(++++) ANIMALS LEARN – KIDS DO, TOO

Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World’s Brightest Bird. By Pamela S. Turner. Photographs by Andy Comins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $18.99.

Prissy & Pop: Big Day Out. By Melissa Nicholson. Harper. $17.99.

Otter Goes to School. By Sam Garton. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Pete the Cat’s Got Class. By James Dean. Harper. $9.99.

     Animal learning, and animals – real or imaginary – as guides to learning, can make education much more interesting for children. The excellent “Scientists in the Field” series focuses directly on the learning experience in Pamela S. Turner’s fascinating Crow Smarts, which looks specifically at the crows of the South Pacific island group known as New Caledonia. These crows have made remarkable adaptations to their environment, using tools that they make themselves to dig grubs, a favorite food, out of the wood in which the grubs hide. The crows practice genuine learning, not merely instinctive behavior, as the scientists who study them learn through a series of amazingly revelatory experiments. Andy Comins’ photos show some of what those experiments involve, but in this book, unlike many others in this series, the pictures are less impressive than the text, which details just how the crows learn to make tools from native vegetation and just how scientists have figured out that the crows’ behavior is a combination of “nature” and “nurture” – the birds seem to have an instinct to perform some of the toolmaking acts, but appear to need instruction from other crows in order to do the rest of them. Where the photos do excel is in showing the differences among the tools the crows make, the most remarkable of which is a hooked piece of pandanus leaf whose hook the crows create on their own – they do not simply accept a pointy end, but twist it until it forms a hook that can be used to extract a grub. In doing this, the crows become one of only two species known to make hooked tools – humans being the other. The intelligence of these crows is at times difficult to believe: in one test involving dropping objects into water to raise the water level and get a treat, “the New Caledonian crows outperformed seven-year-old children who were given the same test.” Crow Smarts does contain a few annoying errors that undermine its many fascinations, such as the comment, regarding exploration of New Caledonia, that “Captain James Cook visited in 1174 [sic]” and the explanation that in scientific research, “A paper tells (often in mind-numbing detail) what the scientists did and what results were found, and discuss [sic] what the results might mean.” But most of the book is excellent. Gavin Hunt, the primary scientist profiled in Crow Smarts, offers a lot of insight into how New Caledonian crows shape and are shaped by their environment, and Turner’s explanations of ways in which crows demonstrate intelligence are nicely complemented by easy-to-follow tables (such as one explaining that only five species make multiple kinds of tools – humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, capuchin monkeys, and New Caledonian crows – while, as noted, only humans and crows make hooked tools). There is also some useful art by Guido De Filippo, a graduate student involved in crow study, including a particularly revelatory page illustrating how crows manage complex thought even though they lack a neocortex, the part of the brain used by mammals to do such thinking. Crow Smarts raises as many questions as it answers, and from it, young readers will learn not to accept what “everyone knows” as fact, such as the notion that “birdbrained” inevitably means “not very intelligent at all.”

     Pigs are reasonably intelligent animals, too, although not at the level of New Caledonian crows. But the mini pigs named Priscilla (Prissy) and Poppleton (Pop) contribute to education in their own way. They are the class pets of the first-grade class taught by Melissa Nicholson in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida – and they are, not surprisingly in view of their adorableness, Internet stars, with a big following on Instagram. Prissy & Pop: Big Day Out is a very simple, pleasantly imaginative story in which the two pigs star as buddies heading for the beach – if they can get their different personalities to work together. Pop is beach-focused, but Prissy has all sorts of other things she wants to do before going there and even while on the way. Eventually they arrive and have a good time – which is not the point of the book at all. What matters here is the chance to see Prissy and Pop pose in varying, always adorable ways. When selecting clothes for their trip, for instance, Prissy stands at a mirror and seems to be admiring her pink outfit and strand of pearls; Pop, meanwhile, is inside a dresser drawer of clothing, apparently trying to figure out what to put on. In another picture, in which the pigs are about to eat breakfast, Prissy leans cutely toward a stack of small pancakes while Pop, open-mouthed, seems to be marveling at the banquet laid out for the two pigs. There is a precious getting-into-a-toy-car picture, a Prissy-at-the-playground series (with Pop acting impatient), and a cute little walking-on-the-sand photo in which the pigs are seen from behind, heading toward the water. It would be stretching things to say that there is anything remotely educational about Prissy & Pop: Big Day Out. But there is surely an educational experience to be had in Nicholson’s classroom from interacting day in and day out with these two unusual companion animals – and this book, along with the Internet, is about as close to that experience as most people are ever likely to get.

     Authors who create fictional, anthropomorphic animals can, of course, more easily use them to give human children lessons. But there has to be plenty of fun there, too, to keep kids involved. There is nothing special to be found out from Sam Garton’s Otter Goes to School except that, in a very general sense, learning is fun. Otter – companion animal to a man known as Otter Keeper – decides one day to start a school for her friends, the toys, after Otter keeper explains that “when he was little he went to a super-fun place called school” where “you learn a lot and get really clever.” Otter Keeper goes off to work, and Otter piles the toys into his toy car and races off to “school,” dropping off the “children” and then dressing up as “the best teacher ever” to introduce herself to the class. What follows is a series of mildly amusing misadventures. For math, Otter writes down lots of numbers and then cannot decide what to do with them, so she and the toys “took turns holding the calculator,” and Otter decides that Giraffe (on whose back the calculator balances neatly) should get gold stars for being good at math. Then Otter and the toys are seen on the piano bench, and Otter declares that Pig has a beautiful singing voice and should get gold stars for music. Then, for story time, Otter reads a book to the toys and decides that she herself should get gold stars for reading so well. And so the day goes – except that Otter cannot decide what one toy, Teddy, is good at, and that makes Otter sad: Garton’s picture of Otter looking downcast next to Teddy is both sweet and hilarious. When Otter Keeper comes home, Otter explains that Teddy is not good at anything and that she herself is not a very good teacher. To perk things up, everyone has an art class before dinner, and Otter Keeper makes sure that “Teddy” draws “the best picture ever,” one showing Otter as “My Favorite Teacher.” So, with silly certitude and a nod toward the notion that everybody is good at something, Otter Goes to School ends with everyone happy.

     The lessons are more explicit for human readers in James Dean’s Pete the Cat’s Got Class. This is one of those “multimedia” books, including a dozen flash cards, a fold-out poster, and a page of stickers: school bus, poster saying “Meow Math,” pencil, guitar with the words “Math Rocks,” lunch box, “Numbers Are Groovy” sign, and so on. As the stickers indicate, the story itself is about – what else? – math. Pete loves it, but his friend, Tom, has trouble with it. So Pete decides to “help Tom become awesome at math,” explaining that Tom does not really hate it: “You just don’t love it yet.” At Tom’s house, Pete finds Tom unwilling to do “boring” math problems – until Pete gets the idea of using Tom’s race cars, which he loves, to create number problems. Soon enough, Tom gets the idea that adding and subtracting can be done with cars or simply with numbers, and everything goes well – until the class takes a math test and Pete and Tom both get one question wrong: the same one. The teacher, Mr. G, suspects that some copying is going on, so Pete gets Tom to bring the race cars to school and shows Mr. G why Tom can now do math and did not need to copy from Pete in order to get a good test grade. The final words of the book are, “Math is neat!” And while that may not be the sentiment of all kids who read Pete the Cat’s Got Class, it is a feeling that can better be evoked by teachers who take the time to find ways to connect an abstract subject such as math with students’ everyday lives, through race cars or anything else. Parents can learn that lesson, too, and use it if they find that their own children come home from class at some point complaining that they hate math or find it boring. The approach might not work for calculus, but it is a pretty good one for basic arithmetic.

(++++) PICTURE THIS, PICTURE THAT

The King of Kazoo. By Norm Feuti. Graphix/Scholastic. $12.99.

Big Nate Doodlepalooza. By Lincoln Peirce. Harper. $6.99.

Nancy Clancy, Book 7: Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune. By Jane O’Connor. Illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser. Harper. $9.99.

     Words and pictures are complementary in graphic novels, but the effect of these not-quite-comic-books, not-quite-novels tends to depend more on visual elements than plot. Norm Feuti’s The King of Kazoo is a lot of fun, and will appeal to a younger age group than many graphic novels do: there are no adult or almost-adult themes here, no real violence, no significant complexity. Instead there is a straightforward story of a capricious and self-important king who spends his time trying to come up with an appropriate legacy instead of listening to people who might actually help him create one – notably his daughter, Bing, and the royal inventor, Torq. King Cornelius is mostly interested in claiming credit for what others do: Bing knows magic, but when she turns up information of interest, her father takes credit. Torq, who does not speak, invents a “gonkless carriage” (this kingdom has kangaroo-like gonks rather than horses) and suggests calling it “Auto-Mobile,” but the king insists that it is a “Cornelius carriage.” He also insists on driving it, with predictably sloppy results. In fact, whenever the king takes matters into his own hands, he messes things up – he is the traditional bumbling, incompetent father seen in so many movies and TV shows. Thus, when a mysterious explosion on a nearby mountain sends Cornelius, Torq and Bing on the road to find out what is going on, and a damaged bridge forces them to take a detour through Kroaker Swamp, the giant frogs living in the swamp promptly capture the trio – and Cornelius’ attempts to lie their way out of the fix only make matters worse. Eventually Bing explains what really happened, and the frogs’ leader tells Cornelius, “You should listen to advisor. Good leader know how to listen.” The king replies that “a good king doesn’t need an advisor,” and the Grand Kroaker fires back, “Maybe not, but you do.” Score one zinger for the frogs. Eventually, inevitably, Cornelius learns a touch of humility and gives credit where it is due after Bing and Torq rescue the kingdom – with the king himself displaying an unexpected touch of bravery, to show that he is not really all bad. This is not an especially inventive graphic novel: there is little unusual in panel design, character creation, or color. But the drawings propel the story along effectively, and the comment on the cover from Big Nate cartoonist Lincoln Peirce, to the effect that Feuti’s work has “plenty of humor and heart,” pretty well sums things up.

     Peirce actually packs more humor and heart into the Big Nate strip than is to be found in The King of Kazoo, but Big Nate Doodlepalooza is a kind of sidelight on Nate’s adventures rather than a sequential selection of them. It is an activity book, Nate style, abundantly sprinkled with cartoon panels designed not for storytelling but for decoration around Nate-focused puzzles. A Sudoku-like square called “Dance Disasters,” for instance, shows sixth-grade dance scenes and portraits of the four P.S. 38 denizens described by Nate as the school’s worst dancers – the objective is to “fill out the grid so they all appear once in each row, column, and box.” Another entry shows “super-cool toys” (such as a music-playing robot and a customized skateboard) and asks readers to come up with ads for them. There is a section called “What Smells?” in which readers are supposed to rank “outrageous odors from gross (1) to gag-a-thon (10).” There are secret codes to decipher to find out what grown-ups are saying, a place to “list all the possible things Nate might be grounded for,” a blank space in which to draw “your dream school,” a pop quiz based on events that take place in the Big Nate comic strip, a fill-in-the-speech-bubbles “pretend you’re a reporter” page, a quiz to figure out which Big Nate character you most resemble, an unscramble-character-names game, a snow-day word scramble, and much more. Strictly for dyed-in-the-wool Big Nate fans, this book offers a way to participate in Nate’s world, refresh your memory of what happens in the strip, and maybe pick up a few pieces of trivia along the way – all while getting a heaping helping of Peirce’s always-clever art work.

     Robin Preiss Glasser’s illustrations, which are de rigueur in the charming Fancy Nancy books, are also key to the enjoyment of the Nancy Clancy series about a more-grown-up version of the French-loving, always-overdressed charmer of a character. The Nancy Clancy books generally lack the bounce, breeziness and sheer joie de vivre of the picture books about a younger Nancy, but Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune is a happy exception: from Glasser’s cover picture of a brightly smiling, dressed-up Nancy in ballet pose in front of an open treasure chest, through a series of illustrations of Nancy and best friend Bree’s earnest but unsuccessful attempts to make money, this is a book that connects the older Nancy with her overdone but endearing roots. Jane O’Connor’s story revolves around one of those TV shows that invite people to bring in all sorts of old junk and perhaps discover that something from the attic is worth a great deal of money. Nancy and Bree connect with the “money” idea and look for various ways to earn some, finding out that doing so is harder than it looks – and eventually, a visit to one of those antique-finding shows leads Nancy to realize that sometimes money is not what matters most even when value turns up in an unexpected way. There is nothing particularly memorable in that lesson, but O’Connor’s pacing here is sure-handed, and Glasser’s illustrations go particularly well with the developing story. From a beauty cream made with food ingredients (which Nancy’s dog, Frenchy, gets into and eats) to gold-foil-covered cardboard crowns that littler girls can wear when they have their hair in a bun, the ideas of Nancy and Bree are seemingly clever but turn out to have flaws that help show them, and readers, that inventing things and making money from them is not so simple. Still, by the end of the book, both girls have found out that they or their families have some valuable items whose worth they had not realized – but, even better, they have each other, and music, and the stars, and other free-but-valuable possessions that all of them can share.

(++++) FACT PACKS

Eureka! 50 Scientists Who Shaped Human History. By John Grant. Zest Books. $14.99.

My Weird School Fast Facts: Geography. By Dan Gutman. Pictures by Jim Paillot. Harper. $5.99.

My Weird School Fast Facts: Sports. By Dan Gutman. Pictures by Jim Paillot. Harper. $5.99.

     The world of once-over-lightly fact books is one in which some entries work a lot better than others. John Grant is at the high end of these short, fact-focused books with Eureka! The 50 scientists about whom he writes briefly, focusing both on their lives and on their discoveries or beliefs, include the typical-for-this-genre mixture of the well-known and the less-known. In the former category are Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Curie, Einstein, Heisenberg, Turing, Salk, Hawking and others. In the latter – which proves in many cases the more-interesting grouping – are Gottfried Leibniz, Mikhail Lomonosov, John Dalton, Ignaz Semmelweis, Lise Meitner, Howard Florey and more. What is amazing to realize is how important these less-known names are: Leibniz invented the form of calculus universally used today (Newton is often deemed the discoverer of this type of mathematics, but in fact Leibniz’ approach, created at the same time, proved vastly superior); Semmelweis discovered the now self-evident reality that hand washing significantly reduces infection rates, saving millions of lives even though he was fired because so many doctors of his time resented being forced to wash up; Florey made mass production of penicillin possible after its discoverer, the far-better-known Alexander Fleming, was unable to figure out how to purify it or produce it in quantity. Grant presents information on the scientists in a breezy, easily readable style that is nevertheless fact-packed. He throws in useful footnotes from time to time – for instance, in discussing Carolus Linnaeus, Grant explains that the reader belongs to the species sapiens of the genus Homo. Grant includes a “But There’s More” section at the end of each mini-biography, pointing readers to further information of various types. For instance, in discussing Émilie du Châtelet, mistress of Voltaire and underappreciated scientific thinker, Grant mentions that an asteroid and a crater on Venus are named for her and also tells readers that “a popular and very approachable (but obviously dated) account of the love affair between Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet is Nancy Mitford’s Voltaire in Love (1957).” Grant does a fine job of explaining the difficulties faced by scientists of all eras. “Galileo had to use his pulse in order to time the swing of the cathedral chandelier because there were no proper clocks then,” Grant writes. Much later in history, “It was easy for the geological establishment, hostile as it was to the idea of moving continents, to dismiss [Alfred] Wegener’s conjecture [about continental drift] as the witterings of an amateur.” Grant manages a fine balance between explanations of the important scientific findings associated with his 50 chosen subjects and some offbeat matters regarding them. Among the latter, at one point he notes that Charles Darwin’s son, George, “produced a theory to explain the origin of the Moon that was for decades rejected but is now (in modified form) widely accepted.” At another he remarks that more information related to Ada Lovelace, considered the creator of the first computer program, may be found in “the early steampunk classic The Difference Engine (1990)” as well as in a graphic novel by Sydney Padua. Grant is knowledgeable and, equally important in an “overview” book like this one, able to communicate knowledge in simple but not simplistic language that readers are likely to find attractive enough so that they will be spurred to dig up more material about these scientists on their own – the best possible outcome after reading a book such as this one.

     Dan Gutman’s writing is even breezier than Grant’s, and the My Weird School Fast Facts books are enlivened by Jim Paillot’s illustrations, but these (+++) books are not especially effective at communicating information to young readers. Indeed, that almost seems not to be their purpose. These are entertainment books above all, using characters that fans of the various My Weird School series (there are several) will recognize and like. To be sure, the facts are there, but they are presented in a fashion that distracts as much as it informs. In the geography book, for example, A.J. starts the chapter on mountains by saying, “Why do we have mountains? Because if we didn’t, mountain climbing would be really boring.” And then there is a footnote: “It’s almost time for the chapter on natural disasters! I can’t wait!” This sort of approach is presumably supposed to build some heady excitement for learning things, and certainly there is learning here: “The tallest mountain on Earth is Mauna Kea, a volcano on the island of Hawaii. The base of Mauna Kea is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so the summit only rises 13,796 feet above sea level. But Mauna Kea is 33,000 feet tall, much higher than Mount Everest. I wonder if Mount Everest is jealous.” Kids who do enjoy the presentation will certainly learn some things: “If you like to fly kites or ride dune buggies, you should go to Namibia. The rust-red sand dunes there are the highest in the world.” There is information in the geography book on various customs around the world: “Every Chinese citizen over eleven years old has to plant at least three trees every year.” And there is material on every state in the U.S.: “Arkansas has the only diamond mine in North America.” “The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Pentagon, the United States Treasury, a dozen other government buildings in Washington, D.C., and fourteen state capitols were built using Indiana limestone.” “Minnesota has more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined.” The information here is delivered in scattershot fashion with a minimum of organization – it is accurate, though, and fans of A.J. and Andrea (the two narrators, each of whom says to ignore the other) will enjoy their back-and-forth.

     Gutman’s sports book works somewhat better than his geography one: sports are not academically significant in the way geography is, and somehow that helps the facts in the book mesh better with the offhand format. Among the information here is that there is no recording of the first Super Bowl, because the tape was reused; a Supreme Court Justice, Byron White, once played professional football; baseball umpires use hand signals for balls and strikes because a deaf-mute player in the 1890s needed them and they caught on with other players; the man who invented basketball also devised one of the first football helmets; someone once used hockey’s Stanley Cup as a cereal bowl; a Boston dentist invented the golf tee; and on and on – this is really a book of trivia, which makes sense in a sports context. Baseball, football, soccer, basketball, hockey, golf, and auto racing get their own chapters here, with skating and skiing and tennis and volleyball and other sports given the once-over-even-more-lightly in a single chapter. Among the most interesting trivia in the book are the ones involving the Olympics, such as mentions of some of the sports that used to be included: tug-of-war, rope climbing, and live pigeon shooting. And American kids may be quite surprised to find out that the world’s two most popular sports are soccer (No. 1) and cricket (No. 2). Both the My Weird School Fast Facts books are enjoyable expansions of the My Weird School franchise, and if neither is presented in a way that makes its facts truly memorable, both are enjoyable enough so that fans of Gutman and Paillot will likely recall some of what A.J. and Andrea tell them. For a few minutes, anyway.

(+++) LOST, AND FOUND, IN SPACE

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. By Becky Chambers. Harper Voyager. $15.99.

     It’s all about the journey. Becky Chambers has rung some changes on science-fiction standards, in which “getting there” generally matters a lot less than where one gets to – which is where the action is. There is precious little action in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is about – well, the title really says it all. A young Mars-born woman named Rosemary boards a ship called the Wayfarer, a good SF sort of name, to get away from her own past and build herself a new life somewhere “out there.” This is a basic trope of science fiction, one of many that Chambers has absorbed – and one of many that she tweaks, sometimes decidedly and sometimes subtly, in telling the story of Rosemary and her shipmates.

     Those fellow travelers come in all sorts – again, a trope of SF. Some are helpful, some less so, some downright prickly, but, and this is something out of the ordinary, most are basically nice. And even the less-than-nice ones are invariably interesting: these characters have real character, something that is not particularly unusual in this genre but that rarely becomes as central to the plot as it is here.

     In truth, there is not much plot. The Wayfarer essentially builds roads – star roads, ways that allow other ships to get from Point A to Point B more quickly and more safely than Wayfarer itself can. There is nothing really special about Wayfarer or, by implication, its crew or job – and that makes this book all the more interesting. There is a fascinating mundanity to the otherworldly exploits here; indeed, calling them “exploits” is stretching things a bit, because for all the standard-for-SF vocabulary (bay doors, navigation hub, ambi cells, the pronouns “xe” and “xyr,” a course called “Intro to Harmagian Colonial History,” and so on), not very much happens in the course of the book. There is strangeness here, but Chambers makes it a point to show that if aliens are strange, so are humans – in this book, there is no unified human spacefaring culture but a series of different, competing or complementary ones, plus some class-and-origin-based prejudice.

     Within 50 pages or so, readers of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will understand exactly what they are getting: an exploration of the interactions of a group of characters confined for a long time in a small space and learning about each other and themselves as a result. That is exactly what readers get for the remaining 400 or so pages. Chambers bends over backwards to be inclusive, to the point that a certain level of PC-ness pervades the book (and becomes somewhat off-putting after a while). There is a lot of love in this novel, a lot of it, and that is a wonderful thing, but Chambers’ determination to offer total inclusiveness (all human gender relationships are just fine, all alien sexuality is taken at face value, all everything is caught up in a wave of sunny anti-prejudicial treatment) becomes, after a while, a touch on the insistent side. Still, in contrast to the usual SF approach, in which pretty much all the characters are white and straight, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet has much to recommend it.

     The book, originally published in England last year and now available in the U.S. as a paperback, is not without conflict. There are bad people – bad beings, if you will – and some bad things happen, including thievery and even tragic (or at least pathos-laden) death. And the character variety can become a tad overwhelming: Captain Ashby, an Exodan human (his forebears left earth to find a better home), is in love with Pei, a fishlike Aeulon; the ship’s chef and doctor is a Grum with six appendages ending in “handfeet” – his species is almost extinct; the crew also includes an obnoxious algaeist (the ship is powered by algae), an Aandrisk (a feathered, lizard-like being), and more. The book is about trust, acceptance and the many forms that can be taken by caring, concern and cooperation (and love); it is only incidentally about a ship hired to bore a wormhole near the core of the galaxy and needing more than a year to travel there. There is a fair amount of laughter in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it is a welcome antidote to the extreme seriousness of so much SF. There is also an overall sense that Chambers has created an extended group hug in which love, if it does not quite conquer all, comes doggone close with a little redefinition and extension of the term. Again, this is basically a nice book about nice people – however “people” may be defined. And if all the foundational pleasantness becomes a trifle treacly and cloying from time to time, at least the repetitive material here involves closeness and the gradual assembly of a strange, multifaceted family, rather than lots of technologically driven destructiveness and grand schemes of larger-than-life good and bad guys. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is, at its heart, not really science fiction: it is fantasy, and just the sort of fantasy that many readers will wish could become reality if and when humans do eventually travel toward the galactic center.

(+++) ALL THE VARIEGATED SOUNDS

Purple Classics Presents: The Classical Music Collection. Naxos. $9.99 (2 CDs).

Rachmaninoff: Variations on a Theme of Chopin; Variations on a Theme of Corelli. Marianna Prjevalskaya, piano. Fanfare Cincinnati. $16.99.

Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet—Ten Pieces for Piano (Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8); Schumann/Liszt: Widmung; Wagner/Liszt: Ballade of the Flying Dutchman; Isoldes Liebestod; Judith Shatin: To Keep the Dark Away; Fantasy on St. Cecilia. Gayle Martin, piano. Ravello. $14.99.

Haskell Small: A Journey of Silence—Reflections on the Book of Hours; Lullaby of War. Haskell Small, piano; Robin Weigert and Martin Rayner, narrators. MSR Classics. $12.95.

David Braid: Joya Variations; Chauvet; Semi; Spirit Dance; Epilogue. David Braid, piano; Epoque String Quartet (David Pokorný and Vladimír Klánský, violins, Vladimír Kroupa, viola; Vít Petrášek, cello). Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

Jeffrey Stadelman: Seraphita (Canons); Eastland; String Quartet No. 2. New England String Quartet (Julia Okrusko and Nelli Jabotinsky, violins; Sam Kelder, viola; Ming-Hui Lin, cello). Navona. $14.99.

     There is a long if not particularly glorious history of releasing brief excerpts from major classical works in an attempt to reach out beyond those works’ core audience and hopefully broaden interest in classical music in general. The assumption underlying such releases is that people not already committed to classical music simply cannot handle the length and complexity of even better-known pieces and must be given bite-sized bits of them to (presumably) entice them into listening at greater length. Ten new Naxos Purple Classics releases fit this pattern, with a difference: they also serve as a small boost for the work of the Alzheimer’s Foundation. Naxos has pledged to donate 50 cents from each Purple Classics CD sale to that organization, with a minimum donation of $25,000 – not nearly enough to do much good in Alzheimer’s research, but nevertheless a fine gesture, and one that it would be nice to see other music labels emulate. Music cannot actually stave off Alzheimer’s, and the evidence that music can boost brain power in general is mixed at best. But certainly listening to music cannot hurt, and it is non-addictive – or rather it can be addictive in a positive, involving way. And Naxos has so deep and broad a catalogue that finding short works, or pieces of works, to include in the Purple Classics series is scarcely a challenge. Whether the specific pieces offered on Purple Classics Presents: The Classical Music Collection are good choices or bad is wholly a matter of opinion – if the release sells well, then by definition these picks were good ones. Several are movements from more-extended works: the second (not the famous first) from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the first from Grieg’s Piano Concerto, the second from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 (BWV 1006), the second (the famous one) from Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 (“Surprise”), and the second from Smetana’s Má vlast (this is Vltava or Die Moldau, which was actually written as a separate symphonic  poem but nowadays is considered part of the six-movement set). To these are added complete works from various time periods: Liszt’s Liebesträume No. 3 and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Johann Strauss Jr.’s Blue Danube Waltz, Ravel’s Boléro, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture, Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Sibelius’ Finlandia, Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture, and (for a bang-up finish) Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. There is no reason to critique as a mishmash a release that is one by design: this is simply a thrown-together set of popular classics designed to find enough of an audience to spread the word (or rather the sound) of classical music and do some good for Alzheimer’s research as well. Whatever its musical merits, it deserves to be wished well.

     Missing from the Naxos release, except in the Grieg excerpt, is the sound of the piano, an otherwise ubiquitous element of classical music ever since the early fortepianos of Haydn’s time. One of the great pianist/composers of the modern era was Rachmaninoff, and Marianna Prjevalskaya offers two of his virtuosic and elegant sets of variations – one fairly well-known, one very rarely played – on a new Fanfare Cincinnati CD. Variations on a Theme of Corelli dates to 1931 and was Rachmaninoff’s final composition for solo piano. The theme Rachmaninoff uses, known as “La folia,” was not actually by Corelli – it predates Corelli’s use of it in 1700. But Corelli himself based a set of 23 variations on it in a sonata for violin and continuo, and Rachmaninoff’s 20 variations (plus an intermezzo after No. 13) partake of similar spirit despite being very different in style and harmonization. By Rachmaninoff’s standards, the Corelli variations are comparatively compact and harmonically advanced, if scarcely forward-looking for their time. Prjevalskaya plays them with relish, nicely contrasting the ones with more-straightforward moods with those marked agitato (Nos. 13 and 19) or misterioso (No. 8). Prjevalskaya also takes the measure of the much earlier, much less frequently performed Variations on a Theme of Chopin, a sprawling 33-minute work created 30 years before the Corelli variations. This was Rachmaninoff’s first large-scale work for solo piano, so the variation sets on this CD stand as brackets around the composer’s other solo piano music. The 22 Chopin variations meander and are at times quite self-indulgent, varying very considerably in length (from eight bars to 108). They essentially encapsulate Rachmaninoff’s knowledge of and feelings about Romantic music at the time he wrote them (1902-03), and compare very intriguingly with the Corelli set for listeners with a strong interest in Rachmaninoff’s piano music. For a more-general audience, the Chopin variations may seem rather turgid despite Prjevalskaya’s determined attempt to keep them flowing with sensitive phrasing and committed technique.

     The piano music of Haskell Small (born 1948) contrasts strongly with that of Rachmaninoff but is as likely to be a specialized interest as the older composer’s Chopin variations. Small’s interest is the place where music meets silence – a crucial element of classical-music construction, to be sure, but one that in Small’s hands tends to produce works that perpetually sound as if they are about to fade away. Small has created several works under the title Journeys in Silence, the most recent of which (composed in 2015) is Reflections on the Book of Hours, a contemplation of a Middle Ages devotional book. Used as the basis of the day’s prayers in monasteries, the book was intended to measure out the religious life through periods of quiet prayer, quiet contemplation and quietness. It fits Small’s esthetic quite precisely, and Small’s performance of it on a new MSR Classics CD – where the work receives its world première recording – certainly captures the notions of slight sonic expansion fading into nothingness again and again. There is a sense of monastic chant in Small’s work, a hint of monastery bells, but mostly there is a feeling of “peace that passeth all understanding” – a very calming experience for a certain period of time. But like Rachmaninoff’s Chopin variations, Small’s Reflections on the Book of Hours lasts more than 33 minutes – and unlike Rachmaninoff’s somewhat overdone work, Small’s sets what is essentially a single mood and dwells upon it. And dwells and dwells. This is soporific music, almost a parody of “New Age” works despite its seriousness of purpose. It is very difficult to hear as anything other than background music – preferably a background for meditative contemplation, a modern notion that is not all that different from what medieval monks engaged in. Reflections on the Book of Hours is paired with a reflective work of a different sort, Lullaby of War (2007). Written for two narrators and piano, this is a setting of six poems, one each by Stephen Crane (War Is Kind), Joy Harjo (NO), Yvan Goll (Recitative), Uri Zvi Greenberg (Naming Souls), Walt Whitman (Look Down, Fair Moon), and Paula Tatarunis (Guernica Pantoum). Crane’s bitterness suffuses the work, but it is moderated by Small’s own propensity for enhancing silence and allowing quietness to creep into even deeply disturbing material. Two of the poems date to the Civil War era, one each to World War I and World War II, and the final two are contemporary – the object, rather obviously, being to show that the depredations of war have changed little. The work’s title is ironic but also oddly reflective of Small’s quiet approach to the turmoil of the subject matter. This is emotionally a more-effective work than Reflections on the Book of Hours, but Lullaby of War shares some of the monochromaticism of the piece with which it appears on this disc. And it too goes on longer than is really necessary to make its points (31 minutes), which are emphasized by the Prayer that concludes the work after the presentation of the six poems. Small, a fine pianistic advocate of his own works, clearly has a deep-seated belief in and attraction to the line between sound and quiet; his music speaks most clearly to those who share that predilection.

     The varied works on a new Ravello CD surely speak clearly to pianist Gayle Martin, who plays them all with considerable feeling. But the music is something of a potpourri without obvious emotional connection – not as disconnected as the works on the Naxos pastiche, but not connected in any fully satisfying way. Two religion-infused multi-movement works by Judith Shatin (born 1949) dominate the disc: the five-movement To Keep the Dark Away and three-movement Fantasy on St. Cecilia. The first of these pieces primarily offers atonal, stop-and-start music whose tone painting is on the obvious side (notably in “The Auroral Light”); the most-effective movement is the central “An Actual Suffering Strengthens,” which has considerable (if brief) intensity. The St. Cecilia music opens with portentous, pounding chords that practically demand listeners pay attention to something serious in the first movement, “Her Struggle,” moves into evanescent and rather formulaic contemporary expressiveness in “Her Passion,” and concludes in “Her Martyrdom” with a contrast between expected expressions of purity and marchlike material clearly designed to reflect forces of evil. There is an obviousness about this music that renders it only intermittently effective. In between the two Shatin works are five of Prokofiev’s piano arrangements from Romeo and Juliet, whose clarity of expression and easy but not overdone use of 20^th-century compositional and piano techniques contrast strongly with Shatin’s music. The Prokofiev, intentionally or not, comes across as the communicative centerpiece of the CD. The disc opens and closes with Liszt arrangements of music that offers forthright Romantic-era expressiveness: at the start, Schumann’s lovely, evocative Widmung; at the end, Wagner’s Ballade of the Flying Dutchman (this is the emotional aria that Senta sings, not the opera’s entire overture), and Wagner’s Isoldes Liebestod (again, the death-and-transfiguration music, not paired with the work’s prelude). Presumably Martin finds emotional connections among all these pieces, and there are some – but the composers’ expressive methods are different enough so that the CD as a whole, especially because of its focus on Shatin, does not hang together very well, although it is certainly very well played.

     Like Rachmaninoff and Haskell Small, David Braid (born 1975) is both composer and pianist, and he is showcased in both roles on a new Steinway & Sons CD. Braid is one of those contemporary musicians readily described as a “crossover artist” with respect to classical music. His pieces are as strongly imbued with jazz sensibilities as with anything traditionally classical. Braid’s attitudinal approach blends rather well with that of the Epoque String Quartet, an ensemble that avowedly intends to mix the beauty of classical strings with jazz performance approaches as well as those of funk and rock. There is more than an improvisational quality to Braid’s music – some of it contains actual improvisation. This is also music with some strong resemblances to film scores (Braid has, indeed, written for the movies): elements of strong contrast appear regularly, short sections of one type give way to others of a very different type without warning, and there is a kind of theatricality to much of the material that would not be out of place in a movie theatre. The longest work on the CD, Chauvet, is in seven movements that Braid calls “parts.” They are intended as his representation of and response to ancient cave paintings found in France; movement titles such as “Homo Spiritualis” and “The Juggler Dreamt of Lions” are intended to evoke in the audience the feelings that the paintings themselves brought forth in Braid. Joya Variations is a two-part piece that sounds more like film music than a traditional theme-and-variations work because of its frequent contrasts and juxtapositions. Semi, an extended and rather meditative work, seems to be reaching for alternating passages of despair and hope, while Spirit Dance is a largely approachable mixture of multiple rhythms and folk-music themes that goes by in something of a whirl. The CD concludes with Epilogue, one of those basically tuneless works that try to be haunting while avoiding melody – although in this case there is some extra interest from Braid’s improvisational piano contributions. Braid’s music is well-made and seems to have an eye on commercial success rather than any significant introspection or deep emotional content.

     Braid is far from alone among today’s composers in seeking methods, whether commercially viable or not, of making contemporary use of the traditional string quartet. On a new Navona CD, three quartets by Jeffrey Stadelman have a more distinctly up-to-date sound than do the quartets of Braid; listeners will need to decide for themselves whether that makes them more intricately interesting or simply more off-putting. To Stadelman, the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and their followers) is merely a jumping-off point for the sounds that can be pulled from stringed instruments. The nine movements of Seraphita (Canons) show this quite clearly: the work starts with a theme from the first song of Schoenberg’s Four Lieder of 1917, then twists, expands, imitates, and taffy-pulls the musical material through a set of changes that are both more and less than classical variations. Eastland, in contrast, is a more immediately accessible work, for all its extreme atonality and often-unpleasant sonic palette. It paints a picture of, and reacts to, a 1915 steamship disaster in which hundreds died. There is little of the emotional turmoil that one might expect in such a piece – Stadelman’s music tends to be dry to the point of aridity – but there are intermittently effective, purely musical elements that suggest a certain banal inevitability to tragedy. Least modernistic in sound and most varied in approach of the works here is String Quartet No. 2, whose three movements open with actual lyricism – a rarity in Stadelman’s music – and then move to a variation element and, in the finale, a complex and generally speedy swirl in which the instruments’ entries seem more arbitrary than they are and in which slower sections here and there serve to accentuate the generally propulsive pace. Stadelman’s music is surely not for all tastes, but those interested in the way a skilled contemporary composer strives to push string writing and performance into the most modern guise possible will find it intellectually, if not emotionally, involving.

(++++) MUSICAL SCHOOL DAYS

Ruby Rose: Off to School She Goes! By Rob Sanders. Illustrated by Debbie Ridpath Ohi. Harper. $15.99.

Rappy Goes to School. By Dan Gutman. Illustrated by Tim Bowers. Harper. $17.99.

On the First Day of Kindergarten. By Tish Rabe. Pictures by Laura Hughes. Harper. $9.99.

     There is always a lot of bounciness in start-of-school stories for ages 4-8 – after all, no one wants kids to get ready for class with a sense of foreboding – but some books are more upbeat than others. And some have beats to a greater degree than others do. Take, for example, Rob Sanders’ story of a little girl who just can’t, just won’t, sit still, Ruby Rose: Off to School She Goes! It’s not that Ruby Rose has a limited attention span – in fact, she has a very good one, but it is fixated on dancing, which she does constantly at home and therefore inevitably brings with her to school. Why, she does ballet during breakfast and belly dancing while brushing her teeth! So of course she hip-hops off the school bus and arabesques to art class and pirouettes to her easel – causing predictable trouble as she spatters paint on her teacher, Ms. Dempsey, who tells Ruby Rose she has “never danced in my life.” Gently and then with increasing firmness, the teacher and other adults in school tell Ruby Rose that she has to sit still and participate in class without distracting herself and the other students. But the irrepressible little girl just has to prance in P.E., promenade into the library, and get her entire class to tap-dance to lunch and line dance back to the classroom. Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s illustrations make Ruby Rose so endearing, her dancing so natural and unforced-looking, that it is hard to understand why the adults in school don’t simply join in. And in fact, after enforcing strict rules that prevent mambo during math, rumba during reading, and samba during science, Ms. D herself ends up dancing after all. It isn’t quite what Ruby Rose or anyone else had in mind – it happens because of an accident resulting in the escape of all the ants from an ant farm – but nothing dampens Ruby Rose’s delight in dance or her enthusiasm as she hulas down the hall and bounces onto the bus to head home. The sheer exuberance of the book is delightful, and the expression on Ruby Rose’s mom’s face when the girl explains that, “by the way,” they have to buy a new ant farm, makes a priceless ending.

     Dan Gutman’s Rappy the Raptor goes for music in a different way – or for lyrics, anyway. As his name shows, Rappy raps, not just sometimes but all the time. Even when he is worried about the first day of school: “I need pencils and pens./ Do you think I’ll make friends?/ Will my teacher be kind?/ I’m losing my mind!” Unlike Ruby Rose, who sees no reason to contain her personality just because she happens to be in school, Rappy decides, “I’m not gonna talk or sing;/ I’m not gonna say a thing.” But his determination is soon put to the test when a big, mean-looking dinosaur kid named Chris makes fun of a shy little dino child named Aidan. Rappy goes into a bouncy rap that distracts Chris and everyone else and gives Aidan time to collect himself as all the dino kids bounce along to Rappy’s recitation and the teacher approvingly looks on. But then it is time for actual school work, and Rappy is embarrassed when called on to spell words – he is no good at spelling. Who is? Aidan, it turns out. And in the spirit of “one good turn deserves another,” Aidan now helps Rappy – and Rappy soon finds himself rapping the spellings of words. Soon Rappy and Aidan are hanging out together and having fun, and mean old Chris has to stay after school for being a bully. The lesson? “Tomorrow I’ll go back to school./ Learning stuff is really cool./ Now I know that in the end/ all you need is one good friend.” This is Gutman’s second Rappy book, again with illustrations by Tim Bowers that nicely communicate the characters’ personalities and Rappy’s unendingly positive attitude. Families that like rap will certainly like this.

     And families that go for something a bit more traditional will certainly enjoy Tish Rabe’s On the First Day of Kindergarten. Rabe here recasts “The 12 Days of Christmas” in a pleasant, age-appropriate celebration of kindergarten made more enjoyable by Laura Hughes’ digitally created ink-paint-and-collage illustrations. The little girl at the center of this story may not dance or rap, but she has lots of experiences that young readers will enjoy saying in the cadence of the familiar Christmas song, or even singing to its tune. For instance, “On the sixth day of kindergarten/ I thought it was so cool/ sliding down the slide,/ SINGING A SONG!/ running in a race,/ counting up to ten,/ making lots of friends,/ and riding the bus to my school!” The always-capitalized “SINGING A SONG” is the “five golden rings” line from the original 12 days; the days at kindergarten mount up in their own cadence, so that by the 12^th-day field trip there is a whole list of enjoyable activities – helping explain the very kindergarten-class-photo-like back-cover picture, in which everyone is clearly happy even though not all the kids are paying quite as much attention as the photographer might have wished. The girl whose story Rabe tells, though, is sitting politely right in the middle of the first row of kindergartners, hands folded on her lap, wearing the sort of smile that can only mean she has been having wonderful experiences and finding them thoroughly enjoyable – all 12 melodic days of them.

(++++) AS HARD-BOILED AS THEY COME

The Perdition Score: A Sandman Slim Novel. By Richard Kadrey. Harper Voyager. $25.99.

     Richard Kadrey writes so well, with such irrepressible delight in profanity and unspeakable descriptions of unspeakable creatures and events, that it is tempting to read his series of Sandman Slim novels for the verbiage alone. In fact, that is often a good idea, since the plots, although intricate, are mostly about James Stark (aka Sandman Slim) smashing things, smashing into things, being smashed by things, getting ready to smash things, or thinking about smashing things. Not too much of that last one, actually, since, as Stark says in The Perdition Score, “This means I have to think and be patient, my two least favorite things.”

     Fans of the character and of Kadrey will be happy to know that there is less thinking and waiting about in this eighth series entry than in the previous one, Killing Pretty, whose ingratiating title (or what passes for ingratiating in Kadrey’s writing) belied a more-static-than-usual plot. Kadrey and Stark are back on the move in The Perdition Score, a little ditty that takes up the matter of a hyper-evil organization called Wormwood that has its tentacles (not all of them figurative) into all sorts of matters living and dead, using people and other things that are living and dead or maybe a little of both. Pursuing Wormwood involves Stark with demons (good and bad), angels (good and bad), a weird substance called “black milk” (good and bad, bringing miraculous healing or death), and various hangers-on in his immediate vicinity (good and bad). It also involves kidnapped kids, the current Angel of Death (someone killed the last one), and a whole lot of description of Los Angeles and its environs and Hell (aka Downtown) and its environs. L.A. example: “When I was dragged Downtown, Silver Lake was still thrift shops, dingy little corner groceries, working-class bars, people cooking on hot plates in garages, and low-level dope dealers. Now it’s Wi-Fi-enabled omelets and gluten-free Vespas.” Downtown example, with the understanding that Downtown is a lot like L.A.: “Griffith Park back in the world is a lot of brittle scrub, annoying bushes, and thirsty trees covering what’s essentially a big rock hemorrhoid looming over Hollywood. …Maybe even sixty years ago some vestiges of golden-age glamour still clung to the place, but even then it was less like romance and more like a particularly enchanting strain of tuberculosis. …Of course, Hellion Griffith Park doesn’t have the same stupid trees and irritating bushes as regular Griffith Park. No, this park is more twisted, vicious, and thorny than Sleeping Beauty’s bastard castle. There are bushes with poisonous berries that burst if you make the slightest contact. Black, twisted trees drop rotten fruit full of venomous centipedes the size of dachshunds.” And so on.

     These marvelously pointed descriptive passages are the greatest pleasure of reading The Perdition Score and a number of the other Sandman Slim books. Just when you think Kadrey cannot possibly get any pithier or Stark any more bitter, out comes: “The gathering is exactly what I was afraid of. A CIA torture session of wine, cheese, and tony chitchat. Maybe eating Brie just makes people stupid. I never trusted the stuff myself. Soft cheese is a reminder that all cheese is just milk that crawled into a ditch to die, then some lunatic came along, spread the corpse on a saltine, and invented hors d’oeuvres. Now people pay heroin prices for stuff they could make themselves if they only had the guts to strap a pint of whole milk to their engine blocks for a few days. Sure it might come out a little greasy, but that’ll just shoot the stuff through your system faster. No need to absorb any actual calories. This is L.A., where the food is prettier than the movie stars and twice as untouchable.” Or: “I want to find the fault line that will drop California into the ocean and toss a nuke down there. No one on this boat, me included, will benefit the human race by living one more day. Let’s just blow the whole shebang into the Pacific and give Nevada a shot at some prime beachfront property.”

     And these are merely asides, short passages largely unconnected to the actual action and activity of The Perdition Score, which contains plenty of derring-do and a fair amount of derring-don’t. And there are plenty of other asides, such as, “If I didn’t know better I’d swear there was no God. But I do know better and the worst I can truly say is that I wish he was better at his job.”

     This being a Hollywood novel and a Sandman Slim book, there are of course lots of movie references in it. One character tells Stark to keep an eye on some people through video cameras: “All you have to do is watch the show. I know you like movies. Pretend it’s My Dinner with André or something.” And Stark inevitably replies, “I prefer A Fistful of Dollars, but I get your drift.” Or, early in the book, a bartender notices how tense Stark constantly is and says, “Your problem is you’re all Koyaanisqatsi. You remember that movie.” Of course Stark does – “a hippie music video ninety minutes too long.” And when the bartender says the whole film is only 90 minutes long, Stark replies, in his best, laconic Clint Eastwood style, “Yep.” But Kadrey takes Stark and the other characters beyond movie criticism into existential weirdness of all types. Consider the following toast offered by one of Stark’s friends, followed by Stark’s reply:

     “May you fly, walk, swim, or crawl for all eternity under the noses of our betters.”

     “And if you can’t, at least get your own reality show. Sasquatch Hoarders. Or The Real Housewives of R’lyeh.”

     Yes, it helps to know your H.P. Lovecraft to get some of the references here, and it helps to have a very dark sense of humor, albeit not necessarily one as dark as Kadrey’s (hard to imagine having one like that). And yet ultimately, there is a peculiarly humane side to Stark, if not quite a human one (he is only half human, the other half being angelic, for all the good it usually does him). Less than halfway through The Perdition Score, Stark, who, as usual, narrates the story, subjects readers to a moment of what passes for introspection with him: “I wonder what’s a stranger life, fighting monsters or trying to figure out how people work? One is a lot more dangerous than the other and it sure as hell isn’t monsters.” And that pretty much encapsulates not only Stark’s thinking and Kadrey’s but also the appeal of The Perdition Score in particular and the ongoing fascination of the Sandman Slim series in general

(++++) HEADING OUT – AND BACK

Come Home, Angus. By Patrick Downes. Illustrations by Boris Kulikov. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.

Little Wing Learns to Fly. By Calista Brill. Illustrated by Jennifer A. Bell. Harper. $17.99.

Lola Knows a Lot. By Jenna McCarthy. Illustrated by Sara Palacios. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     A little boy’s outsized sulk and tantrum take him on an adventure that turns out to be bigger than he bargained for in Patrick Downes’ Come Home, Angus. Angus wakes up in a really bad mood, for no particular reason – it happens sometimes. But as Boris Kulikov shows in his exceptionally clever illustrations, this is one big bad mood: Angus is so full of it that he barely fits in his bed. And Angus grows as his mood blossoms into an even worse one: he gets annoyed at his pet dachshund, his canary and his cat, speaking to them in sharp tones, and by the time he sits down for breakfast, he tells his mother that the pancakes are “too skinny” and besides, he will not apologize to the animals for yelling at them. His mother insists, and Angus’ temper grows so big that it and he fill the whole room as he holds his head and stomps his feet and gets “madder than mad” and says he will not live in the house anymore. And off he goes, his giant-sized steps quickly taking him to his room for his backpack, underwear, socks, a book and a flashlight – and a stuffed gorilla, showing that he may be a big little boy but is still, beneath everything, a little boy. And Angus walks out the door and away, by now so large that he towers over all the nearby buildings. But then, as he goes a second block from home, and a third and fourth and fifth, the buildings get much, much bigger – or Angus gets much, much smaller. Soon he realizes that he has “walked into a whole new world” where nothing is familiar, and he starts to become scared. He has no food – he forgot to pack any – and even though strangers pass by and smile at him or wave to him kindly, Angus becomes more deeply unhappy and homesick as the people walk “to and fro, to and fro, fast, fast, fast.” Angus has had enough, more than enough, when suddenly he sees his mother, who of course has been following him – with the family pets – all along. She has even brought Angus a sandwich – not exactly the way he likes it made, but by now he realizes what really matters, and is more than happy to sit and eat. Lesson learned – and, for that matter, lesson taught, if parents choose to discuss Come Home, Angus with children after reading it with them.

     A similar lesson is learned by a very different youngster in Calista Brill’s Little Wing Learns to Fly. Little Wing is a small dragon – a very cute one, thanks to Jennifer A. Bell’s illustrations, and a very determined one, no matter how many times his attempted takeoffs lead to a sequence of “Flip. Flap. Flop.” Little Wing, who narrates his own story, explains that “a dragon never gives up,” and he is sure that this day of flying attempts is “going to be different.” And it is! With a great effort and eyes squeezed shut, Little Wing manages to go “Flip. Flap. Flutter!” He is flying! And he is so proud of himself that he pays no attention when Mama tells him there are rules he must follow now that he can fly. Little Wing will have none of that! He wants his own rule: “A dragon never comes down.” Mama warns him not to fly too high or too far away, and most important of all, not to fly without her – but Little Wing, buoyed by enthusiasm as much as by air currents, pays no attention, and off he goes. But soon – uh, oh. “The wind pushed and pulled. It bumped me up when I tried to go down. It sent me right when I wanted to go left.” And just like Angus in a different world, Little Wing soon finds himself out of sight of his home, frightened, and unsure what to do. Then, just like Angus’ mother, Little Wing’s Mama comes to rescue him – and now, when she asks about the rules for flying, Little Wing is only too happy to repeat them back to her and promise, in particular, not to fly without her. “And a dragon always keeps his promises,” he tells readers as this offbeat “lessons learned” book comes to its charming conclusion.

     And what sort of lessons will Lola learn in Jenna McCarthy’s Lola Knows a Lot? Lola herself cannot imagine what they might be, since she knows so much already: how to do cartwheels, count to 10 in Spanish, hula-hoop with her eyes closed, tie her own shoes, catch tiny lizards and much more. But, her big sister, Charlotte, asks, does Lola know how to count to 100 by fives and name all the planets? There is so much she does not know! Now Lola starts feeling unsure of herself, so their mother suggests she think of all the things she knows and make a list. Good idea, thinks Lola, even though Charlotte is busy teasing her from behind their mom’s back (the sisters’ interactions are captured particularly well by Sara Palacios). Lola realizes she knows how to make her bed, how to tell her mom the right way to drive, how to use the remote control, and how to drive her sister crazy: “I’m not saying you should try it. I’m just saying I happen to be especially good at it.” Lola’s personality shines through her things-I-know list, as when she mentions how mad moms get when you cut your own hair (“You might want to trust me on that one”) and how complex sister relationships can be: “I know that it’s not always easy being the little sister. But sometimes having a big sister can be pretty nice” (Palacios’ illustrations here are particularly precious). On and on Lola’s list goes, as she thinks of things she knows and things she sort-of-knows and things she sort-of-sort-of-knows, such as what she wants to be when she grows up (a ballerina or dolphin trainer or astronaut or artist or maybe a butterfly). Eventually, Lola realizes that even if there are many things she does not know yet, she is ready to learn them – and that is just the revelation she needs to get ready for the first day of school and a whole set of learning adventures. Yes, this turns out to be a first-day-jitters book, but it takes a decidedly nontraditional approach to this commonplace topic, and in so doing can do a very good job of putting young readers at ease – by showing them that they, like Lola, have already learned so much that school is just a place to find out more and more interesting things.

(+++) COPING WITH ILLNESS IN REALITY AND FICTION

Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease: A Guide to Fertility, Pregnancy, and Postpartum Wellness. By Dana Trentini and Mary Shomon. Da Capo. $16.99.

Ms. Bixby’s Last Day. By John David Anderson. Walden Pond Press. $16.99.

     Limited in audience but of considerable interest, even importance, to the readers they target, these two books – nonfiction for adults and fiction for preteens – serve a similar foundational purpose: to help people understand and cope with diseases and their consequences. Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease is a typical self-help-in-healthcare book in the way it merges medical information with personal stories of many people who have “been there.” In this case, “there” is in the throes of thyroid problems, which affect some 10% of Americans (possibly more) and are in many cases undiagnosed. Some of the 30-million-plus people with thyroid disease are women of childbearing years (thyroid conditions are more common in women than men). Dana Trentini and Mary Shomon both have thyroid illness themselves and are both advice-givers on the subject and advocates for those dealing with it. Their book encapsulates much of the information they provide on an ongoing basis at their Web sites, www.hypothyroidmom.com and www.thyroid-info.com. Thyroid conditions, when not diagnosed and properly treated, can lead to a host of pregnancy-related problems, including infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, postpartum depression and even cognitive problems in children. Both Trentini and Shomon have had thyroid-related miscarriages, and their personal knowledge of the trauma and the not-always-adequate treatments for their condition gives their book considerable power. It also, however, places it firmly in the camp of “we know better than doctors” books, in which anecdotal reports by patients take precedence over (admittedly imperfect) medical treatment. The undercurrent of mistrust of healthcare professionals is unhelpful here and in other books of this type. But it is certainly true that women who find out more about the thyroid and their own thyroid conditions, and learn what to watch for and watch out for when trying to become pregnant and carry children to term, can do a much better job of working with their doctors to find the best personalized treatment regimens. In thyroid disease as in so much of the rest of medicine, one size does not fit all. This is where Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease is most helpful: that first word, your, points toward the sort of individualized approach that doctors today are often far too harried and busy to offer. Women with thyroid disease will especially appreciate the step-by-step advice in Part 3 of the book, “Your Healthy Pregnancy Plans from Preconception to Postpartum,” which offers separate chapters on hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, and such conditions as goiter and thyroid cancer. Postpartum care gets rather short shrift here (only a dozen pages), but the basic information is well-presented and useful. The other parts of the book are “Your Thyroid and Its Role,” “Your Thyroid, from Preconception to Postpartum,” and “Into the Future.” The last of these is strident and demanding, not only of the medical profession (“Doctors need to listen and learn,” “Universal thyroid screening is essential in pregnancy”) but also of medical research (“A study of T4/T3 and NDT in pregnancy is overdue”). This is understandable in light of the authors’ personal experience and narrow focus, and their underlying recommendation to their readers is a good one in light of the insurance-driven reality that doctors are hard-pressed to give patients enough time and personal attention: “Do the research so that you know more about thyroid disease than your doctor.” The resources at the back of Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease are good places to start. Respectfully partnering with medical professionals, rather than hectoring them, would be a good place to continue.

     There is no “story arc” in Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease, since it is a factual book, but Trentini and Shomon are careful to begin and end it on an optimistic note and to provide balancing positive elements throughout when discussing negatives about thyroid disease and its treatment. Books that can provide story arcs are able to teach about illness in different ways. Thus, a novel such as John David Anderson’s Ms. Bixby’s Last Day can approach the topic with fluidity, communicating ups and downs not only of the person with the disease but also of those affected by it because they are affected by her. In this case, the person who is too ill to finish school is the much-loved teacher of the title. The protagonists of the story are three of her students: Topher, Brand and Steve. It has to be accepted from the start that none of these four characters is or will be deeply developed: Ms. Bixby is a prototypical wonderful, unforgettable teacher, and the three boys are defined by their typecast attitudes and approaches to life – there is nothing deep about any of them. None of that really matters, though, because the purpose of Ms. Bixby’s Last Day is not characterization. What Anderson is after is a kind of “emotional life of preteen boys” story, starting when sixth-graders Topher, Brand and Steve decide to make Ms. Bixby’s final day at school a memorable one even though she has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and will be unable to finish the term – and continuing as the boys realize that “last day” may mean more than simply the last day of a school year. Anderson makes Ms. Bixby 35 years old, which is plenty old enough for middle schoolers to consider her a seasoned adult (despite her pink-streaked hair) – but not so old as to have students in the target age range think that anything really serious is about to happen to her. As Topher, Brand and Steve narrate their different parts of the book, as realization dawns on all of them that something really major is in fact going on with Ms. Bixby, readers are supposed to be swept into the uncertainty and emotional turmoil that each boy faces in his own way – as disbelief and denial gradually turn into necessary but deeply troubling acceptance of the severity of Ms. Bixby’s illness. The point here is that there are only a few teachers “who make the torture otherwise known as school somewhat bearable,” and Ms. Bixby is one of them; and as Topher, Brand and Steve try, singly and together, to show her how much she means to them, readers are subtly encouraged to think of good teachers they have known – and how important such teachers are and will always be to them. Whether this message will get through effectively to sixth-grade boys in general is uncertain, but Anderson definitely tries hard, and if he layers on a little too much emotion a little too thickly (sometimes a lot too thickly), he does so in a good cause – showing that teachers are people, too, not only when they are well and doing their jobs of subjecting sixth-graders to education but also when illness becomes, must become, a bigger determinant of their future than anything that happens in the classroom.

(++++) IN SEARCH OF SOUNDS

Thomas Coates: Wilking Quickstep; Plantation Echoes; March Funebra, Op. 18; “Bontey en avant” Quickstep; Columbian National Potpourri; Tycoon March; Funeral March, Op. 19; Salute to Erin—Medley Overture; Frederick J. Keller: Safe in the Arms of Jesus—Fantasia; Franz von Suppé: My Native Land (arranged by J.B. Claus). Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band conducted by Douglas Hedwig. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Quickstep: Brass Band Music of the American Civil War. Coates Brass Band conducted by Douglas Hedwig. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Sparks: Miniature Works for Orchestra. Siberian State Symphony Orchestra, Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and The Wembley Players conducted by Vladimir Lande, Petr Vronský, Kirk Trevor and Bruce Babcock. Navona. $9.99.

Philip Thompson: Chamber Music. IonSound Project. Ravello. $14.99.

     The willing suspension of expectation is required for listeners interested in hearing two superlative MSR Classics recordings of band music conducted by Douglas Hedwig. This is related to Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” which allows enjoyment of literature that is, on its face, unbelievable – but it is not quite the same thing. There is nothing unbelievable about these two band recordings, nor is there anything “unhearable” about them. But they profoundly violate modern expectations of how a band recording “should” sound. Those expectations are deeply, indeed foundationally, related to the band and music of John Philip Sousa: when he began touring with his band in 1892, he forever changed Americans’ (and later the world’s) notion of what a band “ought to” sound like. Sousa substantially reconstituted the band, balancing brass instruments with woodwinds and turning the ensemble into one that could be well-nigh symphonic in scope. And he then wrote music that not only exploited his band’s makeup but also stretched the players’ abilities and ears – and the audience’s ears as well. The importance and influence of Sousa on band music can scarcely be overestimated. But for him to have changed the makeup and sound of bands, there had to be something to change from, and that is what Hedwig and his players present on these CDs. For lovers of brass and those who enjoy exploring musical byways, these recordings are simply marvelous. The bands that Hedwig conducts play original period instruments – and, equally noteworthy, they use period mouthpieces to play them. It is hard to understand how important this is without listening to the music. The composers heard here, of whom Thomas Coates was the most prominent, were writing for brass at a time when brass instruments themselves were changing dramatically. A difference of a year or two, a difference of manufacturer even in the same year, could lead to instruments with vastly different actions and audibly different sound production. Even listeners who understand the fascination in recent decades with historically accurate performance have likely not encountered that sort of scholarship applied to band instruments. But its elements are much the same as are those for strings. It is not just that the instruments themselves should be authentic: having the right mouthpieces is as important for brass players as using gut strings and appropriate bows is for string players. The attention to detail in these performances is simply wonderful.

     This would not matter a whit, though, if the music itself were unworthy. But it is not: much of it deserves to be deemed “undiscovered delights.” Coates, who was born in either 1803 or 1813 and lived into the Sousa era, until 1895, was an excellent producer of military music before and during the Civil War and of works of wider scope afterwards. Not much of it has survived – these two CDs include almost all of it – but there is plenty here to demonstrate that Coates understood the forms of band music well, wrote for them with skill, and created some genuinely unusual and even challenging pieces that sound, in places, far more recent than they are. The CD featuring Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band includes Coates’ later works, many of which may have been peacetime arrangements of ones from the Civil War era. Coates was especially adept with quicksteps, works not quite as fast as their title indicates but more than suitable for a well-paced march – and sounding not at all like the more-familiar tripartite Sousa marches that were to come later. Coates also had considerable skill in assembling potpourris of tunes that were well-known in his time – the same practice often followed by composers of orchestral music. Not all the tunes he used are still familiar, and some are completely unknown, but others, such as several Stephen Foster songs and Dixie in Plantation Echoes, remain quite familiar and are handled very adeptly. And Coates’ funeral marches are genuine dirges, with nothing symphonic, much less entertaining, about them: their purpose is quite clear, and it is fulfilled with admirable skill. This CD includes two non-Coates works that are intended to show some types of music that Coates wrote but of which no examples survive. These are perfectly reasonable period pieces but add little to the works by Coates himself.

     The other CD, featuring the Coates Brass Band, includes 10 Coates pieces from the Civil War or earlier, interspersed rather disconcertingly with music by other composers of the time: William Tanzer, George H. Goodwin, Sir Henry R. Bishop, A. Kurrick, and B.F. Porter. There are also a few oddities by better-known names: a hymn tune by Thomas Pleyel; Hail, Columbia, a still-used patriotic tune by Philip Phile; the traditional and familiar Red, White and Blue; and, strangest of all, an arrangement of the “Death Song” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. There are no potpourris here, but the CD as a whole is something of a potpourri on its own, with non-Coates pieces inserted willy-nilly among those by Coates himself. Despite the comparative lack of focus of this disc compared with the other, it offers equally fine playing and a genuine sense of hearing this music in the way that soldiers and civilians alike must have heard it 150-plus years ago. The sound of Hedwig’s musicians is truly unlike that of any other bands: these original-instrument, original-mouthpiece performances are throwbacks of the most interesting, valuable and moving kind, profoundly connecting the 21^st century with the everyday musical experiences of the middle of the 19^th.

     The sonic palette sought by contemporary composers is quite different; indeed, different composers use the available sounds of a modern orchestra in entirely distinct ways. That is the main impression left by a compilation of nine short, unrelated orchestral works on a (+++) Navona CD called Sparks. There is no real unifying theme here beyond brevity: the pieces all range from four to eight minutes in length. Only one is likely to be familiar to listeners: Gershwin’s Summertime from Porgy and Bess, heard not in its original vocal version but in one featuring Richard Stolzman’s sensitive clarinet playing – which shows just how closely this instrument can duplicate the warm sound of the human voice. The remaining pieces seek different aural worlds. Gangsta by Jay Anthony Gach is intense and brass-focused. Still Motion by Rain Worthington starts with a vibraphone melody and explores it rhythmically. Fragments by Marga Richter also uses a single melody, creating five very short movements that use the orchestra in differing ways. A Tango Fantasy by Phillip Rhodes, the longest piece on the CD, is not a dance work, despite its title – it constantly seems about to become a tango but never does so, instead teasingly approximating the rhythms and melodies of the dance form. Prelude for Charles by Steven Winteregg tries to use the name Charles as the basis of various themes, along the lines of earlier composers’ use of Bach’s name or Shostakovich’s inclusion of his own initials in many works. In Memoriam by Douglas Anderson is suitably solemn, having been written as a response to the terrorist murders in New York City on September 11, 2001. Event Horizon by Bruce Babcock is a study in orchestral texture within a highly dissonant sound world. And Crown of the Continent by Stephen Lias is intended as an evocation of Glacier National Park in Montana, where Lias was artist in residence. Generalizing about these works is impossible and is not the point of the CD, which simply offers them as short-form explorations of the different sounds that contemporary composers can extract from orchestral instruments. In the absence of any unifying musical or conceptual theme, the CD has nowhere specific to go; it simply meanders from one aural approach to the next, so listeners unimpressed by a particular work need not wait long to hear a different composer’s different approach.

     Only one composer’s sound world is present on a new Ravello CD of the music of Philip Thompson, but it would be more accurate to refer to sound worlds, plural, since Thompson makes a real effort in this chamber music to produce distinct aural experiences according to what he wants each work to communicate. Members of the IonSound Project ensemble, joined by violist Marylène Gingras-Roy and percussionist Ryan Socrates, showcase five different types of chamber-music sound here. Trouble (2007) uses a medieval chant as its foundation, while Kecow hit tamen (2011) looks to the past in a different way for its basis, focusing on the language of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina in a piece that mingles the spoken word with a chamber group. Separate Self (2012) is built around dance elements and gains a pronounced jazz flavor through its use of a drum set. The four groups of Nocturnes (2014), three pieces per set, have visual inspirations but come across mostly as grey in color, their use of only three instruments (violin, viola and cello) limiting their expressiveness: running from less than one minute to about two, the pieces seem longer simply because they are so blandly monochromatic. The visual inspiration is of a different type in Score to the film “Virgil Cantini: The Artist in Public” (2009), which also uses just three instruments (flute, cello and piano) but deploys them more successfully to sustain a delicate nine-minute work. None of the music on this (+++) CD is exceptional either in construction or in communicative ability, but listeners interested in Thompson’s attempts to create differing sonic experiences with a limited instrumental complement will find the contrast among the pieces interesting to encounter.