Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. Microsoft. $79.95.
Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000. Microsoft. $99.95.
Everyone knows about Microsoft’s domination in operating-system and business-application software, and computer users tend to love or loathe the company because of the ubiquity of its products and the fact that it dominates so many software sectors.
But under most people’s radar, inspiring no fear or loathing and not as much attention as it deserves, is the hardware part of Microsoft, which consistently turns out high-quality, competitively priced enhancements for PCs (and some for Macs) – and is actually in the forefront of the development of certain product features. This is the Microsoft that more people should know, and two of its new offerings show why.
Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 is one of the strangest-looking mice you are likely to see. Rounded, with a surface elevated much more than is usual in a mouse, and with a vertical right side – like the dropoff of a cliff at the ocean – it looks tall and ungainly. But darned if the thing doesn’t work beautifully and, after a short period of adjustment, feel so comfortable that other mice seem like aberrations. It turns out that this mouse has been very carefully thought out. The rounded and elevated shape lets your fingers relax and curl instead of sticking out nearly straight – that straightening is associated with hand cramps and tiredness after long use of a mouse. The strange-looking vertical right side lets your hand rest on the desk while your fingers use the device (this mouse is only for right-handers). There’s a thumb scoop on the mouse’s left side, an inch above the desk, which turns out to be just the right height to keep your hand in a sort of “handshake” position – which is supposed to help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome by minimizing pressure on nerves in the carpal-tunnel area. It’s impossible to be sure, without long-term use, how well this mouse protects against carpal tunnel syndrome, but it is possible to say that users who have often experienced hand tiredness and cramping after marathon computer sessions will find their hands feeling surprisingly relaxed if they use this mouse instead of one with a standard shape. It has some neat operating features, too: an “instant viewer” tool that displays all open windows at the same time, so you can switch from place to place easily, and a two-color battery-life indicator that is much more convenient than the typical battery-life software programs provided with other wireless mice. This mouse works on both Windows and Macintosh computers, too. And it is compatible with the new Windows Vista operating system.
Because computer users are so accustomed to the shape of traditional mice, it does take some time to adapt to the Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000, but once you do so, you will find it hard (and perhaps painful) to return to a standard mouse. The adaptation time is a minor concern. But there are a couple of others: this mouse is not available bundled with one of Microsoft’s ergonomic keyboards, which is a shame – perhaps that is a cost decision, since the mouse is not inexpensive (another factor to consider). Also, the mouse is rather ungainly to use with a laptop, and is not available in a smaller size for traveling – it may not be possible to put the ergonomic features into a smaller mouse, but it would be nice to see Microsoft try. And how about a version for left-handers? The biggest problem with this product, though, is that you can’t buy it just yet: it won’t be widely available until January. Strongly consider using a holiday gift card for this mouse in the new year – your right hand will thank you.
A Microsoft hardware product that you can buy right now – although it is for Windows laptop PCs only – is Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000. This is an enhancement to the computing experience rather than an improvement in a necessary function. And it happens to be a lot of fun. Many companies make webcams, and a lot of them cost less than this one. But Microsoft packs a lot more into this top-of-the-line, wired LifeCam than you’ll find elsewhere. The camera not only delivers 2.0 megapixel video but also works as a still camera with impressive quality (7.6 megapixels interpolated). It’s got an easy-to-use attachment base that you can secure with one hand; a collapsible lens that lets you carry the camera as easily as a keychain drive (which it resembles); a 3x digital zoom; and a wide-angle lens with automatic face-tracking feature, for ease of use (you can actually teleconference with this camera – it’s not a toy, even though it’s fun to use).
However, to get the most out of this camera, you’ll have to use Microsoft software as well as this hardware, and not everyone will be comfortable with that. The advantages to doing so are many. This LifeCam has a one-touch-blogging feature for easy posting of photos – but it is designed for Windows Live Spaces sites. It has easy-to-use dashboard controls – but they are for the Windows Live Messenger interface. It has a very clever feature called Windows Live Call Button, which lets you see which buddies are online so you can quickly initiate video calls – but it works only with Windows Live Messenger. Every feature on the Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 works well, and the camera’s small size, easy-to-use attachment base and convenient portability (in a nice touch, a carrying case is included) are big pluses, and are big pluses for this camera no matter how you connect to friends, family and colleagues. But it is certainly true that Microsoft – which, after all, is primarily a software company – has optimized the camera in such a way that users need to use some Microsoft connectivity programs to get the maximum possible benefits from this piece of hardware. Yes, this LifeCam is compatible with all major instant-messaging software, and works well with programs other than Microsoft’s. Still, your personal feelings about Microsoft software may determine just how good a value you consider this LifeCam to be. It’s certainly a worthy competitor for anything else now on the market – and its video and still-picture resolutions are top-of-the-line.
November 22, 2006
(++++) BUILDING BETTER BRANDENBURGS
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6; Trio Sonata from “The Musical Offering”; Concerto in G Minor for Flute and Strings. Swiss Baroque Soloists directed by Andrés Gabetta. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).
Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos may be the most famous ignored job application in history. Their exact provenance is still a matter of dispute, but some scholars believe Bach sent them to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in the hope that they would so impress him that Bach would be offered a job. Instead, like many a résumé today, they were unceremoniously thrust into a drawer, unregarded and unknown until rediscovered many years later.
Whatever the exact truth of this story may be, it is certainly true that these six concertos are now so popular that it is fair to ask what new things can be added to them to justify an additional recording. The answer turns out to be adding old things. The Swiss Baroque Soloists play the concertos on original instruments – not the first ensemble to do so, to be sure, but one of the most adept, the players seeming as thoroughly comfortable with the transverse flute, violino piccolo and original forms of more familiar instruments as most orchestral players are with their modern versions. The result is a period-instrument recording that does not feel like a museum piece – it feels like something that lives and breathes the air of an earlier time. And some of that is heady air indeed: it is hard to believe the third movement of Concerto No. 3 can be played this accurately at so fast a tempo.
The reason this and other fast, highly detailed movements are so effective is that the players are uniformly excellent, with Niklas Englund being especially impressive on trumpet in the second concerto and Giorgio Paronuzzi being suitably virtuosic (but without overdoing it) in the fifth. Ensemble balance is exemplary throughout, and the mostly speedy tempi are well chosen – nothing drags here, yet there is no sense of artificially creating drama by speeding through movements for no good reason.
This two-CD set has a couple of bonuses, too. One is the Trio Sonata in C Minor from The Musical Offering, a piece based on a fugal theme given to Bach by King Friedrich II. The king was a competent flautist, and the trio sonata uses that fact to advantage, its opening slow movement letting the flute and violin toss themes back and forth before the following Allegro gives the flute considerable prominence. As would have been customary in Bach’s time, this Trio Sonata actually features four instruments: flute, violin, harpsichord and cello. All are played with grace and stylistic sensitivity.
In addition to playing the transverse flute in the Trio Sonata, Stéphane Réty transcribed the other “encore” piece here, the Concerto in G Minor for Flute and Strings. This is familiar in another form, as the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto, BWV 1056 – a work believed originally to have been a violin or oboe concerto before Bach himself transcribed it for harpsichord. No one thinks it was ever a flute concerto, but it sounds especially light and fleet in this version and is a pleasant curiosity as well as a worthwhile ending for this fine CD set.
Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos may be the most famous ignored job application in history. Their exact provenance is still a matter of dispute, but some scholars believe Bach sent them to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in the hope that they would so impress him that Bach would be offered a job. Instead, like many a résumé today, they were unceremoniously thrust into a drawer, unregarded and unknown until rediscovered many years later.
Whatever the exact truth of this story may be, it is certainly true that these six concertos are now so popular that it is fair to ask what new things can be added to them to justify an additional recording. The answer turns out to be adding old things. The Swiss Baroque Soloists play the concertos on original instruments – not the first ensemble to do so, to be sure, but one of the most adept, the players seeming as thoroughly comfortable with the transverse flute, violino piccolo and original forms of more familiar instruments as most orchestral players are with their modern versions. The result is a period-instrument recording that does not feel like a museum piece – it feels like something that lives and breathes the air of an earlier time. And some of that is heady air indeed: it is hard to believe the third movement of Concerto No. 3 can be played this accurately at so fast a tempo.
The reason this and other fast, highly detailed movements are so effective is that the players are uniformly excellent, with Niklas Englund being especially impressive on trumpet in the second concerto and Giorgio Paronuzzi being suitably virtuosic (but without overdoing it) in the fifth. Ensemble balance is exemplary throughout, and the mostly speedy tempi are well chosen – nothing drags here, yet there is no sense of artificially creating drama by speeding through movements for no good reason.
This two-CD set has a couple of bonuses, too. One is the Trio Sonata in C Minor from The Musical Offering, a piece based on a fugal theme given to Bach by King Friedrich II. The king was a competent flautist, and the trio sonata uses that fact to advantage, its opening slow movement letting the flute and violin toss themes back and forth before the following Allegro gives the flute considerable prominence. As would have been customary in Bach’s time, this Trio Sonata actually features four instruments: flute, violin, harpsichord and cello. All are played with grace and stylistic sensitivity.
In addition to playing the transverse flute in the Trio Sonata, Stéphane Réty transcribed the other “encore” piece here, the Concerto in G Minor for Flute and Strings. This is familiar in another form, as the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto, BWV 1056 – a work believed originally to have been a violin or oboe concerto before Bach himself transcribed it for harpsichord. No one thinks it was ever a flute concerto, but it sounds especially light and fleet in this version and is a pleasant curiosity as well as a worthwhile ending for this fine CD set.
November 16, 2006
(++++) MERRY CATSMAS
CatChristmas. By B. Kliban. Pomegranate. $12.95.
Cat E Gor y. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.
The Twelve Terrors of Christmas. By John Updike. Drawings by Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $9.95.
Top Cats: The Life and Times of the New York Public Library Lions. By Susan G. Larkin. Pomegranate. $19.95.
Some gifts are for cat lovers only. Not cat owners – no one ever really owns a cat – but people who love felines, either the real-life type or the delightfully fictitious sort created by such masters of the medium (whatever medium they used) as B. Kliban and Edward Gorey. Kliban (1935-1990) was an inspired creator of cat stuff, and CatChristmas collects some of his cutest seasonal drawings: the cat hanging from Santa’s nose, the cat atop a Christmas tree (causing it to bend all the way over), the boxed cat wearing a red ribbon, the basket of kittens on a doorstep, and more. This charming little book – small enough for stocking-stuffing – also includes never-before-published feline versions of Christmas carols. “Oscar Beany Catt” writes, “Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your ornaments make great toys.” “Wheela Brie” offers “The Little Drumstick Cat,” which ends, “Pa rumpa pum pum, Yum yum yum.” Also look for “Kitties We Have Heard on High,” “Hark the Hungry Kitties Sing,” and more – it’s cat-egorically funny.
And speaking of categories, the strangely titled Cat E Gor y (the name makes perfect sense when you see it on the cover, accompanied by two cats arranging the letters) reflects the feline celebrations of another top-notch cat artist, Edward Gorey (1925-2000). This book, also small enough to be a stocking stuffer, was not created specifically for Christmas and will be fun at any time for Gorey fans. Its history is unusual: for a limited edition of his book Amphigorey, published in 1973, Gorey created 50 cat drawings – one per book. Each owner of the limited edition thus has one of these drawings – but the owner of Cat E Gor y has all 50. Part of the fun here is finding the numbers contained in each drawing. “Four” is given as “IV” on the shirt worn by a black-and-white cat in a drawing that also includes colored streamers. “Eleven” is written out as a word on the bow of a small boat in which a cat sits dreamily. “Twenty-two” is a partially obscured “22” on a planter atop a high stand – at which a cat on the floor is looking. “Thirty-one” appears as “31” on the scarf of a cat riding a unicycle. Except for the numbers, these are wordless drawings – and no words are required. The book is a great cat-ch.
Gorey did create Christmas-specific illustrations – featuring bats, not cats – for John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, a tongue-fairly-firmly-in-cheek little book (yes, yet another stocking stuffer) in which typically peculiar-looking Gorey characters endure the trials and tribulations of the season. One of those is the mall Santa, with “loose-fitting nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit, [and] funny rummy smell when you sit on his lap.” Then there are Santa’s helpers: “Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next.” As for carols, they “boom and chime from the vaulted ceilings of supermarkets and discount malls – and yet the spirits keep sinking.” And let us not forget “Fear of Returns,” which is “the humiliating descent into mercantilism’s boiler room.” Perfect for the Scrooge on your list, or your own inner Scrooge, The Twelve Terrors of Christmas can help keep the holiday season in perspective so it doesn’t become cat-astrophic.
But the holidays will end, of course, and the seasons will move on – so how about a cat for all seasons? Or, more specifically, two cats? That is what the lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library have been since they were put in place in 1910. Well, actually, not quite…as Susan G. Larkin points out, the lions were not a huge hit when the first plaster models of them were set out, but they soon enough became an important meeting place for New Yorkers of all types. And they really are “for all seasons,” as this book’s 90-or-so images (color and black and white) show: they wear hats and wreaths, are seen on New Yorker covers being playful or erudite, and come across at various times as reassuring, joyous, or simply symbolic of a great city. As interesting as the photos of the finished lions are, showing New Yorkers enjoying them, the story of their creation is equally enthralling. Larkin, an art historian, discusses how the lions were conceived and then built by sculptor Edward Clark Potter, and shows how in later years they were renovated to retain their fresh appearance and their positions as unofficial but very public ambassador-cats of good will.
Cat E Gor y. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.
The Twelve Terrors of Christmas. By John Updike. Drawings by Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $9.95.
Top Cats: The Life and Times of the New York Public Library Lions. By Susan G. Larkin. Pomegranate. $19.95.
Some gifts are for cat lovers only. Not cat owners – no one ever really owns a cat – but people who love felines, either the real-life type or the delightfully fictitious sort created by such masters of the medium (whatever medium they used) as B. Kliban and Edward Gorey. Kliban (1935-1990) was an inspired creator of cat stuff, and CatChristmas collects some of his cutest seasonal drawings: the cat hanging from Santa’s nose, the cat atop a Christmas tree (causing it to bend all the way over), the boxed cat wearing a red ribbon, the basket of kittens on a doorstep, and more. This charming little book – small enough for stocking-stuffing – also includes never-before-published feline versions of Christmas carols. “Oscar Beany Catt” writes, “Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your ornaments make great toys.” “Wheela Brie” offers “The Little Drumstick Cat,” which ends, “Pa rumpa pum pum, Yum yum yum.” Also look for “Kitties We Have Heard on High,” “Hark the Hungry Kitties Sing,” and more – it’s cat-egorically funny.
And speaking of categories, the strangely titled Cat E Gor y (the name makes perfect sense when you see it on the cover, accompanied by two cats arranging the letters) reflects the feline celebrations of another top-notch cat artist, Edward Gorey (1925-2000). This book, also small enough to be a stocking stuffer, was not created specifically for Christmas and will be fun at any time for Gorey fans. Its history is unusual: for a limited edition of his book Amphigorey, published in 1973, Gorey created 50 cat drawings – one per book. Each owner of the limited edition thus has one of these drawings – but the owner of Cat E Gor y has all 50. Part of the fun here is finding the numbers contained in each drawing. “Four” is given as “IV” on the shirt worn by a black-and-white cat in a drawing that also includes colored streamers. “Eleven” is written out as a word on the bow of a small boat in which a cat sits dreamily. “Twenty-two” is a partially obscured “22” on a planter atop a high stand – at which a cat on the floor is looking. “Thirty-one” appears as “31” on the scarf of a cat riding a unicycle. Except for the numbers, these are wordless drawings – and no words are required. The book is a great cat-ch.
Gorey did create Christmas-specific illustrations – featuring bats, not cats – for John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, a tongue-fairly-firmly-in-cheek little book (yes, yet another stocking stuffer) in which typically peculiar-looking Gorey characters endure the trials and tribulations of the season. One of those is the mall Santa, with “loose-fitting nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit, [and] funny rummy smell when you sit on his lap.” Then there are Santa’s helpers: “Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next.” As for carols, they “boom and chime from the vaulted ceilings of supermarkets and discount malls – and yet the spirits keep sinking.” And let us not forget “Fear of Returns,” which is “the humiliating descent into mercantilism’s boiler room.” Perfect for the Scrooge on your list, or your own inner Scrooge, The Twelve Terrors of Christmas can help keep the holiday season in perspective so it doesn’t become cat-astrophic.
But the holidays will end, of course, and the seasons will move on – so how about a cat for all seasons? Or, more specifically, two cats? That is what the lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library have been since they were put in place in 1910. Well, actually, not quite…as Susan G. Larkin points out, the lions were not a huge hit when the first plaster models of them were set out, but they soon enough became an important meeting place for New Yorkers of all types. And they really are “for all seasons,” as this book’s 90-or-so images (color and black and white) show: they wear hats and wreaths, are seen on New Yorker covers being playful or erudite, and come across at various times as reassuring, joyous, or simply symbolic of a great city. As interesting as the photos of the finished lions are, showing New Yorkers enjoying them, the story of their creation is equally enthralling. Larkin, an art historian, discusses how the lions were conceived and then built by sculptor Edward Clark Potter, and shows how in later years they were renovated to retain their fresh appearance and their positions as unofficial but very public ambassador-cats of good will.
(++++) A WHOLE LOT OF HO-HO-HO
Christmas. By Robert Sabuda. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $12.99.
When Santa Fell to Earth. By Cornelia Funke. Chicken House/Scholastic. $15.99.
Mrs. Claus Takes a Vacation. By Linas Alsenas. Scholastic. $16.99.
Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight? By Jerry Pallotta. Illustrations by David Biedrzycki. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.
Mistletoe: Four Holiday Stories. By Hailey Abbott, Melissa de la Cruz, Aimee Friedman and Nina Malkin. Point/Scholastic. $8.99.
There’s something predictably, if understandably, treacly about Christmas, so it is always fun to find books that allow the sentiment of the holiday season to flourish without burying readers in overdone sweetness. Each of these seasonal books finds a way to connect readers with the holiday without going over exactly the same ground that many other stories have covered.
The simplest, most straightforward and most charming of the books is Christmas, a stocking-stuffer-size pop-up book by Robert Sabuda – whose The Christmas Alphabet has become a modern holiday classic. This time, Sabuda brings together a series of original pop-up designs – including one never-before-seen pop-up – to spell out the word “Christmas.” It’s simple, to the point and delightful.
When Santa Fell to Earth is at the opposite extreme: Sabuda’s book is all about images, while Cornelia Funke’s is all about words (although it has some well-done illustrations, too). Leave it to Funke to create a complex, far-fetched holiday tale that is dark but not too dark, worrisome but not overly scary. This one is about what happens in the two weeks before Christmas, after a reindeer accident brings Santa down in a winter storm. He lands and is stranded in a nice neighborhood of helpful people – but all is not well, because Santa is being pursued by Gerold Geronimus Goblynch, who wants Christmas to stop being about children’s wishes and instead be all about money. (Hmm. Sounds as if there are lots of Goblynches around.) Santa (here called Niklas) and his helpers are observed by “a huge silver limousine with pinecones on the license plate and a star on the hood,” and so there is a chase, and hiding, and all sorts of trouble, until a bit of magic turns Goblynch sweet. But this does not mean what you think – Funke is far too clever for that, as readers of the book will find out.
Clever in a different way is Mrs. Claus Takes a Vacation, the first book by Linas Alsenas. It’s a neatly offbeat premise, very amusingly handled: Mrs. Claus is sick of snow and ice and is jealous of the fact that Santa gets to travel all around the world, while she stays home in the cold north. So she takes off in the sleigh, visiting beaches and Japanese restaurants and tourist attractions, making friends everywhere she goes – and leaving behind a worried and lonesome Santa, whose domestic skills leave something to be desired. Then Mrs. Claus starts to get lonely, too, and the stage is set for a trip home and a lovely Christmas-eve surprise.
Speaking of surprises, there are plenty of them in Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight? Jerry Pallotta and David Biedrzycki have cooked up a deliciously silly story about all the animals whose help Santa sought before he finally settled on reindeer. Tigers are too rough, penguins too earthbound, dolphins too fond of dipping Santa’s sleigh in the ocean. Giraffes get stuck in telephone wires, and skunks are…well, smelly. Santa’s trials and tribulations are especially enjoyable because of Biedrzycki’s illustrations, which are always clever and frequently hilarious. This is great fun for younger readers.
For older kids – teens far too sophisticated for naïve holiday celebrations – the four stories in Mistletoe offer seasonal romance, troubles and even some magic. All the authors clearly had fun coming up with holiday-themed stories: Aimee Friedman’s tale of love in a department store, Nina Malkin’s take on holiday magic in Tinseltown, Melissa de la Cruz’s O. Henry-style look at the perfect present, and Hailey Abbott’s story of a scandalous New Year’s Eve party. As Abbott’s protagonist eventually finds out, “everything would be, if not perfect, then at least pretty darn close” – a statement that neatly fits not only this book but also Scholastic’s many other pleasantly offbeat seasonal offerings.
When Santa Fell to Earth. By Cornelia Funke. Chicken House/Scholastic. $15.99.
Mrs. Claus Takes a Vacation. By Linas Alsenas. Scholastic. $16.99.
Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight? By Jerry Pallotta. Illustrations by David Biedrzycki. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.
Mistletoe: Four Holiday Stories. By Hailey Abbott, Melissa de la Cruz, Aimee Friedman and Nina Malkin. Point/Scholastic. $8.99.
There’s something predictably, if understandably, treacly about Christmas, so it is always fun to find books that allow the sentiment of the holiday season to flourish without burying readers in overdone sweetness. Each of these seasonal books finds a way to connect readers with the holiday without going over exactly the same ground that many other stories have covered.
The simplest, most straightforward and most charming of the books is Christmas, a stocking-stuffer-size pop-up book by Robert Sabuda – whose The Christmas Alphabet has become a modern holiday classic. This time, Sabuda brings together a series of original pop-up designs – including one never-before-seen pop-up – to spell out the word “Christmas.” It’s simple, to the point and delightful.
When Santa Fell to Earth is at the opposite extreme: Sabuda’s book is all about images, while Cornelia Funke’s is all about words (although it has some well-done illustrations, too). Leave it to Funke to create a complex, far-fetched holiday tale that is dark but not too dark, worrisome but not overly scary. This one is about what happens in the two weeks before Christmas, after a reindeer accident brings Santa down in a winter storm. He lands and is stranded in a nice neighborhood of helpful people – but all is not well, because Santa is being pursued by Gerold Geronimus Goblynch, who wants Christmas to stop being about children’s wishes and instead be all about money. (Hmm. Sounds as if there are lots of Goblynches around.) Santa (here called Niklas) and his helpers are observed by “a huge silver limousine with pinecones on the license plate and a star on the hood,” and so there is a chase, and hiding, and all sorts of trouble, until a bit of magic turns Goblynch sweet. But this does not mean what you think – Funke is far too clever for that, as readers of the book will find out.
Clever in a different way is Mrs. Claus Takes a Vacation, the first book by Linas Alsenas. It’s a neatly offbeat premise, very amusingly handled: Mrs. Claus is sick of snow and ice and is jealous of the fact that Santa gets to travel all around the world, while she stays home in the cold north. So she takes off in the sleigh, visiting beaches and Japanese restaurants and tourist attractions, making friends everywhere she goes – and leaving behind a worried and lonesome Santa, whose domestic skills leave something to be desired. Then Mrs. Claus starts to get lonely, too, and the stage is set for a trip home and a lovely Christmas-eve surprise.
Speaking of surprises, there are plenty of them in Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight? Jerry Pallotta and David Biedrzycki have cooked up a deliciously silly story about all the animals whose help Santa sought before he finally settled on reindeer. Tigers are too rough, penguins too earthbound, dolphins too fond of dipping Santa’s sleigh in the ocean. Giraffes get stuck in telephone wires, and skunks are…well, smelly. Santa’s trials and tribulations are especially enjoyable because of Biedrzycki’s illustrations, which are always clever and frequently hilarious. This is great fun for younger readers.
For older kids – teens far too sophisticated for naïve holiday celebrations – the four stories in Mistletoe offer seasonal romance, troubles and even some magic. All the authors clearly had fun coming up with holiday-themed stories: Aimee Friedman’s tale of love in a department store, Nina Malkin’s take on holiday magic in Tinseltown, Melissa de la Cruz’s O. Henry-style look at the perfect present, and Hailey Abbott’s story of a scandalous New Year’s Eve party. As Abbott’s protagonist eventually finds out, “everything would be, if not perfect, then at least pretty darn close” – a statement that neatly fits not only this book but also Scholastic’s many other pleasantly offbeat seasonal offerings.
(++++) MORE MAGIC (SEVERAL KINDS)
The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years After. By Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer. Harcourt. $17.
The Boy Book (a study of habits and behaviors, plus techniques for taming them). By E. Lockhart. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
When young kids discover something they really enjoy – a roller-coaster ride, perhaps, or being carried on a parent’s shoulders – they inevitably wait until the last ounce of deliciousness has been squeezed from the experience, and then say, “More!!”
Readers of the Kate-and-Cecy adventures and the stories of Ruby Oliver are likely to shout “more!!” as well after savoring the delights of this tale or that. How fortunate, then, that Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer have come up with a third novel about Kate and Cecy, while E. Lockhart is offering a third story (and second novel) about Roo.
There’s something magical about all the adventures of Kate and Cecy, and not just because the cousins can actually work magic. In these days of E-mail, text messaging, IM and SMS, it is a genuine pleasure to discover an old-fashioned epistolary novel – that is, one written in the form of letters among the characters. Wrede (Cecy) and Stevermer (Kate) are really adept at this form, which has the added advantage of solving the usual problems of collaboration, such as the “voice” in which a book is to be written. Here, the writers give the characters their own voices through their letters – point-of-view consistency is irrelevant (and, given the many things that happen to the protagonists, probably inadvisable). In this third book of their adventures – after Sorcery and Cecilia and The Grand Tour – Kate and Cecy are old hands at marriage, which they have been practicing for 10 years, and at having children (five between them), and of course at magic. Now they are watching the transformation of England by the expansion of the railroads – and James is asked by Lord Wellington himself to investigate the disappearance of a German railroad engineer. While James and Cecy head north on their mission, Kate and Thomas are left with the five kids (all of whom start casting spells themselves) and with a mysterious mute girl whom they have rescued. The sprawling plot has to do with the railroads’ interference with ancient underground magic. The letters that move the plot along are as charming as ever – in what other book would someone write, matter-of-factly, “Mr. and Miss Webb remain dogs for the moment”? And yes, the complexities are nicely knitted together in the end.
The magic is of a different kind in E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver stories (although Roo herself would probably wish she could have the powers of Cecy and Kate). The Boy Book, a sequel to The Boyfriend List, finds Ruby in her junior year in high school, a newly licensed driver, with a new friend (Noel) and a new job (at the zoo). Some of her friends (former friends?) from the earlier book are still not speaking to her, and she still suffers from bouts of self-pity, often expressed in footnotes, such as this one: “Everyone at Tate Prep, even the fifth graders, has a cell phone. Everyone but me.” Still, Ruby is not a perpetual whiner, and her attractive qualities more than make up for her complaining. Her “levels of boyfriends” list, dating to her sophomore year and used here to open one chapter, is still hilarious, still accurate, and still having repercussions. And Ruby’s approach to the all-too-common problems of adolescence – writing a book about them – remains offbeat and refreshing. Ruby is no better at solving her problems here than in The Boyfriend List (or in the story in which she appeared in the anthology, Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything). But that is what makes her attractive: she seems more of a real person than do the protagonists of most teen-focused books, and her failure to make sense of everything in her life is itself a liberating experience – at least she realizes that life doesn’t always make sense. One chapter in particular neatly sums up Ruby’s introspection and ultimate frustration in trying to figure things out. It’s the one called “Why You Want the Guy You Can’t Have: Inadequate Analysis of a Disturbing Psychological Trend.” Ruby is a real charmer.
The Boy Book (a study of habits and behaviors, plus techniques for taming them). By E. Lockhart. Delacorte Press. $15.95.
When young kids discover something they really enjoy – a roller-coaster ride, perhaps, or being carried on a parent’s shoulders – they inevitably wait until the last ounce of deliciousness has been squeezed from the experience, and then say, “More!!”
Readers of the Kate-and-Cecy adventures and the stories of Ruby Oliver are likely to shout “more!!” as well after savoring the delights of this tale or that. How fortunate, then, that Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer have come up with a third novel about Kate and Cecy, while E. Lockhart is offering a third story (and second novel) about Roo.
There’s something magical about all the adventures of Kate and Cecy, and not just because the cousins can actually work magic. In these days of E-mail, text messaging, IM and SMS, it is a genuine pleasure to discover an old-fashioned epistolary novel – that is, one written in the form of letters among the characters. Wrede (Cecy) and Stevermer (Kate) are really adept at this form, which has the added advantage of solving the usual problems of collaboration, such as the “voice” in which a book is to be written. Here, the writers give the characters their own voices through their letters – point-of-view consistency is irrelevant (and, given the many things that happen to the protagonists, probably inadvisable). In this third book of their adventures – after Sorcery and Cecilia and The Grand Tour – Kate and Cecy are old hands at marriage, which they have been practicing for 10 years, and at having children (five between them), and of course at magic. Now they are watching the transformation of England by the expansion of the railroads – and James is asked by Lord Wellington himself to investigate the disappearance of a German railroad engineer. While James and Cecy head north on their mission, Kate and Thomas are left with the five kids (all of whom start casting spells themselves) and with a mysterious mute girl whom they have rescued. The sprawling plot has to do with the railroads’ interference with ancient underground magic. The letters that move the plot along are as charming as ever – in what other book would someone write, matter-of-factly, “Mr. and Miss Webb remain dogs for the moment”? And yes, the complexities are nicely knitted together in the end.
The magic is of a different kind in E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver stories (although Roo herself would probably wish she could have the powers of Cecy and Kate). The Boy Book, a sequel to The Boyfriend List, finds Ruby in her junior year in high school, a newly licensed driver, with a new friend (Noel) and a new job (at the zoo). Some of her friends (former friends?) from the earlier book are still not speaking to her, and she still suffers from bouts of self-pity, often expressed in footnotes, such as this one: “Everyone at Tate Prep, even the fifth graders, has a cell phone. Everyone but me.” Still, Ruby is not a perpetual whiner, and her attractive qualities more than make up for her complaining. Her “levels of boyfriends” list, dating to her sophomore year and used here to open one chapter, is still hilarious, still accurate, and still having repercussions. And Ruby’s approach to the all-too-common problems of adolescence – writing a book about them – remains offbeat and refreshing. Ruby is no better at solving her problems here than in The Boyfriend List (or in the story in which she appeared in the anthology, Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything). But that is what makes her attractive: she seems more of a real person than do the protagonists of most teen-focused books, and her failure to make sense of everything in her life is itself a liberating experience – at least she realizes that life doesn’t always make sense. One chapter in particular neatly sums up Ruby’s introspection and ultimate frustration in trying to figure things out. It’s the one called “Why You Want the Guy You Can’t Have: Inadequate Analysis of a Disturbing Psychological Trend.” Ruby is a real charmer.
(+++) CUTENESS FOR ALL AGES
Gray Matter: Why It’s Good to Be Old! By Bob Elsdale. Andrews McMeel. $14.95.
A Teaspoon of Courage: A Little Book of Encouragement for Whenever You Need It. By Bradley Trevor Greive. Andrews McMeel. $9.95.
The usual explanation of why getting old is good runs something like this: “consider the alternative.” That’s not good enough for Bob Elsdale, who uses composite and digitally enhanced photographs – featuring gray, wrinkled elephants – to make points about the good aspects of aging. This is intended to be cute but tends to come across as cutesy. And not all the digital enhancements are of equal quality – for instance, one showing two big elephants carrying outdoor equipment while taking two small ones to the beach is so poorly rendered that one wonders whether Elsdale wanted readers to know that the elephants weren’t really carrying anything. A lot of the concepts here are enjoyable enough: wind-surfing elephant, elephant on a surfboard, elephants playing chess and tic-tac-toe, and so on. But the most affecting pages are the ones using the least equipment, such as a two-page layout of the beach and two elephants, with nothing but the words, “Everywhere is memory lane.” It’s a bit hard to figure out the audience for this book: unless you are a real elephant fancier (or someone you would give it to is one), the book may fall a bit flat. Certainly it does not have the sheer verve and style of the photo books by Bradley Trevor Greive, who is the master of melding pictures with words.
Greive’s new book, A Teaspoon of Courage, continues his pattern of finding actual (undoctored) animal photos and playing with them, not by changing the photos themselves but by writing captions that explain human foibles in terms of what the animals seem to be doing (but, of course, really aren’t). Thus, this book starts with an adorable puppy peeking through a hole in a wall, with the caption, “Sooner or later everyone runs up against a brick wall.” After this comes a meandering look at what courage does and does not mean. A bird landing on water near an open-mouthed shark, for example, gets a caption that starts, “Doing things that are inherently dangerous does not necessarily indicate courage.” This sort of thing is all well and good – but the underlying theme of this book is more serious than in most of Greive’s works, and that makes the cute juxtapositions a little harder to take than usual. Even Greive cannot come up with a really fitting photo for the words, “Truly brave individuals slowly but surely rebuild their lives after suffering profound personal losses.” The bear seeming to wipe a tear from its eye is okay for “Heroes cry, too,” but the baby elephant struggling to its feet doesn’t quite work for “Every time you reaffirm your faith in yourself, it grows stronger.” Furthermore, the language here is somewhat too New Age-y to be universally appealing: “You will find your holy grail.” “If you just keep paddling, your wave will arrive to take you all the way in to the beach.” But many of the photos are real winners, and if this is not Greive’s most effective book, it certainly has its moments of charm and cuteness – for any and all ages.
A Teaspoon of Courage: A Little Book of Encouragement for Whenever You Need It. By Bradley Trevor Greive. Andrews McMeel. $9.95.
The usual explanation of why getting old is good runs something like this: “consider the alternative.” That’s not good enough for Bob Elsdale, who uses composite and digitally enhanced photographs – featuring gray, wrinkled elephants – to make points about the good aspects of aging. This is intended to be cute but tends to come across as cutesy. And not all the digital enhancements are of equal quality – for instance, one showing two big elephants carrying outdoor equipment while taking two small ones to the beach is so poorly rendered that one wonders whether Elsdale wanted readers to know that the elephants weren’t really carrying anything. A lot of the concepts here are enjoyable enough: wind-surfing elephant, elephant on a surfboard, elephants playing chess and tic-tac-toe, and so on. But the most affecting pages are the ones using the least equipment, such as a two-page layout of the beach and two elephants, with nothing but the words, “Everywhere is memory lane.” It’s a bit hard to figure out the audience for this book: unless you are a real elephant fancier (or someone you would give it to is one), the book may fall a bit flat. Certainly it does not have the sheer verve and style of the photo books by Bradley Trevor Greive, who is the master of melding pictures with words.
Greive’s new book, A Teaspoon of Courage, continues his pattern of finding actual (undoctored) animal photos and playing with them, not by changing the photos themselves but by writing captions that explain human foibles in terms of what the animals seem to be doing (but, of course, really aren’t). Thus, this book starts with an adorable puppy peeking through a hole in a wall, with the caption, “Sooner or later everyone runs up against a brick wall.” After this comes a meandering look at what courage does and does not mean. A bird landing on water near an open-mouthed shark, for example, gets a caption that starts, “Doing things that are inherently dangerous does not necessarily indicate courage.” This sort of thing is all well and good – but the underlying theme of this book is more serious than in most of Greive’s works, and that makes the cute juxtapositions a little harder to take than usual. Even Greive cannot come up with a really fitting photo for the words, “Truly brave individuals slowly but surely rebuild their lives after suffering profound personal losses.” The bear seeming to wipe a tear from its eye is okay for “Heroes cry, too,” but the baby elephant struggling to its feet doesn’t quite work for “Every time you reaffirm your faith in yourself, it grows stronger.” Furthermore, the language here is somewhat too New Age-y to be universally appealing: “You will find your holy grail.” “If you just keep paddling, your wave will arrive to take you all the way in to the beach.” But many of the photos are real winners, and if this is not Greive’s most effective book, it certainly has its moments of charm and cuteness – for any and all ages.
(+++) CAUSES CELEBRES
Working for Peace: A Handbook of Practical Psychology and Other Tools. Edited by Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D., and Psychologists for Social Responsibility. Impact Publishers. $17.95.
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952. By Allen Ginsburg. Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan. Da Capo. $27.50.
Although almost everyone believes in peace in the abstract, getting to it in any concrete way tends to seem extraordinarily difficult, even impossible. Most guides to the cause of peace focus on its importance, on the horrors of the alternative, and on how to get like-minded groups together to protest and/or contact lawmakers and/or stir things up in some other way. Not so Working for Peace. This is a guidebook to the psychology of social activism, in which active peace workers seek to help others build their confidence, organize volunteers, overcome the inevitable obstacles and get out whatever word they are trying to get out. It is certainly true, as editor Rachel MacNair says, that understanding the issues and knowing how to do a press release are necessary abilities but not sufficient ones. The contributors to Working for Peace try to add other, less-often-considered necessities: handling stressful emotions, learning how to assess your own interests and skills, improving your mood during an uphill struggle, fighting “commitment exhaustion,” motivating others to work for or with you, and more. Everything here is exceedingly well-meaning, but if activists suffered from exhaustion before, getting through this book – never mind trying to follow all the prescriptions in it – will be a recipe for collapse. Even a single brief point in a single essay can carry a wealth of difficulty: “A hand placed on someone’s shoulder can be seen as an assertion of status or as a sign of affection. Do not automatically assume that it will be taken as a sign of affection.” Or: “The secret to the effective sound bite is something we call ‘Media Haiku’: Find different ways of saying the same thing. Connect them with ‘and,’ ‘so,’ ‘therefore,’ so your presentation seems like [sic] you’re doing a logical progression (this follows that) rather than merely repeating the same thing.” Bad grammar aside, there’s a lot to digest there. In fact, there is a great deal to digest in the whole book, not all of it especially nutritious. Even the essay on “Three Examples of Successful Social Action Groups” has lessons that may only be applicable to roughly analogous situations – not as general rules. Working for Peace turns out to be more well-intentioned than practical.
One hesitates to think of peace as a cause célèbre, but it certainly seems that way when so many celebrities-of-the-moment fixate on it for the betterment (one suspects) of themselves, not necessarily the rest of humanity. One need not hesitate, however, in thinking of poet Allen Ginsburg as a cause célèbre: that’s how he came to see himself. How he got to that point is the subject of The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, which is strictly for Ginsburg aficionados and for people – such as the co-editors – who seem to have defined their lives largely in relationship to where they were in Ginsburg’s life’s orbit. This is not to say that Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton (who worked with Ginsburg) and Bill Morgan (Ginsburg’s friend and literary archivist) do a poor job editing these minutiae of Ginsburg’s life from high school onwards. But really – there is so much here (more than 500 pages of it), and so much of it is trivial or, what is worse, simply boring. There are 100 poems in this book, 65 of which have never been published before – most of them, it seems, deservedly. Yes, fans of the group that included Ginsburg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac will find things to enthrall them here, such as an account of Ginsburg’s relationship with Neal Cassady that contrasts in significant ways with the story as told by Kerouac. But really, who cares – other than Ginsburg scholars and Ginsburg fanatics (there’s a lot of overlap there)? If you are a committed fan of Ginsburg’s later writings and want to see much of what he wrote on the road to his better work, you will find plenty of it here. But without a preexisting commitment to all things Ginsburg, there’s little reason to martyr yourself by slogging through the artifice of this book.
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952. By Allen Ginsburg. Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan. Da Capo. $27.50.
Although almost everyone believes in peace in the abstract, getting to it in any concrete way tends to seem extraordinarily difficult, even impossible. Most guides to the cause of peace focus on its importance, on the horrors of the alternative, and on how to get like-minded groups together to protest and/or contact lawmakers and/or stir things up in some other way. Not so Working for Peace. This is a guidebook to the psychology of social activism, in which active peace workers seek to help others build their confidence, organize volunteers, overcome the inevitable obstacles and get out whatever word they are trying to get out. It is certainly true, as editor Rachel MacNair says, that understanding the issues and knowing how to do a press release are necessary abilities but not sufficient ones. The contributors to Working for Peace try to add other, less-often-considered necessities: handling stressful emotions, learning how to assess your own interests and skills, improving your mood during an uphill struggle, fighting “commitment exhaustion,” motivating others to work for or with you, and more. Everything here is exceedingly well-meaning, but if activists suffered from exhaustion before, getting through this book – never mind trying to follow all the prescriptions in it – will be a recipe for collapse. Even a single brief point in a single essay can carry a wealth of difficulty: “A hand placed on someone’s shoulder can be seen as an assertion of status or as a sign of affection. Do not automatically assume that it will be taken as a sign of affection.” Or: “The secret to the effective sound bite is something we call ‘Media Haiku’: Find different ways of saying the same thing. Connect them with ‘and,’ ‘so,’ ‘therefore,’ so your presentation seems like [sic] you’re doing a logical progression (this follows that) rather than merely repeating the same thing.” Bad grammar aside, there’s a lot to digest there. In fact, there is a great deal to digest in the whole book, not all of it especially nutritious. Even the essay on “Three Examples of Successful Social Action Groups” has lessons that may only be applicable to roughly analogous situations – not as general rules. Working for Peace turns out to be more well-intentioned than practical.
One hesitates to think of peace as a cause célèbre, but it certainly seems that way when so many celebrities-of-the-moment fixate on it for the betterment (one suspects) of themselves, not necessarily the rest of humanity. One need not hesitate, however, in thinking of poet Allen Ginsburg as a cause célèbre: that’s how he came to see himself. How he got to that point is the subject of The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, which is strictly for Ginsburg aficionados and for people – such as the co-editors – who seem to have defined their lives largely in relationship to where they were in Ginsburg’s life’s orbit. This is not to say that Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton (who worked with Ginsburg) and Bill Morgan (Ginsburg’s friend and literary archivist) do a poor job editing these minutiae of Ginsburg’s life from high school onwards. But really – there is so much here (more than 500 pages of it), and so much of it is trivial or, what is worse, simply boring. There are 100 poems in this book, 65 of which have never been published before – most of them, it seems, deservedly. Yes, fans of the group that included Ginsburg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac will find things to enthrall them here, such as an account of Ginsburg’s relationship with Neal Cassady that contrasts in significant ways with the story as told by Kerouac. But really, who cares – other than Ginsburg scholars and Ginsburg fanatics (there’s a lot of overlap there)? If you are a committed fan of Ginsburg’s later writings and want to see much of what he wrote on the road to his better work, you will find plenty of it here. But without a preexisting commitment to all things Ginsburg, there’s little reason to martyr yourself by slogging through the artifice of this book.
(++++) SONS OF MOTHER RUSSIA
Stravinsky: Three Russian Sacred Choruses; Mass; Cantata; Babel; Symphony of Psalms. Robert Craft conducting soloists, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Simon Joly Chorale, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Naxos. $8.99.
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad.” Kurt Masur conducting Orchestre National de France. Naïve. $16.99.
For Russian composers of the 20th century, there were really only two choices: flee or accommodate. Igor Stravinsky, famously, fled; Dmitri Shostakovich, equally famously, accommodated. The contrasts between the works they produced are surely due in part to their very different relationships to their homeland, just as they are partly due to differences in temperament and training. Yet each composer was, in his own way, Russian to the core.
Stravinsky’s Three Russian Sacred Choruses were specifically written to be used in the Russian Orthodox Church, and are for chorus only – the church does not allow use of musical instruments. The Mass, which does include instruments, uses the five traditional sections of the Latin mass and encapsulates this Roman Catholic religious experience in 17 minutes. Religious music of this sort was anathema in what was then the Soviet Union, which was officially atheist. Yet Stravinsky clearly felt the pull of religious traditions strongly, and thanks to his exile was able to explore them at length. Nor did he stop with the New Testament: both Babel and the justly famous Symphony of Psalms draw on the Old Testament. The first of these uses text from Genesis, while the second uses parts of Psalms 38 and 39 and all of Psalm 150. Babel includes both a narrator (David Wilson-Johnson in the new Naxos Robert Craft CD) and a male chorus, as well as orchestra, while the Symphony of Psalms is for chorus and orchestra only. Craft understands this music viscerally as well as intellectually, and his performances of all these works reach out successfully beyond the religious texts to the wider audience that Stravinsky sought.
In some ways, the most interesting piece on the latest Naxos/Craft CD is the one least tied to traditional religion: Cantata for 5 Instruments, Female Chorus, Mezzo-Soprano and Tenor. This is a seven-movement work whose central “Ricercar II: ‘Tomorrow Shall Be’” is almost as long as the other six movements put together. Craft expertly merges and highlights the voices of mezzo Mary Ann Hart and tenor Thomas Bogdan with the Gregg Smith Singers and Fred Sherry’s cello, Stephen Taylor’s oboe, Melanie Field’s oboe and cor anglais, and the flutes of Michael Parloff and Bart Feller. There is some straightforward religiosity here: that central “Ricercar II” involves Christ’s foretelling of his crucifixion. But there are also four dirges, a poem of a young bride and more – the totality being an emotionally complex and highly moving work to which Craft provides forward thrust and an overall feeling of unity.
Several of these Stravinsky pieces cluster in or around World War II: Babel dates to 1944 and the Mass was started the same year, though not finished until 1948. But none of these pieces speaks directly to the war, as Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 most assuredly does. The first three movements of the composer’s longest symphony were written in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) while the city was under siege by the Nazis in 1941; the triumphal fourth movement was written after Shostakovich and his family had been evacuated. This symphony quickly became immensely popular in a world at war, and its final triumphalism – required in any case by Soviet rules – effectively united the Allies with Russia and obscured the fact that Stalin was a greater mass murderer than Hitler. Yet the work has not had the staying power of some other Shostakovich symphonies or of Stravinsky’s more modestly scaled pieces (this symphony lasts longer than the entire Stravinsky CD).
The Shostakovich Seventh actually has some relationship to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which is recalled in the opening to the symphony’s Adagio. But Shostakovich’s work is most famous for the strident and vulgar march in the first movement, which most commentators take to represent the advancing Nazis. Shostakovich’s technique here was not new: the 11-minute crescendo recalls both Ravel’s Bolero and Rossini’s technique of raising volume by adding instruments, while the increasing menace of side drums sounds much like what Nielsen produced in his Fifth Symphony (written in 1922, shortly after the previous world war). But Shostakovich’s willingness to let the theme be vulgar, to allow it to swallow the idealized simplicity that was portrayed earlier in the movement, was immensely effective – and still is in Kurt Masur’s performance, which pulls out all the stops here. But even Masur’s intensity and the fine playing of Orchestre National de France cannot bring the remaining movements fully into line with the first, which practically stands on its own as a tone poem (which is actually how Shostakovich originally conceived it). The finale, in particular, seems tacked on: it is easy to see why it was welcomed worldwide when international performances began in 1942, but if the first-movement march represents the banality of evil, this movement’s conclusion seems to show the banality of victory. This highly Russia-focused symphony by a composer who stayed in the homeland has less to say to the world today than the more cosmopolitan productions of the exile, Stravinsky. And although Masur’s performance rates (++++) on a strictly musical basis, the Naïve CD deserves only a (+++) overall rating, because the audience at this live recording is unusually noisy – coughing, sniffling, shuffling and crinkling throughout, with even Masur contributing to the sounds. Maybe it’s just hard to sit still for the Shostakovich Seventh in 2006.
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad.” Kurt Masur conducting Orchestre National de France. Naïve. $16.99.
For Russian composers of the 20th century, there were really only two choices: flee or accommodate. Igor Stravinsky, famously, fled; Dmitri Shostakovich, equally famously, accommodated. The contrasts between the works they produced are surely due in part to their very different relationships to their homeland, just as they are partly due to differences in temperament and training. Yet each composer was, in his own way, Russian to the core.
Stravinsky’s Three Russian Sacred Choruses were specifically written to be used in the Russian Orthodox Church, and are for chorus only – the church does not allow use of musical instruments. The Mass, which does include instruments, uses the five traditional sections of the Latin mass and encapsulates this Roman Catholic religious experience in 17 minutes. Religious music of this sort was anathema in what was then the Soviet Union, which was officially atheist. Yet Stravinsky clearly felt the pull of religious traditions strongly, and thanks to his exile was able to explore them at length. Nor did he stop with the New Testament: both Babel and the justly famous Symphony of Psalms draw on the Old Testament. The first of these uses text from Genesis, while the second uses parts of Psalms 38 and 39 and all of Psalm 150. Babel includes both a narrator (David Wilson-Johnson in the new Naxos Robert Craft CD) and a male chorus, as well as orchestra, while the Symphony of Psalms is for chorus and orchestra only. Craft understands this music viscerally as well as intellectually, and his performances of all these works reach out successfully beyond the religious texts to the wider audience that Stravinsky sought.
In some ways, the most interesting piece on the latest Naxos/Craft CD is the one least tied to traditional religion: Cantata for 5 Instruments, Female Chorus, Mezzo-Soprano and Tenor. This is a seven-movement work whose central “Ricercar II: ‘Tomorrow Shall Be’” is almost as long as the other six movements put together. Craft expertly merges and highlights the voices of mezzo Mary Ann Hart and tenor Thomas Bogdan with the Gregg Smith Singers and Fred Sherry’s cello, Stephen Taylor’s oboe, Melanie Field’s oboe and cor anglais, and the flutes of Michael Parloff and Bart Feller. There is some straightforward religiosity here: that central “Ricercar II” involves Christ’s foretelling of his crucifixion. But there are also four dirges, a poem of a young bride and more – the totality being an emotionally complex and highly moving work to which Craft provides forward thrust and an overall feeling of unity.
Several of these Stravinsky pieces cluster in or around World War II: Babel dates to 1944 and the Mass was started the same year, though not finished until 1948. But none of these pieces speaks directly to the war, as Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 most assuredly does. The first three movements of the composer’s longest symphony were written in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) while the city was under siege by the Nazis in 1941; the triumphal fourth movement was written after Shostakovich and his family had been evacuated. This symphony quickly became immensely popular in a world at war, and its final triumphalism – required in any case by Soviet rules – effectively united the Allies with Russia and obscured the fact that Stalin was a greater mass murderer than Hitler. Yet the work has not had the staying power of some other Shostakovich symphonies or of Stravinsky’s more modestly scaled pieces (this symphony lasts longer than the entire Stravinsky CD).
The Shostakovich Seventh actually has some relationship to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which is recalled in the opening to the symphony’s Adagio. But Shostakovich’s work is most famous for the strident and vulgar march in the first movement, which most commentators take to represent the advancing Nazis. Shostakovich’s technique here was not new: the 11-minute crescendo recalls both Ravel’s Bolero and Rossini’s technique of raising volume by adding instruments, while the increasing menace of side drums sounds much like what Nielsen produced in his Fifth Symphony (written in 1922, shortly after the previous world war). But Shostakovich’s willingness to let the theme be vulgar, to allow it to swallow the idealized simplicity that was portrayed earlier in the movement, was immensely effective – and still is in Kurt Masur’s performance, which pulls out all the stops here. But even Masur’s intensity and the fine playing of Orchestre National de France cannot bring the remaining movements fully into line with the first, which practically stands on its own as a tone poem (which is actually how Shostakovich originally conceived it). The finale, in particular, seems tacked on: it is easy to see why it was welcomed worldwide when international performances began in 1942, but if the first-movement march represents the banality of evil, this movement’s conclusion seems to show the banality of victory. This highly Russia-focused symphony by a composer who stayed in the homeland has less to say to the world today than the more cosmopolitan productions of the exile, Stravinsky. And although Masur’s performance rates (++++) on a strictly musical basis, the Naïve CD deserves only a (+++) overall rating, because the audience at this live recording is unusually noisy – coughing, sniffling, shuffling and crinkling throughout, with even Masur contributing to the sounds. Maybe it’s just hard to sit still for the Shostakovich Seventh in 2006.
November 09, 2006
(++++) GOOD OLD STORIES
The Happy Lion Roars. By Louise Fatio. Pictures by Roger Duvoisin. Knopf. $15.95.
Pirates, Ships, and Sailors. By Kathryn and Byron Jackson. Illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. Golden Books. $14.95.
They don’t make ‘em the way they used to, and in many ways that is a good thing: today’s technologies, communications capabilities, and even movies and TV and written stories are in many ways superior to and more interesting than those of 50 or so years ago. Yet there are charms to certain productions of the mid-20th century that are missing in more-modern works, and that is why it is good to have new editions of some old-time books available for a new generation of young people.
The Happy Lion Roars is the second of 10 Happy Lion books by the wife-and-husband team of Louise Fatio and Roger Duvoisin. The first book, The Happy Lion, originally released in 1954 and reissued in 2004, chronicled the adventures in the city of the pleasant, well-fed title character. The Happy Lion Roars, which dates to 1957, starts with the happy lion being unhappy – because he is lonely. Duvoisin’s delightful illustrations give the lion facial expressions and body language that show his loneliness quite clearly, while Fatio’s descriptions of the companionship enjoyed by other animals – and the humans who come to the zoo to visit them – make the lion’s predicament clear. Then the Happy Lion spots a Beautiful Lioness, who is visiting the animal park as part of a circus – and the two lions hatch an escape plot that leads to the Beautiful Lioness moving into the Happy Lion’s cave house, where the Happy Lion’s body conceals her from everyone searching for her. But then a little girl spots the lioness, the circus people move in to recapture her, and “the Happy Lion roared the biggest, loudest, longest roar he had ever roared in his life.” This sets the stage for a happy ending, an end to loneliness, and a book that retains every bit of its charm 50 years after it first appeared.
Pirates, Ships, and Sailors is not a full-length book but a collection of 24 stories and poems – a mixed bag, and a very pleasant one. Dating all the way back to 1950, this large-size book – 10½ by 12 inches – offers denser storytelling than you will usually find in a modern book of 70 pages. Some stories are heartwarming: “The Wonderful Bottle” is about a little girl’s discovery of a ship in a bottle, and how she gets one of her own. Some are adventurous: “The Big Little Cook’s Boy” is the story of how a young boy foils a band of pirates. Some are based on legend: “The Flying Dutchman” is the tale of one seaman’s encounter with that damned soul, and is accompanied by one of the best Gustaf Tenggren illustrations in the book. Kathryn and Byron Jackson tell all the stories straightforwardly and with evident relish, and they sprinkle poems in between the tales, from the moving “Lighthouse” (now rendered obsolete by advancing technology, but still the stuff of little boys’ dreams) to the silly “Twenty-Five Sailors Went Down to the Sea.” More than half a century after its first publication, this remains a book to cherish.
Pirates, Ships, and Sailors. By Kathryn and Byron Jackson. Illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. Golden Books. $14.95.
They don’t make ‘em the way they used to, and in many ways that is a good thing: today’s technologies, communications capabilities, and even movies and TV and written stories are in many ways superior to and more interesting than those of 50 or so years ago. Yet there are charms to certain productions of the mid-20th century that are missing in more-modern works, and that is why it is good to have new editions of some old-time books available for a new generation of young people.
The Happy Lion Roars is the second of 10 Happy Lion books by the wife-and-husband team of Louise Fatio and Roger Duvoisin. The first book, The Happy Lion, originally released in 1954 and reissued in 2004, chronicled the adventures in the city of the pleasant, well-fed title character. The Happy Lion Roars, which dates to 1957, starts with the happy lion being unhappy – because he is lonely. Duvoisin’s delightful illustrations give the lion facial expressions and body language that show his loneliness quite clearly, while Fatio’s descriptions of the companionship enjoyed by other animals – and the humans who come to the zoo to visit them – make the lion’s predicament clear. Then the Happy Lion spots a Beautiful Lioness, who is visiting the animal park as part of a circus – and the two lions hatch an escape plot that leads to the Beautiful Lioness moving into the Happy Lion’s cave house, where the Happy Lion’s body conceals her from everyone searching for her. But then a little girl spots the lioness, the circus people move in to recapture her, and “the Happy Lion roared the biggest, loudest, longest roar he had ever roared in his life.” This sets the stage for a happy ending, an end to loneliness, and a book that retains every bit of its charm 50 years after it first appeared.
Pirates, Ships, and Sailors is not a full-length book but a collection of 24 stories and poems – a mixed bag, and a very pleasant one. Dating all the way back to 1950, this large-size book – 10½ by 12 inches – offers denser storytelling than you will usually find in a modern book of 70 pages. Some stories are heartwarming: “The Wonderful Bottle” is about a little girl’s discovery of a ship in a bottle, and how she gets one of her own. Some are adventurous: “The Big Little Cook’s Boy” is the story of how a young boy foils a band of pirates. Some are based on legend: “The Flying Dutchman” is the tale of one seaman’s encounter with that damned soul, and is accompanied by one of the best Gustaf Tenggren illustrations in the book. Kathryn and Byron Jackson tell all the stories straightforwardly and with evident relish, and they sprinkle poems in between the tales, from the moving “Lighthouse” (now rendered obsolete by advancing technology, but still the stuff of little boys’ dreams) to the silly “Twenty-Five Sailors Went Down to the Sea.” More than half a century after its first publication, this remains a book to cherish.
(++++) TRUTH AND INCONSEQUENTIALITIES
Great Mythconceptions. By Karl Kruszelnicki. Illustrated by Adam Yazxhi. Andrews McMeel. $12.95.
The Odd Brain. By Stephan Juan. Andrews McMeel. $10.95.
See Spot Smell. By Sue Warwick. Andrews McMeel. $7.95.
Sometimes an author gets the balance in what are colloquially called “fun facts” just right. Great Mythconceptions is one of those books in which the fun and the facts are just about equally matched – with each element making the other more enjoyable. Karl Kruszelnicki (who is called “Dr.” but whose form of doctorate is never identified) provides “the science behind the myths” on 52 topics, from dirty desks (which have more bacteria per square inch than a toilet seat does) to the tallest mountain on Earth (which, if “tallest” refers to the mountain whose top is farthest away from the center of the Earth, is Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador – because the Earth bulges outward toward the equator). Kruszelnicki tosses some really fascinating factual tidbits into his explanations, such as one about how the word “pencil” ultimately derives from the Latin word “penis,” which originally meant “tail.” Along the way, he debunks some persistent myths. For instance, the famed dirigible Hindenburg did not burn because of its hydrogen fuel – the culprit was its flammable skin, which was coated with chemicals that burned when static electricity from the mooring ropes reached it. Kruszelnicki includes references at the end of each item, so interested readers – and there should be a lot of them – can check on the facts themselves.
Stephan Juan is also called “Dr.” on the cover of his book, The Odd Brain, and his form of degree is also never explained. His book, a successor to The Odd Body, is more for fun than for factual enlightenment and gets a (+++) rating. There are plenty of facts here, but Juan’s format undercuts the seriousness of his explanations, as in a chapter called, “Cacodemonomania: When You Believe You Are Possessed by a Demon or Devil or Don’t Know ‘Witch.’” The main narrative of this book is punctuated by small fact boxes at various places on the pages – some of which add interesting elements to the discussion and some of which don’t. There are 35 chapters here, starting with “The Antiseptic Brain” and ending with “The TV Brain,” so there’s plenty to read and plenty of interesting material. But Juan does have a tendency to throw in information that begs for elucidation – without providing any. For instance, a Chicago woman has “three small but fully formed and functioning brains in her skull. She lives a normal life as a grocery clerk.” If you want to know more, you’ll have to find it on your own (Juan does provide footnotes) – the approach here is mostly once-over-lightly.
The canine brain is quite different from the human one, and that can make interactions of the two species both fascinating and frustrating. Sue Warwick tries to bridge the gap with the entertaining board book, See Spot Smell, which she designates “A Scratch & Sniff Book for Dogs.” Give this a (+++) rating for being both very clever and very paltry in its contents: a mere six illustrations of items, each with a scratch-and-sniff spot that humans and canines can presumably enjoy together. If you really want to read to your dog, this is a good way to do so – but don’t be surprised if that smell of cheese leads your canine companion to try to eat the book (which is emphatically not edible).
The Odd Brain. By Stephan Juan. Andrews McMeel. $10.95.
See Spot Smell. By Sue Warwick. Andrews McMeel. $7.95.
Sometimes an author gets the balance in what are colloquially called “fun facts” just right. Great Mythconceptions is one of those books in which the fun and the facts are just about equally matched – with each element making the other more enjoyable. Karl Kruszelnicki (who is called “Dr.” but whose form of doctorate is never identified) provides “the science behind the myths” on 52 topics, from dirty desks (which have more bacteria per square inch than a toilet seat does) to the tallest mountain on Earth (which, if “tallest” refers to the mountain whose top is farthest away from the center of the Earth, is Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador – because the Earth bulges outward toward the equator). Kruszelnicki tosses some really fascinating factual tidbits into his explanations, such as one about how the word “pencil” ultimately derives from the Latin word “penis,” which originally meant “tail.” Along the way, he debunks some persistent myths. For instance, the famed dirigible Hindenburg did not burn because of its hydrogen fuel – the culprit was its flammable skin, which was coated with chemicals that burned when static electricity from the mooring ropes reached it. Kruszelnicki includes references at the end of each item, so interested readers – and there should be a lot of them – can check on the facts themselves.
Stephan Juan is also called “Dr.” on the cover of his book, The Odd Brain, and his form of degree is also never explained. His book, a successor to The Odd Body, is more for fun than for factual enlightenment and gets a (+++) rating. There are plenty of facts here, but Juan’s format undercuts the seriousness of his explanations, as in a chapter called, “Cacodemonomania: When You Believe You Are Possessed by a Demon or Devil or Don’t Know ‘Witch.’” The main narrative of this book is punctuated by small fact boxes at various places on the pages – some of which add interesting elements to the discussion and some of which don’t. There are 35 chapters here, starting with “The Antiseptic Brain” and ending with “The TV Brain,” so there’s plenty to read and plenty of interesting material. But Juan does have a tendency to throw in information that begs for elucidation – without providing any. For instance, a Chicago woman has “three small but fully formed and functioning brains in her skull. She lives a normal life as a grocery clerk.” If you want to know more, you’ll have to find it on your own (Juan does provide footnotes) – the approach here is mostly once-over-lightly.
The canine brain is quite different from the human one, and that can make interactions of the two species both fascinating and frustrating. Sue Warwick tries to bridge the gap with the entertaining board book, See Spot Smell, which she designates “A Scratch & Sniff Book for Dogs.” Give this a (+++) rating for being both very clever and very paltry in its contents: a mere six illustrations of items, each with a scratch-and-sniff spot that humans and canines can presumably enjoy together. If you really want to read to your dog, this is a good way to do so – but don’t be surprised if that smell of cheese leads your canine companion to try to eat the book (which is emphatically not edible).
(++++) RAISING KIDS IN GOOD TIMES AND BAD
Touchpoints: Birth to Three, 2nd Edition. By T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., with Joshua D. Sparrow, M.D. Da Capo. $17.95.
Your Child’s Divorce: What to Expect – What You Can Do. By Marsha Temlock, M.A. Impact Publishers. $17.95.
Touchpoints is one book that fully lives up to its subtitle: “Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development.” T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow present an even 500 pages of advice on almost every topic likely to affect parents during the first years of a child’s life in the second edition of Touchpoints: Birth to Three. Much that is here has been kept unchanged since the first edition more than a decade ago: there is month-by-month (and even week-by-week) developmental information, and there are considerations of typical developmental difficulties (or “challenges,” as the authors put it) – ranging from allergies and asthma to television and toilet training. Within the sections, though, there have been a variety of updates, with new discussions on families sleeping together, obesity prevention and more. You simply won’t find more thorough, no-nonsense guides to a child’s early years than Drs. Brazelton and Sparrow. A typical comment, in a section on self-esteem, reads, “The pressure on a small child to learn to read, write, or perform tasks that may not be appropriate for his age and stage of development is a danger if it overwhelms the child’s own sense of competence.” On feeding, the authors remark, “If you give [an eight-month-old] two or three soft bits of table food when you sit her down – to finger, to pick up, to smear, and finally to put into her mouth – you’ll find she is absolutely enthralled.” Even these two brief quotations show the viewpoint of Touchpoints: babies will develop at their own pace, and that is the best way to let them develop – even when some messiness and parental worries are involved. Above all, Brazelton and Sparrow urge parents (though not in so many words) to take it easy – things will be fine, and if they are not fine (the authors explore developmental difficulties level-headedly), there are things that parents and doctors can do. There has always been something highly empowering about Touchpoints. The new edition brings its success up to date.
Once children are well past the “baby” stage and have themselves become adults, parents of those now-grown kids face all sorts of new challenges. Some are distinctly unpleasant, such as what to do when an adult child is getting a divorce. Marsha Temlock, who helped her own two adult children handle difficult divorces, says it is important to strengthen your relationship with your child during this troubled time – while being a role model for him/her and for any grandchildren. This is a very tall order indeed, especially when Temlock urges parents of adult children to do things that sound straightforward on paper but that are extraordinarily difficult to implement in the real world. For example, Temlock recommends helping with the legal and financial issues of divorce and also helping grandchildren deal with their feelings. That is a lot to ask of parents/grandparents who may not live anywhere near their adult children’s families – as is increasingly likely nowadays. “Feelings of guilt will linger for parents who cannot be there face-to-face to answer the call for help.” Well, yes – and so? Temlock suggests phone, E-mail, fax and other long-distance contact, but of course these are not likely to be enough for anyone suffering emotional turmoil. On other subjects, Temlock says what to do when your values clash with those of a divorcing child; how to handle his/her request to come home; what to do if your child needs ongoing financial support; what to tell other children if you are giving extra help to one who is divorcing; and much more. Temlock’s solutions are a touch too pat, and sometimes a trifle too simplified, to give the book a (++++) rating, but it deserves a solid (+++) for its plainspokenness and the well-meaning and loving way it tries to tackle an extraordinarily difficult time in the lives of three separate but interdependent generations.
Your Child’s Divorce: What to Expect – What You Can Do. By Marsha Temlock, M.A. Impact Publishers. $17.95.
Touchpoints is one book that fully lives up to its subtitle: “Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development.” T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow present an even 500 pages of advice on almost every topic likely to affect parents during the first years of a child’s life in the second edition of Touchpoints: Birth to Three. Much that is here has been kept unchanged since the first edition more than a decade ago: there is month-by-month (and even week-by-week) developmental information, and there are considerations of typical developmental difficulties (or “challenges,” as the authors put it) – ranging from allergies and asthma to television and toilet training. Within the sections, though, there have been a variety of updates, with new discussions on families sleeping together, obesity prevention and more. You simply won’t find more thorough, no-nonsense guides to a child’s early years than Drs. Brazelton and Sparrow. A typical comment, in a section on self-esteem, reads, “The pressure on a small child to learn to read, write, or perform tasks that may not be appropriate for his age and stage of development is a danger if it overwhelms the child’s own sense of competence.” On feeding, the authors remark, “If you give [an eight-month-old] two or three soft bits of table food when you sit her down – to finger, to pick up, to smear, and finally to put into her mouth – you’ll find she is absolutely enthralled.” Even these two brief quotations show the viewpoint of Touchpoints: babies will develop at their own pace, and that is the best way to let them develop – even when some messiness and parental worries are involved. Above all, Brazelton and Sparrow urge parents (though not in so many words) to take it easy – things will be fine, and if they are not fine (the authors explore developmental difficulties level-headedly), there are things that parents and doctors can do. There has always been something highly empowering about Touchpoints. The new edition brings its success up to date.
Once children are well past the “baby” stage and have themselves become adults, parents of those now-grown kids face all sorts of new challenges. Some are distinctly unpleasant, such as what to do when an adult child is getting a divorce. Marsha Temlock, who helped her own two adult children handle difficult divorces, says it is important to strengthen your relationship with your child during this troubled time – while being a role model for him/her and for any grandchildren. This is a very tall order indeed, especially when Temlock urges parents of adult children to do things that sound straightforward on paper but that are extraordinarily difficult to implement in the real world. For example, Temlock recommends helping with the legal and financial issues of divorce and also helping grandchildren deal with their feelings. That is a lot to ask of parents/grandparents who may not live anywhere near their adult children’s families – as is increasingly likely nowadays. “Feelings of guilt will linger for parents who cannot be there face-to-face to answer the call for help.” Well, yes – and so? Temlock suggests phone, E-mail, fax and other long-distance contact, but of course these are not likely to be enough for anyone suffering emotional turmoil. On other subjects, Temlock says what to do when your values clash with those of a divorcing child; how to handle his/her request to come home; what to do if your child needs ongoing financial support; what to tell other children if you are giving extra help to one who is divorcing; and much more. Temlock’s solutions are a touch too pat, and sometimes a trifle too simplified, to give the book a (++++) rating, but it deserves a solid (+++) for its plainspokenness and the well-meaning and loving way it tries to tackle an extraordinarily difficult time in the lives of three separate but interdependent generations.
(+++) FACING THE FACTS
Saving the Buffalo. By Albert Marrin. Scholastic. $18.99.
Our World: A Country-by-Country Guide. By Millie Miller. Scholastic. $16.99.
Scholastic Book of World Records 2007. By Jenifer Corr Morse. Scholastic. $9.99.
Strictly factual books for young people fall into two broad categories: narrative and lookup. The narrative books take information and present it in story format, providing, at their best, much of the pacing and intensity of good fiction. The lookup books, not intended to be read straight through, offer informational snippets, to be looked up when needed or glanced at a little bit at a time.
Saving the Buffalo is a narrative, and a good one. It is the story of the great herds of bison that once thundered through the United States midsection – since long before there was a United States – and of how the young nation’s westward expansion nearly brought these once-common large land animals to extinction. It is also the story of their return from the brink – a tale of a conservation effort that succeeded. The story is somewhat marred by political correctness and the modern tendency to take a Rousseauian view of life before mechanization: the railroad and the white settlers who rode it west are the bad guys here, supplanting the far more collegial (if scarcely trouble-free) life of the Indian tribes in the days before European settlement. Still, if Albert Marrin tends to overdo the demonization of white settlers, he has reason: it was their massive hunts, often organized by the railroads themselves, that virtually wiped out the great bison herds. It puts the heroes of the Old West into perspective when Marrin points out, in the context of conservation, that Buffalo Bill Cody once shot 4,280 buffalo in 18 months. The final part of this book, the story of the survival of the buffalo – thanks to conservation efforts initially led by white people, if that matters – is truly inspirational, indicating the importance of bison not only ecologically but also for the spiritual renewal of many Indian tribes.
The narrative tale of bison in the U.S. stands in contrast to the lots-of-facts-per-page approach of Our World: A Country-by-Country Guide, in which the United States gets a few pages of facts – and so do France, Germany, India, China, the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand and even Antarctica. This book is scarcely comprehensive – there are nearly 200 countries in the world, and no attempt is made to discuss all of them. The idea is to give some interesting facts about individual nations and the areas where they are located. The pages on Oceania, for instance, show a Samoan using a conch shell as a trumpet, a Northern Australian frilled lizard, and the white sand beaches of Bora Bora. The book indicates that the Near East includes Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, and that “most people…are Muslims who follow the Islamic religion.” Clearly, this is not an in-depth book or one fraught with political insight: the discussion of Afghanistan and Pakistan mentions the Khyber Pass and tea drinking, but says nothing about war. As a generic once-over-lightly look at a number of countries, the book can be helpful to young children just starting to learn about the world.
Scholastic Book of World Records is designed less for learning than for amazement. The 2007 edition contains a number of items that are not likely to change (world’s longest ship canal, world’s highest city) and a number that, at some point, probably will (runner with the world’s fastest mile, NBA player with the highest salary). The book’s pop-culture emphasis is pervasive: there are 64 pages of sports records, 29 relating to popular culture other than sports, but just 18 on money and business. The net result is a book that is not to be taken too seriously: the information is accurate, and some entries can be fun to read (the world’s top-grossing movie for children is still the 1937 Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), but the data are highly selective and presented in a way that emphasizes visual impact without too much distracting in-depth backup.
Our World: A Country-by-Country Guide. By Millie Miller. Scholastic. $16.99.
Scholastic Book of World Records 2007. By Jenifer Corr Morse. Scholastic. $9.99.
Strictly factual books for young people fall into two broad categories: narrative and lookup. The narrative books take information and present it in story format, providing, at their best, much of the pacing and intensity of good fiction. The lookup books, not intended to be read straight through, offer informational snippets, to be looked up when needed or glanced at a little bit at a time.
Saving the Buffalo is a narrative, and a good one. It is the story of the great herds of bison that once thundered through the United States midsection – since long before there was a United States – and of how the young nation’s westward expansion nearly brought these once-common large land animals to extinction. It is also the story of their return from the brink – a tale of a conservation effort that succeeded. The story is somewhat marred by political correctness and the modern tendency to take a Rousseauian view of life before mechanization: the railroad and the white settlers who rode it west are the bad guys here, supplanting the far more collegial (if scarcely trouble-free) life of the Indian tribes in the days before European settlement. Still, if Albert Marrin tends to overdo the demonization of white settlers, he has reason: it was their massive hunts, often organized by the railroads themselves, that virtually wiped out the great bison herds. It puts the heroes of the Old West into perspective when Marrin points out, in the context of conservation, that Buffalo Bill Cody once shot 4,280 buffalo in 18 months. The final part of this book, the story of the survival of the buffalo – thanks to conservation efforts initially led by white people, if that matters – is truly inspirational, indicating the importance of bison not only ecologically but also for the spiritual renewal of many Indian tribes.
The narrative tale of bison in the U.S. stands in contrast to the lots-of-facts-per-page approach of Our World: A Country-by-Country Guide, in which the United States gets a few pages of facts – and so do France, Germany, India, China, the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand and even Antarctica. This book is scarcely comprehensive – there are nearly 200 countries in the world, and no attempt is made to discuss all of them. The idea is to give some interesting facts about individual nations and the areas where they are located. The pages on Oceania, for instance, show a Samoan using a conch shell as a trumpet, a Northern Australian frilled lizard, and the white sand beaches of Bora Bora. The book indicates that the Near East includes Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, and that “most people…are Muslims who follow the Islamic religion.” Clearly, this is not an in-depth book or one fraught with political insight: the discussion of Afghanistan and Pakistan mentions the Khyber Pass and tea drinking, but says nothing about war. As a generic once-over-lightly look at a number of countries, the book can be helpful to young children just starting to learn about the world.
Scholastic Book of World Records is designed less for learning than for amazement. The 2007 edition contains a number of items that are not likely to change (world’s longest ship canal, world’s highest city) and a number that, at some point, probably will (runner with the world’s fastest mile, NBA player with the highest salary). The book’s pop-culture emphasis is pervasive: there are 64 pages of sports records, 29 relating to popular culture other than sports, but just 18 on money and business. The net result is a book that is not to be taken too seriously: the information is accurate, and some entries can be fun to read (the world’s top-grossing movie for children is still the 1937 Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), but the data are highly selective and presented in a way that emphasizes visual impact without too much distracting in-depth backup.
(+++) FUTURE IMPERFECT
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life. By John Maeda. MIT Press. $20.
The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline. By Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi. MIT Press. $24.95.
John Maeda has some simple, elegant ideas about product design, the interface between technology and the real world, and the Zen of white space (although he does not put it quite that way). He also has a maddening tendency to undercut his own powerful arguments for simplicity through, alas, over-complicating them – and through some cutesy presentation that is less simple than it is gimmicky. Maeda is a graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist, and he is founder of the SIMPLICITY Consortium at the MIT Media Lab. Applied strictly to technology projects, his ideas are remarkably lucid. For example, in one chapter, he sets against each other the questions, “How can you make the wait shorter?” and “How can you make the wait more tolerable?” That is an excellent, to-the-point formulation of two different (and ultimately complementary) approaches to the same problem. Similarly, in another chapter, he positions side by side the tradeoff questions, “How directed can I stand to feel?” and “How directionless can I afford to be?” Set against these elegant constructs are such elements as the blank page marked “don’t write on this page,” the two Japanese characters for “love” and “fit,” and Maeda’s explanation of those characters: “There can be a natural emotional attachment to the object’s life force that is a kind of deep, hidden ornamentation known to only those who feel it.” Maeda offers 10 Laws of simplicity, plus three Keys, and specifically tells readers that “basic simplicity (1 to 3) is immediately applicable,” while “intermediate simplicity (4 to 6) is more subtle in meaning” and “deep simplicity (7 to 9) ventures into thoughts that are still ripening on the vine.” As the book moves from the practical toward the philosophical, it becomes more self-consciously self-important and self-referential – but there are still some valuable and interesting insights here.
If Maeda is trying to get a handle on the future of technology and of the thought processes that go into creating it, Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi are trying to get a handle on something more everyday, though scarcely less complex. The Future of Europe is an argument, from an economic and econometric perspective, that Europe’s wealthiest nations will become increasingly irrelevant economically and politically if they do not tackle and reform a system that focuses on security and relaxation more than on productivity and innovation. This is scarcely a new viewpoint, but Alesina (Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economics at Harvard University) and Giavazzi (Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a Visiting Professor at MIT) make it cogently – and with much reference to financial markets, the costs of doing business, the Euro and other factors. They can and do point out that there are a number of special-interest groups opposed to economic liberalization, which is what the authors call the idea of introducing more American-style competitiveness into European economies. But they do not say – probably because there is no way to say – how to manage the political realities of taking on those groups. The recent disastrous French experiment that would have allowed young, recently hired workers to be dismissed without cause far more easily than others – a plan that sparked riots and was eventually withdrawn – shows just how hard it would be to change European econopolitical culture. There is no current European leader who bestrides the continent like the colossus that would be required to shake up the region’s economies significantly. Meanwhile, there is a counter-current building in the U.S., with some interest groups seeking more comfort and leisure time – and greater government involvement in the economy – along with higher taxes. It seems unlikely that Europe can or will move significantly toward the U.S.-focused model that Alesina and Giavazzi favor. Whether that failure to change does indeed lead to the region’s decline is something that observers are likely to discover in the not-too-distant future.
The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline. By Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi. MIT Press. $24.95.
John Maeda has some simple, elegant ideas about product design, the interface between technology and the real world, and the Zen of white space (although he does not put it quite that way). He also has a maddening tendency to undercut his own powerful arguments for simplicity through, alas, over-complicating them – and through some cutesy presentation that is less simple than it is gimmicky. Maeda is a graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist, and he is founder of the SIMPLICITY Consortium at the MIT Media Lab. Applied strictly to technology projects, his ideas are remarkably lucid. For example, in one chapter, he sets against each other the questions, “How can you make the wait shorter?” and “How can you make the wait more tolerable?” That is an excellent, to-the-point formulation of two different (and ultimately complementary) approaches to the same problem. Similarly, in another chapter, he positions side by side the tradeoff questions, “How directed can I stand to feel?” and “How directionless can I afford to be?” Set against these elegant constructs are such elements as the blank page marked “don’t write on this page,” the two Japanese characters for “love” and “fit,” and Maeda’s explanation of those characters: “There can be a natural emotional attachment to the object’s life force that is a kind of deep, hidden ornamentation known to only those who feel it.” Maeda offers 10 Laws of simplicity, plus three Keys, and specifically tells readers that “basic simplicity (1 to 3) is immediately applicable,” while “intermediate simplicity (4 to 6) is more subtle in meaning” and “deep simplicity (7 to 9) ventures into thoughts that are still ripening on the vine.” As the book moves from the practical toward the philosophical, it becomes more self-consciously self-important and self-referential – but there are still some valuable and interesting insights here.
If Maeda is trying to get a handle on the future of technology and of the thought processes that go into creating it, Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi are trying to get a handle on something more everyday, though scarcely less complex. The Future of Europe is an argument, from an economic and econometric perspective, that Europe’s wealthiest nations will become increasingly irrelevant economically and politically if they do not tackle and reform a system that focuses on security and relaxation more than on productivity and innovation. This is scarcely a new viewpoint, but Alesina (Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economics at Harvard University) and Giavazzi (Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a Visiting Professor at MIT) make it cogently – and with much reference to financial markets, the costs of doing business, the Euro and other factors. They can and do point out that there are a number of special-interest groups opposed to economic liberalization, which is what the authors call the idea of introducing more American-style competitiveness into European economies. But they do not say – probably because there is no way to say – how to manage the political realities of taking on those groups. The recent disastrous French experiment that would have allowed young, recently hired workers to be dismissed without cause far more easily than others – a plan that sparked riots and was eventually withdrawn – shows just how hard it would be to change European econopolitical culture. There is no current European leader who bestrides the continent like the colossus that would be required to shake up the region’s economies significantly. Meanwhile, there is a counter-current building in the U.S., with some interest groups seeking more comfort and leisure time – and greater government involvement in the economy – along with higher taxes. It seems unlikely that Europe can or will move significantly toward the U.S.-focused model that Alesina and Giavazzi favor. Whether that failure to change does indeed lead to the region’s decline is something that observers are likely to discover in the not-too-distant future.
November 02, 2006
(++++) NUMEROUS ENJOYMENTS
The Red Lemon. By Bob Staake. Golden Books. $14.95.
The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven. By Jonah Winter. Pictures by Barry Blitt. Schwartz & Wade. $15.95.
Alphabet Explosion! Search and Count from Alien to Zebra. By John Nickle. Schwartz & Wade. $16.95.
There’s lots of fun with and about numbers in all three of these books – none of which is a counting book. Maybe that’s their numerological secret.
Bob Staake’s delicious The Red Lemon is about a farmer (his body drawn as a huge circle, his head as a smaller one, his nose a still smaller one) who grows hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of wonderful lemons (on trees shaped like huge circles on trunks). “Bright yellow lemons for miles and miles!” exults Farmer McPhee, thinking of all the delicious things people can do with them: pie, sherbet, muffins, lemon chiffon cream cake, and other mouthwatering goodies. But THEN…Farmer McPhee spots a single RED lemon. Impossible! Absurd! Not to be tolerated! He picks it, and the two pages describing his reactions are themselves drawn entirely in red. The farmer tosses the lemon away, and it lands on a small island nearby – an island that, over time, attracts people and commerce, and on which red-lemon trees sprout “in a grove of near twenty.” Furthermore, “if yellow lemons/ were always a treat,/ the red lemon versions/ were six times as sweet!” It’s a delightful tale, told by the numbers – the most important being the number one, as in that one original “wrongly colored” red lemon.
Numbers show up right in the title of The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven, which spins a silly fantasy around the fact that Beethoven did indeed live in 39 apartments in and around Vienna. No one knows why he moved so often; no one knows much about the apartments; but it is known that Beethoven, growing increasingly deaf, pounded more and more loudly on the piano while composing – and since he owned five legless pianos, that pounding must have been very hard on the ears of the downstairs neighbors. Jonah Winter takes the little that is known about Beethoven’s apartments and makes up reasons for his frequent moves: one had a hideous stinky cheese smell; one was palace-like, filled with light and air, but the neighbors kept telling the composer to shut up; one was tiny and in an attic, and a neighbor kept filing complaints with the local magistrate; and so on. Winter also has fun with the idea of how Beethoven’s pianos were moved – Barry Blitt’s pictures are especially amusing in these scenes. For instance, Winter suggests that one piano was lowered from a balcony, taken through the streets, pushed through a grand hall displaying suits of armor, then carried through a dentist’s office and through a hole in the wall of Beethoven’s next apartment. The whole book is written in good fun – although Winter does take some things too far, since young readers probably will not know he is kidding when he says that Beethoven wrote 10 violin sonatas, two symphonies and a string quartet in a single day.
Alphabet Explosion! is playful in a different way. It’s a bit like those books that ask you to find hard-to-detect objects within a scattering of other items. John Nickle creates silly juxtapositions of pictures, then invites readers to find, in each picture, a certain number of items beginning with a particular letter. There are, for example, 25 G’s in a picture in which a giraffe plays a guitar while a goat gives a gift to a groundhog wearing a golf tee. The number of objects varies quite a bit from letter to letter: 15 O’s, 47 S’s, 8 U’s, 7 Z’s. Kids (and parents) who find their eyes glazing over as they search for all the objects, or who simply cannot locate as many as Nickle says are in a picture, can simply turn to the back of the book, where answers are thoughtfully provided. This is an unusual, and unusually creative, approach to the alphabet – you can count on it.
The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven. By Jonah Winter. Pictures by Barry Blitt. Schwartz & Wade. $15.95.
Alphabet Explosion! Search and Count from Alien to Zebra. By John Nickle. Schwartz & Wade. $16.95.
There’s lots of fun with and about numbers in all three of these books – none of which is a counting book. Maybe that’s their numerological secret.
Bob Staake’s delicious The Red Lemon is about a farmer (his body drawn as a huge circle, his head as a smaller one, his nose a still smaller one) who grows hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of wonderful lemons (on trees shaped like huge circles on trunks). “Bright yellow lemons for miles and miles!” exults Farmer McPhee, thinking of all the delicious things people can do with them: pie, sherbet, muffins, lemon chiffon cream cake, and other mouthwatering goodies. But THEN…Farmer McPhee spots a single RED lemon. Impossible! Absurd! Not to be tolerated! He picks it, and the two pages describing his reactions are themselves drawn entirely in red. The farmer tosses the lemon away, and it lands on a small island nearby – an island that, over time, attracts people and commerce, and on which red-lemon trees sprout “in a grove of near twenty.” Furthermore, “if yellow lemons/ were always a treat,/ the red lemon versions/ were six times as sweet!” It’s a delightful tale, told by the numbers – the most important being the number one, as in that one original “wrongly colored” red lemon.
Numbers show up right in the title of The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven, which spins a silly fantasy around the fact that Beethoven did indeed live in 39 apartments in and around Vienna. No one knows why he moved so often; no one knows much about the apartments; but it is known that Beethoven, growing increasingly deaf, pounded more and more loudly on the piano while composing – and since he owned five legless pianos, that pounding must have been very hard on the ears of the downstairs neighbors. Jonah Winter takes the little that is known about Beethoven’s apartments and makes up reasons for his frequent moves: one had a hideous stinky cheese smell; one was palace-like, filled with light and air, but the neighbors kept telling the composer to shut up; one was tiny and in an attic, and a neighbor kept filing complaints with the local magistrate; and so on. Winter also has fun with the idea of how Beethoven’s pianos were moved – Barry Blitt’s pictures are especially amusing in these scenes. For instance, Winter suggests that one piano was lowered from a balcony, taken through the streets, pushed through a grand hall displaying suits of armor, then carried through a dentist’s office and through a hole in the wall of Beethoven’s next apartment. The whole book is written in good fun – although Winter does take some things too far, since young readers probably will not know he is kidding when he says that Beethoven wrote 10 violin sonatas, two symphonies and a string quartet in a single day.
Alphabet Explosion! is playful in a different way. It’s a bit like those books that ask you to find hard-to-detect objects within a scattering of other items. John Nickle creates silly juxtapositions of pictures, then invites readers to find, in each picture, a certain number of items beginning with a particular letter. There are, for example, 25 G’s in a picture in which a giraffe plays a guitar while a goat gives a gift to a groundhog wearing a golf tee. The number of objects varies quite a bit from letter to letter: 15 O’s, 47 S’s, 8 U’s, 7 Z’s. Kids (and parents) who find their eyes glazing over as they search for all the objects, or who simply cannot locate as many as Nickle says are in a picture, can simply turn to the back of the book, where answers are thoughtfully provided. This is an unusual, and unusually creative, approach to the alphabet – you can count on it.
(++++) SIMPLE AND LESS-SIMPLE PLEASURES
Over the Moon: A Collection of First Books. By Margaret Wise Brown. Pictures by Clement Hurd. HarperCollins. $19.99.
Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems. By Jack Prelutsky. Illustrations by Carin Berger. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.
Even the youngest children can and do delight in Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown’s wonderful 1947 story of a little bunny falling gently asleep while saying goodnight to everything in his room and his world. Simple in language, lovingly illustrated by Clement Hurd, it is a book that continues to charm children and parents alike after 60 years. In Over the Moon, it is joined by a little-known Brown/Hurd companion volume and a well-known book in which they use a bunny very differently. That well-known one is The Runaway Bunny, a supreme charmer in its own right – and a double pleasure to find in combination with Goodnight Moon and in a size that small as well as adult hands can manage: the hardcover volume measures 8½ x 7 inches. The Runaway Bunny features a little bunny who is so determined to leave home that he tells his mother all the things he will change into so he can escape. His mother replies with all the things she will do to catch him anyway: she will be a fisherman to his fish, a mountain climber to his rock, a tree in which his bird will roost. The idea that there is no getting away – because love will always find you – is another that has resonated for many decades: The Runaway Bunny dates all the way back to 1942. The third book within Over the Moon is the least known and least successful: My World, written in 1949 and specifically called “A Companion to Goodnight Moon.” Like the more famous, earlier book, it is an at-home story of the bunny family, but it is not quite as charming and seems a little forced: “My dog./ Daddy’s dog./ Daddy’s dog/ Once caught a frog.” The color scenes of family life, interspersed with black-and-white close-ups of everyday items (toothbrush, comb, spoon, etc.), are warm and pleasant, and if the book is not quite at the level of the two others here, it must be said that few children’s books are.
Jack Prelutsky’s level is largely set by Prelutsky himself: he is his own primary competition, having created more than 40 books of poetic word play. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is one his most absurdist romps, and one of his best. As the title and cover illustration indicate, this is a book in which animals are combined with inanimate objects, then described in verse. Among the denizens of this uniquely Prelutskian zoo – all amusingly illustrated by Carin Berger – are the Alarmadillos: “You’d imagine they’d be calmer,/ No one means them any harm,/ And besides, they’re thickly armored,/ Yet they’re always in alarm.” Or consider the Ballpoint Penguins: “Although they’ve nothing much to say,/ They write and write it anyway.” Or the Pop-up Toadsters, whose perfectly prepared bread slices are promptly snapped up by the Toasterns. Or the Clocktopus: “It moves with slow precision/ At a never-changing pace,/ Its tentacles in tempo/ With the clock upon its face.” The Circular Sawtoise, Limber Bulboa, Zipperpotamus and many more are to be found in a book that is intended for kids ages four and up – but whose combinatorial cleverness should appeal to all ages.
Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems. By Jack Prelutsky. Illustrations by Carin Berger. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.
Even the youngest children can and do delight in Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown’s wonderful 1947 story of a little bunny falling gently asleep while saying goodnight to everything in his room and his world. Simple in language, lovingly illustrated by Clement Hurd, it is a book that continues to charm children and parents alike after 60 years. In Over the Moon, it is joined by a little-known Brown/Hurd companion volume and a well-known book in which they use a bunny very differently. That well-known one is The Runaway Bunny, a supreme charmer in its own right – and a double pleasure to find in combination with Goodnight Moon and in a size that small as well as adult hands can manage: the hardcover volume measures 8½ x 7 inches. The Runaway Bunny features a little bunny who is so determined to leave home that he tells his mother all the things he will change into so he can escape. His mother replies with all the things she will do to catch him anyway: she will be a fisherman to his fish, a mountain climber to his rock, a tree in which his bird will roost. The idea that there is no getting away – because love will always find you – is another that has resonated for many decades: The Runaway Bunny dates all the way back to 1942. The third book within Over the Moon is the least known and least successful: My World, written in 1949 and specifically called “A Companion to Goodnight Moon.” Like the more famous, earlier book, it is an at-home story of the bunny family, but it is not quite as charming and seems a little forced: “My dog./ Daddy’s dog./ Daddy’s dog/ Once caught a frog.” The color scenes of family life, interspersed with black-and-white close-ups of everyday items (toothbrush, comb, spoon, etc.), are warm and pleasant, and if the book is not quite at the level of the two others here, it must be said that few children’s books are.
Jack Prelutsky’s level is largely set by Prelutsky himself: he is his own primary competition, having created more than 40 books of poetic word play. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is one his most absurdist romps, and one of his best. As the title and cover illustration indicate, this is a book in which animals are combined with inanimate objects, then described in verse. Among the denizens of this uniquely Prelutskian zoo – all amusingly illustrated by Carin Berger – are the Alarmadillos: “You’d imagine they’d be calmer,/ No one means them any harm,/ And besides, they’re thickly armored,/ Yet they’re always in alarm.” Or consider the Ballpoint Penguins: “Although they’ve nothing much to say,/ They write and write it anyway.” Or the Pop-up Toadsters, whose perfectly prepared bread slices are promptly snapped up by the Toasterns. Or the Clocktopus: “It moves with slow precision/ At a never-changing pace,/ Its tentacles in tempo/ With the clock upon its face.” The Circular Sawtoise, Limber Bulboa, Zipperpotamus and many more are to be found in a book that is intended for kids ages four and up – but whose combinatorial cleverness should appeal to all ages.
(++++) ADVENTURES IN REALITY
The Adventures of Marco Polo. By Russell Freedman. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $17.99.
Dino Poop. By Jane Hammerslough. Illustrated by Andrea Morandi. Scholastic. $9.99.
Quincy the Hobby Photographer: The Complete Guide to Do-It-Yourself Dog Photography. By J. Otto Seibold. Harcourt. $14.95.
Books can take young readers on real-world journeys as fascinating as anything in fantasy – and, in some cases, on adventures in which readers can participate themselves. These three books offer one adventure in the past, one in the deep past with modern-day participatory elements, and one in which kids can get involved anytime.
In the case of Marco Polo, the amount of fantasy and the amount of real-world adventure remain in question after 700 years. Polo is famous as the greatest explorer of his time, perhaps of any time – unless he was one of the world’s greatest liars. Polo certainly journeyed out of 13th-century Venice, his home, into what are now Turkey and Iran – places well known to Venetian traders. The questions about his travels arise based on what he said he saw as he pressed onward toward and into China – a land then unknown to Europeans. The Adventures of Marco Polo is a fascinating account of Polo’s report of his journey, and a book that makes doubts about his observations clear. Polo, for example, said that bandits he encountered used spells to turn day into night. More likely, they waited for naturally occurring sandstorms and then attacked – but Polo’s certainty about magic has caused some of his other apparently fantastic observations to be called into question. On the basis of what we know now, Polo’s journey to China – which covered 8,000 miles, including detours – does seem genuine. But it is hard to doubt that Polo may have exaggerated at times, as when he says that a huge lion brought into the presence of the Great Khan immediately flung itself down at the Khan’s feet, acknowledging the Khan as its lord, and then remained lying placidly, unchained, in the throne room. Readers of The Adventures of Marco Polo can try to unravel the mysteries of his travels themselves – and imagine what it must have been like to go to a land so different from one’s own that it seemed truly magical.
There is magic of a different, humbler sort in the oddly titled Dino Poop, which actually comes with a small coprolite – fossilized dinosaur dung. Jane Hammerslough’s title may be off-putting to parents (though probably not to kids), but families willing to look beyond what the book is called will find some truly fascinating information about very, very ancient times. The importance of dinosaur dung for plant propagation (a role dung still fills today), the sheer amount of the stuff (some dinosaurs may have produced a ton a day), even the possibility that methane produced by dinosaurs may have damaged Earth’s ozone layer in prehistoric times – these are just some of the subjects considered in this fascinating book. Chapters on amber (“Tree Spit” – Hammerslough is obviously going for a gross-is-cool factor) and the remains of mammoths and other extinct mammals are also highly interesting. And the book tells modern-day kids how to make their own coprolite-like sculptures, where to see some amazing fossils, and more.
For a much more everyday sort of adventure – but an adventure nevertheless – Quincy the Hobby Photographer shows kids the ins and outs of taking interesting photos of their canine pals. J. Otto Seibold’s book is odd in some ways: the illustrations of equipment are realistically done, the actual photos included as examples are attractive, but the pictures of Quincy and other make-believe characters range from silly to somewhat unpleasant. It’s also a little difficult to know the age range at which Seibold’s book is directed: many instructions are simple enough for even young children to follow, but when Seibold includes a page called “Keep This Chart in Your Head” that includes 11 interconnected elements of photography, he is likely to go over the heads of many kids and more than a few parents. Despite the high quality of the advice in the book, its odd presentation gives it a (+++) rating rather than a higher one. Also, kids may want an explanation of what that thing called “film” is: this is a book about traditional photography, not the increasingly common digital type. The best things here are the actual dog photos, including some that Seibold modified in a darkroom rather than on a computer. Suggestion: skim well before buying.
Dino Poop. By Jane Hammerslough. Illustrated by Andrea Morandi. Scholastic. $9.99.
Quincy the Hobby Photographer: The Complete Guide to Do-It-Yourself Dog Photography. By J. Otto Seibold. Harcourt. $14.95.
Books can take young readers on real-world journeys as fascinating as anything in fantasy – and, in some cases, on adventures in which readers can participate themselves. These three books offer one adventure in the past, one in the deep past with modern-day participatory elements, and one in which kids can get involved anytime.
In the case of Marco Polo, the amount of fantasy and the amount of real-world adventure remain in question after 700 years. Polo is famous as the greatest explorer of his time, perhaps of any time – unless he was one of the world’s greatest liars. Polo certainly journeyed out of 13th-century Venice, his home, into what are now Turkey and Iran – places well known to Venetian traders. The questions about his travels arise based on what he said he saw as he pressed onward toward and into China – a land then unknown to Europeans. The Adventures of Marco Polo is a fascinating account of Polo’s report of his journey, and a book that makes doubts about his observations clear. Polo, for example, said that bandits he encountered used spells to turn day into night. More likely, they waited for naturally occurring sandstorms and then attacked – but Polo’s certainty about magic has caused some of his other apparently fantastic observations to be called into question. On the basis of what we know now, Polo’s journey to China – which covered 8,000 miles, including detours – does seem genuine. But it is hard to doubt that Polo may have exaggerated at times, as when he says that a huge lion brought into the presence of the Great Khan immediately flung itself down at the Khan’s feet, acknowledging the Khan as its lord, and then remained lying placidly, unchained, in the throne room. Readers of The Adventures of Marco Polo can try to unravel the mysteries of his travels themselves – and imagine what it must have been like to go to a land so different from one’s own that it seemed truly magical.
There is magic of a different, humbler sort in the oddly titled Dino Poop, which actually comes with a small coprolite – fossilized dinosaur dung. Jane Hammerslough’s title may be off-putting to parents (though probably not to kids), but families willing to look beyond what the book is called will find some truly fascinating information about very, very ancient times. The importance of dinosaur dung for plant propagation (a role dung still fills today), the sheer amount of the stuff (some dinosaurs may have produced a ton a day), even the possibility that methane produced by dinosaurs may have damaged Earth’s ozone layer in prehistoric times – these are just some of the subjects considered in this fascinating book. Chapters on amber (“Tree Spit” – Hammerslough is obviously going for a gross-is-cool factor) and the remains of mammoths and other extinct mammals are also highly interesting. And the book tells modern-day kids how to make their own coprolite-like sculptures, where to see some amazing fossils, and more.
For a much more everyday sort of adventure – but an adventure nevertheless – Quincy the Hobby Photographer shows kids the ins and outs of taking interesting photos of their canine pals. J. Otto Seibold’s book is odd in some ways: the illustrations of equipment are realistically done, the actual photos included as examples are attractive, but the pictures of Quincy and other make-believe characters range from silly to somewhat unpleasant. It’s also a little difficult to know the age range at which Seibold’s book is directed: many instructions are simple enough for even young children to follow, but when Seibold includes a page called “Keep This Chart in Your Head” that includes 11 interconnected elements of photography, he is likely to go over the heads of many kids and more than a few parents. Despite the high quality of the advice in the book, its odd presentation gives it a (+++) rating rather than a higher one. Also, kids may want an explanation of what that thing called “film” is: this is a book about traditional photography, not the increasingly common digital type. The best things here are the actual dog photos, including some that Seibold modified in a darkroom rather than on a computer. Suggestion: skim well before buying.
(++++) COMICS: UP AND UP-AND-COMING
Scrum Bums: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $10.95.
Brevity. By Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry. Andrews McMeel. $10.95.
Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy has become something of a phenomenon, even though Conley still has some very strange habits. One is cartoonist “in” jokes: the latest Get Fuzzy is dedicated to Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) and features a cover in which Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch are scrimmaging over a rugby ball marked “Dilbert.” A little of this goes a long way. So does a little of Rob Wilco, the human in Bucky’s and Satchel’s life, who is drawn in a genuinely ugly style and frequently made to appear as if he is one step from being deranged: in one panel, a slice of pizza fills his entire mouth as he talks about Bucky and stares at nothing with popped eyes…and that’s only one example. So why does Conley’s work earn a (++++) rating? Because much of it is genuinely clever, and much of it appears to be intentionally strange – in addition to the parts that seem to be strange because Conley doesn’t seem able to help it. Conley gets the byplay between aggressive (and aggressively stupid) Bucky and overly nice, thoroughly self-unaware Satchel just right – maybe this cartoonist just has problems with humans. For instance, Bucky becomes fascinated with Garfield in this collection, thinking that the strip may be an unauthorized Bucky biography. Rob takes the cat and dog to visit Canada, where Satchel was born, with predictable (and some unpredictable) weirdness. Satchel, in one of his unending misunderstandings of language and of Rob, determines that Napoleon was a monkey. Bucky continues his campaign against the ferret living in a nearby apartment – and continues to lose out every time. Get Fuzzy is an odd sort of strip: part funny-animal comic, part standup-comedian shtick, part pets-and-humans story (Bucky and Satchel speak to people all the time, and the people understand them and talk with them), part character comedy (Chubby Huggs, a cat that hugs everyone, is introduced in this volume, to good effect). Maybe someday, Conley will do as well with the humans in the strips as with the animals – or maybe the point is that he simply can’t, or simply doesn’t want to.
What Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry, who sign themselves “Guy & Rodd,” want is clear enough: to create another single-panel hit along the lines of Close to Home. That is one of the cartoon series that Brevity resembles, although it also draws on everything from Non Sequitur (which is occasionally in single-panel format) to The Far Side. It is a derivative strip, although it is clever enough to earn a (+++) rating. There is no particular pattern to Guy & Rodd’s panels, and there are no particular recurring characters. The best panels are genuinely funny, such as a machine with the warning “CAUTION! DO NOT TOUCH! Extreme danger of electric shock!!!” – repeated below the words in Braille. But most panels are not at that lofty level. “Newton discovers anti-gravity” has an apple rising from the ground to hit him. Parents tell their daughter, “Now that you’re 10, we can tell you the truth: beauty isn’t actually in the eye of the beholder. There are international standards – and you haven’t met them.” One young woman tells another, “I’m looking for a man who enjoys long walks on the beach – so he has something to do while I’m shopping.” Most of the jokes are rather blah, and so is most of the drawing (Guy is the writer, Rodd the artist). There is potential here, because some of the panels require a moment’s thought: crew members of an ocean liner look into the water ahead of the ship and say, “Oh no! Loose lips!” But for now, Guy & Rodd take the easy way out too much of the time. In brief, Brevity can be better.
Brevity. By Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry. Andrews McMeel. $10.95.
Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy has become something of a phenomenon, even though Conley still has some very strange habits. One is cartoonist “in” jokes: the latest Get Fuzzy is dedicated to Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) and features a cover in which Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch are scrimmaging over a rugby ball marked “Dilbert.” A little of this goes a long way. So does a little of Rob Wilco, the human in Bucky’s and Satchel’s life, who is drawn in a genuinely ugly style and frequently made to appear as if he is one step from being deranged: in one panel, a slice of pizza fills his entire mouth as he talks about Bucky and stares at nothing with popped eyes…and that’s only one example. So why does Conley’s work earn a (++++) rating? Because much of it is genuinely clever, and much of it appears to be intentionally strange – in addition to the parts that seem to be strange because Conley doesn’t seem able to help it. Conley gets the byplay between aggressive (and aggressively stupid) Bucky and overly nice, thoroughly self-unaware Satchel just right – maybe this cartoonist just has problems with humans. For instance, Bucky becomes fascinated with Garfield in this collection, thinking that the strip may be an unauthorized Bucky biography. Rob takes the cat and dog to visit Canada, where Satchel was born, with predictable (and some unpredictable) weirdness. Satchel, in one of his unending misunderstandings of language and of Rob, determines that Napoleon was a monkey. Bucky continues his campaign against the ferret living in a nearby apartment – and continues to lose out every time. Get Fuzzy is an odd sort of strip: part funny-animal comic, part standup-comedian shtick, part pets-and-humans story (Bucky and Satchel speak to people all the time, and the people understand them and talk with them), part character comedy (Chubby Huggs, a cat that hugs everyone, is introduced in this volume, to good effect). Maybe someday, Conley will do as well with the humans in the strips as with the animals – or maybe the point is that he simply can’t, or simply doesn’t want to.
What Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry, who sign themselves “Guy & Rodd,” want is clear enough: to create another single-panel hit along the lines of Close to Home. That is one of the cartoon series that Brevity resembles, although it also draws on everything from Non Sequitur (which is occasionally in single-panel format) to The Far Side. It is a derivative strip, although it is clever enough to earn a (+++) rating. There is no particular pattern to Guy & Rodd’s panels, and there are no particular recurring characters. The best panels are genuinely funny, such as a machine with the warning “CAUTION! DO NOT TOUCH! Extreme danger of electric shock!!!” – repeated below the words in Braille. But most panels are not at that lofty level. “Newton discovers anti-gravity” has an apple rising from the ground to hit him. Parents tell their daughter, “Now that you’re 10, we can tell you the truth: beauty isn’t actually in the eye of the beholder. There are international standards – and you haven’t met them.” One young woman tells another, “I’m looking for a man who enjoys long walks on the beach – so he has something to do while I’m shopping.” Most of the jokes are rather blah, and so is most of the drawing (Guy is the writer, Rodd the artist). There is potential here, because some of the panels require a moment’s thought: crew members of an ocean liner look into the water ahead of the ship and say, “Oh no! Loose lips!” But for now, Guy & Rodd take the easy way out too much of the time. In brief, Brevity can be better.
(+++) THE MANY USES OF HELL
Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones. By Robert Greenfield. Da Capo. $24.
The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II. By Nina Shandler. Da Capo. $25.
The Patient from Hell: How I Worked with My Doctors to Get the Best of Modern Medicine and How You Can Too. By Stephen H. Schneider, Ph.D., with Janica Lane. Da Capo. $15.95.
How have the mighty forces of Hell fallen. The word still has power in some circles, but it has been largely overshadowed as a curse by words redolent of bodily functions; and it is now used figuratively – sometimes even in a positive sense – by writers trying to make a point.
Thus, Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones has the second part of its title specifically to remind fans that the Stones’ 1971 double album, Exile on Main Street, resulted from a time when Mick Jagger fled England (and its confiscatory tax rates) while Keith Richards settled down in a mansion in France to make a very strong effort to kill himself with pretty much any drug that came within arm’s reach – especially favoring heroin. The fact that Jagger and Richards are still around and still performing 35 years later – both are grandparents now – inevitably robs Exile on Main Street of some power and forces it to speak almost entirely to the baby boomers who remember the Rolling Stones’ implosion after the violence at Altamont but who nevertheless consider Exile on Main Street the Stones’ last great album. Robert Greenfield, who also wrote of the Stones’ 1972 tour and penned biographies of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia, knows exactly what sort of audience he is after. He is no music critic, he points out, but someone who wants to show “how relentless it was” to be part of the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll scene in (or near) the Stones’ heyday. This is a top-notch gossip book for those whose gossiping is focused three decades in the past.
Go back even further, and give “Hell” something closer to its traditional meaning, and you find The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, which is about a witchcraft trial, of all things, during World War II. “Nell” was Helen Duncan, a mother of six and grandmother of four who was tried in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Winston Churchill himself thought the trial was “tomfoolery,” but Nell was found guilty and jailed until the war’s end. For what? For holding séances at which she claimed to channel spirits that seemed to know a little too much about British ship movements. Unable to muster enough evidence to try Nell as a spy, prosecutors decided (in the name of national security) to try her as a witch. This is a strange story, one of those byways of war that are unlikely to find a wide audience but that will fascinate people immersed in the era. Nina Shandler tells the tale well, having done a great deal of primary research in diaries, personal papers and formerly classified documents. But readers seeking an answer to the mysteries of Nell’s séances will be disappointed: no one is quite sure if Nell was a victim, a charlatan or a real medium.
To see to what extent the word “Hell” has been transformed in the present, one need only turn to The Patient from Hell, in which Stephen H. Schneider urges readers to become just that. Yes, you want to be the patient from Hell, he argues, because if you are not, you will receive only average treatment, suitable for statistically average patients but probably not for you as an individual. Schneider’s railing against the depersonalization of modern medicine is nothing new, but his approach to improving care has much to recommend it. Schneider had a potentially fatal illness – mantle cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – so he had no intention of simply listening to doctors and doing whatever they told him to do. It was his own life for which he was fighting, and he was not going to be pleasant and cooperative if that resulted in anything less than the absolute best care. Schneider urges patients to create partnerships with their doctors, seek experimental and unconventional treatments, and convince specialists to create individualized treatment protocols – not just to use standard approaches. This is, on one level, simply an argument to treat the patient, not the disease – something the best doctors already do. And it is an argument to take control of your own health, however dire your condition seems to be – not a new idea, but one that bears repeating. Schneider’s cancer is fully in remission, so this plan clearly worked for him, and his self-praise is justified. But that does not mean it will work for everyone: neither Schneider nor the by-the-book doctors he reviles can succeed in every patient by taking the same approach all the time.
The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II. By Nina Shandler. Da Capo. $25.
The Patient from Hell: How I Worked with My Doctors to Get the Best of Modern Medicine and How You Can Too. By Stephen H. Schneider, Ph.D., with Janica Lane. Da Capo. $15.95.
How have the mighty forces of Hell fallen. The word still has power in some circles, but it has been largely overshadowed as a curse by words redolent of bodily functions; and it is now used figuratively – sometimes even in a positive sense – by writers trying to make a point.
Thus, Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones has the second part of its title specifically to remind fans that the Stones’ 1971 double album, Exile on Main Street, resulted from a time when Mick Jagger fled England (and its confiscatory tax rates) while Keith Richards settled down in a mansion in France to make a very strong effort to kill himself with pretty much any drug that came within arm’s reach – especially favoring heroin. The fact that Jagger and Richards are still around and still performing 35 years later – both are grandparents now – inevitably robs Exile on Main Street of some power and forces it to speak almost entirely to the baby boomers who remember the Rolling Stones’ implosion after the violence at Altamont but who nevertheless consider Exile on Main Street the Stones’ last great album. Robert Greenfield, who also wrote of the Stones’ 1972 tour and penned biographies of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia, knows exactly what sort of audience he is after. He is no music critic, he points out, but someone who wants to show “how relentless it was” to be part of the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll scene in (or near) the Stones’ heyday. This is a top-notch gossip book for those whose gossiping is focused three decades in the past.
Go back even further, and give “Hell” something closer to its traditional meaning, and you find The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, which is about a witchcraft trial, of all things, during World War II. “Nell” was Helen Duncan, a mother of six and grandmother of four who was tried in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Winston Churchill himself thought the trial was “tomfoolery,” but Nell was found guilty and jailed until the war’s end. For what? For holding séances at which she claimed to channel spirits that seemed to know a little too much about British ship movements. Unable to muster enough evidence to try Nell as a spy, prosecutors decided (in the name of national security) to try her as a witch. This is a strange story, one of those byways of war that are unlikely to find a wide audience but that will fascinate people immersed in the era. Nina Shandler tells the tale well, having done a great deal of primary research in diaries, personal papers and formerly classified documents. But readers seeking an answer to the mysteries of Nell’s séances will be disappointed: no one is quite sure if Nell was a victim, a charlatan or a real medium.
To see to what extent the word “Hell” has been transformed in the present, one need only turn to The Patient from Hell, in which Stephen H. Schneider urges readers to become just that. Yes, you want to be the patient from Hell, he argues, because if you are not, you will receive only average treatment, suitable for statistically average patients but probably not for you as an individual. Schneider’s railing against the depersonalization of modern medicine is nothing new, but his approach to improving care has much to recommend it. Schneider had a potentially fatal illness – mantle cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – so he had no intention of simply listening to doctors and doing whatever they told him to do. It was his own life for which he was fighting, and he was not going to be pleasant and cooperative if that resulted in anything less than the absolute best care. Schneider urges patients to create partnerships with their doctors, seek experimental and unconventional treatments, and convince specialists to create individualized treatment protocols – not just to use standard approaches. This is, on one level, simply an argument to treat the patient, not the disease – something the best doctors already do. And it is an argument to take control of your own health, however dire your condition seems to be – not a new idea, but one that bears repeating. Schneider’s cancer is fully in remission, so this plan clearly worked for him, and his self-praise is justified. But that does not mean it will work for everyone: neither Schneider nor the by-the-book doctors he reviles can succeed in every patient by taking the same approach all the time.
(++++) SYMPHONIES, GREATER AND LESSER
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4, “Romantic.” Klaus Tennstedt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. LPO. $16.99.
Gounod: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Patrick Gallois conducting Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä. Naxos. $8.99.
Only a couple of decades separate Anton Bruckner’s Fourth from Charles Gounod’s two symphonies, but the works might as well have been composed on different planets. In a sense, they were: Gounod’s, from 1855, were written by an opera and church composer along classical lines; Bruckner’s, first written in 1874 and revised in 1877-8, was structured under strong Wagnerian influence (Bruckner’s previous symphony quotes directly from Wagner operas) by a master symphonist whose strong religious belief was reflected mostly in his instrumental music. And of course, Gounod’s works fall in the French tradition (his first symphony influenced the Symphony in C by his pupil, Georges Bizet), while Bruckner’s are distinctly and distinctively Germanic.
It is easy, even facile, to call Bruckner’s Fourth the greatest of these three works and simply to dismiss Gounod’s symphonies. The Bruckner is great music, and the Gounod works are not, but when well played and well conducted, they have charm and a direct emotional appeal that is quite different from the lofty sentiments of the much vaster Bruckner work.
This Klaus Tennstedt performance of the Bruckner Fourth, recorded live in 1989, is an exceptional one. Tennstedt, originally from East Germany, had a visceral feeling for Mahler, and he turned the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a very fine Mahler orchestra, if never a wholly intuitive one. But Tennstedt was not identified with Bruckner as much as with Mahler – and, on the basis of this CD, that may have been a mistake. Tennstedt here shows tremendous sensitivity to the innards of Bruckner’s Fourth, the interrelatedness of its themes, the way in which the parts of each movement fit together and the parts of all movements are assembled to create a stunning entirety. Tennstedt takes chances: he zips through the Scherzo, usually an 11½-to-12-minute movement of some stolidity, in a mere 10½ minutes, making the outer sections nearly breathless and the central Trio a region of genuine respite. The overall feeling of this performance is one of forward motion, building inexorably toward the overwhelming climax of the finale. But in fact there is nothing inexorable in this work, as many other performances show. This Tennstedt reading, which has the added advantage of a very fine sound recording by BBC Radio, is one to cherish.
It is doubtful that anyone will cherish the new CD of Gounod’s symphonies: they are built on a much smaller scale, ask less of the listener, and deliver a smaller experience in a straightforwardly effective manner. Patrick Gallois, better known as a flautist than a conductor, leads Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä with clarity and a fine sense of pacing. The first symphony will be more interesting for many listeners, both because of the Bizet influence and because it is a simpler, more straightforward, significantly shorter work. The second has aspirations to greater grandeur (calling them “delusions of grandeur” would be unkind), with a first-movement Adagio introduction that sets the scene for something broad – only to switch to fairly commonplace gaiety in the main section, marked “Allegro agitato.” Gounod’s theatricality and interest in wide appeal seem to conflict with his desire for depth: he marks the slow movement “Larghetto (non troppo),” as if wanting to be sure it isn’t taken too seriously, then produces a slow, involving theme that he soon proceeds to contrast with jaunty dotted rhythms. The finale is jaunty, too, with delicacy and fleetness and a triumphant conclusion. No, Gounod’s symphonies are not great music, but there is a place in the concert hall for pleasant music, too. Or there ought to be.
Gounod: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Patrick Gallois conducting Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä. Naxos. $8.99.
Only a couple of decades separate Anton Bruckner’s Fourth from Charles Gounod’s two symphonies, but the works might as well have been composed on different planets. In a sense, they were: Gounod’s, from 1855, were written by an opera and church composer along classical lines; Bruckner’s, first written in 1874 and revised in 1877-8, was structured under strong Wagnerian influence (Bruckner’s previous symphony quotes directly from Wagner operas) by a master symphonist whose strong religious belief was reflected mostly in his instrumental music. And of course, Gounod’s works fall in the French tradition (his first symphony influenced the Symphony in C by his pupil, Georges Bizet), while Bruckner’s are distinctly and distinctively Germanic.
It is easy, even facile, to call Bruckner’s Fourth the greatest of these three works and simply to dismiss Gounod’s symphonies. The Bruckner is great music, and the Gounod works are not, but when well played and well conducted, they have charm and a direct emotional appeal that is quite different from the lofty sentiments of the much vaster Bruckner work.
This Klaus Tennstedt performance of the Bruckner Fourth, recorded live in 1989, is an exceptional one. Tennstedt, originally from East Germany, had a visceral feeling for Mahler, and he turned the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a very fine Mahler orchestra, if never a wholly intuitive one. But Tennstedt was not identified with Bruckner as much as with Mahler – and, on the basis of this CD, that may have been a mistake. Tennstedt here shows tremendous sensitivity to the innards of Bruckner’s Fourth, the interrelatedness of its themes, the way in which the parts of each movement fit together and the parts of all movements are assembled to create a stunning entirety. Tennstedt takes chances: he zips through the Scherzo, usually an 11½-to-12-minute movement of some stolidity, in a mere 10½ minutes, making the outer sections nearly breathless and the central Trio a region of genuine respite. The overall feeling of this performance is one of forward motion, building inexorably toward the overwhelming climax of the finale. But in fact there is nothing inexorable in this work, as many other performances show. This Tennstedt reading, which has the added advantage of a very fine sound recording by BBC Radio, is one to cherish.
It is doubtful that anyone will cherish the new CD of Gounod’s symphonies: they are built on a much smaller scale, ask less of the listener, and deliver a smaller experience in a straightforwardly effective manner. Patrick Gallois, better known as a flautist than a conductor, leads Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä with clarity and a fine sense of pacing. The first symphony will be more interesting for many listeners, both because of the Bizet influence and because it is a simpler, more straightforward, significantly shorter work. The second has aspirations to greater grandeur (calling them “delusions of grandeur” would be unkind), with a first-movement Adagio introduction that sets the scene for something broad – only to switch to fairly commonplace gaiety in the main section, marked “Allegro agitato.” Gounod’s theatricality and interest in wide appeal seem to conflict with his desire for depth: he marks the slow movement “Larghetto (non troppo),” as if wanting to be sure it isn’t taken too seriously, then produces a slow, involving theme that he soon proceeds to contrast with jaunty dotted rhythms. The finale is jaunty, too, with delicacy and fleetness and a triumphant conclusion. No, Gounod’s symphonies are not great music, but there is a place in the concert hall for pleasant music, too. Or there ought to be.
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