(++++) TALES OF TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

Reaching for the Moon. By Buzz Aldrin. Paintings by Wendell Minor. Collins. $6.99.

Leningrad: State of Siege. By Michael Jones. Basic Books. $27.95.

Out of Bounds: Seven Stories of Conflict and Hope. By Beverley Naidoo. HarperTrophy. $5.99.

The Greatest Story Never Told: The Babe and Jackie. By Ray Negron. Illustrated by Laura Seeley. HarperCollins. $17.99.

     For every tale of great human success, there seems to be one of our inhumanity to ourselves. Some accomplishments, though, stand out all the more because they involve overcoming severe hardships, often ones imposed by fellow human beings.

     Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s walk on the Moon in 1969 was, as Aldrin tells it, the culmination of a lifelong dream and the result of a great deal of hard work and “determination, strength, independence” – qualities the young Buzz admired in his favorite movie hero, the Lone Ranger. The target audience for this simplified biography, children ages 6-9, will probably need help from parents or grandparents to understand who the Lone Ranger was. Most of Aldrin’s tale, though, is simple enough: a focus on sports, especially ones in which he could excel as an individual; admission to West Point; joining the Air Force; admiring the men of the Mercury program, America’s first astronauts. Then the story takes an educational turn – a useful lesson for young readers. Aldrin realizes that he needs more than piloting skills to become an astronaut, so he returns to school, studies aeronautics, and identifies an area that he thinks will give him an edge in applying to the astronaut program. Yet it is only on his second try that he is accepted. The rest of the book is about training for and accomplishing the first Moon landing – and even in simplified form, this is a fascinating story from Aldrin’s first-person perspective. Supplementary pages on the origins of the Moon landing program and the history of flight will give parents a broader view of what Aldrin did, and a chance to discuss their own children’s hopes and dreams.

     The only hope and dream of the people of Leningrad during World War II was survival, and for many of them, that dream did not come true. A greater contrast between the positive nature of Aldrin’s book for children and military historian Michael Jones’ terrifying Leningrad: State of Siege for adults is hard to imagine. For an astonishing 900 days – nearly two-and-a-half years – the people of Leningrad (now restored to its previous name of St. Petersburg) endured a deliberate attempt by the Nazi High Command to starve them into submission and ultimately wipe them out: Adolf Hitler specifically said he would not accept any offer of surrender. He never got one: with a degree of pluck and determination amazing to contemplate, the citizens of Leningrad held out against the Nazi battle machine, forcing their enemies to spend longer trying to move from one side of a street to the other than they had spent in their entire conquest of France. First-person stories, careful use of primary sources (including some that were suppressed until recently), and a focus on the psychological strength of the starving, surrounded and outgunned citizenry make Jones’ book as readable as a novel, and often more frightening. The casualties were almost unimaginable: more than a million people died before the Soviet Army liberated Leningrad in 1944. But the tales of heroism, more in small ways than in large ones, are what resonate here. Among them are remarkable stories about the power of music. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad,” written largely during the siege and completed after the composer finally fled the city, proved to be a tremendous rallying point: conductor Karl Eliasberg said that with its first performance, “The whole city had found its humanity. And in that moment, we triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine.” And soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a Leningrad native who would later marry cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, remembers being a teenager during the siege and attending an opera put on by nearly frozen performers: “The thrill I felt…was pride in my resurrected people, in the great art which compelled those human shadows – the emaciated musicians, singers, the audience – to come together in that great opera-house, beyond whose walls air-raid sirens wailed and shells exploded.” An absolutely incredible story; a tremendously effective telling of it.

     Sometimes a fictional guise helps an author tell a nonfiction story, especially in books intended for younger readers. Both Beverley Naidoo’s Out of Bounds and Ray Negron’s The Greatest Story Never Told use that approach. Both handle their tales well, but take a little too much advantage of the ability to fictionalize reality: they tie things up a touch too neatly. As a result, both books receive (+++) ratings. Naidoo’s focuses on apartheid in South Africa, the author’s home country, through seven stories set in a timeline that stretches from 1948 to 2000 (the last two tales take place after apartheid has ended). The book is intended for ages 10 and up, with each story focusing on a choice made by a young person at a particular time in South Africa’s history. “The Dare” ends with a brutal caning; “The Noose” includes a Lone Ranger outfit, but with a perspective on that character very different from that of Buzz Aldrin; “The Typewriter” is about the perils of stirring up the oppressed with leaflets, and the solidarity that eventually ends oppression; and so on.

     The Greatest Story Never Told has a racial element, too: two hospitalized boys, one white and one black, both gravely ill (one with cancer, one with diabetes), focus on their differences and demand new roommates – until a nurse arranges for a magical batboy to take them on a journey through time to meet Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, and to learn how the things that unite us are so much more important than those that divide us. A seriously ill Ruth did actually sneak out of his hospital room in 1948 to see Robinson play, but this story is about magic and human connections more than any semblance of reality. It is an effective tearjerker, very earnest and assiduously well-meaning, but its emotional manipulativeness is on the extreme side, especially for the 5-9 age group for which it is intended.

(+++) FUNNY ANIMALS (PEOPLE, TOO)

A Dinosaur Called Tiny. By Alan Durant. Illustrated by Jo Simpson. HarperCollins. $16.99.

Fly Guy #6: Hooray for Fly Guy! By Tedd Arnold. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.

Charming Ponies: A Pony Legend. By Lois K. Szymanski. HarperFestival. $4.99.

My Weird School Daze: #1, Mrs. Dole Is Out of Control!; #2: Mr. Sunny Is Funny! By Dan Gutman. HarperTrophy. $3.99 each.

     Small characters having big adventures can be a real treat for young readers. A Dinosaur Called Tiny uses that formula very well. It is simply the story of a dinosaur born unusually small – and who never gets much larger. So of course the bigger dinosaurs won’t play with him – although he does make friends with a helpful bird who is also quite small. Then comes a crisis, and Tiny’s size is what lets him become a “pint-sized prehistoric hero” and decide that he likes being as small as he is. There is nothing particularly unusual about Alan Durant’s story or about its implied lesson – that everyone is important and should appreciate who he or she is. Jo Simpson’s amusing illustrations help raise the book’s level of fun, though. Kids ages 4-8 will enjoy it.

     They will also have fun with Tedd Arnold’s sixth Fly Guy adventure, Hooray for Fly Guy! Arnold always manages something slightly offbeat in his plots, and his drawings of Fly Guy (the pet of a boy named Buzz), showing the fly with huge eyes and a look of perception (if not overwhelming intelligence), are a big attraction of these books. In this one, Buzz is on the school football team, and Fly Guy wants to join, too, but of course he cannot kick the ball, catch it or tackle anyone. He becomes a sort of team mascot – and here, too, his small size and special abilities end up saving the day for the team. However, this wouldn’t be a Fly Guy book if there weren’t something faintly disgusting about what those special abilities are and how Fly Guy uses them. Let’s just say that Fly Guy and Buzz come up with a winning play that is nothing at which to turn up your nose. Or maybe it is something at which to turn up your nose….

     For slightly older readers, ages 7-10 – particularly for girls – the Charming Ponies series is enjoyable, easy to read and a nice exercise in wish fulfillment for kids who love horses but just can’t have one in real life. Each book comes with a pony charm – including the gold-colored one on a chain supplied with A Pony Legend. The story in the book is simple, and typical of the series. A girl named Meg has a very special, very beautiful white pony named Azure, with blue eyes. Since Azure was born, magic seems to have come to the valley where Meg lives. And there is a legend there about a great white stallion living high in the mountains. Could Azure be the stallion’s son? Could that explain why Azure seems able to feel Meg’s emotions and almost read her mind? And if the legend is true, what is the destiny of Azure and the girl who loves him?

     Back in the real world (or the realer one, anyway), the destiny of kids ages 7-10 is school. But not school the way Dan Gutman writes about it in My Weird School Daze. This series of paperbacks, featuring a boy named A.J., picks up on the popularity of similar books about weird and offbeat teachers, administrators and students – the whole “Teacher from the Black Lagoon” thing. In the first book – Mrs. Dole Is Out of Control! – the second-graders are about to move into third grade, but the president of the PTA (that would be Mrs. Dole) wants to turn the moving-up ceremony into a big, BIG deal, complete with a petting zoo, fireworks display and Blue Angels flyover. Mrs. Dole is given to pronouncements such as, “This flame represents the eternal quest for knowledge that will forever burn within you.” Out of control, indeed – even former President Clinton shows up. And then things start to go wrong. Really wrong…. And then there’s the second book – Mr. Sunny Is Funny! – which is about a lifeguard who is “brave and handsome, and he’s an artistic genius” because he “leans his cheek on his hand.” This is a sure sign that someone has a crush on him (ewwww); that someone is Andrea, whose family has rented the beach house next to the one being rented by A.J. and his family. The lifeguard is Mr. Sunny, who turns out to have a secret and a problem – but what gets really interesting is the appearance, quite out of the blue (sky, that is), of someone who will soon be A.J.’s and his friends’ third-grade teacher. My Weird School Daze is silly, harmless fun, and may even make the everyday school daze easier to take.

(+++) TALES WOVEN FOR TEENS

Poison Ink. By Christopher Golden. Delacorte Press. $8.99.

The City in the Lake. By Rachel Neumeier. Knopf. $15.99.

Shadows in the Twilight. By Henning Mankell. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

     Readers ages 12 and up who are looking for scares, fairy tales and stories of sensitivity have plenty of places to go, such as these three recent releases. Poison Ink is an intriguing mystery-horror thriller about bonding and tattooing gone wrong. It is about five girls who don’t fit into the usual high-school cliques and decide to form a group of their own, asserting their bonding by getting matching tattoos. But although four of the girls – Caryn, Katsuko, Letty and T.Q. – get the tattoos, the fifth, Sammi, is put off by the appearance of the tattoo parlor and worried about what her parents would say. So she does not get the tattoo – and soon finds the other girls ignoring her. This would be a fairly standard friends-to-enemies high-school story – “as much as it hurt her the way they’d defriended her, she missed them” – if it were not for what Sammi finds while breaking up a fight one day: Letty’s tattoo, originally five waves coming up from a heavy black circle, has grown. Now the lines are longer and are curling, vinelike, in all directions – like something evil spreading all over Letty’s body. “Everything had been poisoned, and the poison was spreading,” Sammi had thought earlier as her former friends turned nasty and started acting out in all sorts of bad-girl ways. Now Sammi knows she was right, but in a way she never expected. The tattoo artist, with the improbable name of Dante, must be behind whatever is happening. And Sammi has nowhere to turn – even a boy named Adam, with whom she has been becoming close, has deserted her after getting text messages, apparently from Sammi, showing her to be a slut who is using him. And there is worse to come, all of it highly melodramatic but quite effective in its one-dimensional way.

     The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeier’s first novel, is one-dimensional, too, but differently. This is a fairy tale of a fabled city surrounded by old magic that has become unbalanced since the land’s prince has mysteriously disappeared. At the center of the story is a girl named Timou, who lives in a village a four-to-five-day walk from the city and is learning to be a mage and healer – but who is pulled into the matter of the missing prince after her father joins the search for him and fails to return. Timou senses that the mystery of the prince and that of her own unknown mother are somehow related, so she begins her own quest. And when she eventually encounters the prince, Cassiel, she explores his mind and realizes, as he himself does not, that “you are the heart of the Kingdom. …You are the source of power, and your power is the Kingdom.” Mage meetings, castle politics, and a source of potent evil are all part of the tale, and when the identity of Timou’s mother is finally revealed, there is nothing happy about the knowledge. The book is filled with the usual portentous dialogue – “the dark is most powerful when it breaks into the light,” for example – but the characterizations are strong, and Timou’s final journey is an interesting one. This is a book that successfully masters many of its own clichés.

     Shadows in the Twilight is cliché-ridden, too, but in another way. This is a very earnest novel, intended as a companion to Henning Mankell’s previous book, A Bridge to the Stars, which was a coming-of-age novel filled with affecting if superficial emotional insight. Shadows in the Twilight revolves around the same central character, Joel Gustafson, who in the new book is almost 12 years old and thoroughly bored with his community. Then he is run over by a bus – but emerges completely unhurt. And so he decides to repay the favor, whatever it was and however it came about, by doing a good deed for someone else. The plot machinery is pretty creaky, since what Joel decides to do has no direct relationship to what happened to him: he determines to find a husband for Gertrud, a shy young woman he knows. But his elaborate plans, which involve first finding the right man and then secretly bringing man and woman together, go badly awry, and he ends up being hurtful rather than helpful. Joel talks and thinks in capitalized words – what happened to him was the Miracle, and he will start a Secret Society someday, and the disappointing person he tried to find to marry his friend is the Caviar Man, not to be confused with the Barefooted Man, and so on. Joel’s grandiose thoughts contrast with his extreme naïveté in ways that are sometimes cringe-inducing, and when he finally reveals his plot to Gertrud and suffers as a result (both emotionally and physically), it is really no more than he deserves. Mankell tries too hard in this book to evoke sympathy and empathy for Joel. Shadows in the Twilight will appeal to readers who wanted to know more about Joel after reading A Bridge to the Stars, but it is not a particularly satisfying book on a standalone basis.

(++++) SPANNING A CENTURY

Mahler: Symphony No. 5. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jaap van Zweden. LPO. $16.99.

Joseph Marx: Six Pieces for Piano; Herbst-Legende; Carneval (Nachtstück); Canzone; Die Flur der Engel. Tonya Lemoh, piano. Chandos. $18.99.

Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du Temps; Les Offrandes oubliées; Thème et variations. Robert Plane, clarinet; Gould Piano Trio (Lucy Gould, violin; Alice Neary, cello; Benjamin Frith, piano). Chandos. $18.99.

Jørgen Plaetner: Episodes and Collisions; Sonata for Clarinet and Piano; Three Songs to Texts by Stig Dagerman; Selected Songs—Myggesang; Din stemme hvisker natten frem; I en klit…; Lille menneske. LINensemble with Helene Gjerris. Open Space/Dacapo. $9.99.

Michael Nyman: Eight Lust Songs (I Sonetti Lussuriosi). Marie Angel and the Michael Nyman Band conducted by Michael Nyman. MN Records. $16.99.

Adrian Johnston: Brideshead Revisited. BBC Philharmonic conducted by Terry Davies. Chandos. $18.99.

     What a century it was. Although no collection of recordings can fully encompass the musical tastes and trends that marked the 20^th century and progressed into the 21^st, these CDs give a taste – indeed, more than a taste – of the many directions in which composers, from the well-known to the little-known, took music in the 1900s and early 2000s.

     Mahler’s Fifth Symphony did not exactly start it all – any starting point is arbitrary – but it does date to 1901-2 and mark considerable progress beyond traditional symphonic form, without the use of the vocal elements that Mahler included in his three previous symphonies. Mahler famously said, “My time will yet come,” and it did, 50 years after his death, largely through the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s (although Bruno Walter had championed the symphonies since Mahler wrote them). Now Mahler is firmly established in the standard repertoire – so firmly that his work can be heard in quite a straightforward performance, like that of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden, and sound absolutely right. There are no excesses of tempo or accentuation in this recent live recording, no attempt to overdo Mahler’s grandiosity or occasional overreaching; instead, the symphony grows organically, movement by movement, like a 19^th-century work – but one that clearly reaches beyond its predecessors in formal structure and tonality. This is a fine performance, very well played, and a strong indication of just how mainstream Mahler’s music has become.

     There is nothing mainstream, in the sense of frequently heard, about Joseph Marx, although he was writing not long after Mahler (Six Pieces for Piano, for example, dates to 1916) and in an idiom more Romantic than Mahler’s own. Marx (1882-1964) was best known as a composer of songs, and his piano works are so unfamiliar that everything on Tonya Lemoh’s new CD except the Six Pieces is a world premiere recording. This is music in the style of Richard Strauss and Max Reger, impressionistic and interesting rather than challenging. Seekers of the little-known will give the CD (++++); certainly Lemoh’s playing merits that rating. For a wider audience, the CD rates (+++) – Marx does not show an especially individualistic voice in these pieces, although they are certainly well crafted.

     Olivier Messiaen’s musical voice, thoroughly informed by his Catholicism and by numerous occurrences in his life, is deeply individual, and the new CD of his music certainly rates (++++). The chief work here is the justly famous Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, written when Messiaen was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and given its premiere before 5,000 fellow prisoners. Messiaen wrote for the four instruments he had available – hence this quartet’s unusual scoring for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The work remains extraordinarily affecting, even for those who know nothing of the circumstances of its composition, and this performance is beautifully crafted and emotionally true. Thème et variations for violin and piano, composed by Messiaen as a wedding gift for his violinist wife, requires both virtuosity and spiritual understanding, and gets both in this recording. The premiere recording of Messiaen’s piano transcription of Les Offrandes oubliées, a meditative work composed in 1930, nicely rounds out an exceptionally well-played CD.

     Messiaen lived until 1992 but never partook of such mid-20^th-century trends as electronic music, in which Jørgen Plaetner (1930-2002) was a Scandinavian pioneer. The new Plaetner CD, though, shows him as a skilled composer for voice and traditional instruments. Episodes and Collisions (1996) is for clarinet, cello and piano – three-fourths of the quartet used by Messiaen in his concentration-camp masterpiece – and was written for the LINensemble, which performs it with understanding and sensitivity. The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (2000-1) is an even larger-scale work, in five movements, and is one of Plaetner’s last. This recording is the piece’s world premiere and shows Plaetner as a distinctive musical voice using more-or-less classical form for his own purposes. The Three Songs to Texts by Stig Dagerman are political in orientation, using Dagerman’s antiwar sentiments to reflect Plaetner’s own. The four other songs here, to words by four different Danish poets, have a wider emotional range: they are more expressive and less aphoristic. Plaetner’s acoustic music has many intriguing elements, but probably not enough to appeal to a wide audience; the CD gets a (+++) rating.

     So does Michael Nyman’s latest self-produced CD, although this one is likely to appeal to anyone looking for far more licentiousness than one usually encounters in classical (or “post-classical” or “neoclassical”) music. Nyman’s Eight Lust Songs may be 21^st-century works, but their source is from the 16^th century: they are settings of texts by Pietro Aretino, an outspoken critic of church and state authority and the creator of a set of sonnets called I Sonetti Lussuriosi. The Italian of the songs is quite forthright and apparently designed to shock – indeed, the CD carries a parental content advisory – but Nyman’s settings of these paeans to physical love and the body parts that produce it (from the tongue to more intimate areas) are in no sense exploitative. Nyman, a fine film composer, manages to bring out the sensuality of the lyrics without making the songs seem overdone – or, in truth, as erotic as the sonnets surely were in 16^th-century Rome. Eight Lust Songs is ultimately a rather odd but often effective mixture of the explicit and the moving.

     And so we come all the way to 2008 and the recent release of a big-screen adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, with music by another fine modern film composer, Adrian Johnston. Like Nyman’s songs, Johnston’s music looks back, as it should for a historical tale; but unlike Nyman, Johnston scores his music for the same sort of large orchestra used by Mahler more than 100 years ago. This is not a matter of music coming full circle or returning to some arbitrary set of roots – the music for Brideshead Revisited, which gets a (+++) rating, in fact has less substance than Mahler’s symphony, which is not surprising for pieces designed to support a visual experience rather than provide a strictly aural one. The two dozen well-played tracks here, only one of which lasts longer than three minutes, are scene setters, action enablers and fine tone paintings of characters and circumstances. They are effective at what they do, and never pretend to be anything other than miniatures – their scope being as great a contrast as possible to that of Mahler, who famously insisted more than 100 years ago that a symphony must contain the entire world.

(++++) DISCOVERY AND REDISCOVERY

Bach: Music for Lute-Harpsichord. Elizabeth Farr, lute-harpsichord. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

Joseph Martin Kraus: Secular Cantatas. Simone Kermes, soprano; L’Arte del Mondo conducted by Werner Ehrhardt. Phoenix Edition. $16.99 (SACD).

Mozart: Requiem; Mass in C minor, K. 427. Kölner Rundfunkchor and Kölner-Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Gary Bertini. Phoenix Edition. $16.99 (2 SACDs).

     It is a genuine pleasure to discover less-known works by a very well-known composer. It is an equally genuine pleasure to discover a composer who is not well known but whose works show a very high quality of craftsmanship. And sometimes, the pleasure lies simply in a performance of familiar works that is so good that it reveals the music in all its greatness.

     Bach’s lute-harpsichord music is fascinating primarily because of the instrument’s sound. Some of the works on Elizabeth Farr’s new two-CD set will be familiar to listeners in other arrangements, such as the Fugue in G minor, BWV 1000, which is the second movement of Sonata No. 1 for Violin Solo; or the Sonata in D minor, BWV 964, better known as the Sonata No. 2 (in A minor) for Violin Solo. Other works here, such as suites originally written for lute, may be less well known. No matter – everything sounds different and quite wonderful on the lute-harpsichord, which is a keyboard instrument, strung with gut, that provides a lute-like sound but with much fuller sonic range. Bach owned two of these curious hybrid instruments, and Farr plays a reconstruction of one of them. The music is quite recognizably by Bach, but the sound is highly unusual, as if a lute’s courses had been expanded substantially (each course was typically two strings, except for the highest, single-string chanterelle). No human hand could play a stringed instrument with as many courses as are available on the lute-harpsichord; but the keyboardist can do so. And while the sound of the lute-harpsichord is not quite that of the lute, neither is it that of the harpsichord, having more of the lute’s characteristic warmth. The four suites in this set (BWV 995, 996, 997 and 1006a), and the fugue and sonata arrangements, are complemented by a Prelude, Fugue and Allegro (BWV 998), a Prelude (BWV 999), and a Sarabanda con partite (BWV 990) – all played with fine attention to detail and with a sound whose discovery is a delight in itself.

     The discovery of the music of Joseph Martin Kraus, an almost exact contemporary of Mozart (Kraus lived from 1756 to 1792), is not exactly new: Werner Ehrhardt has been advocating Kraus’ music for years. But the four Kraus secular cantatas conducted by Ehrhardt on a new SACD are something of a revelation, with soprano Simone Kermes singing throughout in a clear, well-modulated voice that has fine tone throughout its range, as Kraus weaves music of subtlety and refinement throughout works entitled La Scusa, La Primavera, La Gelosia and La Pesca. Kraus, it turns out, has considerable skill in tone painting (although his “spring” is nothing like, say, Vivaldi’s), and his use of the orchestra is as impressive as his vocal writing. Four excerpts from Olympie – the overture, two Largos and an Andantino – are used as entr’actes to separate the cantatas, and they provide further insight into Kraus’ fine handling of purely instrumental music. This is a Classical-era composer whose acquaintance is definitely worth making.

     Yet Kraus was, of course, no Mozart, and it is rather unfair to listen to Kraus’ secular cantatas and then turn to the new two-SACD set of Mozart’s great sacred music. The pleasures of Mozart are of a higher sort, and perhaps never higher than in the Requiem and the “Great” Mass in C minor. These recordings conducted by Gary Bertini – originally dating to 1991 – feature top-notch choral singing, first-rate orchestral playing, and two different sets of solo voices, each of them excellent. For the Mass, there are soprano Arleen Auger, mezzo-soprano Doris Soffel, tenor Thomas Moser and bass Stephen Roberts. In the Requiem, the soprano is Krisztina Laki; Soffel is again the mezzo; the tenor is Robert Swensen; and the bass is Thomas Quasthoff – whose voice is especially sonorous and full. There are many versions of these two magnificent works from which to choose. Bertini’s rank high among them – and will be of especially great interest to those whose systems allow full use of SACD sound (and the two-SACD set is offered at the same price usually charged for a single SACD). These great Mozart sacred works have simply never sounded better than they do here.

(++++) DIMENSIONS OF DELIGHT

The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. By Edwin A. Abbott. Introduction and notes by Ian Stewart. Basic Books. $17.95.

Alice in Wonderland. By Lewis Carroll. Illustrated by Mary Engelbreit. HarperFestival. $9.99.

Dragon Keepers #1: The Dragon in the Sock Drawer. By Kate Klimo. Random House. $14.99.

      It was Dr. Seuss who wrote of “the thinks you can think” and “the places you’ll go,” but Edwin A. Abbott and Lewis Carroll were taking readers to strange and wonderful realms long before the good doctor ever penned his not-so-nonsensical-after-all rhymes. Abbott’s Flatland, first published in 1884, remains the best short introduction ever written to issues of mathematical multidimensionality and the implications of going beyond three dimensions. The novella is also a book of social commentary, examining the mores of Abbott’s own time and finding them wanting in areas ranging from the general stultification of thinking to the specific treatment of women. Ian Stewart – who has extended Abbott’s concept by writing a book called Flatterland – produced The Annotated Flatland in 2002, but it has only now become available in a paperback edition that, one hopes, will rekindle the always-simmering popularity of Abbott’s book and make Stewart’s gloss more widely available. For Stewart does add a lot to Abbott – not to the basic story, which remains well-nigh perfect in its simplicity, but to an understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts as well as the societal implications of what Abbott wrote. Abbott postulates a land where all is two-dimensional (hence his book’s title); he then has the narrator, A. Square, visited by a sphere – which of course appears to A. Square as a circle. It is only when the sphere lifts A. Square out of Flatland through a direction that A. Square could never have imagined that A. Square begins to understand multidimensionality. Square and sphere visit one-dimensional and no-dimensional worlds; but when A. Square suggests, quite reasonably, that there must be worlds beyond that of three dimensions, the sphere scoffs at him, showing the limitations of his own thinking. Eventually A. Square is imprisoned in Flatland for his heretical notions about other dimensions. Stewart’s book includes Abbott’s original in larger type, set within boxes; Stewart’s own comments are in the margins, with some Abbott pages getting no comments at all and others receiving such long notes that (in one case) seven lines of Abbott are all that appear on two full pages of text. Stewart does go a bit overboard in his commentary at times, but of course there is no need to read more than one wishes to; Abbott’s book stands quite well on its own. If, however, you do want to understand more about Abbott’s discussion of polygons, read about the constraints of physics in Flatland, or find out in what way Flatland may be commenting on the Sepoy Mutiny, Stewart is available as a knowing guide. Flatland itself remains an astonishment. The Annotated Flatland is an expansion that does not make the original any better but may make elements of it more understandable to the modern reader.

      There is, rather surprisingly, no tinkering at all with another Victorian classic in the Mary Engelbreit’s Classic Library edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Engelbreit is a well-known illustrator, her sentimental and rather overdone renderings gracing all manner of books and gift items. But she is quite delightfully restrained here, simply contributing a cover of Alice and the Cheshire Cat (making both of them look somewhat younger, and the cat less mystifyingly threatening, than in Carroll’s writing), then producing a White Rabbit figure to introduce each chapter and an illumination for each chapter’s first letter. A gold-colored necklace from which a White Rabbit charm hangs is included with the book. But these are the only vestiges of the sentimentality for which Engelbreit is known: aside from them, this is Carroll’s work, unembellished and unannotated. In truth, readers ages 8-12 – the book’s target audience – could probably use some guidance to Carroll’s satire of Victorian pretensions, nursery songs and judicial oddities; but that is not what this edition is all about. Instead, it makes Alice in Wonderland reader-friendly, presenting the book as a relatively small hardcover that is easy to carry, with type large enough to be easy to read, and without illustrations (the classic ones by Sir John Tenniel are quite marvelous, but would make the edition considerably longer and would not go well with Engelbreit’s far more simplistic style). Young fans of Engelbreit who are unfamiliar with Alice’s adventures may well be drawn to them through this edition – and that would be a very good thing indeed.

      Kate Klimo is no Carroll or Abbott, but she too has come up with a kind of alternative-dimension story for the same ages targeted by the Engelbreit Alice. The first title in a planned series called Dragon Keepers, Klimo’s The Dragon in the Sock Drawer is one of those cute fairy-tale-like stories…but it is also neatly connected with our everyday 21^st-century world. For example, when a baby dragon hatches from an apparently ordinary rock, 10-year-old cousins Daisy and Jesse have to figure out what to feed it. So they take their problem to…Google. That doesn’t work, of course (in real life, you can get an answer by asking Google what to feed your baby dragon – but it refers to a lizard called a bearded dragon). In any case, the cousins’ unsuccessful search sets them to using the computer for further exploration, and that brings them to a site called www.foundadragon.org (which also exists in the real world – to promote this very book). It turns out that the cousins became Dragon Keepers when their dragon hatched, and must now keep the dragon safe from the centuries-old villain Saint George, who stays alive by drinking dragon blood. There are enough twists and turns in the basic plot to keep young readers well entertained, and Klimo keeps finding amusing ways to play with the old fairy tales. For instance, when the cousins have their inevitable confrontation with Saint George, Jesse realizes that the dragon’s real name must not be known to the villain, so he calls the dragon Esmeralda “after Cinderella’s ugly stepsister,” even though the stepsisters are really named Anastasia and Drizella. Later, after a daring rescue of the dragon from Saint George, Jesse and Daisy have to contend with the appetite that Emmy (her actual name; short for Emerald) has developed for fine Italian shoes. The Dragon in the Sock Drawer is great, silly fun, with a climax that makes it abundantly clear that the whole book is a shaggy dog story (even if young readers won’t necessarily know what that is). The ending also sets the scene neatly for the second book in the series – which, based on this first one, will have quite a lot to live up to.

(+++) HISTORIES AND ODDITIES

Greetings from the 50 States: How They Got Their Names. By Sheila Keenan. Illustrated by Selina Alko. Scholastic. $18.99.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2009. Scholastic. $15.99.

      Families interested in American historical trivia will enjoy Sheila Keenan’s name game involving the 50 states (and Washington, D.C.), but should not expect definitive answers to how the states got their names. In many cases, there aren’t any. Arizona, for example, may have come from a Pima Indian word, Alehzon, modified by Spanish settlers to Arizonac; or the name may mean “place of the small spring,” Ali-Shonak; or it could come from the Spanish words for “arid place.” Maine may come from “mainland,” spelled “main,” “Meyne” or “Mayne,” or from a grant from King Charles I referring to “the Mayne Lande and Premises.” But if Greetings from the 50 States: How They Got Their Names is far from definitive, it can be a great deal of fun for families interested in a virtual tour of the nation – with information on when each state joined the Union (although it omits mentioning when the states of the Confederacy left it). The book also includes states’ nicknames, both the official ones and some unofficial ones. Nebraska is officially the Cornhusker State, after an old way of harvesting corn, but is also the Tree Planters State, because Arbor Day started there in 1872; Connecticut is officially the Constitution State because of a constitution-like document written there in 1639, but it is unofficially the Nutmeg State for the very hard fruit seed that residents of the state used to sell. There may be more information here than many kids will find interesting (except perhaps in class during studies of American history); or there may be less than kids want to know, in which case the list of Web sites for all the states, provided at the back of the book, will be a big help.

      It’s hard to imagine a school course that would use the facts in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2009, which are – as always in this long-lasting series – just plain weird. But there remains a certain fascination to these snippets of information on odd things and people. The new edition includes “Ripley Rewind” entries, which look back on Ripley listings of the past, as well as very up-to-date data. The book is laid out in six sections: “Way Out World,” “Flaky Folk,” “Animal Antics,” “Against the Odds,” “Body Oddity” and “Strange but True.” Some of the items are simply coincidences of no significant interest: a girl was born at 3:33 p.m. on the third day of the third month (March) in the year 2003. Others are weird but not strange in the original Ripley “can you believe this?” manner: a patient operated on in 2007 had green blood, not red blood, because he had been taking large doses of a certain medicine. But some items really are wonders: a woman whose sight was restored by transplantation of the cornea from a cat’s eye; a two-headed lamb that drinks milk from either mouth; a four-foot-four-inch-long green bean; the way secret messages were passed in ancient Greece – through tattoos on heads, which were concealed as hair grew over them; panda dung as a souvenir of this year’s Beijing Olympics; and more. As always, there is a mixture here of the old and the new, the amazing occurrences and the groaners, and there are some items that just seem inappropriate – such as the photo of an immensely fat baby whose weight is caused by a rare disease. There will be families that find this latest Ripley’s compilation offbeat, unusual and entertaining; but there will be others that find a lot of it simply tasteless – believe it or not.

(+++) MUSICAL TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS

Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera. By Sarah Caldwell with Rebecca Matlock. Wesleyan University Press. $27.95.

Lang Lang: Playing with Flying Keys. By Lang Lang with Michael French. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

      From Offenbach’s Voyage to the Moon to Mozart’s Magic Flute, with much in between, Sarah Caldwell staged operas in Boston for more than 30 years. She also toured the United States with productions and made trips to Germany, Israel, South Africa, China, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. And she contended, throughout her long career as impresario and conductor and more, with lack of funds, intransigent unions, pervasive sexism, and the many needs and demands of major artists from Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland to Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Challenges was put together by Rebecca Matlock, a longtime friend of Caldwell and a member of the Board of Directors of Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston, from taped interviews done during the three-year period before Caldwell died in 2006 at the age of 82. The book will be instructive, if perhaps not particularly enjoyable, for opera lovers, since Caldwell knew the field so well but said so little about it during her lifetime – she rarely granted interviews or sought publicity. Some of her stories show Caldwell managing to overcome the realities of society as it existed during her career: she was the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera and the United States Marine Band. Other tales remain useful for the classical-music sphere today: the infighting, the internal politics, the huge egos, and the constant search for enough money to mount one more production, make one more tour, develop one more new idea, hire one more top-rank singer. The book’s style, unfortunately, can be matter-of-fact to the point of dullness. For example, regarding a planned production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, for which Caldwell wanted to recruit the famed bass Boris Christoff: “I took with me a model of the set that we had used [in a previous staging]. I didn’t want to have any trouble when he came and saw that it was very different from the sets to which he was accustomed. He professed to think it was the most wonderful set he had seen, a very exciting concept, he thought.” The constant parade of simple declarative sentences quickly becomes wearing; Challenges is a challenge to read straight through, although there is much of interest in it when it is taken in small doses.

      The young Chinese pianist Lang Lang (born 1982) is as flamboyant and public a figure as Sarah Caldwell was a private one. It is no surprise that a version of Lang Lang’s biography, Journey of a Thousand Miles, is being offered to young readers as Playing with Flying Keys, because Lang Lang represents a type of celebrity pianism that reaches out to audiences of all ages. Michael French’s adaptation maintains the idea of celebrity hagiography, with a rags-to-riches story arc of a child prodigy to whom music came “as naturally as breathing.” Also in keeping with the form, Playing with Flying Keys contains 16 pages of photographs, ranging from one of seven-year-old Lang Lang practicing in his underwear to ones of him with conductors Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim and Sir Simon Rattle. There is not much insight into Lang Lang as a person here, although we do learn of his family turmoil, the poverty of his childhood, and his love of Transformers. Readers familiar with classical music will be able to read between the lines. For example, Lang Lang tells conductor Christoph Eschenbach that, given the choice, he would like to play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Chicago Symphony: “I suddenly remembered how many careers had been galvanized by that brilliant composition – Horowitz’s and Rubinstein’s among them.” But Lang Lang pointedly does not mention that the concerto launched Van Cliburn’s career – an omission that says something about how the Chinese pianist sees himself. However, Playing with Flying Keys is not really intended for a musically sophisticated audience, and that is just as well, since there is some controversy about Lang Lang’s playing – whether there is really much substance behind his pianism, and whether he tends to “phone in” some performances instead of working hard at them. There is no such controversy here: the book contains nothing but uplift, being a story of success on the stage of the world. It is an appealing tale for readers ages nine and up. They will have time to learn the nuances of life, Lang Lang’s as well as their own, later.

(+++) PLUCK AND LUCK – AND LOVE

The Princess and the Hound. By Mette Ivie Harrison. HarperTeen. $8.99.

The Juliet Club. By Suzanne Harper. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Rumors: A Luxe Novel. By Anna Godbersen. HarperCollins. $17.99.

Labor of Love. By Rachel Hawthorne. HarperTeen. $5.99.

Lucky. By Rachel Vail. HarperTeen. $16.99.

      The variations on themes of teenage discovery of self and of love seem to be endless, as does the parade of books on those subjects. But some approaches are cleverer than others. The Princess and the Hound, originally published last year and now available in paperback, moves in some interesting directions. It is a sort of beauty-and-the-beast story, although here the beastliness is more on the female side than the male. Mette Ivie Harrison pulls in all the fairy-tale elements (prince, princess, castles, neighboring kingdoms, magic, and so on), but she does a better job than many other writers of making her protagonists, George and Beatrice, come alive for the reader. George is a reluctant prince – the duties, he finds, are a burden – and the possessor of animal magic that he must constantly conceal, even though speaking with animals gives him great pleasure. Bound to marry Beatrice in the aftermath of a war, he finds her to be a young woman with her own problems: “It seemed that she was rejected for any signs of femininity yet also rejected for not showing enough femininity.” Illnesses treated by mysterious physicians, discoveries of true nature and true names, and acceptances of the burdens of leadership add up to a well-woven story that invites a sequel – which will be the forthcoming The Princess and the Bear.

      The Juliet Club is a more ordinary book, but it too has a level of mythic resonance, as Suzanne Harper’s echo-of-Shakespeare title makes clear. The heroine, Kate Sanderson, is the daughter of a Shakespeare scholar. Kate’s boyfriend breaks up with her; Kate decides to avoid love forever; and she heads off to a summer Shakespeare symposium where she can let her intellect flow and hold her hormones in check. But of course, things don’t work that way (at least in romance novels), and Kate finds herself irresistibly attracted to a fellow Shakespeare Scholar named Giacomo, whose watchword – even though he too has been dumped by someone – is, “My heart does not break.” The book is laid out in acts, scenes and entr’actes rather than chapters, and the finding-each-other Act V is no surprise at all, but The Juliet Club is a nicely written book with which young teenage girls can pass their time dreaming of exotic lands and exotic boys.

      There is a touch of the exotic in Rumors as well, but this sequel to The Luxe is somehow harder to swallow than The Juliet Club. Set among glittering (and 100% stereotyped) New York socialites and their hangers-on at the turn of the 20^th century, Anna Godbersen’s novel introduces or reintroduces characters already familiar from The Luxe and, it seems, from countless period pieces before it: the too-appealing cad, the sister seeking to redeem the family name, the seductress determined to pick up where her betters left off, the lower-class schemer learning to trade in upper-class gossip, and more. There is plenty of talk here and a modicum of action, but this tale of misplaced pride and prideful romance is so overwrought that the reappearance of Elizabeth Holland – heroine of the previous book – is not only no surprise but also a foregone conclusion.

      The foregone conclusion in Labor of Love, by that reliable recounter of summertime love, Rachel Hawthorne, is that heroine Dawn Delaney will do her very best to avoid falling for a very cute guy but will fall for him anyway. Dawn’s first and only boyfriend cheated on her, so of course she has sworn off all boys and gone to New Orleans to help rebuild houses (isn’t that what everyone does?). She and her friends, Jenna and Amber, have also gone to a psychic, who has told Dawn to expect to encounter a stranger with a red baseball hat. And that’s what happens! And the guy is cute! And Dawn meets him at a bakery, and later at a restaurant! And it’s all just too precious for words! But there are plenty of words here, in Hawthorne’s usual style: “The thought of being with only Brady, with no buffer, no other people, was scary and thrilling. And I suddenly realized that it was something I wanted. I wanted a lot.”

      What Phoebe Avery wants in Lucky is something a bit more unusual, at least in a novel for teenagers: she wants her mom’s wealth back. Lucky is the first book of a planned trilogy about the Avery sisters, who have plenty of material possessions and (as a result) lots of admiration from many, many friends – but whose mother, the source of all that money, suddenly loses her job, plunging the family into financial crisis. Now Phoebe, who has always considered herself lucky, cannot count on having just the right dress for graduation from middle school; nor is she sure she can count on her best friend any longer, or on her crush. Phoebe is not close to her two older sisters, and is too embarrassed to discuss her family’s financial reverses with her school friends, so she has nowhere to turn – until, slowly but surely, she comes to realize that friendship and love are more important than money. Phoebe seems a little too shallow to discover the inner strength that she needs to pull herself through the family crisis, but Rachel Vail makes sure to give her that strength and make it available in time for an ending that is, probably inevitably, syrupy-sweet. Books for young teens rarely focus on financial matters – it seems somehow easier to write about sex, families’ emotional breakdowns, and so forth – so Lucky deserves credit for tackling a subject that is not often handled for this age group. But the characters remain one-dimensional and the ending too pat.

(++++) OPERA DELIGHTS FROM ALL OVER

Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro. Glyndebourne Chorus and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Silvio Varviso. Glyndebourne. $44.99 (3 CDs).

Prokofiev: Betrothal in a Monastery. Glyndebourne Chorus and London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Glyndebourne. $29.99 (2CDs).

Wagner: The Mastersingers of Nuremburg. Sadler’s Wells Opera Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Reginald Goodall. Chandos. $44.99 (4 CDs).

Lully: Psyché. Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs. CPO. $33.99 (3 CDs).

      To the numerous self-launched CD labels that have sprung up in recent years can now be added one that should have opera lovers everywhere rejoicing: the Glyndebourne Festival’s own label, which will release both recent and archival performances from the famous festival and which is starting off with one of each. Silvio Varviso’s Marriage of Figaro dates all the way back to 1962 – this is an analog recording, although one that has been well remastered – and retains tremendous charm. How could it not, with Mirella Freni as Susanna? And it also has Gabriel Bacquier in fine voice as Count Almaviva, plus the relatively little-known Heinz Blankenburg turning in a passionate and energetic performance as Figaro. With Leyla Gencer as the Countess and Edith Mathis as Cherubino rounding out the principals, the cast is finely balanced and well attuned to the music, which of course bubbles along with this opera’s marvelous mixture of fun and heart. Not the greatest performance of The Marriage of Figaro, perhaps, but a very noteworthy one that showcases the strengths of – among other things – the Glyndebourne Chorus.

      The chorus (not the identical members, of course) also does very well in a much more recent performance, the 2006 Glyndebourne production of Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery. As little known as Mozart’s work is well known, Prokofiev’s 1940-1 work is also a comic opera, although it was scarcely written during an amusing time: the Nazis were invading Russia as Prokofiev worked on it. Nevertheless, this is one of the composer’s brightest and bounciest compositions, based loosely on Richard Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, The Duenna. The plot revolves around two pairs of lovers and makes more than passing references to the fading of the now-impoverished aristocracy as the lower classes, including the merchant class, gain wealth and therefore power. It is a member of that class, the fishmonger Mendoza (sung by Sergei Alexashkin), who emerges as the opera’s central hero (or antihero). Neither Alexashkin nor the other singers will be particularly well known to most listeners, but all handle their roles well, and Vladimir Jurowski, who seems to thrive when conducting unfamiliar scores, bring Prokofiev’s wit and underlying wisdom vividly to life.

      The wisdom pervading Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is deeper than anything Prokofiev offers: Wagner’s grand comedy is one of the most humane and understanding of all operas. It is also an opera so thoroughly enmeshed in the German language – including the series of outrageous German-language errors that eventually sinks Beckmesser’s bid for Eva’s hand, and Hans Sachs’ reminder at the end to honor the German masters of the past and their art – that it is particularly ill-suited to appear in the Chandos “Opera in English” series. Still, the live 1968 Sadler’s Wells analog recording, led by Reginald Goodall, has a great deal to recommend it. This is a famous “lost” recording, archived by BBC Radio for many years. Even remastered, the sound is less than ideal, but there is enough beautiful singing (from Norman Bailey as Sachs, Alberto Remedios as Walther von Stolzing, Margaret Curphey as Eva, and others) to make the recording more than a period piece. It is, however, something of a curiosity, given the deeply Germanic nature of the method that Wagner used to tell his story of beauty, melancholy and art. A huge treat for those who have long awaited the return of this recording to the catalogue, Goodall’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg will not likely be a first-choice recording for anyone else.

      The new recording of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Psyché, on the other hand, will be the first choice of anyone interested in this opera, since the work has never been recorded before. Lully’s lyric tragedy of the world’s most beautiful woman, and the jealousy she provokes in the goddess Venus, was originally performed at the court of Louis XIV – 330 years ago. Certainly the overextended plot and opera seria approach of the action being carried forward through extended recitatives show the work’s age. But with the ongoing rediscovery of operas by Vivaldi and Haydn, listening to Lully is no longer the stretch that it would have been as recently as a decade ago. The Boston Early Music festival performance, recorded just last year, is a very fine one indeed, featuring Carolyn Sampson as Psyché, Karina Gauvin as Venus, and Aaron Sheehan as Cupid – whom Psyché is eventually able to marry after Jupiter (Matthew Shaw) overcomes Venus’ objections by giving the human girl the gift of immortality. Before that happens, there are arguments on Olympus, journeys to the underworld, and all sorts of lavish arias and choruses to explain and comment upon the characters’ trials and tribulations. Lully’s music is varied and colorful, and the singing is skillful and conveys emotions with appropriate intensity. It would be unreasonable to expect Psyché to appear in the first rank of the operatic canon, but this is a work of considerable interest both vocally and instrumentally, and the new CPO recording should be of great interest to opera lovers looking for something unusual.

(+++) VIDEOS OPERATIC AND PIANISTIC

Lehár: Die Lustige Witwe. Gunther Emmerlich (Baron Mirko Zeta), Lydia Teuscher (Valencienne), Bo Skovhus (Graf Danilo Danilowitsch), Petra-Maria Schnitzer (Hanna Glawari), Oliver Ringelhahn (Camille de Rosillon), Christoph Pohl (Vicomte Cascada), Gerald Hupach (Raoul de St. Brioche), Ahmad Mesgarha (Njegus). Staatsopernchor Dresden and Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Manfred Honeck. Medici Arts DVD. $29.99.

Martha Argerich: Evening Talks. A film by Georges Gachot. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

      The newly issued live recording of the Semperoper Dresden performance of Die Lustige Witwe has a lot going for it: fine pacing, excellent orchestral playing, a delightful set, and staging that keeps everything and everyone moving pretty much constantly. It also, unfortunately, has some things going against it, from some peculiar stage-management decisions to, alas, considerable vocal weakness in some of the principal parts. This is a production that puts acting above beautiful singing – a state of affairs that does not quite work for The Merry Widow, Franz Lehár’s most famous work. Jérôme Savary, who directed the work for the stage, mounts the operetta in modern dress and with plenty of flash, including a helicopter that delivers and removes singers at climactic moments and a number of pinpoint lights that illuminate everything from the Eiffel Tower backdrop to the eyes in the portrait of the Pontevedrian leader that appears in several scenes. The dialogue has been largely rewritten to accommodate the updating – and the inclusion of such items as an “Andy Warhol” couch shaped like a giant hand, and a promise by Danilo never to tell Hanna he loves her in German, so he eventually says the words in English. Unfortunately, the spoken words often end up at odds with the sung ones: we have a 21^st-century Hanna being told she is finally being granted the right to vote, which she graciously accepts in the “Ladies’ Choice” scene. Odd; very odd. But not as odd as having the first verse of the erotic Vilja Song sung by Hanna to a child, or having Danilo’s deeply emotional (if barely concealed) proclamation of love through the fairy tale of the prince and princess staged with marionettes. Miscues such as these might be forgiven in a production packed with top-notch singing, but unfortunately this one does not have it. Bo Skovhus makes a fine Danilo, whose pain at losing Hanna is barely concealed from the beginning, and who delights in his interactions with some very sexy grisettes. But there are no sparks between him and Petra-Maria Schnitzer as Hanna, and Schnitzer, although she handles the basic singing creditably enough, seems to have trouble pronouncing German and says her spoken lines with a pronounced accent (if this is deliberate, it does not work). The almost-love-scene between the principals in Act Two – in which the orchestra sneaks in the strains of the famous waltz, which Lehár wrote to appear in Act Three only – falls flat. Among the other singers, Oliver Ringelhahn is all right as Camille, but appears more put-upon than passionate – this is a deeply felt role when done well, but here everything is on the surface. A surface-level interpretation makes sense for Valencienne (although there are better ways to handle the character), and Lydia Teuscher is all glitz, although her mercurial mood changes do not always come across effectively. As her husband, Baron Mirko Zeta, Gunther Emmerlich is the weakest principal singer of all: the conclusion of his opening aria is transposed down to fit his limited vocal range, and he talks his way through his later singing rather than even trying to get the notes right. On the other hand, Ahmad Mesgarha overacts effectively in the spoken role of Njegus (and is actually given a brief chance to sing here). This production is all sparkle: the final act even transports the characters to Maxim’s instead of having Hanna remake her own home in its image, thus undercutting the emotional content of the operetta but making possible the display of some wonderfully inventive scenery, dancing and acting. But Die Lustige Witwe is deeply heartfelt beneath its glossy surface, and it is Lehár’s effective tapping into that emotional vein that is largely missing here.

      Emotion is on tap in George Gachot’s 63-minute film about pianist Martha Argerich, which is paired on a new DVD with 38 minutes of Argerich rehearsing and in concert. Argerich, born in Argentina in 1941, is a famously private pianist, although not to the extent of Sviatoslav Richter. In Evening Talks, she opens up a bit about her life, her background and her love of music; as she speaks, Gachot sometimes shows her talking and sometimes shows her rehearsing at home or in a concert hall; at other times, she is seen in concert. A feast for fans of Argerich, the film is likely to be disappointing to others, since the focus is entirely on the performer and not on the music – anyone hoping to hear a variety of complete Argerich performances will have to go elsewhere. Argerich does have an interesting background, and she communicates her passion for music and music-making effectively – but she is more effective still when communicating from the piano to an audience. That is not what Gachot has her do here; it is not what he intended her to do. Nevertheless, Evening Talks finally comes up a little short by letting viewers hear Argerich’s voice discussing who she is and what she tries to put across to the audience, while offering comparatively few opportunities to hear how she does it through the voices of the pianos on which she plays so well.

(++++) FUNNIES, SERIOUSLY

Brevity (Remix). By Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection. By Scott McCloud. Harper. $24.95.

      The nice thing about “Guy & Rodd,” as the writer and artist of Brevity style themselves, is that they take the single-panel medium seriously without taking the world or themselves seriously. The Brevity title refers to a style that, when it works, is minimalist in both words and art, putting across an amusing or cynical observation in an unusually pithy way. Guy and Rodd have a nicely skewed sense of humor. For example, as a shark eats another fish, one of the three remoras clinging to the shark thinks, “Oh great, now we’re accomplices.” Or, as a peacenik pulls up (and therefore kills) flowers to place in gun barrels, a still-unpicked flower says to another, “Such senseless brutality – when will it stop?” And then there’s the “Shrinks in Heaven” panel, with the haloed psychiatrist asking his haloed and thoroughly relaxed patient, “Couldn’t you at least pretend to have a problem?” Not all the panels work – some are far from exercises in brevity, being overly filled with words, while others are silly or obvious, such as one imagining Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings as a crossing guard saying, “You shall not pass.” But it’s nice to know that Guy and Rodd do think about what they’re doing – they offer commentary throughout this oversize “Treasury” collection, informing readers that (among other things) they hate to do research and therefore usually make up such things as the right clothing for a particular era or the shape of a narwhal. It’s also nice to know that they can work together even when they disagree – they point out some panels that one or the other of them didn’t care for, and a few that neither of them, in retrospect, considered worthwhile. And then there are the panels that could have used more brevity, such as the one showing Tolstoy erasing part of his original title, “War & Peace & Cabbage,” which would indeed have worked better without the added words, “It was a last minute change, but a good one.” The nice thing is that even though Brevity sometimes misfires, its creators are actually paying attention to what works and what doesn’t – a recipe for greater success in the future.

      Scott McCloud went on to much greater success in his future after his Zot! comics: he became an intelligent analyst of the medium with some striking (if debatable) views on its value, meaning and societal implications. But that was in his three works called Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. All are light years beyond the determinedly pedestrian Zot! series, which earns its (+++) rating mostly as an artifact and because of the commentary that McCloud provides throughout the book. The Zot! series was originally done in color and then, McCloud says, restarted as a black-and-white sequence, but in fact these stories require more filling-in of the background of characters and settings than McCloud offers within the tales themselves. And the stories themselves are, really, not much to read or look at. They begin as superhero/alternative universe tales – a concept already humdrum by the late 1980s, not only in literature but also in comics (certainly for anyone familiar with the underground comics, which had gone far beyond this sort of thing more than 20 years earlier). Then they turn into illustrated tales of life on our own planet, through the well-worn device of having Zot (the eponymous superhero) stranded on our Earth. The stories have moments of pleasant insouciance, especially when Zot is fighting the strange and mostly feckless villains of his own world. And they have moments of genuine tenderness in Zot’s relationship with Jenny Weaver, whom he meets on our Earth – although Jenny herself is never very fully developed as a character. The drawing style tends to the wooden when McCloud is portraying people – a shortcoming he acknowledges – but has its fascinations, too, as when McCloud uses large panels to portray details of Zot’s world, or when he “sees” elements of that world through the distorted eyes and minds of some of the bad guys. The Zot! series did break some new ground by the long-outmoded standards of DC and (to a lesser extent) Marvel comics, and will be of interest to readers of those companies’ products and to people familiar with McCloud’s later and much better work. On their own terms, though, these stories have not worn particularly well in either narrative or artistic terms.

(++++) THE USES OF POETRY

Sputter, Sputter, Sput! By Babs Bell. Illustrated by Bob Staake. HarperCollins. $16.99.

Honeybee. By Naomi Shihab Nye. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Psyche in a Dress. By Francesca Lia Block. Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins. $7.99.

      Poetry works differently at different parts of the age scale. Sputter, Sputter, Sput! is by far the simplest book here – which makes sense, since it is for ages 2-5. Here the poetry aids directness of expression and, through its rhythms and rhymes, enjoyment of the very simple story, in which a character drives a car “Uphill. Downhill. Up and down/ past all the houses in my town.” But then the car sputters and stops (hence the book’s title) – it is out of gas. A quick fill-up (“Glug! Gurgle! Glug!”) and the trip continues. That is essentially the entire book, and no, it is not a parable of conspicuous consumption or a warning for children about current high gas prices – it is simply a straightforward, charming story told in deliberately repetitive rhymes, compactly written by Babs Bell (whose full name is Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz) and delightfully illustrated by Bob Staake with characters whose heads are, in most cases, bigger than the rest of their bodies. For its target audience, it is right on target.

      Honeybee aims higher – in age, anyway. Intended for ages 10 and up, Naomi Shihab Nye’s book includes both poetry and short bursts of prose. Some of the pieces here, such as “Hibernate,” have intriguing subjects: “My father’s friend Farouk/ has a dream:/ God resigned./ And all the people took better care of one another/ and got together then/ because, well, they had to.” Others are odd, such as “Accuracy,” in which one girl says she married another girl’s sock puppet “in my mind” but, when complimented for loving him, answers, “I didn’t say I love him! I said, he is my husband!” Still others, such as “The Cost,” have social and political undercurrents: “Oh students, we will teach you/ everything you need to know/ then place a gun in your hands?/ Makes sense, doesn’t it?/ No sense seems common anymore.” Because the book leaps and meanders rather than progresses, and because it is somewhat inconsistent in both style and subject matter, it gets a (+++) rating – but existing fans of Nye, a popular author of novels as well as poetry, will rate it higher.

      Existing fans who are still older – 14 and up – will be the primary target for Psyche in a Dress. Francesca Lia Block’s very short 2006 book, now available in paperback, is a set of prose poems in which ancient Greek transformation myths are updated for modern times. The tale of Psyche and Cupid becomes one in which she says the god “told me all the myths, one after the other/ night after night/ my beautiful, brutal bedtime tales.” Psyche, here imagined as an independent filmmaker, wishes for a change comparable to those of the characters in the tales that Cupid tells her. Other figures are also reimagined in a modern urban environment: Aphrodite as a shopgirl, Echo and Narcissus as actors, and so on. The various stories interconnect with a framing tale about filmmaking, and the narratives are done from a variety of perspectives: the tale of Orpheus, for example, includes his voice, that of Eurydice and that of the Maenad (here, a rock star). The density of the themes belies the book’s 115-page length, but the interlocking stories and the interweaving of the ancient and the modern may prove difficult for teens not already familiar with Block to digest. This book too gets a (+++) rating, but it will be especially appealing to those already familiar with Block’s style.

(+++) WHEN TEENS’ WORLDS CHANGE

High Dive. By Tammar Stein. Knopf. $15.99.

How to Build a House. By Dana Reinhardt. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

      Loss, finding oneself, uncertainty, the drive to know – these are the recurring themes of a host of novels for teenagers, including these two, both of which handle their subject matter with sensitivity but not with a great deal of originality. In High Dive, the second novel by Tammar Stein (whose debut, Light Years, was very well received), what holds Arden Vogel’s family together is a small house in Sardinia that is filled with her childhood memories. The house represents her parents’ love and her own sense of self. But it is a flawed symbol: Arden’s father dies suddenly, and then her mother is deployed to Iraq, and there is no longer a way to keep the house. It is Arden herself who must go to Europe to get the house ready for sale, all the while dreading both her mother’s danger and her own sense of disconnection from her roots. Small wonder, then, that when she meets three apparently carefree girls of her own age who are heading for Europe for summer break, she joins them and does her best to enjoy all the tourist spots and all the carefree living she can. But even while seeing art in Florence or climbing the Eiffel Tower, Arden finds her thoughts drifting back to her mother’s safety and her own responsibilities, which she will have to face sooner rather than later. Of course, it turns out that the apparently blithe girls have their own troubles – one is pregnant by an ex-boyfriend, for example – but their problems are not Arden’s, and she knows she eventually has to go to Sardinia to get on with her life. And she does, finding there a level of support she never expected, and learning that she can indeed handle what life has thrown at her so far – and, by implication, what it will throw at her in the future. None of Arden’s progress is surprising or (in the context of this sort of book) particularly unusual, but Stein manages to tell the story with an appealing mixture of both sensitivity and realistic grittiness.

      How to Build a House has a house as a focus, too, but not in the same way. Dana Reinhardt’s third novel for young adults is the story of Harper Evans, who journeys from California to a small town in Tennessee to help rebuild a home destroyed by a tornado. But what she is really trying to do, of course, is rebuild her sense of self and of her own home. Harper (whose mother died when she was two years old) loves her stepmother, Jane, and her stepsister, Tess – who is her best friend. But the whole arrangement unravels quickly when Harper’s dad and Jane get a divorce, sundering everything on which Harper has come to rely. Harper knows she is running away by going to Tennessee to work on home rebuilding, but she wants to run away, and likes the idea of maybe doing some good at the same time. And she needs time to think about herself and where she stands, without emotional entanglements. But there will inevitably be an emotional entanglement in Tennessee – in the form of Teddy, the son of the family for whom the home is being rebuilt. Slowly, slowly, Harper learns to trust someone again, and even comes to love Teddy, a relationship that “feels like the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life.” The changes involving Teddy – and the re-entry of Tess in Harper’s life – are what lead to an unsurprising but emotionally satisfying sense that Harper has built not only a house but also the start of a better life for herself. The theme and its execution are nothing new; nor is Reinhardt’s handling of Harper’s story. But readers will find the conclusion more than satisfactory nevertheless.