it must be said, not necessarily a book that modern-day parents and children will find attractive.
Wilkin’s strength in a certain illustrative style may be her undoing for 21st-century readers, because that style is one that seems at least quaint, at most old-fashioned and out-of-date today. In the end-of-book “Remembrance of Eloise Wilkin,” written in 1987 after Wilkin’s death, Jane Werner Watson says “she has left us, only slightly idealized, rich reminders of a lovely time not very long ago.” In the ensuing two decades, though, that “lovely time” has come to seem very, very long ago indeed.
Some children will no doubt still find these mid-20th-century books charming. The oldest, Busy Timmy by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, is simply a series of pictures of a charming towheaded toddler going through everyday play. Guess Who Lives Here (1949) by Louise Woodcock has a cute premise: showing objects associated with a home’s residents and asking young children to guess whose things they are. But the apron-wearing housewife (not “homemaker,” which is a modern term) and trench-coated, briefcase-toting father seem like relics of olden times. My Little Golden Book about God (1956) by Jane Werner Watson offers some unusually interesting illustrations – a two-page extreme closeup of a child bending over to look at an insect on a flower is exceptional – and will likely please traditionalists who want their children to see the hand of a Western, paternalistic deity in everything. But it may make many families uncomfortable with its simplistic approach and implication that everyone sees God the same way (would a book like this even be published today by a mainstream company?). And so it goes: lovely pictures of idealized children living an idealized life in idealized settings, no matter what the subject matter. Even Wilkin’s illustrations of nursery rhymes and Robert Louis Stevenson poems have the same slight otherworldly flavor.
From a certain angle, there is tremendous charm here, and parents who themselves grew up with Little Golden Books may want this treasury as a keepsake as well as something to share with their own children. From another point of view, Wilkin’s pictures sugarcoat a world that never really existed – and now, decades after she made them, contain more of curiosity than of easily accepted beauty. Wilkin was a talented artist, and her work is certainly heartfelt. But it may be harder for her pictures to touch 21st-century hearts than the hearts of those for whom it was originally intended.
(++++) A VIVID IMAGE-INATION
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006. Windows 98SE or later. Microsoft. $99.99.
Ask anyone who does frequent digital photo editing and you’re likely to be told that Adobe Photoshop 3.0 is “the one to beat” among editing suites. That may be true for experienced photo editors, but novices are likely to find Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 easier and more pleasant to use – and even for more adept users, this new product gives Adobe’s a run for the money.
Microsoft’s 2006 product is a mostly revamped and upgraded version of its earlier ones, and the improvements are all to the good. It is essentially three products in one: Library to organize images, Photo Story 3.1 to create slide shows, and Editor to change components of images. Library is neatly designed and easy to use. You can create keywords and assign them to individual images, as before – and now you can organize the keywords themselves so you don’t have to sort through long alphabetical lists. You can also rank individual images (up to five stars) so you can more easily put together the best ones. Photo Story 3.1 makes it easy to create video slide shows – including music and motion effects. It’s a very nice product, but not in itself a reason to buy the suite – since it is available for free as a download from Microsoft’s Web site.
Editor is something of a mixed bag. Although newly named, it is not much different from earlier Microsoft digital-editing products. The interface is clumsier than in the suite’s other components, and although the editing tools work well, there is nothing special about them and nothing particularly new – except for a really neat feature to convert color images to black-and-white.
Ease of use and mostly well-done suite integration are the big selling points here. Expect to spend a couple of hours learning all the ins and outs of the suite and practicing with it– but that’s much less than you would spend with Adobe’s product. And some elements, such as image enhancement, are so intuitive that you can use them almost immediately. Others, such as layer and transparency, are much easier than in Adobe’s software. Users of the RAW image format will be pleased that Microsoft’s new suite supports it.
New users of digital-editing programs will find Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 to be a great deal of fun. It takes only a few clicks to correct color balance and contrast, switch photo backgrounds, remove objects from pictures, E-mail photos in a size that is small enough so even dialup users can send and receive them quickly, and much more.
The program installs easily and painlessly, though it does require 400 megabytes of disk space. Slower computers (microprocessor clock speed below 1 GHz) and ones with less than 512 megabytes of RAM can run it but probably shouldn’t – it works, but slowly. Users may run into occasional glitches with certain photo formats in certain types of projects, but the Help files are genuinely helpful and can usually point you toward a fix or workaround. Automatic resizing and the sharpening tool are weak points, but neither is a serious problem – they are just not up to the quality of the rest of the suite.
Expert digital editors and those with a strong technical inclination may continue to prefer Adobe’s product for its top-of-the-line image editing tools and an integration even tighter than Microsoft’s. There are also some other good editing suites out there, such as Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X. And some buyers may balk at spending $100 for a three-component suite when one of those components is available free. Despite all this, Microsoft Digital Image 2006 is a good value and a very worthwhile competitor in its field – especially for people who want to start getting top-notch results quickly and without wading through mounds of jargon.
Ask anyone who does frequent digital photo editing and you’re likely to be told that Adobe Photoshop 3.0 is “the one to beat” among editing suites. That may be true for experienced photo editors, but novices are likely to find Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 easier and more pleasant to use – and even for more adept users, this new product gives Adobe’s a run for the money.
Microsoft’s 2006 product is a mostly revamped and upgraded version of its earlier ones, and the improvements are all to the good. It is essentially three products in one: Library to organize images, Photo Story 3.1 to create slide shows, and Editor to change components of images. Library is neatly designed and easy to use. You can create keywords and assign them to individual images, as before – and now you can organize the keywords themselves so you don’t have to sort through long alphabetical lists. You can also rank individual images (up to five stars) so you can more easily put together the best ones. Photo Story 3.1 makes it easy to create video slide shows – including music and motion effects. It’s a very nice product, but not in itself a reason to buy the suite – since it is available for free as a download from Microsoft’s Web site.
Editor is something of a mixed bag. Although newly named, it is not much different from earlier Microsoft digital-editing products. The interface is clumsier than in the suite’s other components, and although the editing tools work well, there is nothing special about them and nothing particularly new – except for a really neat feature to convert color images to black-and-white.
Ease of use and mostly well-done suite integration are the big selling points here. Expect to spend a couple of hours learning all the ins and outs of the suite and practicing with it– but that’s much less than you would spend with Adobe’s product. And some elements, such as image enhancement, are so intuitive that you can use them almost immediately. Others, such as layer and transparency, are much easier than in Adobe’s software. Users of the RAW image format will be pleased that Microsoft’s new suite supports it.
New users of digital-editing programs will find Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 to be a great deal of fun. It takes only a few clicks to correct color balance and contrast, switch photo backgrounds, remove objects from pictures, E-mail photos in a size that is small enough so even dialup users can send and receive them quickly, and much more.
The program installs easily and painlessly, though it does require 400 megabytes of disk space. Slower computers (microprocessor clock speed below 1 GHz) and ones with less than 512 megabytes of RAM can run it but probably shouldn’t – it works, but slowly. Users may run into occasional glitches with certain photo formats in certain types of projects, but the Help files are genuinely helpful and can usually point you toward a fix or workaround. Automatic resizing and the sharpening tool are weak points, but neither is a serious problem – they are just not up to the quality of the rest of the suite.
Expert digital editors and those with a strong technical inclination may continue to prefer Adobe’s product for its top-of-the-line image editing tools and an integration even tighter than Microsoft’s. There are also some other good editing suites out there, such as Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X. And some buyers may balk at spending $100 for a three-component suite when one of those components is available free. Despite all this, Microsoft Digital Image 2006 is a good value and a very worthwhile competitor in its field – especially for people who want to start getting top-notch results quickly and without wading through mounds of jargon.
(++++) MULTIFACETED FANTASIES
Hummel: Fantasie in G Minor, Op. 123; Fantasie in E-flat Major, Op. 18; Rondo quasi una fantasia in E Major, Op. 19; “La Contemplazione” in A-flat Major from “Six Bagatelles,” Op. 107; Fantasie “Recollections of Paganini”; Fantasina in C Major on “Non più andrai,” Op. 124. Madoka Inui, piano. Naxos. $7.99.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) had the misfortune to be both ahead of and behind his time. Madoka Inui’s excellent performances of his piano fantasies show how and why. There is no single “Hummel style” in these works – instead, there is a multiplicity of styles, each of which was to be extended, improved upon and incorporated into the works of Hummel’s contemporaries and successors.
The most obvious “extenders” were Beethoven and Liszt. Hummel’s Op. 18 Fantasie, written in 1805 and by far the longest work on this CD, is really a grand piano sonata, with an especially intense Lento introduction to the first movement and a series of difficulties for the player throughout. Beethoven knew the work, which may well have influenced his own Fantasie, Op. 77, a curious, improvisational-sounding piece of ever-shifting moods. Hummel’s Op. 18 even has elements that seem to have been absorbed and expanded by Beethoven in the Hammerklavier of 1818. Now, so many years after all these works were written, Hummel’s – for all its intensity – sounds somewhat like a pale imitation of better music, when in fact it was more likely an inspiration.
As for Liszt – who so admired Hummel that he arranged for a Hummel monument to be erected in what is now Bratislava – he surely took pieces like “Recollections of Paganini” and the Fantasia on “Non più andrai” to heart in his own very extended reminiscences, expansions, contemplations and virtuoso variations on the works of many composers. These two Hummel works are quite charming, and Inui plays them with both delicacy and panache. But they are also superficial, being closer to reproductions and expansions of the original Paganini and Mozart tunes than analyses or extensions of them. They are fun to hear, but the listener must keep Liszt’s ghost at bay.
It is Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini who are suggested by Hummel’s Rondo, Op. 19, which has an operatic quality to it. So does “La Contemplazione,” a slow and extended meditation (nearly as long as the four-movement Paganini fantasy) whose quiet beauty would fit well into many operas of the time. The Fantasie Op. 123, though, has an entirely different quality. This work – here given its world-première recording – is based on folk-song themes by two minor composers, with an introduction and march on themes by Hummel itself. The work is in five disconnected movements and does not aspire to the profundity of some of the other fantasies. Yet it too makes one think of Liszt – specifically the Liszt of Hexameron, a grand work with contributions by Chopin, Czerny, Thalberg and others. Inui makes a strong case for Hummel’s piano music, which was a key to his successful career as a much-admired virtuoso. The music itself does seem a little pale today; but, taken on its own terms and without (if possible) comparing it too minutely to the works of other composers, it stands well on its own and is decidedly worth hearing.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) had the misfortune to be both ahead of and behind his time. Madoka Inui’s excellent performances of his piano fantasies show how and why. There is no single “Hummel style” in these works – instead, there is a multiplicity of styles, each of which was to be extended, improved upon and incorporated into the works of Hummel’s contemporaries and successors.
The most obvious “extenders” were Beethoven and Liszt. Hummel’s Op. 18 Fantasie, written in 1805 and by far the longest work on this CD, is really a grand piano sonata, with an especially intense Lento introduction to the first movement and a series of difficulties for the player throughout. Beethoven knew the work, which may well have influenced his own Fantasie, Op. 77, a curious, improvisational-sounding piece of ever-shifting moods. Hummel’s Op. 18 even has elements that seem to have been absorbed and expanded by Beethoven in the Hammerklavier of 1818. Now, so many years after all these works were written, Hummel’s – for all its intensity – sounds somewhat like a pale imitation of better music, when in fact it was more likely an inspiration.
As for Liszt – who so admired Hummel that he arranged for a Hummel monument to be erected in what is now Bratislava – he surely took pieces like “Recollections of Paganini” and the Fantasia on “Non più andrai” to heart in his own very extended reminiscences, expansions, contemplations and virtuoso variations on the works of many composers. These two Hummel works are quite charming, and Inui plays them with both delicacy and panache. But they are also superficial, being closer to reproductions and expansions of the original Paganini and Mozart tunes than analyses or extensions of them. They are fun to hear, but the listener must keep Liszt’s ghost at bay.
It is Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini who are suggested by Hummel’s Rondo, Op. 19, which has an operatic quality to it. So does “La Contemplazione,” a slow and extended meditation (nearly as long as the four-movement Paganini fantasy) whose quiet beauty would fit well into many operas of the time. The Fantasie Op. 123, though, has an entirely different quality. This work – here given its world-première recording – is based on folk-song themes by two minor composers, with an introduction and march on themes by Hummel itself. The work is in five disconnected movements and does not aspire to the profundity of some of the other fantasies. Yet it too makes one think of Liszt – specifically the Liszt of Hexameron, a grand work with contributions by Chopin, Czerny, Thalberg and others. Inui makes a strong case for Hummel’s piano music, which was a key to his successful career as a much-admired virtuoso. The music itself does seem a little pale today; but, taken on its own terms and without (if possible) comparing it too minutely to the works of other composers, it stands well on its own and is decidedly worth hearing.
January 05, 2006
(++++) FICTION, NONFICTION, OR BOTH?
Scholastic Atlas of Earth. Editor: Johanne Champagne. Scholastic. $17.99.
Unexpected: 11 Mysterious Stories. Edited by Laura E. Williams. Scholastic. $5.99.
The early part of a new year seems like a good time to choose directions. In the case of books, that can mean choosing to start the year reading fiction or nonfiction. Interestingly, no matter which way young readers choose, they can find something to enjoy from Scholastic, which offers both fictional and nonfictional books of consistently high quality.
If you’d like to start the year by learning more about our planet, Scholastic Atlas of Earth makes a fine introduction. Arranged in sections called “History of Earth,” “Inside Earth,” “Breathtaking Landscapes,” “Earth’s Fits of Anger,” and “The Environment,” this book gives basic and amply illustrated information on how life began and developed, how fossils are formed, how different climates affect life, the formation of mountains and caves, tectonic motion, volcanoes and earthquakes, and more – including the latest thinking on climate change, global warming, deforestation and other important ecological issues of the day. This is not an in-depth work: the emphasis is as much on attractive presentation as on transmitting facts. But it is a good start for learning the material, and each paragraph packs in a surprising amount of information. For example, the brief section on the food chain – from plants to herbivores to carnivores to top predators to decomposers and back to plants – is nicely complemented by a box explaining that “each link in the food chain gets only 10% of the energy that was stored by the preceding link,” and what that means in terms of how plants and animals grow. Bonus hands-on activities at the end can make the study of Earth even more enjoyable: young readers can easily make their own fossils or create mountains, using techniques that quickly duplicate, on a small scale, the tremendously slow and vast forces that constantly change the face of our planet.
If you’d rather begin by reading fiction, one recent release worth considering is Unexpected. The title fits with any new year – we are always sure to experience the unexpected! – but the subject matter is the timeless stuff of mysteries and shudders. Some of the stories are scary precisely because they really could happen – such as Will Weaver’s “Marked for Death,” about a deer hunt gone horribly wrong. Others couldn’t, but their twists and turns make them shuddery anyway – such as Laura E. Williams’ Poe-etically titled “The Telltale Croak.” Still others have the characteristic blend of fright and humor for which their authors are well known, such as Bruce Coville’s abduction-by-trolls story, “The Troddler.” The remaining eight tales – by Peter Lerangis, Gail Carson Levine, Norma Fox Mazer, Graham Salisbury, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Marion Dane Bauer, Dian Curtis Regan, and the team of Heidi E.Y. Stemple and Jane Yolen – are darksome in different ways. This is a good book to read when early-year busy-ness makes it hard to find the time for a novel, since the stories are loosely connected by mood but otherwise quite independent (the preponderance of authors using triple names notwithstanding). Of course, if the early part of the year is just too busy, it’s fine to put either or both of these books aside for a while. Their levels of interest will keep quite nicely.
Unexpected: 11 Mysterious Stories. Edited by Laura E. Williams. Scholastic. $5.99.
The early part of a new year seems like a good time to choose directions. In the case of books, that can mean choosing to start the year reading fiction or nonfiction. Interestingly, no matter which way young readers choose, they can find something to enjoy from Scholastic, which offers both fictional and nonfictional books of consistently high quality.
If you’d like to start the year by learning more about our planet, Scholastic Atlas of Earth makes a fine introduction. Arranged in sections called “History of Earth,” “Inside Earth,” “Breathtaking Landscapes,” “Earth’s Fits of Anger,” and “The Environment,” this book gives basic and amply illustrated information on how life began and developed, how fossils are formed, how different climates affect life, the formation of mountains and caves, tectonic motion, volcanoes and earthquakes, and more – including the latest thinking on climate change, global warming, deforestation and other important ecological issues of the day. This is not an in-depth work: the emphasis is as much on attractive presentation as on transmitting facts. But it is a good start for learning the material, and each paragraph packs in a surprising amount of information. For example, the brief section on the food chain – from plants to herbivores to carnivores to top predators to decomposers and back to plants – is nicely complemented by a box explaining that “each link in the food chain gets only 10% of the energy that was stored by the preceding link,” and what that means in terms of how plants and animals grow. Bonus hands-on activities at the end can make the study of Earth even more enjoyable: young readers can easily make their own fossils or create mountains, using techniques that quickly duplicate, on a small scale, the tremendously slow and vast forces that constantly change the face of our planet.
If you’d rather begin by reading fiction, one recent release worth considering is Unexpected. The title fits with any new year – we are always sure to experience the unexpected! – but the subject matter is the timeless stuff of mysteries and shudders. Some of the stories are scary precisely because they really could happen – such as Will Weaver’s “Marked for Death,” about a deer hunt gone horribly wrong. Others couldn’t, but their twists and turns make them shuddery anyway – such as Laura E. Williams’ Poe-etically titled “The Telltale Croak.” Still others have the characteristic blend of fright and humor for which their authors are well known, such as Bruce Coville’s abduction-by-trolls story, “The Troddler.” The remaining eight tales – by Peter Lerangis, Gail Carson Levine, Norma Fox Mazer, Graham Salisbury, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Marion Dane Bauer, Dian Curtis Regan, and the team of Heidi E.Y. Stemple and Jane Yolen – are darksome in different ways. This is a good book to read when early-year busy-ness makes it hard to find the time for a novel, since the stories are loosely connected by mood but otherwise quite independent (the preponderance of authors using triple names notwithstanding). Of course, if the early part of the year is just too busy, it’s fine to put either or both of these books aside for a while. Their levels of interest will keep quite nicely.
(+++) EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
Kate, the Cat and the Moon. By David Almond and Stephen Lambert. Doubleday. $15.95.
The Me Book. By Jean Tymms. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely. Golden Books. $5.99.
Young children need not search for adventure in far-off places. They can find plenty of it close to home, as these two books show. Kate, the Cat and the Moon, for ages 4-8, is novelist David Almond’s first picture book. And a charming one it is, thanks partly to Almond’s story and partly to Stephen Lambert’s pleasantly evocative illustrations. The tale is a simple one of a young girl named Kate who has a wonderful dream. Late one moonlit night, she sees a brilliant white cat sitting on a garden wall near her home. The cat says “meow,” and when Kate responds “meow’ in turn, she is transformed into a cat herself, spending the night seeing the wonders of everyday feline life: a cat-shaped moon, a “sky [that] was full of dreams,” and all the fields, hedges and ditches of a pleasant countryside. The tour over, Kate returns home, and with another “meow” exchange, is transformed back to a little girl, whose whole family talks about dreams at breakfast. It’s a straightforward tale, but very well told and highly enjoyable. Try it as a bedtime story – it invites pleasant dreams.
The Me Book represents adventure of a different kind. It is all about self-discovery: what a child’s body is and what it can do. Originally published in 1974 and now reissued in an attractive board-book format, The Me Book is simplicity itself, using animals as stand-ins for kids until the very end. For example, monkeys are featured on the “my arms are for” pages, which show simians – dressed in kids’ clothing – hugging, making muscles and more. Koalas appear on the “my hands are for” pages – tickling and making mud pies, among other things. Tibor Gergely’s hippos on the “my waist is for” pages are especially whimsical, notably when twisting and when putting a belt on. At the end, Jean Tymms writes, “all of me is for” such activities as climbing, hiding, dancing and somersaulting. Here the illustrations actually show children – modified in this edition for 21st-century multicultural sensibilities. This is an attractive early-reading book with some genuinely funny illustrations: check out the parasol-carrying kangaroo wearing floral-design sunglasses, the pig whistling a tune, and the frog putting on sneakers.
The Me Book. By Jean Tymms. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely. Golden Books. $5.99.
Young children need not search for adventure in far-off places. They can find plenty of it close to home, as these two books show. Kate, the Cat and the Moon, for ages 4-8, is novelist David Almond’s first picture book. And a charming one it is, thanks partly to Almond’s story and partly to Stephen Lambert’s pleasantly evocative illustrations. The tale is a simple one of a young girl named Kate who has a wonderful dream. Late one moonlit night, she sees a brilliant white cat sitting on a garden wall near her home. The cat says “meow,” and when Kate responds “meow’ in turn, she is transformed into a cat herself, spending the night seeing the wonders of everyday feline life: a cat-shaped moon, a “sky [that] was full of dreams,” and all the fields, hedges and ditches of a pleasant countryside. The tour over, Kate returns home, and with another “meow” exchange, is transformed back to a little girl, whose whole family talks about dreams at breakfast. It’s a straightforward tale, but very well told and highly enjoyable. Try it as a bedtime story – it invites pleasant dreams.
The Me Book represents adventure of a different kind. It is all about self-discovery: what a child’s body is and what it can do. Originally published in 1974 and now reissued in an attractive board-book format, The Me Book is simplicity itself, using animals as stand-ins for kids until the very end. For example, monkeys are featured on the “my arms are for” pages, which show simians – dressed in kids’ clothing – hugging, making muscles and more. Koalas appear on the “my hands are for” pages – tickling and making mud pies, among other things. Tibor Gergely’s hippos on the “my waist is for” pages are especially whimsical, notably when twisting and when putting a belt on. At the end, Jean Tymms writes, “all of me is for” such activities as climbing, hiding, dancing and somersaulting. Here the illustrations actually show children – modified in this edition for 21st-century multicultural sensibilities. This is an attractive early-reading book with some genuinely funny illustrations: check out the parasol-carrying kangaroo wearing floral-design sunglasses, the pig whistling a tune, and the frog putting on sneakers.
(+++) BYWAYS OF A SIMPLE QUESTION
Sky in a Bottle. By Peter Pesic. MIT Press. $24.95.
This is one of those books that would likely be described the same way by those who enjoy it and those who do not: offbeat, capricious, skewed, quirky. Those who consider those positive adjectives will enjoy Peter Pesic’s meandering study of blueness. Those who find the adjectives pejorative had best avoid Sky in a Bottle altogether.
Pesic’s book has a disarmingly simple starting point: the common childhood question, “Why is the sky blue?” The scientific answer is straightforward enough: atmospheric particles scatter the redder wavelengths of sunlight less than the bluer wavelengths. The more-scattered wavelengths are more visible – so we see blue when we look up at a clear sky. But to Pesic, a physics Ph.D. who is now Tutor and Musician-in-Residence at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this phenomenon, known as Rayleigh scattering, barely scratches the surface of blueness. From the opening of his book’s first chapter (“A mystery must emerge before it can be solved”) to an appendix showing how readers can try to duplicate color experiments of times past, Pesic pulls in art and history as well as science in his discussion of celestial blueness.
In fact, Pesic is less interested in why the sky is blue than in the ramifications of the question “why is the sky blue?” itself. A given page is as likely to contain a bit of a poem by William Wordsworth; a sketch by the elder Lord Rayleigh (his son also held the title) of his first observations on the blue of the sky; or an illustration from 1815 of Arago’s cyanometer, which allowed light from different areas of the sky to be seen against a color scale.
Sky in a Bottle switches, sometimes disconcertingly, from plainspokenness to scientific discussion: “Avogadro [a 19th-century natural philosopher] could not determine the number of molecules per one mole because at that time chemistry had no way of counting the individual molecules. Not knowing that number meant that he did not know the size of one molecule, if the number of molecules in one cubic meter of a liquid or solid equals that volume divided by the volume occupied by a single molecule. Conversely, determining the size of atoms and molecules would fix the number.” This sort of writing can be bracing for those of a scientific bent, but it requires a scientist-artist like Pesic himself to switch so often between poetry and analytical mathematics, chemistry and physics. Indeed, it is hard to escape the suspicion that Pesic essentially wrote this book for himself and perhaps a small coterie of the like-minded. If you are one of those, you will find Pesic’s musings and his ramblings from science to poesy and back again to be charming; otherwise, you will find them merely discursive.
This is one of those books that would likely be described the same way by those who enjoy it and those who do not: offbeat, capricious, skewed, quirky. Those who consider those positive adjectives will enjoy Peter Pesic’s meandering study of blueness. Those who find the adjectives pejorative had best avoid Sky in a Bottle altogether.
Pesic’s book has a disarmingly simple starting point: the common childhood question, “Why is the sky blue?” The scientific answer is straightforward enough: atmospheric particles scatter the redder wavelengths of sunlight less than the bluer wavelengths. The more-scattered wavelengths are more visible – so we see blue when we look up at a clear sky. But to Pesic, a physics Ph.D. who is now Tutor and Musician-in-Residence at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this phenomenon, known as Rayleigh scattering, barely scratches the surface of blueness. From the opening of his book’s first chapter (“A mystery must emerge before it can be solved”) to an appendix showing how readers can try to duplicate color experiments of times past, Pesic pulls in art and history as well as science in his discussion of celestial blueness.
In fact, Pesic is less interested in why the sky is blue than in the ramifications of the question “why is the sky blue?” itself. A given page is as likely to contain a bit of a poem by William Wordsworth; a sketch by the elder Lord Rayleigh (his son also held the title) of his first observations on the blue of the sky; or an illustration from 1815 of Arago’s cyanometer, which allowed light from different areas of the sky to be seen against a color scale.
Sky in a Bottle switches, sometimes disconcertingly, from plainspokenness to scientific discussion: “Avogadro [a 19th-century natural philosopher] could not determine the number of molecules per one mole because at that time chemistry had no way of counting the individual molecules. Not knowing that number meant that he did not know the size of one molecule, if the number of molecules in one cubic meter of a liquid or solid equals that volume divided by the volume occupied by a single molecule. Conversely, determining the size of atoms and molecules would fix the number.” This sort of writing can be bracing for those of a scientific bent, but it requires a scientist-artist like Pesic himself to switch so often between poetry and analytical mathematics, chemistry and physics. Indeed, it is hard to escape the suspicion that Pesic essentially wrote this book for himself and perhaps a small coterie of the like-minded. If you are one of those, you will find Pesic’s musings and his ramblings from science to poesy and back again to be charming; otherwise, you will find them merely discursive.
(+++) TRIPLE THREAT FOR THE 8-TO-12 SET
Barry, Boyhound. By Andy Spearman. Knopf. $15.95.
Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money. By Christopher Paul Curtis. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.95.
Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family. By Steven R. Schirripa & Charles Fleming. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
Here’s a trio of not-to-be-taken-too-seriously romps for preteens. Barry, Boyhound is a simple story about Barry, who looks like a boy but is actually a dog…and about his straightforward environment, which includes telepathic squirrels, a squashed frog, an exploding raccoon and a couple of talking fleas. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t so simple after all. This is Andy Spearman’s first novel, and it shows a good sense of comic timing and pacing, plus design elements likely to be especially attractive to preteen boys: photos, drawings, multiple typestyles, and occasional forays into yuckiness (“maggots are the little wormy bugs called larvae that hatch after flies lay their eggs on dead animals or in a pile of rotting old disgusting garbage”). There’s stuff here about Sasquatch, Kublai Khan, a typical boy’s brain (“girls: lobe not yet activated”), how to pick a poodle, George Washington Carver, and the five phases of upset mothers. It’s a quick read and lots of fun.
The same can be said of Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money, in which the Newbery Medal-winning author of Bud, Not Buddy discovers his loopy side: “(Here’s a word of warning: NEVER, EVER, EVER LICK THE CANDLES ON A BIRTHDAY CAKE. Steven’s tongue hurt for three weeks after this little stunt.)” The book’s plot revolves around a quadrillion-dollar bill (a one with 15 zeroes). Nine-year-old Steven gets the bill from the blind man in the neighborhood, Mr. Chickee, with whom Steven spends time on Saturday mornings. Mr. Chickee doesn’t know how big the bill is, of course, and “Steven’s experience with really big, gigantic, humongous numbers actually went only to 635,541,” so what’s to be done about this bill? Is it even real? Enter Agent Fondoo of the government, determined to get the bill back – and enter, on Steven’s side, his best friend, Russell, and Zoopy the giant dog. Predictable mayhem – and some that is not so predictable – ensues. Everything is frothy and amusing.
Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family is not as silly; but it is, in its own way, equally enjoyable. This is a book with “heart” written all over it – a family story. Watch that word “family,” though: coauthor Steven R. Schirripa plays Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri on “The Sopranos.” And this book is all about an Italian family – but not that kind of family. Schirripa and Charles Fleming, a novelist and entertainment reporter, tell the story of Nicholas Borelli II, who lives with his family in suburban New Jersey (okay, where else?). But the important part of this book is connected not with the Garden State but with Brooklyn, New York, where Nicholas ends up having to stay with family because of a septic-tank explosion at his summer camp. In Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, Nicholas finds out about and connects with his Italian roots, learning the culture, filling up on the food, and picking up the nickname that is the book’s title. The authors try a little too hard to force warmth into Nicky’s story – everyone is so gosh-darned well meaning all the time! – but the characters are entertaining (if one-dimensional), and the idea of learning about and enjoying one’s past really does have resonance in a country that remains, after all, a nation of immigrants.
Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money. By Christopher Paul Curtis. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.95.
Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family. By Steven R. Schirripa & Charles Fleming. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
Here’s a trio of not-to-be-taken-too-seriously romps for preteens. Barry, Boyhound is a simple story about Barry, who looks like a boy but is actually a dog…and about his straightforward environment, which includes telepathic squirrels, a squashed frog, an exploding raccoon and a couple of talking fleas. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t so simple after all. This is Andy Spearman’s first novel, and it shows a good sense of comic timing and pacing, plus design elements likely to be especially attractive to preteen boys: photos, drawings, multiple typestyles, and occasional forays into yuckiness (“maggots are the little wormy bugs called larvae that hatch after flies lay their eggs on dead animals or in a pile of rotting old disgusting garbage”). There’s stuff here about Sasquatch, Kublai Khan, a typical boy’s brain (“girls: lobe not yet activated”), how to pick a poodle, George Washington Carver, and the five phases of upset mothers. It’s a quick read and lots of fun.
The same can be said of Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money, in which the Newbery Medal-winning author of Bud, Not Buddy discovers his loopy side: “(Here’s a word of warning: NEVER, EVER, EVER LICK THE CANDLES ON A BIRTHDAY CAKE. Steven’s tongue hurt for three weeks after this little stunt.)” The book’s plot revolves around a quadrillion-dollar bill (a one with 15 zeroes). Nine-year-old Steven gets the bill from the blind man in the neighborhood, Mr. Chickee, with whom Steven spends time on Saturday mornings. Mr. Chickee doesn’t know how big the bill is, of course, and “Steven’s experience with really big, gigantic, humongous numbers actually went only to 635,541,” so what’s to be done about this bill? Is it even real? Enter Agent Fondoo of the government, determined to get the bill back – and enter, on Steven’s side, his best friend, Russell, and Zoopy the giant dog. Predictable mayhem – and some that is not so predictable – ensues. Everything is frothy and amusing.
Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family is not as silly; but it is, in its own way, equally enjoyable. This is a book with “heart” written all over it – a family story. Watch that word “family,” though: coauthor Steven R. Schirripa plays Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri on “The Sopranos.” And this book is all about an Italian family – but not that kind of family. Schirripa and Charles Fleming, a novelist and entertainment reporter, tell the story of Nicholas Borelli II, who lives with his family in suburban New Jersey (okay, where else?). But the important part of this book is connected not with the Garden State but with Brooklyn, New York, where Nicholas ends up having to stay with family because of a septic-tank explosion at his summer camp. In Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, Nicholas finds out about and connects with his Italian roots, learning the culture, filling up on the food, and picking up the nickname that is the book’s title. The authors try a little too hard to force warmth into Nicky’s story – everyone is so gosh-darned well meaning all the time! – but the characters are entertaining (if one-dimensional), and the idea of learning about and enjoying one’s past really does have resonance in a country that remains, after all, a nation of immigrants.
(++++) FOUR FOR FOUR HORNS
Schumann: Konzertstück for Four Horns; Handel: Concerto in F Major; Telemann: Overture in F Major; Haydn: Symphony No. 31, “Horn Signal.” American Horn Quartet (Geoffrey Winter, Kerry Turner, David Johnson, Charles Putnam). Dariusz Wišniewski conducting Sinfonia Varsovia. Naxos. $7.99.
There is something slightly overwhelming about the notion of four horns playing together. It is fair to wonder how far beyond hunting calls it is possible to take the horn quartet. This CD gives the answer: very far indeed. Schumann, Handel, Telemann and Haydn were well aware of the design of the horn as a signaling instrument appropriate to the outdoors. Schumann and Haydn, in particular, incorporated this element of horn playing into the pieces recorded here. But all four composers took the horn quartet beyond the obvious doubling (or quadrupling) of parts and into unusual tonal realms.
Schumann took things farthest – but then, he had the most adaptable instruments available. The Konzertstück for Four Horns was written for valve horns, not the earlier and more limited natural horn. The American Horn Quartet – which is equally at home with pieces written for both forms of the instrument – plays Schumann’s work for all it is worth, with brisk tempi and plenty of chances for the horns’ different melodic lines to be heard overlapping or in contrast.
Handel’s work is the most modest here, lasting just a bit more than six minutes, but it has charm aplenty. The music of the first, slow section is very close to that of the overture to the Royal Fireworks Music, written slightly later than this concerto. Handel was an inveterate self-borrower and may have taken the theme, which has a strong outdoorsy feel to it, from this work. The second part of this one-movement work is faster, and is attractively ornamented by the players in the virtuosic style typical of Handel’s time.
Telemann’s Overture in F – one of the many suites of disconnected pieces at whose construction he was such an expert – is a fascinating and unusual work. After the opening, itself called Overture, there are eight movements, each with a title in German referring to everyday life in the area around Hamburg’s Alster Lake. “Das Alster-Echo,” for instance, has the expected echo effects; “Die Hamburgischen Glockenspiele” has a tick-tock rhythm that looks ahead to Haydn’s Symphony No. 101, “Clock”; “Der Schwanengesang” is quiet and plaintive, befitting the song of the swan; and “Der Konzertiereden Frösche und Krähen” is highly chromatic, appropriately for a dialogue between frogs and crows. This Overture has many charms, though it does not specifically highlight the four horns – they are merely part of its alfresco orientation. To the credit of the American Horn Quartet – and of conductor Dariusz Wišniewski – the horns never overwhelm the rest of the instruments, simply taking their places as Telemann intended.
Horns are not the centerpiece of Haydn’s Symphony No. 31 in D, either, despite the title “Horn Signal.” This is one of two symphonies Haydn wrote for four horns in the early to middle 1760s, the other being the greatly misnumbered No. 72. The opening movement and very end of No. 31 are indeed filled with horn virtuosity. But Haydn, here as elsewhere, highlighted instrumental virtuosity throughout the orchestra, not merely in one part of it. Thus, the finale – a set of variations that is almost as long as the other three movements put together – gives as much prominence to strings and flutes in some sections as to horns in others. Unfortunately, the performance of the symphony is the weakest on the CD, not because of the instrumentalists – Sinfonia Varsovia is a highly talented ensemble – but because Wišniewski does not seem to have any particular overview of the music. The notes are well played, but the conductor does nothing to shape the work, which as a result sounds meandering. Despite this flaw, this Naxos CD is an attractive one, offering an unusual chance to hear an uncommon combination of instruments, uncommonly well played.
There is something slightly overwhelming about the notion of four horns playing together. It is fair to wonder how far beyond hunting calls it is possible to take the horn quartet. This CD gives the answer: very far indeed. Schumann, Handel, Telemann and Haydn were well aware of the design of the horn as a signaling instrument appropriate to the outdoors. Schumann and Haydn, in particular, incorporated this element of horn playing into the pieces recorded here. But all four composers took the horn quartet beyond the obvious doubling (or quadrupling) of parts and into unusual tonal realms.
Schumann took things farthest – but then, he had the most adaptable instruments available. The Konzertstück for Four Horns was written for valve horns, not the earlier and more limited natural horn. The American Horn Quartet – which is equally at home with pieces written for both forms of the instrument – plays Schumann’s work for all it is worth, with brisk tempi and plenty of chances for the horns’ different melodic lines to be heard overlapping or in contrast.
Handel’s work is the most modest here, lasting just a bit more than six minutes, but it has charm aplenty. The music of the first, slow section is very close to that of the overture to the Royal Fireworks Music, written slightly later than this concerto. Handel was an inveterate self-borrower and may have taken the theme, which has a strong outdoorsy feel to it, from this work. The second part of this one-movement work is faster, and is attractively ornamented by the players in the virtuosic style typical of Handel’s time.
Telemann’s Overture in F – one of the many suites of disconnected pieces at whose construction he was such an expert – is a fascinating and unusual work. After the opening, itself called Overture, there are eight movements, each with a title in German referring to everyday life in the area around Hamburg’s Alster Lake. “Das Alster-Echo,” for instance, has the expected echo effects; “Die Hamburgischen Glockenspiele” has a tick-tock rhythm that looks ahead to Haydn’s Symphony No. 101, “Clock”; “Der Schwanengesang” is quiet and plaintive, befitting the song of the swan; and “Der Konzertiereden Frösche und Krähen” is highly chromatic, appropriately for a dialogue between frogs and crows. This Overture has many charms, though it does not specifically highlight the four horns – they are merely part of its alfresco orientation. To the credit of the American Horn Quartet – and of conductor Dariusz Wišniewski – the horns never overwhelm the rest of the instruments, simply taking their places as Telemann intended.
Horns are not the centerpiece of Haydn’s Symphony No. 31 in D, either, despite the title “Horn Signal.” This is one of two symphonies Haydn wrote for four horns in the early to middle 1760s, the other being the greatly misnumbered No. 72. The opening movement and very end of No. 31 are indeed filled with horn virtuosity. But Haydn, here as elsewhere, highlighted instrumental virtuosity throughout the orchestra, not merely in one part of it. Thus, the finale – a set of variations that is almost as long as the other three movements put together – gives as much prominence to strings and flutes in some sections as to horns in others. Unfortunately, the performance of the symphony is the weakest on the CD, not because of the instrumentalists – Sinfonia Varsovia is a highly talented ensemble – but because Wišniewski does not seem to have any particular overview of the music. The notes are well played, but the conductor does nothing to shape the work, which as a result sounds meandering. Despite this flaw, this Naxos CD is an attractive one, offering an unusual chance to hear an uncommon combination of instruments, uncommonly well played.
December 29, 2005
(+++++) A CALENDAR FOR ALL AGES
Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo: A 15-Month Centennial Calendar. By Peter Maresca. Sunday Press Books. $22.95 from www.sundaypress.com.
It does not matter how many wall calendars you have for 2006. You need another one. If you have none and want one, this is the one to get. If you don’t care for wall calendars, this one will change your mind. There is simply nothing like it anywhere – and hasn’t been, really, for a century.
Talk about a labor of love (and very, very, very long hours): Peter Maresca has resuscitated the most beautifully drawn comic strip of all time, Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, and turned 15 of McKay’s magnificent Sunday panels into calendar pages. At 14 by 20 inches, the calendar is actually smaller than McKay’s work was when originally printed in The New York Herald on cheap newsprint (the horror!). You can see McKay’s work in full size in Maresca’s superb book of Sunday pages – but at $120 plus postage, it is pricey if you are not a devotee of comic art (though it’s priceless if you are). As an alternative to the book, or a supplement, this calendar is a wonderful way to immerse yourself in an experience largely unavailable for a century.
There is nothing at all fusty about McKay’s adventures of five-to-six-year-old Nemo, an ordinary little boy who has extraordinary adventures every time he goes to bed. Yes, some of the narration sounds a bit dated – but it flows from drawing to drawing in very modern style. Yes, the characters’ clothes are old-fashioned – but the surrealistic landscapes, people and creatures of Slumberland are timeless. This strip has never lacked for a cult following – now Maresca’s calendar opens it up to everyone.
And what an opening! Even calling McKay’s work a “comic strip” cheapens it – it was artwork, offered every Sunday to anyone with the price of a newspaper. Maresca has done a wonderful job of selecting Sunday pages for the calendar. The January page features Nemo meeting Father Time, who takes him to the wall where years are made and invites Nemo to choose a year and see what he will look and feel like then. Thus, Nemo instantly becomes 15, then 25, then 48 – and then, when left alone, over-curiously heads for the year 1999….
The marvelous March page, filled with forced perspective and McKay’s usual extraordinary detail, features a magnificent peacock-pulled cart beneath a smiling and astonished sun. For May, Nemo turns into a five-year-old giant (in one panel, a tiny, realistically drawn bear looks up at him from ankle height) and confronts the mountainous Guards of the Fourth Gate. September features an utterly amazing set of five huge vertical panels showing the approach toward the reader of a gigantic elephant, whose trunk and open mouth nearly fill the fifth of them. Every single page is a garden of delights – worthy of keeping year after year, no matter what the date. It was McKay’s conceit that each page ended with Nemo waking up, safe at home but often frustrated, in a manner related to his Slumberland adventures. But you won’t want to awaken from the world into which McKay takes you. This is less a calendar than a work of art in 15 pages. If you want a really happy new year, treat yourself to this unmatchable experience. And buy a second calendar if you care deeply enough for someone to share dreams with him or her.
It does not matter how many wall calendars you have for 2006. You need another one. If you have none and want one, this is the one to get. If you don’t care for wall calendars, this one will change your mind. There is simply nothing like it anywhere – and hasn’t been, really, for a century.
Talk about a labor of love (and very, very, very long hours): Peter Maresca has resuscitated the most beautifully drawn comic strip of all time, Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, and turned 15 of McKay’s magnificent Sunday panels into calendar pages. At 14 by 20 inches, the calendar is actually smaller than McKay’s work was when originally printed in The New York Herald on cheap newsprint (the horror!). You can see McKay’s work in full size in Maresca’s superb book of Sunday pages – but at $120 plus postage, it is pricey if you are not a devotee of comic art (though it’s priceless if you are). As an alternative to the book, or a supplement, this calendar is a wonderful way to immerse yourself in an experience largely unavailable for a century.
There is nothing at all fusty about McKay’s adventures of five-to-six-year-old Nemo, an ordinary little boy who has extraordinary adventures every time he goes to bed. Yes, some of the narration sounds a bit dated – but it flows from drawing to drawing in very modern style. Yes, the characters’ clothes are old-fashioned – but the surrealistic landscapes, people and creatures of Slumberland are timeless. This strip has never lacked for a cult following – now Maresca’s calendar opens it up to everyone.
And what an opening! Even calling McKay’s work a “comic strip” cheapens it – it was artwork, offered every Sunday to anyone with the price of a newspaper. Maresca has done a wonderful job of selecting Sunday pages for the calendar. The January page features Nemo meeting Father Time, who takes him to the wall where years are made and invites Nemo to choose a year and see what he will look and feel like then. Thus, Nemo instantly becomes 15, then 25, then 48 – and then, when left alone, over-curiously heads for the year 1999….
The marvelous March page, filled with forced perspective and McKay’s usual extraordinary detail, features a magnificent peacock-pulled cart beneath a smiling and astonished sun. For May, Nemo turns into a five-year-old giant (in one panel, a tiny, realistically drawn bear looks up at him from ankle height) and confronts the mountainous Guards of the Fourth Gate. September features an utterly amazing set of five huge vertical panels showing the approach toward the reader of a gigantic elephant, whose trunk and open mouth nearly fill the fifth of them. Every single page is a garden of delights – worthy of keeping year after year, no matter what the date. It was McKay’s conceit that each page ended with Nemo waking up, safe at home but often frustrated, in a manner related to his Slumberland adventures. But you won’t want to awaken from the world into which McKay takes you. This is less a calendar than a work of art in 15 pages. If you want a really happy new year, treat yourself to this unmatchable experience. And buy a second calendar if you care deeply enough for someone to share dreams with him or her.
(+++) THE IDES OF DOOM, OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT
Babylon Babies. By Maurice G. Dantec. Translated by Noura Wedell. Semiotext(e) Native Agents/MIT Press. $19.95.
Cross Tom Clancy with Robert Heinlein, throw in some Michael Crichton and a touch of William S. Burroughs, add cyberpunk sensibilities and a set of characters of whom the most interesting is a machine, and you have something of a hodgepodge. Which is what Babylon Babies is.
Maurice Dantec’s book was originally written in French, and it appears to suffer in Noura Wedell’s translation, which includes such words as “heteroclite,” “volute” and “millefeuille” (yes, used as a translated word), and has trouble with tenses: “Speeded” is used as the past tense of “speed,” and “fit” rather than the correct “fitted” to mean “attached.”
Still, it would be unfair to lay all the inelegance and stylistic uncertainty at the translator’s door. After all, it is Dantec who writes in one paragraph of “clouds shaped like zeppelins” and then, two paragraphs later, of “clouds…like menacing zeppelins.” It is Dantec who writes, apparently without humor or irony, the following one-sentence paragraph: “It wasn’t easy being a closet.” It is Dantec who has his central character, in another one-sentence paragraph, think, “Brilliant plan, in fact” – and, on the very next page, in yet another one-sentencer, “It was a perfect plan,” which means every reader knows that the plan is going to go tremendously wrong.
Yet Dantec has genuinely interesting ideas, if he could only control them a bit and not sprawl quite so much: the book runs 526 pages. The central character is a sort of Everyman named Toorop, if an Everyman is a for-hire fighter in small and large wars worldwide, with expertise in all forms of weaponry and survival. Toorop’s latest job is to lead a three-person team escorting a young woman from Russia to Canada, and then to deliver this human package, Marie Zorn, to a specified recipient. The whole thing involves the Russian Mafia and a set of real or incipient double- and triple-crosses, and Marie turns out to be both psychotic and enormously valuable – not because of who she is, but because of what she is carrying within her body…which is something that could end human life as we know it.
Babylon Babies is part thriller, part Messianic fantasy, part an updated Dr. Strangelove (a lot of the bad guys seem to be near-cyborgs). Its characters are types rather than people, except for the fascinating machine called Joe-Jane, “a bionic brain, a network of artificial neurons, grown on DNA biofiber and plugged into input-output electronic devices that served as organs of perception. She is alive, or at least considers herself as such, which is, apparently, the distinguishing trait of living beings.” Joe-Jane steals every scene in which she appears – too bad there are not more of them.
The plot veers between adventure story and future dystopian fantasy. Early on, Dantec writes, “Toorop told himself things were going from outlandish to sci-fi,” and the reader would do well to tell himself or herself the same thing. Babylon Babies, for all its stylistic and structural flaws, is jam-packed with ideas, some of them fascinating and some truly outré. Because scenes of genuine excitement alternate with ones of banality, it can be a frustrating book to read. But it is also a fascinating one, and some elements will leave you thinking after you finally turn the last page.
Cross Tom Clancy with Robert Heinlein, throw in some Michael Crichton and a touch of William S. Burroughs, add cyberpunk sensibilities and a set of characters of whom the most interesting is a machine, and you have something of a hodgepodge. Which is what Babylon Babies is.
Maurice Dantec’s book was originally written in French, and it appears to suffer in Noura Wedell’s translation, which includes such words as “heteroclite,” “volute” and “millefeuille” (yes, used as a translated word), and has trouble with tenses: “Speeded” is used as the past tense of “speed,” and “fit” rather than the correct “fitted” to mean “attached.”
Still, it would be unfair to lay all the inelegance and stylistic uncertainty at the translator’s door. After all, it is Dantec who writes in one paragraph of “clouds shaped like zeppelins” and then, two paragraphs later, of “clouds…like menacing zeppelins.” It is Dantec who writes, apparently without humor or irony, the following one-sentence paragraph: “It wasn’t easy being a closet.” It is Dantec who has his central character, in another one-sentence paragraph, think, “Brilliant plan, in fact” – and, on the very next page, in yet another one-sentencer, “It was a perfect plan,” which means every reader knows that the plan is going to go tremendously wrong.
Yet Dantec has genuinely interesting ideas, if he could only control them a bit and not sprawl quite so much: the book runs 526 pages. The central character is a sort of Everyman named Toorop, if an Everyman is a for-hire fighter in small and large wars worldwide, with expertise in all forms of weaponry and survival. Toorop’s latest job is to lead a three-person team escorting a young woman from Russia to Canada, and then to deliver this human package, Marie Zorn, to a specified recipient. The whole thing involves the Russian Mafia and a set of real or incipient double- and triple-crosses, and Marie turns out to be both psychotic and enormously valuable – not because of who she is, but because of what she is carrying within her body…which is something that could end human life as we know it.
Babylon Babies is part thriller, part Messianic fantasy, part an updated Dr. Strangelove (a lot of the bad guys seem to be near-cyborgs). Its characters are types rather than people, except for the fascinating machine called Joe-Jane, “a bionic brain, a network of artificial neurons, grown on DNA biofiber and plugged into input-output electronic devices that served as organs of perception. She is alive, or at least considers herself as such, which is, apparently, the distinguishing trait of living beings.” Joe-Jane steals every scene in which she appears – too bad there are not more of them.
The plot veers between adventure story and future dystopian fantasy. Early on, Dantec writes, “Toorop told himself things were going from outlandish to sci-fi,” and the reader would do well to tell himself or herself the same thing. Babylon Babies, for all its stylistic and structural flaws, is jam-packed with ideas, some of them fascinating and some truly outré. Because scenes of genuine excitement alternate with ones of banality, it can be a frustrating book to read. But it is also a fascinating one, and some elements will leave you thinking after you finally turn the last page.
(+++) IN INCONCLUSION
The Dark Flight Down. By Marius Sedgwick. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.95.
Falcondance. By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. Delacorte Press. $14.95.
A reader expects something rip-roaring at the end of a multi-book fantasy series. A middle volume may flag a bit – most do – but the conclusion needs to pull everything together, reward the good, punish the evil, and leave the reader feeling that the long journey was worth the trip.
These two books’ conclusions may do that for some readers, but probably not all. The Dark Flight Down is actually the second half of a story rather than the more usual third part of a trilogy. In his prior novel, The Book of Dead Days, Marius Sedgwick was able to weave an interesting journey around a fairly standard sorcerer’s-apprentice plot. The magician Valerian – who, it turned out, might have been the apprentice Boy’s father – was undone at the end of the first book, but the future of Boy himself was uncertain. This sequel starts with Boy on the run – but he is soon captured and taken to the emperor’s palace, where he encounters a world of far greater splendor than he has ever known…and one whose dark undercurrents and treachery are all too familiar to him. Boy and his friend, Willow, have to deal with scheming courtiers, depraved necromancers, and a frightening entity called the Phantom. But Boy’s greatest danger may come in the form of the apparently well-meaning Kepler, who has cast Boy’s horoscope and learned a secret of great importance. All these familiar currents are eventually sorted out in a familiar way, leading to a predictable climax that may have readers wondering whether the trip was worthwhile after all.
The journey in Falcondance is a longer one, since this is the third book of a trilogy – three-book series being the norm in fantasy at least since J.R.R. Tolkien (who, unknown to most modern fantasists, actually wrote The Lord of the Rings as a single, extremely long novel). The first two books of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ The Kiesha’Ra series, Hawksong and Snakecharm, established a fascinating world of interrelated shapeshifters, each group having its own customs, strengths, weaknesses and worries. The settings were generally more interesting than the plots and characters: the latter settled into Romeo-and-Juliet mode with the love between an avian and a serpiente. The most powerful of the shapeshifters, the falcons, are feared and hated by the other groups (in our world, of course, falcons prey both on other birds and on snakes). Falcondance focuses on a young falcon named Nicias, who lives in the unified avian-serpiente land as a royal guard and endures the distrust and dislike of others at court. Nicias ends up returning to the falcons’ land of Ahnmik, where he confronts a choice between duty and destiny – the sort of thing fantasy protagonists run into all the time. Falcondance could possibly spawn further sequels, but the book comes to a satisfactory if not very original end, and Atwater-Rhodes – a talented young writer who created her first novel at age 13 – may do better to turn her hand to deeper characters and more innovative plots…if she can.
Falcondance. By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. Delacorte Press. $14.95.
A reader expects something rip-roaring at the end of a multi-book fantasy series. A middle volume may flag a bit – most do – but the conclusion needs to pull everything together, reward the good, punish the evil, and leave the reader feeling that the long journey was worth the trip.
These two books’ conclusions may do that for some readers, but probably not all. The Dark Flight Down is actually the second half of a story rather than the more usual third part of a trilogy. In his prior novel, The Book of Dead Days, Marius Sedgwick was able to weave an interesting journey around a fairly standard sorcerer’s-apprentice plot. The magician Valerian – who, it turned out, might have been the apprentice Boy’s father – was undone at the end of the first book, but the future of Boy himself was uncertain. This sequel starts with Boy on the run – but he is soon captured and taken to the emperor’s palace, where he encounters a world of far greater splendor than he has ever known…and one whose dark undercurrents and treachery are all too familiar to him. Boy and his friend, Willow, have to deal with scheming courtiers, depraved necromancers, and a frightening entity called the Phantom. But Boy’s greatest danger may come in the form of the apparently well-meaning Kepler, who has cast Boy’s horoscope and learned a secret of great importance. All these familiar currents are eventually sorted out in a familiar way, leading to a predictable climax that may have readers wondering whether the trip was worthwhile after all.
The journey in Falcondance is a longer one, since this is the third book of a trilogy – three-book series being the norm in fantasy at least since J.R.R. Tolkien (who, unknown to most modern fantasists, actually wrote The Lord of the Rings as a single, extremely long novel). The first two books of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ The Kiesha’Ra series, Hawksong and Snakecharm, established a fascinating world of interrelated shapeshifters, each group having its own customs, strengths, weaknesses and worries. The settings were generally more interesting than the plots and characters: the latter settled into Romeo-and-Juliet mode with the love between an avian and a serpiente. The most powerful of the shapeshifters, the falcons, are feared and hated by the other groups (in our world, of course, falcons prey both on other birds and on snakes). Falcondance focuses on a young falcon named Nicias, who lives in the unified avian-serpiente land as a royal guard and endures the distrust and dislike of others at court. Nicias ends up returning to the falcons’ land of Ahnmik, where he confronts a choice between duty and destiny – the sort of thing fantasy protagonists run into all the time. Falcondance could possibly spawn further sequels, but the book comes to a satisfactory if not very original end, and Atwater-Rhodes – a talented young writer who created her first novel at age 13 – may do better to turn her hand to deeper characters and more innovative plots…if she can.
(+++) TALE OF TWO SCIENCE-FICTIONAL CITIES
The Begum’s Millions. By Jules Verne. Translated by Stanford L. Luce. Wesleyan University Press. $29.95.
The Begum’s Millions – a more accurate translation of the French title would be “The Begum’s 500 Millions” – is one of the less-known novels of Jules Verne and is not one of his best. It is nevertheless a fascinating work, especially for scholars of Verne and of early science fiction, but also for readers who are familiar with such Verne classics as Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days and are looking for something different that still bears Verne’s unmistakable stamp.
First published in 1879, The Begum’s Millions is the first novel in which Verne’s generally optimistic view of technology starts to darken. It is also the first in which his later thorough distrust of the Teutonic temperament begins to come to the fore. It is the story of the unexpected bequest of 500 million francs to two scientists by an Indian rajah (the “begum” of the title) – and what the two do with the money. The French scientist, François Sarrasin, creates a city called France-Ville that is focused entirely on the health and safety of its inhabitants. The German, Herr Schultze, builds Stahlstadt, the City of Steel, in which he manufactures weapons with which to take over the world.
This may sound prescient to our post-World War II world (or even a post-World War I one), but it is more likely the result of simmering French resentment over the nation’s defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The book is ably translated by Stanford L. Luce (this is the first complete and correct English translation, though two others appeared the year the novel was first published). The free-flowing prose makes it clear that Verne is mostly interested in the negative uses to which technology can be put – not in making specific political points. Verne lavishes more attention on Stahlstadt and its evils than on France-Ville, showing the underhanded and overbearing ways Herr Schultze competes with his well-intentioned French counterpart. Eventually, in the sort of event that would later become typical of movie climaxes, Herr Schultze is spectacularly undone by the untimely explosion of one of his weapons of mass destruction – though this climax also has its laughable moments, as the evil scientist is expanded to giant size instead of being blown to tiny pieces.
The biggest problem with The Begum’s Millions is that Verne does not present an attractive alternative to Stahlstadt. At the end, Sarrasin and France-Ville take over Stahlstadt and turn its productive capacity to good ends, but France-Ville itself is not the sort of city in which modern readers would likely want to live. It looks like a huge housing project, with detailed rules for building its rigidly uniform houses, which are constantly under observation by sanitation police. The city is a place of rules and strictures, all designed to ensure citizens’ health (to be sure, a greater worry in the 19th century than in the developed world today). France-Ville comes across as nitpicky, communistic and unpleasant (“idle lives will not be tolerated,” notes one part of one rule). In the absence of a real-seeming (or at least interesting-seeming) utopia, the Stahlstadt dystopia becomes more of a rant and less of a genuinely interesting exploration of technology gone awry. Verne’s pacing is, as always, swift and sure, but The Begum’s Millions is a book of more interest to specialists or those seeking something different for its own sake than for the general reader or typical Verne fan.
The Begum’s Millions – a more accurate translation of the French title would be “The Begum’s 500 Millions” – is one of the less-known novels of Jules Verne and is not one of his best. It is nevertheless a fascinating work, especially for scholars of Verne and of early science fiction, but also for readers who are familiar with such Verne classics as Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days and are looking for something different that still bears Verne’s unmistakable stamp.
First published in 1879, The Begum’s Millions is the first novel in which Verne’s generally optimistic view of technology starts to darken. It is also the first in which his later thorough distrust of the Teutonic temperament begins to come to the fore. It is the story of the unexpected bequest of 500 million francs to two scientists by an Indian rajah (the “begum” of the title) – and what the two do with the money. The French scientist, François Sarrasin, creates a city called France-Ville that is focused entirely on the health and safety of its inhabitants. The German, Herr Schultze, builds Stahlstadt, the City of Steel, in which he manufactures weapons with which to take over the world.
This may sound prescient to our post-World War II world (or even a post-World War I one), but it is more likely the result of simmering French resentment over the nation’s defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The book is ably translated by Stanford L. Luce (this is the first complete and correct English translation, though two others appeared the year the novel was first published). The free-flowing prose makes it clear that Verne is mostly interested in the negative uses to which technology can be put – not in making specific political points. Verne lavishes more attention on Stahlstadt and its evils than on France-Ville, showing the underhanded and overbearing ways Herr Schultze competes with his well-intentioned French counterpart. Eventually, in the sort of event that would later become typical of movie climaxes, Herr Schultze is spectacularly undone by the untimely explosion of one of his weapons of mass destruction – though this climax also has its laughable moments, as the evil scientist is expanded to giant size instead of being blown to tiny pieces.
The biggest problem with The Begum’s Millions is that Verne does not present an attractive alternative to Stahlstadt. At the end, Sarrasin and France-Ville take over Stahlstadt and turn its productive capacity to good ends, but France-Ville itself is not the sort of city in which modern readers would likely want to live. It looks like a huge housing project, with detailed rules for building its rigidly uniform houses, which are constantly under observation by sanitation police. The city is a place of rules and strictures, all designed to ensure citizens’ health (to be sure, a greater worry in the 19th century than in the developed world today). France-Ville comes across as nitpicky, communistic and unpleasant (“idle lives will not be tolerated,” notes one part of one rule). In the absence of a real-seeming (or at least interesting-seeming) utopia, the Stahlstadt dystopia becomes more of a rant and less of a genuinely interesting exploration of technology gone awry. Verne’s pacing is, as always, swift and sure, but The Begum’s Millions is a book of more interest to specialists or those seeking something different for its own sake than for the general reader or typical Verne fan.
(++++) TOP-OF-THE-LINE COMPUTER PROTECTION
Norton SystemWorks 2006 Premier. Windows 2000 Professional SP4 or higher, or Windows XP. Symantec. $99.99 ($20 rebate available for current customers or users of competing products).
As a company, Symantec Corporation was buffeted from many directions during 2005: some of its own products came slowly to market, Microsoft got into some of the same business areas that Symantec has long dominated, malware creators started to target protective products by Symantec and others, and some free software available online improved to the point that it became a real challenge to Symantec’s paid products.
It is good to know that these currents and cross-currents do not show at all in Norton SystemWorks 2006 Premier, Symantec’s latest version of its top-notch computer-protection suite. The 2006 version of SystemWorks continues the commendable trend of recent years by packing more value into the software while making it far simpler for consumers to use. The old days, when Norton-branded software was excellent but too geeky to be useful for most people, are long gone.
The best thing in the new version of this software is Norton Protection Center, a single place for users to go to get a clear and relatively straightforward summary of everything they need to know about protecting their systems – based on their own computing habits. The Protection Center aggregates information from Norton AntiVirus, the most basic computer protection of all; Norton GoBack, which lets users return to an earlier, safe configuration if a computer is ever compromised; Norton Cleanup, an easy way to get rid of the clutter that comes from Web surfing and other everyday tasks and that eventually clogs a computer and slows it down; Norton Utilities, the heart of the suite, the redoubtable program for solving all sorts of operational problems and fine-tuning a computer for better ongoing performance; and more.
The Premier version of Norton SystemWorks 2006 costs $30 more than the standard version because it includes the excellent and efficient, but previously somewhat under-utilized, Norton Ghost 10.0. Long sold as a standalone product for businesses needing an automated backup feature, Norton Ghost integrates remarkably well with SystemWorks 2006 Premier, which even includes a Symantec Recovery Disk feature to rescue unbootable PCs – the ultimate horror for a computer user. The operation of this new Ghost is particularly impressive: it automatically creates an initial backup schedule based on current configuration, makes backups either on its own or on command, displays scheduled backups conveniently, and works well with Maxtor external drives equipped with OneTouch backup-starting buttons. It is a significant enhancement of SystemWorks and well worth the extra cost.
Not everything in this generally excellent new suite will please all users, though. Norton GoBack is installed by default and takes a big chunk of memory. Users satisfied with existing backup systems may not want Norton Ghost (in which case they should opt for the standard rather than premier suite). Although some enhancements are quite useful (Norton Cleanup is now compatible with multiple browsers and can automatically import and preserve favorites and trusted Web sites), other elements are unhelpful or confusing (Process Viewer and System Optimizer are not for the faint of heart). And a full installation of the Premier suite requires 250 megabytes – not a small amount of space even on today’s large hard drives. Symantec’s policy of providing only one year of updates continues to be an annoyance, too, especially when excellent free products for many functions are readily available (AVG Anti-Virus, Ad-Aware SE, Spybot – Search & Destroy, etc.).
Nevertheless, it has to be said that there is an elegance to Symantec’s suite that its competitors, paid and free, lack. The parts of Norton SystemWorks 2006 work seamlessly together, the interface is well-designed and more comfortable than ever for near-novices to use, and the number of functions monitored, boosted, assisted and fine-tuned by this suite is unmatched by anything else on the market. The result is a product that keeps Symantec Corporation in the forefront of computer protection, fine-tuning and performance improvement – an excellent investment for the year to come and beyond.
As a company, Symantec Corporation was buffeted from many directions during 2005: some of its own products came slowly to market, Microsoft got into some of the same business areas that Symantec has long dominated, malware creators started to target protective products by Symantec and others, and some free software available online improved to the point that it became a real challenge to Symantec’s paid products.
It is good to know that these currents and cross-currents do not show at all in Norton SystemWorks 2006 Premier, Symantec’s latest version of its top-notch computer-protection suite. The 2006 version of SystemWorks continues the commendable trend of recent years by packing more value into the software while making it far simpler for consumers to use. The old days, when Norton-branded software was excellent but too geeky to be useful for most people, are long gone.
The best thing in the new version of this software is Norton Protection Center, a single place for users to go to get a clear and relatively straightforward summary of everything they need to know about protecting their systems – based on their own computing habits. The Protection Center aggregates information from Norton AntiVirus, the most basic computer protection of all; Norton GoBack, which lets users return to an earlier, safe configuration if a computer is ever compromised; Norton Cleanup, an easy way to get rid of the clutter that comes from Web surfing and other everyday tasks and that eventually clogs a computer and slows it down; Norton Utilities, the heart of the suite, the redoubtable program for solving all sorts of operational problems and fine-tuning a computer for better ongoing performance; and more.
The Premier version of Norton SystemWorks 2006 costs $30 more than the standard version because it includes the excellent and efficient, but previously somewhat under-utilized, Norton Ghost 10.0. Long sold as a standalone product for businesses needing an automated backup feature, Norton Ghost integrates remarkably well with SystemWorks 2006 Premier, which even includes a Symantec Recovery Disk feature to rescue unbootable PCs – the ultimate horror for a computer user. The operation of this new Ghost is particularly impressive: it automatically creates an initial backup schedule based on current configuration, makes backups either on its own or on command, displays scheduled backups conveniently, and works well with Maxtor external drives equipped with OneTouch backup-starting buttons. It is a significant enhancement of SystemWorks and well worth the extra cost.
Not everything in this generally excellent new suite will please all users, though. Norton GoBack is installed by default and takes a big chunk of memory. Users satisfied with existing backup systems may not want Norton Ghost (in which case they should opt for the standard rather than premier suite). Although some enhancements are quite useful (Norton Cleanup is now compatible with multiple browsers and can automatically import and preserve favorites and trusted Web sites), other elements are unhelpful or confusing (Process Viewer and System Optimizer are not for the faint of heart). And a full installation of the Premier suite requires 250 megabytes – not a small amount of space even on today’s large hard drives. Symantec’s policy of providing only one year of updates continues to be an annoyance, too, especially when excellent free products for many functions are readily available (AVG Anti-Virus, Ad-Aware SE, Spybot – Search & Destroy, etc.).
Nevertheless, it has to be said that there is an elegance to Symantec’s suite that its competitors, paid and free, lack. The parts of Norton SystemWorks 2006 work seamlessly together, the interface is well-designed and more comfortable than ever for near-novices to use, and the number of functions monitored, boosted, assisted and fine-tuned by this suite is unmatched by anything else on the market. The result is a product that keeps Symantec Corporation in the forefront of computer protection, fine-tuning and performance improvement – an excellent investment for the year to come and beyond.
December 22, 2005
(+++) WINNING THE BOSS BATTLE
A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses. By Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D. AMACOM. $15.
‘Tis the season to be jolly, but not if you work for one of the pointy-haired idiots (to borrow a Dilbert description) discussed in these pages. Unfortunately, Gini Graham Scott’s book is about workplace reality, not the almost-reality (or surreality) of Scott Adams’ super-popular comic strip.
This is a depressing tome in which columnist Scott, who has written more than 40 books, accurately portrays some of the worst boss types around through a series of to-the-point, based-on-reality anecdotes. Unfortunately, the book does not quite live up to its subtitle: “Dealing with Bullies, Idiots, Back-Stabbers, and Other Managers from Hell.” The reason is that Scott’s prescriptions are less helpful than her descriptions. Her recommendations tend to involve becoming devious, creating a lot more work for yourself to track what a bad boss does, or finding a new job. These may in fact be the best things you can do in the particular situations Scott presents, but if that is true, the modern workplace remains as drab and dull as any long-ago assembly line. Not a pleasant thought.
For example, Scott tells the story of Janice, an assistant to a demanding film director. The director insisted on having child actors work beyond allowed hours, despite the protests of a child-welfare guardian on the set, and then decided to have the children do a physically dangerous scene in those non-allowed hours. By coincidence, the director was injured during the filming and the scene was not shot, but that did not solve Janice’s bigger problem. Scott lays out her options, as she does for everyone whose story she offers: say nothing and hope for the best, discuss the problems with others or the director, etc. But Scott concludes that “this situation is one of those cases where you can do little” and suggests that people who do not fit well in an organization should “find someplace where you will find a better fit” – not an easy or pleasant task.
Other examples involve the perfectionist/micromanaging boss (“be ready to stand up for yourself”), the boss who combines praise with putdowns (“don’t take the putdown personally”), the boss who pits coworkers against each other (“come up with some plays to end the game”), and many more. There are 37 chapters here, almost all of them dealing with specific types of bad bosses, and one has to admire Scott for the amount of research she has done on distinguishing characteristics of boss trouble – while bemoaning the many variations of the species. Scott’s greatest service is helping readers see the signs of particular types of mismanagement in their own bosses – and letting them know they are not alone; others face a similarly miserable environment. Scott’s specific suggestions, though, are sometimes too glib and sometimes too difficult and time-consuming to implement while also doing one’s job and hopefully having a life outside work. Since it is not always practical to find a new job (and possibly a new bad boss), Scott’s ideas are at least worth attempting, but the cures seem unequal to the severity of the disease.
‘Tis the season to be jolly, but not if you work for one of the pointy-haired idiots (to borrow a Dilbert description) discussed in these pages. Unfortunately, Gini Graham Scott’s book is about workplace reality, not the almost-reality (or surreality) of Scott Adams’ super-popular comic strip.
This is a depressing tome in which columnist Scott, who has written more than 40 books, accurately portrays some of the worst boss types around through a series of to-the-point, based-on-reality anecdotes. Unfortunately, the book does not quite live up to its subtitle: “Dealing with Bullies, Idiots, Back-Stabbers, and Other Managers from Hell.” The reason is that Scott’s prescriptions are less helpful than her descriptions. Her recommendations tend to involve becoming devious, creating a lot more work for yourself to track what a bad boss does, or finding a new job. These may in fact be the best things you can do in the particular situations Scott presents, but if that is true, the modern workplace remains as drab and dull as any long-ago assembly line. Not a pleasant thought.
For example, Scott tells the story of Janice, an assistant to a demanding film director. The director insisted on having child actors work beyond allowed hours, despite the protests of a child-welfare guardian on the set, and then decided to have the children do a physically dangerous scene in those non-allowed hours. By coincidence, the director was injured during the filming and the scene was not shot, but that did not solve Janice’s bigger problem. Scott lays out her options, as she does for everyone whose story she offers: say nothing and hope for the best, discuss the problems with others or the director, etc. But Scott concludes that “this situation is one of those cases where you can do little” and suggests that people who do not fit well in an organization should “find someplace where you will find a better fit” – not an easy or pleasant task.
Other examples involve the perfectionist/micromanaging boss (“be ready to stand up for yourself”), the boss who combines praise with putdowns (“don’t take the putdown personally”), the boss who pits coworkers against each other (“come up with some plays to end the game”), and many more. There are 37 chapters here, almost all of them dealing with specific types of bad bosses, and one has to admire Scott for the amount of research she has done on distinguishing characteristics of boss trouble – while bemoaning the many variations of the species. Scott’s greatest service is helping readers see the signs of particular types of mismanagement in their own bosses – and letting them know they are not alone; others face a similarly miserable environment. Scott’s specific suggestions, though, are sometimes too glib and sometimes too difficult and time-consuming to implement while also doing one’s job and hopefully having a life outside work. Since it is not always practical to find a new job (and possibly a new bad boss), Scott’s ideas are at least worth attempting, but the cures seem unequal to the severity of the disease.
(+++) TEEN TROUBLES OF UNUSUAL TYPES
Girl, Nearly 16, Absolute Torture. By Sue Limb. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
Chloe Leiberman (Sometimes Wong). By Carrie Rosten. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
The slightly over-clever titles of these two teen novels introduce two slightly over-clever books. Both have considerable charm and a kind of off-kilter goofiness; neither has much more profundity than a typical “beach read.”
Girl, Nearly 16, Absolute Torture is a sequel to Sue Limb’s Girl, 15, Charming but Insane – and is a somewhat better book. This time, heroine Jess Jordan doesn’t seem quite as much of a cliché, and a few of the things that happen to her are at least a bit out of the ordinary. Limb’s good sense of pacing and dialogue are intact, making the book easy to read for its intended audience: ages 10 and up. The two intertwined themes here are Jess’s relationships with her boyfriend, Fred, and with her divorced parents. Jess plans a perfect summer with Fred, only to be whisked away by her mother for a two-week trip to visit her father – which, incidentally, leaves Fred available to Jess’s gorgeous best friend, Flora, who in the past expressed an interest in him. The predictable worries and jealousies are nicely offset by some less-predictable events, including Fred’s decision on a trip that he takes and Jess finding out from her father why he and her mother really broke up. The book’s lighthearted tone prevents any of the revelations from hitting too hard, with the result that everything ends happily and in clear anticipation of another Jess book to come.
Chloe Lieberman (Sometimes Wong) could also spawn a sequel: it ends by announcing that “the end is always just the beginning.” Chloe has the feel of a slightly older Jess: she is a high-school senior who is trying to pursue a career in fashion design and therefore has not applied to college (though her parents think she did – how clueless are they??). Intended for slightly older readers than Sue Limb’s book – ages 12 and up – Carrie Rosten’s relies heavily for its effect on Rosten’s writing style and format tricks. The book is arranged as a sort of application for design school, as if every question on such an application were considered at great length and answered in entirely non-academic prose. Chapters begin with a “do” and a “don’t,” as in one called “Sacrifice. DO: Sacrifice for the right cause. DON’T: Sacrifice just because.” Chloe is half Jewish, half Chinese (hence the book’s title, with “wong” also a pun on “wrong”), and lucky enough to have highly supportive friends who help her try to realize her design-school dream. The book is frothy and rather too blasé about major life decisions, but Rosten’s bright writing compensates for the flippancy and makes it easy to root for Chloe – who, you just know, will be fine by the end (and is).
Chloe Leiberman (Sometimes Wong). By Carrie Rosten. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
The slightly over-clever titles of these two teen novels introduce two slightly over-clever books. Both have considerable charm and a kind of off-kilter goofiness; neither has much more profundity than a typical “beach read.”
Girl, Nearly 16, Absolute Torture is a sequel to Sue Limb’s Girl, 15, Charming but Insane – and is a somewhat better book. This time, heroine Jess Jordan doesn’t seem quite as much of a cliché, and a few of the things that happen to her are at least a bit out of the ordinary. Limb’s good sense of pacing and dialogue are intact, making the book easy to read for its intended audience: ages 10 and up. The two intertwined themes here are Jess’s relationships with her boyfriend, Fred, and with her divorced parents. Jess plans a perfect summer with Fred, only to be whisked away by her mother for a two-week trip to visit her father – which, incidentally, leaves Fred available to Jess’s gorgeous best friend, Flora, who in the past expressed an interest in him. The predictable worries and jealousies are nicely offset by some less-predictable events, including Fred’s decision on a trip that he takes and Jess finding out from her father why he and her mother really broke up. The book’s lighthearted tone prevents any of the revelations from hitting too hard, with the result that everything ends happily and in clear anticipation of another Jess book to come.
Chloe Lieberman (Sometimes Wong) could also spawn a sequel: it ends by announcing that “the end is always just the beginning.” Chloe has the feel of a slightly older Jess: she is a high-school senior who is trying to pursue a career in fashion design and therefore has not applied to college (though her parents think she did – how clueless are they??). Intended for slightly older readers than Sue Limb’s book – ages 12 and up – Carrie Rosten’s relies heavily for its effect on Rosten’s writing style and format tricks. The book is arranged as a sort of application for design school, as if every question on such an application were considered at great length and answered in entirely non-academic prose. Chapters begin with a “do” and a “don’t,” as in one called “Sacrifice. DO: Sacrifice for the right cause. DON’T: Sacrifice just because.” Chloe is half Jewish, half Chinese (hence the book’s title, with “wong” also a pun on “wrong”), and lucky enough to have highly supportive friends who help her try to realize her design-school dream. The book is frothy and rather too blasé about major life decisions, but Rosten’s bright writing compensates for the flippancy and makes it easy to root for Chloe – who, you just know, will be fine by the end (and is).
(+++) BOTTOM-LINE DATA DEFENSE
Cryptography in the Database: The Last Line of Defense. By Kevin Kenan. Symantec Press/Addison-Wesley. $44.99.
Encryption can contain the seeds of its own undoing. Sony BMG Music discovered this when it included a hidden file to prevent certain forms of use of songs on several dozen of its CD releases, only to have hackers take advantage of the file’s invisibility and nonremovability to create malware on computers whose owners were unknowingly running the automatically installed code. The major public embarrassment for Sony BMG led to a recall of nearly five million CDs, removal programs being created by Microsoft and (ineffectively) by Sony itself, and (of course) a spate of lawsuits.
Despite cautionary examples such as this one, any database manager knows that protection of information is crucial – and, in many cases, a legal obligation. Kevin Kenan, who leads Symantec Corporation’s information technology application and database security program, protects data for a living. In this book, he shows other database managers how to do it.
Understanding the book’s audience is important. The first of this book’s four parts, “Database Security,” contains a great deal of information that a reasonably well-informed computer user will be able to understand and that will add to his or her knowledge of the environment in which data are created, collected, protected and compromised today. But the three other parts of the book – “A Cryptographic Infrastructure,” “The Cryptographic Project” and “Example Code” – are strictly for professionals who handle corporate databases.
Those professionals will find an exceptionally to-the-point presentation here, starting with a basic philosophical overview (“the more data a key encrypts, the weaker it becomes”) and continuing step by step through creation of a well-protected database from the initial “state of primordial innocence” through completion. Kenan shows not only how to build a database that is secure from outside intrusion but also how to make sure it cannot be compromised from within: have different programmers work on different security-sensitive components, make different system administrators responsible for different areas, etc. Any reader who thinks this approach steps over the line from security consciousness to paranoia needs to read more news headlines about data disruption and compromise.
Kenan shows how to design, build and test an encrypted database, and how to decommission one that is no longer needed. His “Example Code” section, the longest part of the book, gives precise technical instructions about code needed to implement the recommendations in the previous sections. So what is to prevent hackers from reading Kenan’s book, learning his techniques and figuring out how to compromise them? In theory, this cannot happen, since Kenan’s encryption system changes protective elements constantly in ways that are not predictable. In practice, of course, purveyors of malware continue to surprise data defenders with their adaptability and cleverness at finding chinks in systems’ armor. So Kenan’s road map should be seen as an excellent way to find a route to protection against today’s known threats – but should not be considered the be-all and end-all of data defense. New attacks, in new forms, are a virtual certainty.
Encryption can contain the seeds of its own undoing. Sony BMG Music discovered this when it included a hidden file to prevent certain forms of use of songs on several dozen of its CD releases, only to have hackers take advantage of the file’s invisibility and nonremovability to create malware on computers whose owners were unknowingly running the automatically installed code. The major public embarrassment for Sony BMG led to a recall of nearly five million CDs, removal programs being created by Microsoft and (ineffectively) by Sony itself, and (of course) a spate of lawsuits.
Despite cautionary examples such as this one, any database manager knows that protection of information is crucial – and, in many cases, a legal obligation. Kevin Kenan, who leads Symantec Corporation’s information technology application and database security program, protects data for a living. In this book, he shows other database managers how to do it.
Understanding the book’s audience is important. The first of this book’s four parts, “Database Security,” contains a great deal of information that a reasonably well-informed computer user will be able to understand and that will add to his or her knowledge of the environment in which data are created, collected, protected and compromised today. But the three other parts of the book – “A Cryptographic Infrastructure,” “The Cryptographic Project” and “Example Code” – are strictly for professionals who handle corporate databases.
Those professionals will find an exceptionally to-the-point presentation here, starting with a basic philosophical overview (“the more data a key encrypts, the weaker it becomes”) and continuing step by step through creation of a well-protected database from the initial “state of primordial innocence” through completion. Kenan shows not only how to build a database that is secure from outside intrusion but also how to make sure it cannot be compromised from within: have different programmers work on different security-sensitive components, make different system administrators responsible for different areas, etc. Any reader who thinks this approach steps over the line from security consciousness to paranoia needs to read more news headlines about data disruption and compromise.
Kenan shows how to design, build and test an encrypted database, and how to decommission one that is no longer needed. His “Example Code” section, the longest part of the book, gives precise technical instructions about code needed to implement the recommendations in the previous sections. So what is to prevent hackers from reading Kenan’s book, learning his techniques and figuring out how to compromise them? In theory, this cannot happen, since Kenan’s encryption system changes protective elements constantly in ways that are not predictable. In practice, of course, purveyors of malware continue to surprise data defenders with their adaptability and cleverness at finding chinks in systems’ armor. So Kenan’s road map should be seen as an excellent way to find a route to protection against today’s known threats – but should not be considered the be-all and end-all of data defense. New attacks, in new forms, are a virtual certainty.
(++++) TAMING THE INTERNET JUNGLE
Norton Internet Security 2006. Windows 2000 Professional with SP3 or higher, or Windows XP. Symantec. $69.95.
Norton AntiVirus 2006. Windows 98, Me, 2000 Professional, or XP. Symantec. $39.95.
The coming new year is sure to bring surprises both pleasant and unpleasant. One way to avoid the most unpleasant computer-related surprises is to use Norton Internet Security 2006. Like an insurance policy, this product is designed to help you sleep better at night, knowing that an important part of your life is safe and secure. Unlike insurance, though, it works actively to make sure that threats to your electronic well-being are kept away.
This is not one product but a suite. Its innards are a good deal more complex than in prior versions, because threats have become more complicated and more difficult to fight. But its user interface, thankfully, is simpler and easier to use than in previous years – Symantec seems to get better annually at this aspect of design.
The functions of Norton Internet Security 2006 sound familiar enough: virus protection, spyware removal, firewall, intrusion prevention, privacy protection, spam detection and content filtering. The last two of these remain only moderately helpful: no spam filter is completely satisfactory, and most parental controls are either too tight or too easy for younger users to outfox. The rest of the suite, though, is highly useful, and contains some notable improvements over past years’ offerings.
The greatest enhancements are in the simplicity department. The new Norton Protection Center uses non-technical language to summarize what a user needs to know about computer defense. Security Inspector, also new, is a super-easy-to-use, automated way to find and fix security problems. Norton AntiSpam now has an improved filter for automatically identifying phishing – the growing problem of attempts to divert Web users from legitimate sites to phony ones that extract personal data. Home Page Hijacking Protection adds to safety by preventing a would-be hijacker from redirecting a user’s home page to a spyware site. And, at last, the default setting for Norton Personal Firewall is “on,” so users unfamiliar with the technology are automatically protected by this important safety feature.
All the parts here work well together, and everything can be updated at the same time – a big advantage of this suite over downloadable programs available free or at low cost via the Web, since those programs may or may not work well in concert and are sure to require multiple updates. Note, though, that updates of Norton Internet Security 2006 are free for only 12 months – an ongoing design and marketing irritation.
The most basic of all Internet protection components is an antivirus program, and the excellent Norton AntiVirus 2006 not only comes within the security suite but is also available on a standalone basis. In reality, if you install antivirus software and nothing else, your computer remains at risk; also, if you do want just an antivirus program, there are some excellent free ones available, such as Grisoft’s AVG Anti-Virus. But if you run an older Windows operating system, you would do well to pay for Norton AntiVirus 2006. You can’t count on the ability of most new programs to handle virus protection under Windows 98 or Windows Me, but you can depend on Symantec’s product, which in effect grew up under those operating systems and handles them very well indeed. Most users will do best with Norton Internet Security 2006, especially now that its use has been so well simplified. But, at minimum, get Norton AntiVirus 2006 if you run an older version of Windows.
Norton AntiVirus 2006. Windows 98, Me, 2000 Professional, or XP. Symantec. $39.95.
The coming new year is sure to bring surprises both pleasant and unpleasant. One way to avoid the most unpleasant computer-related surprises is to use Norton Internet Security 2006. Like an insurance policy, this product is designed to help you sleep better at night, knowing that an important part of your life is safe and secure. Unlike insurance, though, it works actively to make sure that threats to your electronic well-being are kept away.
This is not one product but a suite. Its innards are a good deal more complex than in prior versions, because threats have become more complicated and more difficult to fight. But its user interface, thankfully, is simpler and easier to use than in previous years – Symantec seems to get better annually at this aspect of design.
The functions of Norton Internet Security 2006 sound familiar enough: virus protection, spyware removal, firewall, intrusion prevention, privacy protection, spam detection and content filtering. The last two of these remain only moderately helpful: no spam filter is completely satisfactory, and most parental controls are either too tight or too easy for younger users to outfox. The rest of the suite, though, is highly useful, and contains some notable improvements over past years’ offerings.
The greatest enhancements are in the simplicity department. The new Norton Protection Center uses non-technical language to summarize what a user needs to know about computer defense. Security Inspector, also new, is a super-easy-to-use, automated way to find and fix security problems. Norton AntiSpam now has an improved filter for automatically identifying phishing – the growing problem of attempts to divert Web users from legitimate sites to phony ones that extract personal data. Home Page Hijacking Protection adds to safety by preventing a would-be hijacker from redirecting a user’s home page to a spyware site. And, at last, the default setting for Norton Personal Firewall is “on,” so users unfamiliar with the technology are automatically protected by this important safety feature.
All the parts here work well together, and everything can be updated at the same time – a big advantage of this suite over downloadable programs available free or at low cost via the Web, since those programs may or may not work well in concert and are sure to require multiple updates. Note, though, that updates of Norton Internet Security 2006 are free for only 12 months – an ongoing design and marketing irritation.
The most basic of all Internet protection components is an antivirus program, and the excellent Norton AntiVirus 2006 not only comes within the security suite but is also available on a standalone basis. In reality, if you install antivirus software and nothing else, your computer remains at risk; also, if you do want just an antivirus program, there are some excellent free ones available, such as Grisoft’s AVG Anti-Virus. But if you run an older Windows operating system, you would do well to pay for Norton AntiVirus 2006. You can’t count on the ability of most new programs to handle virus protection under Windows 98 or Windows Me, but you can depend on Symantec’s product, which in effect grew up under those operating systems and handles them very well indeed. Most users will do best with Norton Internet Security 2006, especially now that its use has been so well simplified. But, at minimum, get Norton AntiVirus 2006 if you run an older version of Windows.
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