(++++) M IS FOR MARVELOUS

M Is for Magic. By Neil Gaiman. HarperCollins. $16.99.

InterWorld. By Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. HarperCollins. $16.99.

      Neil Gaiman is something of a marvel. Whether writing in short form or long, alone or in partnership, he puts an indelible stamp of mystery, intrigue and the most unexpected sort of heart-tugging emotion into his work. For example, his Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett, is a classic of sorts, with two top-notch stylists and plotters complementing each other rather than (as could easily have happened) rubbing each other the wrong way. Gaiman has a way of getting the most from words, from collaborators, and from concepts – and that includes in his stories for children.

      But beware: what Gaiman considers appropriate for kids may not be quite what parents want them reading. His novel Coraline had enough genuine chills to be a dark adult fantasy, but was recommended for ages eight and up. These two new books target ages 10 and up, but there are plenty of 10-year-olds who will not be psychologically ready for them. Some 12-year-olds, too – and maybe even some older readers.

      The more “adult” of the books is the short-story collection, M Is for Magic, which pays tribute to the dark fantasies of Ray Bradbury in a number of ways. The title mirrors those of such Bradbury books as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space (although the content does not – there’s virtually no SF here); and one story, the spookily atmospheric “October in the Chair,” is dedicated to Bradbury. Other tales here are worthy of the same dedication: “Troll Bridge,” about life and loss from a perspective far too adult for most young readers; “Don’t Ask Jack,” a short chiller left deliberately open-ended; and “The Price,” a truly scary cat story. Other standouts among these 11 stories are the picaresque “Sunbird,” the sort-of-science-fictional “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” and the tremendously involving and genuinely strange “The Witch’s Headstone” (about a boy raised by the dead). Gaiman does humor, too, in the tall tale of “How to Sell the Ponti Bridge,” the gently offbeat “Chivalry,” and the wonderful telescoping of detective stories and nursery rhymes, “The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds.” The free-verse “Instructions,” which ends the book, is also a fairy tale – or, rather, a guide to any reader who might find himself or herself caught in one. All these stories have been published before, and some have been collected before, but that in no way diminishes their power – or the expressive range that Gaiman shows in every one of them.

      The range is somewhat more limited in the novel InterWorld, and that is not necessarily a bad thing – certainly not for those who enjoy Gaiman’s forays into SF, for that is what this book is. It’s the story of a boy who has a habit of getting lost, and who at one point gets so lost that he finds himself in a parallel world, where there is another one of him; and it turns out that there are lots of other versions of him, and they must all band together to fight unspeakably evil forces whose triumph could meant the end of all the worlds. This is not a particularly unusual SF plot, but Gaiman’s trademark creation of amused sympathy for characters gives it more depth than many similarly plotted books possess. And Michael Reaves, who is not only an SF writer himself but also an experienced writer for TV and films, contributes fast pacing and cinematic cuts from scene to scene that keep InterWorld moving at a fast pace – even as the character sketches by Gaiman (who has done his own share of TV and movie work) provide an expansive view of young Joey Harker and all the other Joey Harker approximations with whom he interacts. (In truth, it is pure guesswork as to who contributed what to the book; but this scenario makes sense based on the style of Gaiman’s and Reaves’ other work. And if it’s wrong, that just means that their cross-pollination has been even more effective.) The underlying plot of InterWorld has to do with science, magic, and the balance between them, within our world and across an infinitude of worlds. It’s a big subject, which Gaiman and Reaves make manageable by keeping the focus on Joey, a non-hero who, of course, turns out to be quite a hero indeed. There is high adventure here, and there is also some thoughtfulness – all of it mixed with skill and authorial panache. And because of the story’s design, it would be easy for Gaiman and Reaves to craft a sequel, or several, if InterWorld proves popular.

(+++) TV OR NOT TV?

Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television. By Lee Siegel. Basic Books. $15.95.

      Does television matter anymore? Yes, it is pervasive, but younger TV viewers have taken the fine art of using it as background to new heights, often doing homework and sending text messages (and maybe doing other things as well) while the TV is on. In the days when Marshall McLuhan designated TV a “cool medium” (in contrast to radio, a “hot medium”), the method of interaction (or lack thereof) between the tube and the audience seemed highly significant, tied into the type of shared experience that millions had at any given time and thus to the direction in which society (American society, anyway) seemed to be going.

      But the “shared experience” value of TV has diminished to the point of vanishing. There are no longer only three networks; there are few programs that huge numbers of people watch at the same time, as opposed to on a recorded basis with commercials (and often portions of the shows) skipped – the Super Bowl and the finales of “Friends” and “The Sopranos” are very much exceptions, not the rule. And yet there are some critics, such as Lee Siegel, who persist in taking the medium very seriously indeed. Siegel has done so in Harper’s, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic – from the last of which the essays in this book come. Not Remotely Controlled collects some of Siegel’s work written between 2003 and 2006, on such subjects as cop shows, sitcoms, drama, cartoons, documentaries, news and so-called reality shows.

      The essays are most interesting when they raise major societal concerns from an underlying assumption that TV doesn’t just matter – it continues to have huge importance in society. “The funny thing about television is that it distracts you as you watch it,” writes Siegel in an essay that is purportedly about SpongeBob SquarePants but that barely mentions the anarchic cartoon character. “It doesn’t hold your attention, it eases it. …Television stills your mind and lets it roam, as if the mind were a crying infant that the television took in its glowing arms and soothed so that it could sleep and dream.” This is excellent writing – and profoundly wrong in terms of how many people, especially younger people, use TV today. But accept Siegel’s worldview for a while and he gets into interesting territory, such as “the extent to which television cultivates distraction into a new kind of discipline.”

      Siegel’s well-turned phrases and somewhat academic overview of TV are the best part of this book. “CSI” and “Law & Order,” he writes, are “a kind of medical porn” on one level, but also “offer the illusion of control after great painful upheaval.” Morning news shows “are often studies in orchestrated humility and rigged self-effacement.” As for reality shows, “Only in America could reality become a trend.” But the book bogs down when it focuses on the minutiae of individual programs at specific points in time – and since Siegel is, after all, a columnist, that is what the book does for most of its length. One essay opens, “Brokaw is leaving. Rather is leaving. Jennings is obviously about to leave.” How dated can you get? (Well, it made sense in December 2004.) Another opens, “After weeks of the media pandering to the Christian right in re Ashley, Terri, and John Paul, there suddenly comes Revelations.” (This was clear in April 2005.) And then there are the serious analyses of such shows as “The New Kojak,” “Weeds” and “Stump the Schwab,” and such documentaries as “The Children of Leningradsky” and “The Staircase.” If you don’t remember the programs Siegel discusses – and care about them and their possible (or possibly overstated) societal implications – then very little in this book will have meaning for you. Whether it should matter is a different issue. Siegel’s determination to take television seriously, even when wrongheaded, is a worthwhile attempt to come to terms with what TV does and means in our society today. And his writing is stylish and often pointed, even if readers who don’t recall details of trivial TV programming from the last five years will often be unable to get the points.

(+++) TALES OF CUTE AND FUNNY

Dear Dumb Diary #6: The Problem with Here Is That It’s Where I’m From. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $4.99.

Princess Power #5: The Stubbornly Secretive Servant. By Suzanne Williams. Illustrated by Chuck Gonzales. HarperCollins. $4.99.

      There’s some sort of cuteness-to-funniness ratio out there in books for preteens. Get the ratio right and you have a series that works, book after book. Get it wrong and you have a dud. One of these series has a closer-to-ideal ratio than the other, but both have their appealing moments.

      Jim Benton’s “Tales of Mackerel Middle School” tend to start on the funny side of things, stay funny pretty much throughout, then pull into Cuteville near the end. Benton is really good at this formula, of which The Problem with Here Is That It’s Where I’m From is the sixth example. The characters are familiar to readers by now: Jamie Kelly, who confides her innermost thoughts, wishes and schemes to her diary and draws hilarious pictures in it (Benton’s art is often even better than his prose); Isabella, Jamie’s best friend, as clever and devious as they come; and Angeline, Jamie’s nemesis, who is incredibly pretty and gets loads of attention and is just nerve-wrackingly sweet. As this book starts, Jamie confides, “I’m trying to grow an accent,” because she wants to be from anywhere except where she’s from. Soon, she meets a “foreigner,” who is actually just a super-pretty girl from another school, temporarily taking classes at Mackerel. This girl, Colette, may be a challenge to Angeline in the “prettiest” category in an upcoming school election. The election includes such categories as “funniest,” “most artistic” and “best friends,” and the way these categories eventually get sorted out at the end is Benton’s punchline. But there are plenty of lesser punches along the way, mostly in the form of captions for drawings: “Overly dainty feet must be tattooed to look hairy,” for example. Or side-by-side pictures: “Crazy killer clown hiding under your bed” and, just to the right, the same picture “with parsley sprig.” Benton’s plotting and counterplotting is as clever as ever, marred only by the sameness of the gibes and the absolute knowledge that everything will be just fine at the end: Angeline will turn out not to be so bad after all, and good will triumph and evil be punished and all like that there. Okay, this is a predictable series, but it still rates high on both the fun and cuteness scales.

      Princess Power, although it is also for preteens, seems to be for younger ones. It’s the story of four princesses – Lysandra, Fatima, Elena and Tansy – who are best friends and have a series of magic-laced adventures. They met in The Perfectly Proper Prince, came to the rescue of one of Fatima’s relatives in The Charmingly Clever Cousin, helped Tansy deal with The Awfully Angry Ogre, solved the mystery of a comb that Elena found in The Mysterious, Mournful Maiden, and in the latest book are visiting Lysandra’s sister and brother-in-law while awaiting the arrival of a handsome prince. The prince doesn’t show up, but his servant does – and is quite close-mouthed about what has happened. So the princesses torture him until…no, this isn’t that kind of book at all. They do lock up the servant, Thomas, but not very unpleasantly, and they then do their own search for the missing prince, who turns out to have been changed into…but that would be telling. This is not much of a mystery and really not much of a story, but it’s mildly amusing – made more so by illustrations that definitely lean toward the cute side of the scale. Younger preteens, especially ones who still dream of old-fashioned castles, crowns, elegant dresses and simple-to-do magic, will have a good time with this easy-to-read series that is more cute than funny.

(+++) TEENS IN TROUBLE

A Swift Pure Cry. By Siobhan Dowd. David Fickling Books. $16.99.

The Whole Sky Full of Stars. By René Saldaña, Jr. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

      The level of teenage angst is typical, but the settings are on the exotic side in these two books – which make good summer reading only if you find tears and worry cathartic. The death of a parent looms large in both novels – of a mother in A Swift Pure Cry, a father in The Whole Sky Full of Stars. But the books are really about teens’ attempts to make something of themselves and their lives after the losses occur.

      A Swift Pure Cry is set in a small town in Ireland, where Shell Talent’s mother dies when Shell is 15. Shell’s father is religious to the point of obsession, but his belief does not keep him from the bottle, and he soon descends into alcoholism and depression. This leaves Shell to care for her younger brother and sister – and to try to handle, on her own, her intense and growing feelings for her childhood friend, Declan. The burgeoning romance comes to an abrupt end when Declan leaves Ireland to try for a better life across the sea, in the United States – after which Shell, her heart already broken, finds out that she is pregnant, with all the fear and ostracism that implies in the southern Irish countryside in the 1980s. First-time novelist Siobhan Dowd lays things on very thickly, indeed: “The thin needle of fear threaded its way deep into the back of her thoughts again, like an earthworm disappearing into the soil.” Dowd twists and turns everything in Shell’s life – the town’s intolerance, her own fears, her need to care for others while being unable to care properly for herself – and does not even leave Shell with the satisfaction of a child to raise. By piling so much heartache upon Shell, Dowd turns realism into melodrama, and the final mildly optimistic portion of the book seems tacked-on and false. The novel does tug at the heartstrings, again and again – Dowd is a good enough writer to do that – but it is all so overdone that it may leave readers, by the end, with a sense of relief that it is finally over.

      The Whole Sky Full of Stars is gritty, too, but it speaks of a different time, different class issues and a different worldview. It starts with a fight – Barry punches his longtime best friend, Alby, after Alby makes a disrespectful comment about Barry’s mother – and fighting, especially its seamier side, is what the book is all about. Barry has the unpolished boxing skills of a natural fighter, and Alby, who has gambling debts and is in deep trouble with some minor-league thugs, sees Barry as a way out of his problems. Barry sees something in his fighting ability, too: he has been drifting since his father’s death, and he needs something on which to focus, and he wants to help both his mother and Alby – although he doesn’t approve of the trouble Alby has gotten himself into. René Saldaña, Jr.’s structure for the book is a little jarring, ratcheting back and forth between Barry and Alby as if their lives are a ping-pong match – until Barry starts fighting, when the focus is strongly on him and his opponents. Non-fans of boxing will not appreciate the realism of the fights, especially the final one of the series, in which Barry and his opponent maul each other. The end of the book returns to the issue of friendship – what it means, what can boost or damage it, and how important it is – and if the life lessons are scarcely new or uniquely presented, they are at least told with enough real-world connection to provide a satisfactory conclusion.

(+++) BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES

Overexposed: Perverting Perversions. By Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e). $14.95.

      One of the great numbers in the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera is “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” which sardonically details the many ways men are inevitably overcome by women. Sylvère Lotringer’s Overexposed takes sexual dependency a number of steps farther – so far that it is sometimes hard to tell, when reading the book, how much is real and how much surreal. Originally published in 1988, Overexposed is about a controversial behavior-modification technique in which sexual deviants – such as rapists and child molesters – are saturated with scenes that stimulate them to the point (it is hoped) at which they will no longer stimulate them at all.

      Lotringer, professor of French Literature and Philosophy at Columbia University – and the founder of the publisher of his book – approaches the technique with bitter humor and a willingness to plunge himself into a number of aspects of the approach, from listening to the tapes made by participants to himself donning the penile device that measures a man’s sexual response and is supposed to help him learn to control it.

      All this is both intellectually stimulating (and perhaps, in some scenes, physically stimulating as well)…and simply strange. The reason is Lotringer’s tone, which maintains a distance from the subject matter that he himself, in his physical body, does not. Thus, he writes, “Sexual deviations, like everything else, have grown democratic. Freud’s French master, the celebrated alienist Charcot, used to present his hysterical cases on the stage of the Salpêtrière, ready to perform, in a seductive négligé, for a select audience their most erotic ‘crises.’ Today’s hysteria affects women and men alike, but no one pays much attention anymore, unless it leads to collective suicide or mass murder. Like Charcot’s ‘great hysterics,’ the age of the great debauchees and libertines – cynical, satanical, dissolute – is definitely over.” This is powerful writing, historically astute and apparently putting the “saturation” approach into context. But it is part of Lotringer’s introductory material, belied by many later chapters – which bears such one-word titles as “Arouse,” “Tease,” “Enjoy,” “Date,” “Bore,” “Reject” and “Deter.” In those chapters, there is frequently nothing at all but brief questions by Lotringer and extended responses by the clinicians – or point-of-view essays by the subjects going through treatment. Context becomes conspicuous by its absence.

      Near the end of the book, as Lotringer questions a lab technician, he is told how the satiation treatment becomes effective with child molesters. Lotringer asks, “You mean that each time they see a little girl, they’re going to repeat their lines?” The “lines” are simple statements that, in a lab context, the subjects have said again and again and again, to the point of boredom and beyond – far past the point of any arousal. “You don’t have to repeat them,” the technician replies. “You can learn very quickly how to inhibit arousal through some mental gymnastics, if you want.”

      If you want. The prepositional phrase is a throwaway; Lotringer does not pick up on it. But the question of wanting is central to the treatment of sex offenders – and in some ways to the definition of sexual deviance in the first place. The treatment that Lotringer details, and in which he himself participates to a limited extent, is designed to remove that want, replacing it with aversion to behaviors that are not societally sanctioned. And what then is left, in the realm of sexuality and arousal, for those trained to feel aversion to their previous stimulations? “Who cares?” is not a satisfactory answer, for therapies like this one are designed to remove subjects’ deviancy while retaining the functioning of their personalities. Is that even possible – or may the deviancy be too central to functionality to be removable without being replaced by something equally unacceptable? These are therapeutic questions that Lotringer does not even ask, much less try to answer, in a book that is more experiential than exploratory (despite its author’s obvious intellectual weight). Readers of Overexposed will certainly know by the end that they have co-experienced something with the author, even if they may be unsure exactly what it is. Left unanswered is whether Overexposed, and the therapy at its core, have rewritten “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” or merely added a new verse to it.

(++++) THE PLEASURES OF RUNNING AMOK

How Do Dinosaurs Go to School? By Jane Yolen. Illustrated by Mark Teague. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $16.99.

Phooey! By Marc Rosenthal. HarperCollins. $16.99.

      There’s something about creating books for kids ages 4-8 that seems to bring out adults’ desire to romp. Jane Yolen, Mark Teague and Marc Rosenthal all seem to have had a rollicking good time making these wonderful books – and their pleasure translates wonderfully to the young readers for whom the books are intended.

      The How Do Dinosaurs series has a fascinating premise, and Yolen and Teague keep finding hilarious new ways to implement it. Yolen provides simple rhyming stories about the day-to-day lives of young children. Teague provides astonishing illustrations: dinosaurs, drawn with exactitude and apparent anatomical correctness, but dressed in kids’ clothing and behaving (or misbehaving) as young children themselves typically do. The inside front and back covers of these books are, in some ways, as much fun as the stories, since the covers show the various dinosaurs portrayed within and give their real, difficult-to-pronounce names – while still displaying them in clothing and poses like those in the book. Thus, we get a speckled Herrerasaurus tossing a ball, a striped Ceratosaurus watering small plants, and a winged and bizarre-headed Dsungaripterus descending toward a slide in How Do Dinosaurs Go to School? There is nothing the slightest bit threatening about any of the dinos, because the story shows them in such delightfully ordinary activities – despite their enormous size (which is nevertheless reduced from their real-world size). There’s the Silvisaurus rushing toward the door in the morning, about to grab thermos and lunch bag from a human mom; the horned and crested Centrosaurus riding atop a minivan; the multi-horned Stygimoloch running up the stairs; and many more. Yolen’s story follows the familiar, delightful pattern of these books. The first pages ask whether a dinosaur does certain things – which of course should not be done: “Does he drag his long tail?/ Is he late for the bus?/ Does he stomp all four feet?/ Does he make a big fuss?” Then the latter part of the book teaches correct behavior: “A dinosaur carefully raises his hand./ He helps out his classmates with projects they’ve planned.” Kids won’t even realize how much they are learning about manners and social interaction. They’ll be too busy laughing at Teague’s wonderful illustrations – which are just as much fun when the dinos are being good as when they’re misbehaving.

      The illustrations are also the thing in Marc Rosenthal’s Phooey! This is an old-fashioned-looking, absolutely hilarious version of Rube Goldberg’s cartoons, in which incredibly complex schemes were devised to do simple, everyday activities. More precisely, it’s Goldberg crossed with “The House That Jack Built”: this is the can that hit the cat that was chased by the dog that frightened the zookeeper who…and so on and so on, all because a bored little boy has been walking along, lamenting, “Nothing ever happens around here!” Of course, a tremendous amount happens, all of it after the boy casually kicks that can – but the boy walks along, oblivious to the craziness all around him, lost in his world of boredom. A little girl who joins him on his walk notices the madness everywhere, but says nothing as the boy continues lamenting the absence of anything interesting going on. Rosenthal’s drawings, which resemble those of H.A. Rey in the “Curious George” books, are a delight, whether he is showing a terrified elephant racing along the street; a bin of “navel oranges, extra bouncy,” boinging along (the sound effects are great); or a peglegged pirate getting hit by a pie and exclaiming, “Aaar!” Phooey! is a journey through the wilder side of cause and effect – and the book itself will be the cause of a great deal of the always-welcome effect of laughter.

(++++) PASSIONATE NONFICTION

The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas. By Robert H. Frank. Basic Books. $26.

The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity. By James Lovelock. Basic Books. $15.95.

      Ever since Thomas Carlyle first called economics “the dismal science” in the mid-19^th century, there have been economists finding ways to prove the epithet wrong. Robert H. Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University’s Graduate School of Management, is particularly clever at enlivening his subject in The Economic Naturalist. Many people realize that economic decisions affect us at times – for instance, should we drive a couple of extra miles to save a few pennies on a gallon of gas? But most people do not realize that there are underlying economic principles informing many of the decisions of everyday life. What Frank does, with clarity and wit, is to explain some of those principles and then show how they are part of activities that we experience all the time – by answering questions that have been raised by his students. For example, Frank looks at the economic realities that lead products to take particular forms – soda cans being cylindrical, and usually on the tall side, while milk cartons are rectangular solids. He shows how economics results in drive-up ATMs having Braille lettering, even though blind people cannot drive (Braille is needed for walk-up ATMs, and it is more economical for manufacturers to make all ATMs with Braille than to keep different types in stock and ship the right type to the right place). He discusses standardization of product and price, using it to show why movie tickets cost less at matinees than at night. If you have wondered why it costs more to transfer funds between banks electronically – a simple procedure for the banks – than to move money in a more complex way, by check, Frank has an answer (customers who choose electronic transfer show by their choice that speed matters to them, so they can be charged more). And on and on the explanations go: why there are video-rental stores but no book-rental stores; why most states enforce mandatory ages for children to start kindergarten; why cars must have seat belts but school buses do not have to. This is fascinating stuff, even when it occasionally seems wrong-headed. Example: Frank says that cars’ fuel-filler doors are not all on the same side, because that would lead to long lines on only one side of fuel pumps, with the pumps’ other side empty. But this assertion is true, at most, only for gas stations with a single entrance – two-entrance stations (which is what most of them are) have traffic flow to the pumps from two directions, so a one-side-only fuel-door design would work. It’s fun to learn economics the way Frank teaches it here, and fun to use your brain cells to come up with alternatives to some of his explanations.

      The Revenge of Gaia, originally published last year and now available in paperback, has none of the lightness or lightheartedness of Frank’s book. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory – which says that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating organism – is intensely serious in arguing that our planet is critically ill, because of human activity. Yes, this is the same greenhouse-gas argument that many others have made and continue to make, but Lovelock’s passion and scientific reasoning make his book clearer and more disturbing than anything coming out of self-interested politicians. “The concept of Gaia, a living planet, is for me the essential basis of a coherent and practical environmentalism,” writes Lovelock. “It counters the persistent belief that Earth is a property, an estate, there to be exploited for the benefit of humankind.” He adds that few people, “even among climate scientists and ecologists, seem yet to realize fully the potential severity, or the imminence, of catastrophic global disaster.” Lovelock’s aim is to increase the level of realization – which he does through effective and often-frightening marshalling and juxtaposition of facts about environmental change and degradation. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps for all of us, the parade of problems has become commonplace, and “imminent global disaster” is simply too big a concern to allow most people to take action. Lovelock does not believe in the “think globally, act locally” concept, since Earth’s problems are so huge that they require concerted global effort. But he acknowledges that we face a future of increasing tribalism – so how will we get together as one world to solve Gaia’s troubles? Even in a single country, the United States, concerted effort has so far proved impossible – and there exists no mechanism to convince, browbeat or compel people throughout the world to make the huge changes in their lives and expectations that Lovelock believes are necessary to restore Gaia to health. The Revenge of Gaia deserves a (+++) rating for its intense jeremiad against what humans have done: “We have made this appalling mess of the planet and mostly with rampant liberal good intentions.” But there are no genuine solutions here, nor any signposts to anything practical. Saying that “economists and politicians have to square the utter necessity of a rapid and controlled shutdown of emissions from fossil fuel burning with the human needs of civilization” is to say exactly nothing. Lovelock has a strong grasp of where we are, how we got here, and in what ways our future looks extremely bleak. But The Revenge of Gaia, with its hectoring tone throughout, is ultimately useless for pointing us anywhere but toward doom.

(+++) HIGH INTENSITY

Walking on Glass. By Alma Fullerton. HarperTempest. $15.99.

The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance. By Catherine Ryan Hyde. Knopf. $15.99.

      Be forewarned: these are not books for the faint of heart. With emotion cranked up to the maximum from start to finish, they appear to be intended for teenage readers who either have insufficient angst in their own lives, or who have so much trouble of their own that they desperately want to read stories of young people who have as much, or even more.

      The HarperTempest imprint seems ideally matched to Walking on Glass, which is tempestuous indeed. Told in free verse – a gentle form at odds with the highly upsetting story – Alma Fullerton’s novel is about life-or-death choices. The narrator’s mother chose death, but did not quite get there: after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, which her son interrupted, the mother is comatose and not expected ever to regain consciousness. The unnamed narrator and his unnamed father visit the hospital periodically, with the man expressing hope and the boy feeling none. What he does feel is a need to escape, even briefly, from the twilight world in which his mother is not quite gone – and there is someone with a name who helps him do that: Jack, his best friend, who “knows how to have a good time” but is far from a positive influence. Indeed, there is precious little positive in Walking on Glass, a depressing work from open to close. What uplift there is at the end comes only from final acceptance of death. And it takes much torment to get there – for most of the book, when the narrator sees his mother, “Wires force life into a body/ left hanging/ like a marionette/ with no one to pull/ the strings.” A few people besides Jack have names – Dr. Mac, who has urged the narrator to keep a journal (which is what Walking on Glass is), and Alissa, a girl who could perhaps help if only the narrator would allow her to (which he doesn’t). Downbeat from start to finish, Walking on Glass will be an exercise in self-torment for many readers; but some may, for reasons of their own, need a book like this.

      The reasons someone might need The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance are clearer. Catherine Ryan Hyde’s book is about alcoholism – alcoholic parents and alcoholic kids. Thirteen-year-old Cynthia, known as Cynnie, is the narrator, who has a mother who is drunk all the time. So Cynnie takes care of her little brother, Bill, whom she adores, while her mother goes through a series of failed relationships and a series of bottles. Cynnie doesn’t do so well with relationships herself – she obviously has no satisfactory adult role model. Then her grandparents come and take Bill to live with them, and Cynnie’s awful life goes from bad to worse, to the point that “it was like I didn’t have one single thing left.” Cynnie drives a boy’s car illegally, is caught, and is ordered by a judge to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Her “miraculous reappearance” begins when, after much soul-searching, she stands up at an AA meeting and announces, “My name is Cynthia. I’m an alcoholic.” The change from self-identification as Cynnie (sounds like “sin-ny”) to Cynthia is an overly obvious plot device, and the last part of the book, in which Cynthia discovers previously unrecognized depth in herself and does her best to make amends with her grandparents, is clichéd throughout. But the book certainly has power, especially for teens whose lives have been affected by alcohol abuse. They will welcome its ultimate uplifting message.

(++) GETTING PUSHY

Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care. By Jennifer Block. Da Capo. $26.

      Beware the committed do-gooder. He – or, in this case, she – believes so totally in her point of view that she argues with as much emotion as reason, and conveniently ignores matters that may undercut an argument that she just knows is correct. In the case of Pushed, that argument is that U.S. doctors do too many C-sections and give pregnant women too many drugs at labor, while midwives and birthing centers are scarce and in some areas illegal.

      Block, a former editor of Ms. Magazine and an editor of the revised version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, is a feminist of a rather quaint kind. Giving birth – specifically, giving birth the correct way, as Block defines it – is a woman’s absolute right, and anything that interferes with it is to be swept away.

      Unfortunately for this belief, some things don’t sweep so neatly. Block writes of the “casual resignation in the air” at one hospital where C-sections are routine and vaginal births unusual. That is, of course, Block’s interpretation of the atmosphere. Why is this hospital doing all those C-sections? Largely, it turns out, because the pregnant women are insisting on them; Block herself cites one poll in which 88% of respondents feared rectal damage from vaginal birth, and 58% feared sexual dysfunction. These fears, it is true, are vastly overblown. But what is a doctor to do when someone with these fears, or others, insists that she needs a C-section – perhaps after consulting a perinatologist, who may have administered sophisticated ultrasounds to determine a baby’s size and may then have told the mother that the size may be an issue? Notice all the “may” elements: this or that may happen, which of course means it may not. But if women control their bodies, themselves, and they want C-sections, should it be up to their doctors – or to Block – to discourage them?

      What’s in it for a doctor to argue strenuously in favor of vaginal birth? If the woman’s fears themselves lead her to have – or to believe she has – complications after giving birth vaginally, what happens to the doctor? A malpractice lawsuit – a possibility than hangs over doctors’ heads today like the sword of Damocles, but to which Block gives short shrift. As it happens, doctors’ fears of losing malpractice suits are overblown – they usually win – but the suits take time, effort and emotional strength to fight, and doctors are understandably more interested in practicing medicine than in practicing law.

      And what about insurers? Insurance coverage for some of the approaches that Block advocates, such as birthing centers and use of midwives, is spotty at best. But Block barely touches on insurance issues in her rush to advocate what she deems more-natural approaches to birth. She also has little patience with drugs to induce or speed up labor – but, again, are doctors to withhold drugs that patients want, or to let labor proceed at a drawn-out pace that may lead new mothers (correctly or incorrectly) to believe that the doctor caused whatever postpartum problems they have, and (again) to resort to legal action?

      The most irritating thing about Pushed is that it makes so many good points, but in such an annoying way. There are too many C-sections done in the United States – many doctors themselves say so. There are too many doctors willing to give in when women’s fears of the pain of childbirth (partly justified, partly irrational) lead them to demand more drugs than are necessary. There are too many doctors whose fear of malpractice suits leads them to overly cautious approaches in women for whom vaginal birth would be just fine. And there are too many areas where alternative birthing methods – for those who want them – are difficult or impossible to find. Block’s problem is not that she is wrong, but that she is dismissive. For example, “One could argue that the ‘liability crisis’ is to blame for the unique attitude [against vaginal birth after a woman has had a C-section] in the United States, but it seems to me that suspended in the chasm between evidence and practice is a profound cultural denial that goes beyond malpractice anxiety or convenience.” It seems to her, so it must be correct – and “liability crisis” is placed in quotation marks, indicating skepticism that there is one, and “profound cultural denial” is firmly asserted without backup. This is Block’s style: strong assertion of her positions coupled with skimming over of anything that does not fit them. This may be good advocacy – demean or ignore anything that might counter your argument – but it is not good science or good medicine. Block is right in much of what she says, but wrong, far too much of the time, in the way she says it.

(+++) GHOSTLY PROTECTOR

Norton Ghost 12.0. Windows Vista or XP. Symantec. $69.99.

      Sometimes Symantec returns to its roots in Peter Norton’s elegant but extremely complex and advanced world of somewhat finicky utility software. Norton Ghost 12.0 is one example. It does what it is supposed to, quickly and efficiently, but it is only marginally user-friendly for the average computer owner and really should be considered only by the advanced PC users at whom it is targeted.

      Norton Ghost is a backup and recovery program – and there are quite a few of these, including Symantec’s own Norton Save & Restore – but it has significant differences that will be important to “power users.” Most importantly, earlier versions (the latest of them was 10.0; there was no 11.0 sold separately) were not Vista-compatible, and 12.0 is. In other ways, 12.0 continues to do what users of Norton Ghost like: it makes all sorts of backups, whether of a full hard drive or a partition (and if you don’t know what a partition is, this is not a product for you); it can recover data even in case of operating-system failure; and its encryption and error-checking features prevent unauthorized access to backups.

      The new features of 12.0 make it easily the most advanced – and complex – Norton Ghost yet. It allows system restoration from a remote location; allows creation of one-time backups whose specifications need not be saved for later use; is integrated with Google Desktop for faster data recovery through searchable backup indexes; and lets users who are part of a network back up the data of other, presumably less expert users on the same network. And 12.0 performs all these tasks – plus others carried over from prior versions – more quickly than those earlier versions did.

      The main concession to simplicity in 12.0 is a single-view interface similar to that in the latest version of Norton Utilities. This gives a quick status report, with a big green check mark front and center if everything is fine – and a brown exclamation point of warning if something needs attention. This is a small but nice touch, since it provides conformity of appearance to users running multiple Symantec utilities.

      Not everything in 12.0 will necessarily please users of earlier versions of Norton Ghost. The new program will restore data from backups made with prior versions, but its file format is new – it does not support the prior .gho format. And while its backup and restoration features are impressive, they do not include a way to create images from a boot CD or floppy disk – perhaps a matter of little importance now that floppies are essentially obsolete, but perhaps significant for the sort of advanced user who will be able to take full advantage of the functionality of this software.

      Norton Ghost 12.0 is certainly not for everyone – there are easier-to-use, less expensive and less complex backup utilities out there. But for advanced users, including administrators of small-business or home networks, this software offers a level of flexibility that neatly matches its level of complexity.

(+++) UNHEARD SYMPHONIES

Grieg: Symphony in C Minor; Old Norwegian Romance with Variations; Three Orchestral Pieces from “Sigurd Jorsalfar.” Bjarte Engeset conducting the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Naxos. $8.99.

Gottschalk: Symphonie Romantique (No. 1), “A Night in the Tropics”; Symphony No. 2, “À Montevideo”; Célèbre Tarantelle pour piano et orchestre; Escenas Campestres Cubanas—Opéra en 1 acte; Variations de concert sur l’hymne portugais du Roi Louis I; Ave Maria; La Casa del Joven Enrique por Méhul—Gran overture. Richard Rosenberg conducting the Hot Springs Festival Orchestra. Naxos. $8.99.

      It’s a safe bet that few listeners will have heard any of the three symphonies on these two CDs before playing the recordings – and it’s nearly a sure bet that virtually no listeners will have heard all three of them. These are minor symphonies by composers who did not excel in or even much practice the symphonic form; indeed, the two so-called symphonies by Louis Moreau Gottschalk are really tone poems, lacking symphonic structure, length and gravitas. As a whole, what these CDs offer is well-played curiosities – not first-tier or even second-tier music, perhaps, but the sorts of works worth discovering by listeners who are tired of the standard repertoire and looking for something to tickle their ear buds.

      Edvard Grieg was generally at his best in small things. His great success with such works as Peer Gynt and Sigurd Jorsalfar came precisely because the incidental music he composed was a series of snippets. The symphonic form did not come easily to Grieg; but when he was a young composer, he was an admirer of Niels Gade. Grieg’s sole symphony follows the model of Gade’s Symphony No. 1 very closely indeed – it is even in the same key. Indeed, the opening of Grieg’s first movement is practically a tribute to the older composer’s Sturm und Drang. Grieg declared in 1867, after several partial performances of his symphony, that it “must never be performed,” and indeed it disappeared from concert halls for 113 years. But since 1980, it has garnered some attention and a few recordings – and the one by Bjarte Engeset and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, which does not try to make the work more than it is, is particularly fine. There is very little of the later Grieg audible here, but the work is structurally sound, reasonably well constructed and certainly worth an occasional hearing.

      The Old Norwegian Romance with Variations is less worthwhile. It is rather stolid music, with nothing wrong but nothing exciting in it, and the variations are brief even by Grieg’s miniaturist standards, many running less than a minute and none lasting more than two. The excerpts from Sigurd Jorsalfar are more interesting: the scene-setting Prelude, which has some of the sound of the nature scenes from Peer Gynt; the Intermezzo, which represents a dream and which effectively portrays both sleep and the martial worries that intrude on it; and the unusual Homage March, in which the triumphal sections make up only a small part of the overall pastoral mood. In all, this is primarily a CD for Grieg fanciers.

      It’s harder to say for whom the Gottschalk disk is. It is a very strange CD, including all the extant orchestral music by Gottschalk – but much of it is not really Gottschalk’s, having been resurrected, arranged, filled in and bulked up by conductor Richard Rosenberg and others. The music is strange, too, sounding mostly like tuneful “pop” works even though Gottschalk wanted very much to be taken seriously as a composer – not just a piano virtuoso. Gottschalk’s death at age 39, and his extremely sloppy habits during extensive international travel as a performer, left his manuscripts scattered and in a huge mess; many were lost altogether. The reconstruction of these Gottschalk pieces is admirable, but the resulting CD roams all over the place, just as much in its way as Gottschalk did during his life.

      The first “symphony” is bright and forthright, ending with an extended treatment of “Yankee Doodle,” while the second starts with a sultry, gently swaying section and then moves into a bouncy, happy one with lots of swing (Gottschalk here anticipates jazz by half a century). These are the bookends of the CD. In between is music of varying interest and quality. The Célèbre Tarantelle is a fine Lisztian showpiece, and pianist Michael Gurt plays it with real style. It is hard to see Escenas Campestres Cubanas as an opera – it lasts just 13 minutes – or even as a song cycle (only two of the four movements are vocal). But it is colorful, with attractive dance rhythms, and the sections in which the three voices intertwine (soprano Anna Noggle, tenor Darryl Taylor and bass-baritone Richard Ziebarth) are neatly scored and nicely sung.

      The Variations de concert are pleasant but foursquare; Gurt handles them well enough, but there is little of substance in them. Ave Maria, though, is a surprise: a pretty and sentimental setting of the familiar verses, with soprano Melisa Barrick offering a childlike voice, almost devoid of vibrato – it puts one in mind of the naïve wonder of the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. La Casa del Joven Enrique por Méhul, on the other hand, is all pomposity, using five pianists (John Contiguglia, Richard Contiguglia, Angela Draghicescu, Chin-Ming Lin and Joshua Pepper) – fewer than Gottschalk wanted – at the service of a great deal of sound and fury, signifying very little. The large scale of most of these works is seen only in their orchestrations, not the thoughtfulness or depth of their ideas. Lost Gottschalk works, such as his operas, may have had more substance; but this CD, despite the care taken in the reconstructions and the mostly excellent playing, will do nothing to change the reputation of Gottschalk as an outstanding performer and clever composer whose strength was primarily in the piano, not in the handling of larger forces.

(++++) WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME

The New Space Opera. Edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. Eos. $15.95.

DarkGlass Mountain, Book One: The Serpent Bride. By Sara Douglass. Eos. $26.95.

      A not-so-long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, all science fiction was space opera – a description used derogatorily of the churned-out tales of heroes and half-dressed women (human or alien) in the pulp magazines, and applied even to the extremely good writing that found its way into the pulps and helped produce science fiction’s “Golden Age.” So what age are we in now – silver, bronze, plastic, nanotech? However we might describe it, it’s an age as much in need of heroes (and, now, heroines) and vast canvases and a certain degree of naïve optimism as any earlier time. And that is what you will find in The New Space Opera, in which 18 of today’s top SF writers take on the action-adventure approach that used to be just about all there was to science fiction – and twist it in some new and interesting ways. In fact, editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan had to stretch the traditional notion of “space opera” a bit to accommodate everything here. Although some of these stories pack all the short-form punch of Golden Age tales (for example, Peter F. Hamilton’s “Blessed by an Angel” and Ken Macleod’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?”), others are too complex in style and plot to fit even an expanded space-opera definition (notably Ian McDonald’s “Verthandi’s Ring”). Still others, including Robert Reed’s “Hatch” and Tony Daniel’s “The Valley of the Gardens,” feel as if they really want to be novels. And many of these tales contain far more humor than Golden Age space opera tended to include, although such a work as “Send Them Flowers” by Walter Jon Williams recalls some of the tales of Northwest Smith and some Asimov heroes. A few stories seem a little too thinly disguised as political statements, such as “Art of War” by Nancy Kress, in which the question is whether the military will ignore intelligence that it does not want to hear. To be fair, this was a Golden Age theme as well; but some tales here tackle subjects that would never have made it into the pulps: “Dividing the Sustain” by James Patrick Kelly starts with a character deciding to become gay. What all these very different stories have in common is how well-written they are – Dozois and Strahan have selected some really fine authors for this book. Among the most interesting tales are ones using old adventures to make space-age points. Robert Silverberg’s “The Emperor and the Maula” retells the tale of Scheherazade; Kage Baker’s “Maelstrom” is about an attempt to perform an adaptation of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” on Mars; and Dan Simmons’ superb “Muse of Fire” focuses on space-wandering actors’ personal concerns as they travel about the galaxy performing Shakespeare. Not all these stories are space opera in the old sense – but all of them indicate that in a new sense, the pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Tales still survive, transmogrified.

      The old days of the works of Sara Douglass still survive, too – in The Serpent’s Bride, the first book in her new series, DarkGlass Mountain. This is a book for existing Douglass fans, preferably ones familiar with her prior works, The Wayfarer Redemption, Threshold and Beyond the Hanging Wall. Characters from these books reappear in The Serpent’s Bride, which takes place in some of the same places as the earlier books but after all the other stories have ended. This is a big novel – 627 pages of unusually small type – and a well if conventionally paced one, earning a (+++) rating for its style and plotting even though it may be confusing to readers not familiar with other work by Douglass. The plot is fairly typical by heroic-fantasy standards: Ishbel Brunelle is Archpriestess of a Serpent cult, foretelling the future by examining the entrails of human sacrifices (and yes, she is the heroine). Alliances, a possible royal marriage, the return of former god Axis Sunsoar from the Otherworld, and the escape of the Dark God Kanubai from prison, are some of the currents and countercurrents here. There is exoticism aplenty in the descriptions of competing kingdoms and characters, and writing of the sort that heroic-fantasy lovers crave: “Can you imagine what would happen to the Star Dance as it filtered through DarkGlass Mountain? Stars, it is a nightmare! …I think that whatever is wrong with DarkGlass Mountain is far older than the pyramid itself, although that damned pile of glass is cursed enough. There’s…something beneath the pyramid, a part of the very soil on which the Magi built. It is very ancient and very powerful.” And so it goes, and goes and goes, as Douglass spins a large and finely wrought web of intrigue that her fans will surely enjoy, although non-fans will likely be thoroughly exhausted long before the end.

(+++) SUMMERTIME OR ANYTIME

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy. By Jeanne Birdsall. Yearling. $6.50.

Your Own Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath. By Stephanie Hemphill. Knopf. $15.99.

      If you want something light, nostalgic and nonthreatening to read this summer, for yourself, to your children or with your children, the new paperback edition of The Penderwicks is a good choice. Jeanne Birdsall’s first book is a charmer on many levels – it’s easy to ignore the fact that parts of it are pure cliché, while the characters are defined more by their descriptions than by any substantive personality traits or development. Reminiscent of some of the books by Eleanor Estes, The Penderwicks features a widowed father and his four daughters going for a summer vacation to a rented cottage on an estate called Arundel. They might as well be traveling in a time warp back to the 1950s (computers are mentioned, but they play no part in the story, and there are no videogames or other newfangled forms of entertainment). The four girls are responsible Rosalind, moody Skye, would-be writer Jane, and little Batty (who has the most personality). They encounter all sorts of delights at Arundel: tame rabbits, formal gardens (which they mess up in an endearingly mischievous way), and boys named Jeffrey (11-year-old son of the estate’s owner) and Cagney (a teenage groundskeeper). Jeffrey, artistic and musically talented, is a wonderful – and entirely innocent – playmate for the girls. But there is trouble in the form of Jeffrey’s mother, a snob who dislikes the Penderwick family, and her boyfriend (one should almost say “her intended,” so old-fashioned does the book seem), Dexter Dupree (and how old-fashioned is that name?). These adults’ conflicts with the Penderwick girls, and their decision to marry and send Jeffrey away to military school, provide what drama there is in an essentially good-hearted tale. There’s nothing really upsetting in the book: the worst things the girls do are lose their tempers and occasionally be less than truthful; even Jeffrey’s troubling situation is satisfactorily resolved at last. The Penderwicks does only that which is expected – or would have been expected 50 or so years ago – in a book that is mostly for and about preteens. Parents of a certain age will surely relish its air of innocence; children of today may find it a refreshing change of pace from other books aimed at them. And for those who love the book, there is a sequel due out next year.

      There have been no sequels from poet Sylvia Plath since 1963, when she committed suicide. Your Own Sylvia is about as strong a contrast to The Penderwicks for summer reading (or reading anytime) as can be. It is a far more serious, dour and distressing book, although it is both well and cleverly written. This is a book that engages the mind as well as the emotions. What Stephanie Hemphill has done is to tell the story of Plath’s short life (31 years) through poems that Hemphill has written herself and attributed to people in Plath’s world – as if Plath’s poetic sensibility imbued all those around her with her own muse. At the bottoms of pages, Hemphill provides biographical information about Plath in small type. Hemphill occasionally quotes brief excerpts of Plath’s poems, or discusses them – so readers can find them on their own. But the bulk of Your Own Sylvia is the poetry that Hemphill herself has created. She imagines Olive Higgins Prouty, the benefactor who made it possible for Plath to attend Smith College, musing, “What pleasure to know/ that my scholarship goes/ to such a talented delight.” There is this, attributed to Plath’s on-and-off college boyfriend, Dick Norton: “Stymied like a fly/ stuck in amber, she writes/ that she cannot write,/ confides in her mother/ that her muse has retired,/ abandoned her, left her/ with no imagination, just/ nerve ends of worry.” Plath’s friend and Smith roommate, Nancy Hunter, is given these lines: “I protect my Sylvia and she watches/ after me. I will stop her from jumping/ in front of trains, even if I have to bind/ my own hands and feet to the rail.” The poetic approach does wear a bit thin after a while – it is a tour de force, but a gimmick as well – and yet it successfully humanizes Plath in a way that more straightforward narratives of her life may not. Readers willing to challenge themselves to enter Plath’s world, as Hemphill herself has made a brave attempt to do, will find this a fascinating reading experience, if a dark and disturbing one.

(+++) MANY FORMS OF MOTHERHOOD

My Grandma/Mi Abuelita. By Ginger Foglesong Guy. Illustrated by Viví Escrivá. HarperCollins. $15.99.

A Chair for My Mother/Un Sillón para Mi Mamá. By Vera B. Williams. Greenwillow/HarperTrophy. $6.99 each.

Mama Always Comes Home. By Karma Wilson. Illustrated by Brooke Dyer. HarperTrophy. $6.99.

My Mother the Cheerleader. By Robert Sharenow. HarperTeen. $16.99.

      For kids of any age, speakers of any language, there is a special bond between child and mother – explored here in books for kids from newborns to teenagers. In the dual-language My Grandma/Mi Abuelita, a boy and his family fly from New York City, above the clouds and over the sea, to visit the children’s beloved grandmother. Each page has only one or two words in each language, starting in the morning at home and ending at night, going to sleep in Grandma’s house. The charming illustrations make this a lovely book for children up to age five.

      For ages 3-8, A Chair for My Mother – available in either English or Spanish – retains great charm 25 years after its initial publication. It is the story of a child; her mother, a waitress; and her grandmother, who live together until a fire burns their home and ruins their possessions. They move to a new apartment, receiving kind gifts of basic furniture from concerned neighbors, but what they really want is a big, comfortable chair – a place for grandma to rest and mother to relax after a hard day on her feet. A story of resilience in the face of loss, with determination and without self-pity, the book explains how this three-person family saves money in a huge jar, one dime at a time, until finally, finally, the jar is full and can be used to buy that much-desired armchair. The very simplicity of the everyday courage of girl, mother and grandmother gives their story staying power and real-world meaning.

      Another aspect of the real world – a mother going off to work – is at the heart of another book for the same age range, Mama Always Comes Home. Here, the human connection is not made until late in the story, which starts with brief looks at mother and baby animals: birds, cats, dogs, dolphins and more. In each vignette, a mother leaves her baby or babies for a specific reason, then returns to them, because “Mama always comes home.” Eventually, the refrain applies to a human mother, whose child cries, “Don’t go away!” – but who is able to reassure her baby that, after work, she too is sure to come home. The reassurance will be especially welcome for toddlers whose mothers are working outside the home.

      The real-world connection of the teen-oriented My Mother the Cheerleader is of a different and more intense type, focusing on a time that modern children cannot remember but that many adults will want them to understand. Set in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, decades before Hurricane Katrina drowned much of the area, it is a tale of the fight for desegregation, told by a white girl – 13-year-old Louise Collins – whose mother joins an anti-integration group called the Cheerleaders and joins in daily heckling of the first black student at the local elementary school. Robert Sharenow’s first novel has strong racial language, interpersonal intensity and enough surprising, tear-jerking revelations to qualify as a TV drama (Sharenow is an executive at the A&E Network). It’s not a particularly profound book, and the things that eventually happen to the major characters will not surprise anyone who has ever watched a courageous-blacks-vs.-evil-whites portrayal of the struggle for educational integration. But the book does have something to say about what makes a woman a mother, and what makes a child feel that a woman is her mother – and that may have more lasting value than the rather trite story itself.

(+++) THE ECSTASY OF THE AGONY

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. By Niklaus Largier. Translated by Graham Harman. Zone Books. $37.

      Zone Books’ forays into some of the more outré aspects of human sexuality tend to find ways to be interesting without being prurient. In Praise of the Whip is a particularly intriguing example of this sort of exploration, because it involves not only sexuality but also religion – and one of the places where the two intersect. For that matter, as Niklaus Largier shows, literature and sexuality intersect in the same place.

      Largier is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He here tackles a subject that encompasses both his academic fields – and illustrates it with art dating back to antiquity and, in the case of religious works, the 14^th century. Indeed, he writes, “The highly ritualized performance of flagellation, which follows the basic features of the churchly penance ritual, complementing it solely through gestural action and bodily pain, also provided the model for private practice.” But the “correlation between prayer and the whip” intersects with earthier human desires as well, and it is not difficult to see why the church became concerned with this element of the ritual, and worried about flagellation supplanting rather than supplementing more traditional means of moving toward salvation. In Graham Harman’s rather slow-moving translation, Largier (perhaps simply a pedantic stylist) writes of one church critic “thinking especially of scenes and narratives (which were already stock scenarios as early as the Middle Ages) in which the priest uses his pictorial-affective rhetoric to seduce the pious sinner or the nun, playing with flagellation in a kind of double game behind which we catch a glimpse of concealed diabolical shadows that first come fully to light with the libertines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

      Largier’s exploration of the church’s mixed reception of flagellation is just one element of In Praise of the Whip, and not necessarily even the most intriguing (except perhaps to religious scholars interested in, among others, “the Cryptoflagellants of Thuringia”). The later “libertines,” for whom the whip was an overt pleasure generator, have an even greater fascination, not only through the doling out of pain (by such as the Marquis de Sade) and its reception (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and others), but also through overt flagellation literature that began to spread in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and reached a pinnacle of sorts in the midst of Victorian times. Largier devotes considerable time to the bibliographical endeavors of “Pisanus Fraxi” (Henry Spencer Ashbee), the well-known Victorian author of Index librorum prohibitorum (1877), a guide to many of the then-extant pornographic works – including ones celebrating flagellation. Quoting from some of these works, whose purpose is pleasure alone, Largier also points out that flagellation was used (even in nonreligious treatises) as a supposed source of bodily improvement (for example, Flagellum salutis – “The Healing Whip” – dates to 1698). He also discusses flagellation in the work of such authors as James Joyce and Marcel Proust, and in both the work and life of “the most infamous flagellant in the history of literature,” Algernon Charles Swinburne.

      In Praise of the Whip is finally more encyclopedic than explanatory. There is a lot about the uses of flagellation here – for good or ill, however either term is defined – but little insight into the psychological rewards of its use (although Largier repeatedly asserts or assumes that they are there). There is very little provocative in this book, except for the subject matter itself; there is also very little sense of verve in the exploration of a somewhat non-mainstream vice (or is it a virtue?). After more than 500 pages of examples of whip usage for reasons of religion, personal pleasure or both, one is left knowing a great deal about the physical hows of flagellation but rather less about the emotional whys.

(++++) NORWEGIAN PLEASANTRIES

Nielsen: Chamber Music, Volume 1—Piano Trio; Serenata in Vano; Wind Quintet, Op. 43; Fantasy Piece for Clarinet and Piano; Two Fantasy Pieces, Op. 2; Canto Serioso; Three Selections from “Moderen” (“The Mother”). Trio Ondine (Piano Trio); Members of the DiamantEnsemble. Dacapo. $16.99.

      One does not usually think of chamber music when one thinks of Carl Nielsen, who made his mark mostly in the orchestral and operatic spheres. But as Dacapo makes clear in this first volume of Nielsen’s chamber music – this time, most of it with wind instruments – there are many little pleasures, and occasionally some larger ones, in Nielsen’s work for small ensembles.

      The seven works here were written as early as 1881, when Nielsen was 26, and as late as 1922: the famous Wind Quintet, by far the most substantial piece on this CD. The performances are uniformly excellent, filled with just the right blend of gravitas and lightness. But the CD’s arrangement is odd, jumping from early works to late ones and back again. This can be corrected by listening to the tracks in any order one pleases, but it would be nice to know if there was some organizing principle in this presentation or if the order is merely as random as it seems.

      The two most substantive works on this CD are also the most rewarding to hear. The Piano Trio is early (1883) and sounds little like Nielsen: the first movement has the charm, poise and classical balance of Mozart, the third is bright and Haydnesque, and the middle movement mixes classical-style emotionalism with lighter sections. Still, the work has a certain joie de vivre that is very pleasant, and Trio Ondine plays it with panache.

      The Wind Quintet is a large-scale work. The first movement is interestingly harmonized; the second features clever figurations in a “Menuetto” that is a minuet in name only, although it does have a triple-time basis; the brief “Praeludium” is solemn and cadenza-like; and the lengthy final theme and variations takes the hymnlike theme through sounds that are at times Brahmsian, at times jazzy, at times scattered, and always intricate. Of all the works here, this one most clearly possesses the “Nielsen sound.” It is also the most creatively structured and scored.

      Between these two pieces on this CD is the amusing Serenata in Vano (1914), a fantasy-like work whose attempted heartfelt expressions give way at the end to a jaunty march.

      Filling out the CD are the very early Fantasy Piece for Clarinet and Piano (1881), which is short and shows effective clarinet scoring; Two Fantasy Pieces, Op. 2 (1889) for oboe and piano, the first warm, the second jagged and rhythmically interesting; Canto Serioso (1913) for French horn and piano, an occasional piece (written as an audition item for would-be Royal Orchestra horn players) that focuses on the horn’s low range; and three short, atmospheric excerpts from The Mother (1920) – one for flute and harp, one for flute solo and one for flute and viola. Although the CD’s contents make it something of a hodgepodge, it is a very enjoyable one, showcasing some little-known examples of Nielsen’s work in enthusiastic and idiomatic performances. It will be interesting to find out what Dacapo plans for Volume 2 of this series.

(++++) BABY TALK

How to Be a Baby, by Me, the Big Sister. By Sally Lloyd-Jones. Illustrations by Sue Heap. Schwartz & Wade. $15.99.

One Naked Baby: Counting to Ten and Back Again. By Maggie Smith. Knopf. $15.99.

      “When you’re a baby, you don’t read books. You eat them,” explains Big Sister. And: “You can’t eat normal food. You can only eat yucky baby food.” And: “When you’re a baby, you’re called Muffin or Pumpkin or Peanut or Dumpling, and people say, ‘I could EAT you ALL UP!’” And eating (or not eating) is just a small part of being a baby in Sally Lloyd-Jones’ warmhearted look at babyhood from the perspective of an older sibling. “When you’re a baby, you don’t know how old you are or where you live or even if you’re a boy or a girl. Here’s what else you don’t know: …Any secrets. Any jokes. How to make a snowman. Anything!” These are wonderful observations, and are just the type that a real-life big sister might make. They become more wonderful yet through the charming illustrations of Sue Heap, who previously collaborated with Lloyd-Jones on Handbag Friends. It’s not just that the pictures of the baby and her sister are so delightful. There are also the lists, which look as if they were printed by hand on multicolored notebook paper – not only “what else you don’t know” but also “what else you can’t do” and “what else you are scared of” and more. And there is, above all, the loving sentiment underlying both words and illustrations. Big Sister describes the “teeny weeny eensy weensy teeny tiny baby” as the baby sits happily nearby; she draws amusing pictures to explain that as baby grows, “you don’t look so fat like a big balloon with a weird belly button sticking out”; and even when she complains about baby waking her up in the middle of the night and giving her a headache, Big Sister adds, “And that’s when I come in and whisper to you and kiss you and tell you, ‘Don’t worry, Baby Dumpling, it’s just a scary dream,’ and then you feel better.” The love comes through especially strongly at the end of this delightful book, when Big Sister imagines “when you get big” and all the things the siblings will do together, including “laugh[ing] and point[ing] at pictures of you in the olden days when you were a baby.” It’s hard to imagine a better Big Sister than this – or a better book for growing families than this one.

      A baby is enlisted for a very different purpose – teaching counting – in One Naked Baby. The book follows the adventures of a baby exploring his world, starting clean and fresh out of the tub and continuing until he is so dirty that he ends up back in the tub all over again (parents will immediately recognize the reality of the sequence!). Some things that are counted are in the environment (two fat cats, three laundry baskets); others are part of baby (“five toes for tickling”); some are on clothing (nine tiny chicks on baby’s hat); some are outdoors (the four perfect puddles and three wet pups that get baby all dirty again). Maggie Smith tells the home-and-yard adventure in easy-to-read rhymes, and every two-page spread highlights the number or numbers involved in that part of the story. Smith’s baby and baby’s-eye-view pictures are charming, with a fairy-tale gloss over real-world scenes (she gives worms eyes, for instance). And the inside front and back covers show the entire number adventure in a dotted-line sequence reminiscent of one of the wanderings depicted in the cartoon The Family Circus – except that this sequence starts with the naked baby at upper left and ends with the naked baby again, at lower right!