(+++) 10-DAY MIRACLES?

10 Days to a Bully-Proof Child. By Sherryll Kraizer, Ph.D. Marlowe & Co./Da Capo. $14.95.

10 Days to a Less Distracted Child. By Jeffrey Bernstein, Ph.D. Marlowe & Co./Da Capo. $14.95.

      The culture of “I want it and I want it now” has even extended itself to serious issues of childhood behavior and development, as the titles of these books indicate. If it were really possibly to solve bullying and attention-deficit problems in a week and a half, parents wouldn’t be the only ones lining up for the answers – they’d have to shove aside the teachers, administrators, psychologists and counselors trying to get those solutions first. So it pays to take the titles here with a few grains of salt, then look at the books’ content for nuggets of wisdom – without expecting magic-wand solutions to serious difficulties.

      In the case of 10 Days to a Bully-Proof Child, the book’s approach is based on Sherryll Kraizer’s “Take a Stand” program, which is in use at some schools around the U.S. Intended to provide a practical method of stopping bullying and other forms of interpersonal violence, the program works primarily by having parents enact role-playing scenarios with their children – so the kids are better prepared when similar situations crop up in real life. After briefly explaining forms of bullying, psychological research on bullies and reasons kids don’t report bullying, Kraizer uses a question-and-answer format to help parents address specific issues involving being bullied – or being a bully. Her basic concepts for a child being bullied involve building his or her confidence, dealing directly with fear and anxiety, role-playing, then talking daily with the child about what worked and did not work that day and what tactics need to change. In a laboratory environment, this step-by-step approach makes sense; and Kraizer’s program has certainly enjoyed some real-world success. But there are significant difficulties with it that she does not address. It is by no means simple to get a shy or timid child (a frequent target of bullies) to admit fear and go through role-playing once – much less day after day, making modifications time after time as plans work or fail. Kraizer acknowledges that adult intervention may be needed sometimes, but provides no very good guidelines as to when. She also acknowledges that such intervention may fail (but not that it may make the bullying significantly worse, which it may). When failure does occur, all she can suggest is ongoing monitoring, logging of contacts with school personnel, calling police if necessary, and similar high-profile interventions that will take a good deal more than 10 days and are by no means assured of success. Similarly, for parents whose children are bullies, the recommendations – to set limits, teach coping skills that do not involve bullying, and seek professional help if necessary – are well-meant but are not new, quick or certain to work. Kraizer has some very helpful ideas – the concept of developing an inner voice to counter and drown out a bully’s nasty comments is particularly good – but she does families a disservice by making only passing references to how incredibly time-consuming and difficult it can be to break the cycle of bullying.

      Jeffrey Bernstein, a licensed psychologist specializing in child and family therapy, sets a somewhat more modest goal in 10 Days to a Less Distracted Child, since being less distracted does not mean being cured of attention problems (including but not limited to attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD). Bernstein, who wrote 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child, applies some of the same techniques here that he used in the earlier book: understand what is going on, build kids’ confidence and self-esteem, and determine whether medication might help. One of the good things Bernstein does is to reassure parents: “Don’t be upset if you have to keep working at being patient. Patience may be a virtue, but having to scramble to find it does not make you a poor parent.” He tries to show parents how not to overreact or be overdemanding – to accept that a child is just as frustrated by attention problems as are his/her parents. Bernstein spends a fair amount of time explaining the distracted child’s legal rights in the educational system, and also offers lists of all sorts, such as “Thirty-Six Strategies for Teaching Distractible Children.” These approaches frequently contain valuable elements – for example, break down large tasks into small ones, keep being encouraging, and create emotional safety in the classroom (“It’s essential for teachers to pay attention to the emotions involved in the learning process”). But Bernstein’s ideas are more often ideals, difficult if not impossible to implement in a world of crowded classrooms that include many children with differing and often contradictory special needs – and time-pressed parents who may well be juggling more than one job and more than one child. There is a great deal of good advice here on a variety of subjects, from homework hassles to peer pressure. But there is little understanding of the extreme difficulty of implementing many of these good ideas in a world in which parents may not even have the time to get through the book in 10 days, much less try out all the many things it suggests.

(++++) DELIGHTS OF THE UNEXPECTED

Buxtehude: Membra Jesu Nostri. Les Voix Baroques conducted by Alexander Weimann. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

Sullivan: Pineapple Poll (arr. Mackerras); Symphony in E, “Irish.” Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Lloyd-Jones. Naxos. $8.99.

      Everyone knows what Dietrich Buxtehude composed: organ works, which so impressed Bach that the younger man extended his planned one-month visit to Buxtehude in 1705 to a full four months. Well, the Bach part of what “everyone knows” may be correct, but the “organ works” part is wrong, or at least incomplete. For Buxtehude was as much a composer of vocal music as of pieces for organ – and on the basis of such works as Membra Jesu Nostri, he deserves to be as famed for his handling of voices as for his instrumental music. The full title of this work is Membra Jesu Nostri patientis sanctissima, “The Most Holy Body Parts of Our Suffering Jesus.” It is, of course, a religious work – but one that humanizes Christ in important ways by focusing on his body while singing of his divinity. Each of its seven sections, labeled cantatas, is addressed to a different part of Christ’s body: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart and face. The employment of small forces – two sopranos, alto, tenor, bass, two violins (except in one of the cantatas), violone, theorbo and organ – lends the work great intimacy and makes it a personal expression as well as one of scriptural (specifically Lutheran) orthodoxy. Buxtehude weaves the words wonderfully, in solo arias and settings for three or five voices. And he uses instrumental sections with consummate skill, as in the emotionally intense opening Sonata (in tremulo) of the second cantata. The first cantata features excellent five-part and individual vocal writing; the third is dour but calming; the fourth has a particularly affecting air for the first soprano; and the Concerto à 3 is a highlight of the fifth. The final cantatas depart emotionally from the first five. The sixth drops the violins and substitutes a quartet of violas da gamba, lending the cantata a far darker and even more somber tone than the earlier ones possess (think of Bach, not too many years later, dropping violins in his Brandenburg Concerto No. 6). The contrast of the musical mood with such vocal effects as the bass voice’s “Viva! Viva!” (addressing both Christ’s heart and the singer’s own) is highly effective. And then the final cantata brings back the violins, offers a surprisingly bright instrumental opening, and is throughout more celebratory than anything that has gone before.

      The enjoyment of this unfamiliar music is helped immensely by the excellence of the performance. Sopranos Suzie LeBlanc and Catherine Webster, alto (countertenor) Matthew White, tenor Pascal Charbonneau and bass Thomas Meglioranza sing idiomatically and enthusiastically, but with enough piety so the essential religious message of Buxtehude’s work shines through. This is sacred music that, through sheer beauty, speaks even to our secular age.

      Fast-forward now to the mid-19^th century and the work of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who – everyone knows – composed light music, especially the famous operettas he created with W.S. Gilbert. True, Sullivan has a few non-operatic works to his credit, such as the song The Lost Chord and the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers, but everyone knows that Sullivan was at his best in frothy music. One thing he certainly wasn’t was a symphonist.

      But he was. The Symphony in E, “Irish,” is an early work – written when Sullivan was 21 and first performed in 1866, when he was 24 – but it is an entirely legitimate symphony; even more, it is charming, well constructed and skillfully orchestrated – albeit derivative, especially of Mendelssohn. The lengthy first movement starts with a two-and-a-half minute introduction featuring fine horn writing and being somewhat reminiscent of the Sturm und Drang of the first symphony by Niels W. Gade, a Danish composer also much influenced by Mendelssohn. The main section of this movement trips along much of the time with Mendelssohnian lightness, with only a few foreshadowings of the sort of music that Sullivan was later to write. The second movement, with horns again prominent, has a chorale-like opening and major-to-minor meanderings reminiscent of Schubert. It has lovely, lyrical string passages and some nice wind touches, although it is never deep. The third movement is the most interesting: it has a fascinating opening for pizzicato strings and oboe, and a bucolic, relaxed theme that sounds nothing like the theme of a scherzo – although Sullivan gradually and skillfully turns it first into a march and then into a scherzo-like passage. The contrasting trio, in which the strings are muted, is also highly original. The finale is less successful, featuring a bright fanfare-like opening and broad themes interlaced with horn calls. There is a vaguely Irish cast to some of the thematic material, but it is not strong, and the themes are not particularly memorable. Still, Sullivan builds the movement to an effective close with, once again, prominent horns. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under David Lloyd-Jones plays this symphony for all it is worth, and it is in fact worth a good deal – not great music, true, but music that shows us a virtually unknown side of Sullivan, and one certainly worth knowing.

      Pineapple Poll, a pastiche ballet arranged by conductor Charles Mackerras from 12 of the 14 operas that Sullivan wrote to Gilbert’s libretti (everything except Utopia Ltd. and The Grand Duke), brings us back to territory far more closely associated with what “everyone knows” about Sullivan – although the juxtaposition of pieces from multiple operettas can be a little unsettling to fans of the Savoy canon. Here Lloyd-Jones and the orchestra really cut loose, emphasizing the ways in which Mackerras added to Sullivan’s original orchestration through highly prominent horns and percussion (among other things). This is a jaunty work, alternating delicacy with drama, and is a thorough delight to hear when played with as much spirit as it has here. It’s great fun, but – unlike Sullivan’s symphony – it’s fun of a more familiar sort.

(++++) AS THE SPIRIT MOVES YOU

Steven R. Gerber: Spirituals for String Orchestra; Clarinet Concerto; Serenade Concertante for Two Violins, String Orchestra and Harp. St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony conducted by Vladimir Lande; Jon Manasse, clarinet; José Miguel Cueto and Natalia Malkova, violins. Arabesque. $11.99.

      The big question for modern classical music is whether a work is worth a second hearing. Audiences have become sufficiently sophisticated and sufficiently interested in new sonorities and instrumental combinations to try out many pieces once – but not necessarily again. Steven R. Gerber’s 10-movement suite, Spirituals, is a work that will repay multiple listenings, and to which audiences are likely to return after they first hear it.

      Written between 1999 and 2001, Spirituals is highly congenial for Gerber’s musical temperament: sensitive, quiet and thoughtful. The first nine movements are inspired by spirituals; the 10^th, an arrangement of Balm in Gilead, incorporates arpeggiated harmonics taken from Ravel. The movements’ pacing is generally deliberate, but the treatment of the themes is highly varied. The first and longest movement, which takes off from a tune by Harry Burleigh – the man who introduced Dvořák to spirituals – is reminiscent of early Ives in its full harmonies, warmth and expansiveness. Among the other highlights are the sixth movement, based on Go Down, Moses, whose fascinating orchestration makes it sound for a moment as if woodwinds have joined the strings; and the light and dancelike ninth, derived from Glory to That Newborn King. But every movement has its own charms, and hearing the original songs peek through – sometimes their melodies, sometimes their rhythms, sometimes their harmonies – makes Spirituals an involving experience, and one to which listeners will want to return. Vladimir Lande and the St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony play the work with warmth and understanding, which are just the qualities it needs.

      The Clarinet Concerto was written from 2000 to 2002 for Jon Manasse, whose performance here is both skilled and knowing. In the first of its two movements, a serious introduction gives way to a bouncy segment with prominent harp and a particularly effective string-pizzicato section. The clarinet floats naturally into and out of the orchestra – even the cadenza sounds integral to the movement. The second movement, which largely retains the deliberate pace of the first, explores more of the chalumeau register. The brief faster sections here seem like interludes as the music waits to slow down again. The work is meditative, exploring the clarinet’s songful side but not its exuberant one.

      The opening of the Serenade Concertante (1998) makes Gerber’s distinctive sonic world clear. There is a lot of ebb and flow in the first of the two movements, with the solo violins cooperating rather than competing: they often twine around each other. The writing for the orchestra’s lower strings is particularly well done, but the overall sound of the work is rather monochromatic. After a brief slow introduction, the second movement introduces some welcome liveliness: on this entire CD, the tempo marking “Allegro” appears only twice, both times in this movement, and both times qualified by “non troppo.” This movement has a distinct American flavor in its rhythms and intervals, plus some attractive pizzicati – a pleasant recurring feature of Gerber’s style. Its central section of variations is loosely based on the name “Brahms,” but this is rather contrived, mixing musical meanings from different notation systems. Still, the variations themselves are clever and interesting. Both this work and the Clarinet Concerto are worthy of more-frequent performance, but it is Spirituals that is most likely to appeal to audiences time after time.

(++++) MAKING THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY

Oliver Who Would Not Sleep! By Mara Bergman. Illustrations by Nick Maland. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $16.99.

Pssst! By Adam Rex. Harcourt. $16.

      Here are two books that fully deserve the exclamation points in their titles. Both turn the everyday events of life into absolutely wonderful adventures.

      What could be more ordinary than a boy who just can’t get to sleep? It happens all the time – but the way it happens to Oliver Donnington Rimington-Sneep makes it seem like the most remarkable event in (or out of) the world. Oliver doesn’t sleep simply because he prefers to stay awake and do things. He paints and draws and does magic and reads – and reads and reads and reads. And then Mara Bergman’s story really takes off. Does it all happen in Oliver’s mind or in some wonderful world that’s not quite ours? Does it matter? Oliver blasts off in his very own rocket, seeing the marvelous night sights of Earth and traveling all the way to Mars, where “Oliver stood and Oliver stared, without even being the slightest bit scared.” Then, looking through his telescope from Mars back toward Earth, Oliver sees his home – so he rides his rocket all the way back to his bed, where “Bat and Owl, Fox and Ted” are waiting for him. And at the very, very end of his adventures, as his eyes get heavier and heavier and the type gets smaller and smaller, Oliver finally (there are six “finallys,” each smaller than the one before) falls asleep. This is a wonderful journey from wakefulness to sleep, allowing children ages 5-8 to experience vicariously all the pleasures of staying awake (and what child hasn’t wanted to stay up past his or her bedtime?)…while wooing them eventually to peaceful slumber. Nick Maland’s delightful pictures of wide-eyed Oliver and all the things he sees – which include some things he is emphatically not afraid of, such as monsters climbing all over the roof – make the book as much fun to look at as to read.

      The visual element is the main attraction of the hilarious Pssst! It’s a zoo story – but what a zoo this is! Adam Rex imagines a little boy coming to the zoo all by himself – by subway – and hearing animal after animal whisper, “Pssst!" Each one talks to him; each one wants something. The gorilla asks for a tire to replace his broken tire swing; the bats want flashlights – not for themselves, but for the hippopotamus; the penguins want paint (they’re tired of everything around them being white); the sloths want bicycle helmets (because they hang upside down, and what if they fall?). And so on – every request being simultaneously absurd and just logical enough so the boy agrees to help…after the baboon gives him a huge bag of coins to pay for everything. “The peacock picks them out of the fountains,” explains the tortoise. So the boy supplies what the animals want and everyone is happy – especially kids ages 5-8, who will find the utterly absurd oil-and-acrylic pictures a delight. The illustrations mesh extreme realism (as in the items that the boy piles high in a real-looking wheelbarrow) with what look like sketches (for backgrounds and some pages). Rex loves to throw in little asides that have nothing to do with the main story, such as a narwhal displayed inside a huge snow globe. There is also a cute twist ending – and a map on the inside front covers that, because of the narrative, has an important difference when it reappears on the inside back covers. Pssst! Want to have a really great time with a book? Try Psst!

(++++) NEW AND NEWER

The Prophecy. By Hilari Bell. Eos. $6.50.

Knight and Rogue I: The Last Knight. By Hilari Bell. Eos. $16.99.

Dead Water Zone. By Kenneth Oppel. HarperTeen. $6.99.

Darkwing. By Kenneth Oppel. Eos. $16.99.

      Here are two book pairs, each providing an opportunity to visit (or revisit) an older novel that is now in paperback, and to encounter for the first time a new book by the same author. When that author is Hilari Bell, the novels are likely to be of consistently high quality, as are these two. The Prophecy, originally published last year and now available in paperback, is the story of Prince Perryn, a book-loving scholar who cannot manage to get the hang of weaponry and cannot rely much on magic, either, since it seems to be disappearing. The prophecy of the title tells Perryn how to kill a dragon that the attacking Norsemen have bound to their will. But the prophecy relies, as all such things seem to, on the very magic that is leaving the world. There are elements of both comedy and tragedy here, but by the end, the overall tone of the tale has become serious – and although Perryn’s eventual emergence as a blend of king and scholar will surprise few readers, the adventures through which he reaches his goal do contain plenty of surprises.

      The Last Knight starts a new Bell series, with elements that will be familiar to her readers – those of The Prophecy and her other books. This is the story of a rescue of a damsel in distress that goes seriously awry when it turns out that the damsel was imprisoned for what seems to have been good reason: she was awaiting trail for murdering her husband. The pairing of characters that gives this book, and the series it introduces, the title Knight and Rogue, melds Sir Michael Sevenson (a nobleman’s younger son who, like Don Quixote, has taken up knighthood and heroism centuries too late) with Fisk (a streetwise con artist who has ended up as Sir Michael’s squire). These two are teenagers – Sir Michael is 18, Fisk 17 – and not nearly as worldly wise as they think they are. Lady Ceciel, for one, seems to pull the proverbial wool over their eyes rather neatly. The book is narrated in alternating first-person chapters, and the contrasting viewpoints of the characters make The Last Knight particularly enjoyable to read.

      There is nothing enjoyable in Watertown, where 16-year-old Paul goes to look for his younger, weaker brother, Sam, who has disappeared after taking a job as a research assistant. Kenneth Oppel’s Dead Water Zone is dystopic science fiction about pollution and urban deterioration – and about what happens in a place where you can trust no one. Originally published in 1992 and now available in paperback, the book follows Paul into Watertown’s eerie streets, where he meets a girl named Monica who seems helpful, but who clearly isn’t telling him everything about her reasons for assisting him. Paul not only has to search for Sam but also has to confront Sam’s determination to do something for himself by using strange “dead water” that changes people’s metabolism. “You can’t understand the pull of the dead water, even the weakest of it,” one character tells Paul, but Paul must learn about that pull and confront it if he is to have a chance to save both Sam and himself – and perhaps Monica as well.

      Oppel’s new Darkwing is fantasy, not science fiction, and it returns to the world of his Silverwing trilogy about bat clans (Silverwing, Sunwing and Firewing). Darkwing is a prequel to the other books, taking place as the age of dinosaurs ends. Indeed, the winged saurians of the dinosaur age are believed to be extinct – until Dusk, the protagonist of this novel, sees one while exploring in the tree canopy. In his clan, Dusk alone can fly and see in the dark, but these are not seen as positive evolutionary adaptations by the clan, where being different leads to, at best, being shunned by other clan members. Dusk is fortunate: he is the son of the clan leader and therefore protected, at least for a time, from the others’ enmity. His status as a clan outsider, and the “outsider” status of the remaining winged saurians, are set against the plans of a creature called Carnassial: a predator who also has reasons for being concerned about the winged saurians, and who leads an attack on Dusk’s island that results in a massacre and forces Dusk and the few other survivors to leave their homes forever. The predator-and-prey relationships and dominance bids are the standard stuff of heroic fantasy; because the plot proceeds pretty much straightforwardly, Darkwing earns a (+++) rating. Still, Oppel’s setting (65 million years ago) and his decision to choose bats (actually “pre-bats” that he calls “chiropters”) as protagonists give Darkwing additional interest, especially for those who enjoyed the modern bats featured in the Silverwing trilogy.

(+++) SOUND MAGIC

Jazz on a Saturday Night. By Leo & Diane Dillon. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $16.99.

Clair-de-Lune. By Cassandra Golds. Yearling. $5.99.

Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs. Edited by Phil Freeman. Da Capo. $16.95.

      The magic of music shows itself three ways in these books for three age groups. Jazz on a Saturday Night is an attractive picture book that imagines a “Dream Team” of jazz greats playing together one night: Miles Davis, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Stanley Clarke and Ella Fitzgerald. This is an advocacy book: Leo and Diane Dillon dedicate it in part to “the spirit of New Orleans,” provide a list of their favorite jazz recordings, and include their own CD, on which they read about jazz and the instruments featured in the book. The CD also features an original song named for the book and inspired by the paintings in it, which have all the realism of a full-color dream. The text is nothing special (“At first, notes surprise; then they sweeten and rise”), but the pictures are, portraying the greats of jazz, the audience enchanted by them, and sometimes just the notes they play and the imagined effect those notes are having. Unfortunately, the book does not address – except indirectly – the basic question of whether jazz is exclusively an African-American art. Every single person performing and listening in the book is black, with the result that the work feels exclusionary rather than inclusive. This seems at odds with the Dillons’ expressed desire to get everyone interested in jazz – and with the enjoyment that performers such as Dave Brubeck have brought to generations of listeners.

      Music of a different sort is at the heart of Clair-de-Lune, whose eponymous heroine lives with her grandmother and practices ballet every day – as did her mother, who died when Clair-de-Lune was a baby. The girl has not spoken a word since her mother died: “If I do not speak, no one will ever really be able to dislike me, because no one will ever really know me. If I do speak, then it will be possible for people to dislike not just the person they think I am, but the person I am.” But this is not a tragic story – it is a heartwarming fantasy. One day, Clair-de-Lune meets a remarkable mouse named Bonaventure who can speak, and does, and who dreams of starting a dancing school just for mice. It is the adventures of this unlikely pair in a hidden world that is and is not part of Clair-de-Lune’s building that eventually let the girl open herself to her talent and her heart to the world. Cassandra Golds’ writing is overly sentimental, and the book’s happy-but-sad ending is predictable, but readers ages 9-12 – especially aspiring ballerinas – will surely be moved by the story.

      Marooned is strictly for adults. A sequel to Stranded, which focused on rock music that critics deemed worthy of having with them if they were ever stuck on a desert island, Marooned expands the musical repertoire to include pop, hip hop, folk, jazz, punk, electronica and more. The 20 essays are by such critics as Matt Ashare, Jeff Chang, Rob Harvilla, Anthony Miccio, Dave Queen, Dave Tate, Douglas Wolk, and anthology editor Phil Freeman himself. If you don’t know who the critics are, you can check the brief biographies in the back – but if you don’t know who they are, why would you care about their opinions? So the book is strictly for people already familiar with at least some of the critics and at least some of the music they write about – and interested in spending their time with writing that is, in general, focused more on the authors than on what they are supposedly discussing. “The supermarket is where I learned the Zen of pea stacking. Alone, all night, slicing open box after box, I really got a chance to think about my life.” “I remember all the swaying seeming to intensify a bit, all of us just crammed into that spot, the heat and the light and the feeling that we were all going to eventually faint at some point, though it never came to that.” “I hurled the first batch of twelve-inchers into the ocean in frustration, stupidly wasting my precious resources.” This sort of self-indulgence pervades the writing here, and although some of the critics do actually focus on the music rather than on themselves, it is hard to see this as a particularly useful guide to music suitable for desert-island listening. It’s certainly not a desert-island book itself.

(+++) WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH KIDS TODAY?

Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet. By Kathryn C. Montgomery. MIT Press. $29.95.

The Guy’s Guide to Surviving Toddlers, Tantrums, and Separation Anxiety (Yours, Not Your Kid’s!). By Michael Crider. Da Capo. $12.95.

      Here are two attempts, one very sober and the other very lighthearted, to say something about childhood and parenting in the digital age. Generation Digital takes itself so seriously that its footnotes and index are more than half the length of its text (120 pages vs. 225). It is an advocacy book – Kathryn C. Montgomery is founder of the Center for Media Education (CME) as well as a professor at American University’s School of Communication – and is, at bottom, more for policy wonks than for parents (except when the policy wonks are parents). Montgomery makes a good basic point about modern, media-driven perceptions of today’s children and teens: on the one hand, they are the most technology-savvy people ever, far more connected to far more devices holding far more information than has ever been widely available in history; on the other hand, they are innocents who can and will be corrupted by the nature of much of the information to which they are exposed, unless something can be done to protect them. Just what that something should be is by no means clear. For example, Montgomery analyzes in some detail the political process that went into crafting the Communications Decency Act that President Clinton signed into law, but she is well aware of the legislation’s overreaching and poorly crafted language. She discusses supposed Internet “safe havens” for children, such as KidsCom, then points out that these turned out to have marketing rather than child safety as their primary goals. She talks a great deal about “policy intervention,” especially in terms of the work of her own CME but also in connection with efforts by the Kaiser Foundation and others, but never really formulates an approach that can help children stay digitally safe while ensuring their continued ability to reach and interact with a world of information and, not incidentally, allowing unfettered data access to adults. Montgomery’s primary concern is inclusiveness – “The true democratic potential of the new media can never be fulfilled unless everyone has the ability to participate” – but the specifics of getting to that goal are never made clear.

      Michael Crider’s concerns are as focused and humor-filled as Montgomery’s are wide-ranging and somber. Crider has written several books about being a guy in today’s dating, marriage and child-rearing scenes, and The Guy’s Guide to Surviving Toddlers, Tantrums, and Separation Anxiety moves his focus up the age ladder to the point at which a child is ready for school – or preschool, anyway. Crider is curiously bifurcated in his role as a modern father. On the one hand, he writes with obvious pride about being “sort of in the beginning of a climate shift in parenting, as a lot of fathers were choosing the stay-at-home route” at the same time he chose it. On the other hand, he is absolutely convinced that the way all men bond, with each other and with their kids, is through sports. Heaven help the boy who’s more interested in, say, ballet. The main thing Crider brings to his books is his rather juvenile sense of humor, which is most attractive when he makes jokes at his own expense: “There were only two times in my childhood when I can remember bringing up the subject of sex. And both times ended up with me knowing just as little as before I asked. …I learned about it the way a lot of Generation X kids first discovered the truth about sex: HBO.” (Quick – alert Kathryn Montgomery and the CME!) Crider ends every chapter of The Guy’s Guide to Surviving Toddlers, Tantrums, and Separation Anxiety with a series of “review questions: what have we learned here?” These are a nicely done sendup of similar chapter endings in many self-help books: “Do you ever wonder who thought of a vasectomy in the first place? I’m guessing it was first performed on a stay-at-home dad, and he probably did the surgery himself after spending too much ‘quality time’ with his children.” For all the joking and silliness, Crider’s book has warmth, which peeps through whether he is discussing the excesses of kids’ birthday parties or the weird interviews of children conducted by some preschool administrators. It’s his heart, not his joke-telling ability, that makes Crider a father worth listening to, at least some of the time.

(++++) CHACONNE À DEUX

Brahms: Symphony No. 4; Hungarian Dances Nos. 2, 4-9. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos. $8.99.

John Corigliano: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “The Red Violin”; Sonata for Violin and Piano. Joshua Bell, violin; Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop (Concerto); Jeremy Denk, piano (Sonata). Sony. $18.99.

      There’s life in the old chaconne yet. These two recordings show that this form – which dates back to the 16^th century and was most popular in the 17^th and 18^th – survived through the 19^th century and all the way to the 21^st. A chaconne is simply a set of variations, almost always in triple time, on a repeated set of chords; there is often a recurring bass line (ground bass) as well. It is partly because Brahms chose to end his fourth and final symphony with a magnificent chaconne that Marin Alsop’s performance of the work is the best in her Brahms cycle with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Alsop is better at detail than at grand conceptualizations, and her attentiveness to individual elements of this work’s finale – while Brahms himself provides the broad overview – produces a thrilling and very well-played symphonic conclusion.

      The first three movements are top-notch as well. The first is warm, expansive and broad, with good balance of strings and brass. If it is a tad episodic, with individual sections better than its overall shape, this is mostly the result of Alsop’s typical approach to complex music. The second movement features lovely horn tone at the opening and a stately, detail-oriented approach throughout. It does bog down a bit at times, but not for long. And the relationship of upper and lower strings is excellent, as are the horn chorales. The brief third movement gets some real and welcome humor here – it is marked Allegro giocoso, but some conductors forget the “giocoso” – emerging as jovial but not light, with horns once again outstanding, this time in the Trio. Alsop’s performance may not be one for the ages, but it is a fine one in almost every way, and it still leaves her room to grow interpretatively.

      The seven Hungarian Dances that fill out the CD are not much more than filler. Brahms himself orchestrated Nos. 1, 3 and 10 from his first dance set (originally written for two pianos), and various other arrangers have essayed the rest. These versions are by Peter Breiner and were commissioned for this Naxos recording. They are not very idiomatic and are packed with percussion – a fresh look, perhaps, but not a very Brahmsian one. The performances are all right but not exceptional. No. 2 is a little plodding, although the middle section has nice rhythm. Neither it nor No. 4 is very warm or emotional – the heart that Alsop wears on her sleeve is an artificial one. No. 4 does have some good wind scoring, though. No. 5 is a little cool, and the percussion use is odd; the same is true of No. 6, in which snare drums are intrusive. No. 7 is simply so-so, and No. 8 lacks a sense of mystery. No. 9 sounds more like an English country dance than a Hungarian one, thanks to its cymbals, stately pacing and lack of rhythmic fluidity. It is the symphony, and notably its final chaconne, that is the gem here.

      An extended chaconne that sounds little like Brahms’ (and even less like its baroque predecessors) opens John Corigliano’s Violin Concerto, which is based on his Oscar-winning score for the film, The Red Violin. Alsop excels in this music, too, playing it with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, of which she has just become Music Director. The chaconne starts this concerto and is its longest movement. The mysterious and portentous opening, filled with swirling romanticism, gives Joshua Bell a chance to showcase his full sound and remarkable comfort with rapid rhythmic changes. And the Baltimore players are with him every step of the way – this is a live recording, but soloist and orchestra meld as well as if they were in a studio and had the chance for plenty of retakes. Bell’s lovely tone unites all the tempo changes and instrumental outbursts, while Alsop keeps the orchestra on an equal footing with the soloist at all times – even as the movement meanders (in contrast to Brahms, who uses the chaconne form as a unifying structure).

      Corigliano’s work is largely tonal, but not dogmatically so, and its three later movements are all interestingly titled. The second, Pianissimo Scherzo, is aptly named – it is clever, with interesting orchestration and with the violin making sounds as much as music. The third movement, Andante flautando, is warm and pretty, although not deep. The conclusion, Accelerando Finale, starts with the violin almost “fiddling” and features squeaks and rattles in the orchestra – plus an acceleration section that sounds like Arthur Honegger’s impression of a steam engine in Pacific 231. But there is slow music here, too, and a genuine “acceleration contest” only in the last 90 seconds. Corigliano’s concerto often sounds like expanded film music – which is, after all, what it is – but it has some beauty to go with its cleverness, and Bell, Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony certainly play it for all it is worth.

      The Violin Sonata is a more modest work, with less cleverness for its own sake. The first movement has good violin-piano balance, angular themes, and strong and varied rhythms. The second is relaxed, more flowing and more rhythmically even. The third is slow, with a serious piano-only opening; the piano is more dissonant and the violin quieter and more tonal here. The finale is a fine tension release, with bounce and lots of scurrying, including an almost cartoonish middle section and a playful ending after several false ones. Bell seems to be just as comfortable here as in the concerto, and Jeremy Denk keeps the piano on an equal footing with the violin in a work that is more a partnership of equals than a display piece for the string player.

(++++) THE MAESTRA’S MAHLER…AND MORE

John Adams: Fearful Symmetries; Mahler: Symphony No. 5. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Live performance at Strathmore Music Center, North Bethesda, Maryland, September 27, 2007.

      The various furors and tempests in teapots relating to Marin Alsop’s selection as the 12^th music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra are now old news, and Alsop has officially assumed her new duties with an opening-night concert that shows her to be an uncompromising programmer and a fine podium showman…or is that showwoman? She chose a long and difficult program to launch the BSO’s 2007-2008 season, and handled everything with panache if not always perfect musicality.

      The first work, John Adams’ Fearful Symmetries, is filled with catchy rhythms, clever orchestral textures, good humor and lots and lots of noise. It is also much too long; or perhaps, if you accept Adams’ approach to this 1988 work, too short. Adams himself was on hand to introduce the piece and pump it up a bit, but his speech mostly showed how difficult it is to talk people into or through music. Fearful Symmetries is essentially an exercise in orchestral color and continuous driving rhythms, played until the very end entirely at mf through fff dynamics. Supplementing a full orchestra with saxophones, synthesizer and more, Adams essentially creates a half-hour ostinato above which rock and heavy metal styles merge (or clash) with traditional classical ones. The work has no apparent organizational principle in terms of its length – this is why it could easily be shorter or longer. It is an Alice in Wonderland case of “begin at the beginning; continue until you get to the end; then stop.” Alsop and the BSO certainly gave the work everything they had, with enormous masses of sound rolling off this very well-balanced ensemble while Alsop paid meticulous attention to details: a pizzicato here, a wind screech or brass outcry there. And Alsop made herself into a big part of the show, bending and bouncing and cajoling and stretching to emphasize a point or cue a musician way at the back of the stage. She was fun to watch; the work was fun to hear; but there is less to this music than meets the ear.

      Mahler’s Fifth was another sonic world altogether. This is a huge and complex symphony and an important one, marking Mahler’s return to pure orchestral expression after three symphonies in which voices had important roles. Mahler said it is in three parts: the first two movements; the third; and the fourth and fifth. First trumpet Andrew Balio presented the opening solo with clarity, and in general the brass was very impressive (although Balio had one embarrassing missed note later in the movement). There was demonic energy here, but Alsop had an irritating tendency to insert fussy little hesitations at the start of almost every new section – exactly the opposite of what Mahler intended. The result was unwonted fragmentation of the movement. Alsop did bring out many lovely details, but her decision to re-seat the orchestra with the cellos to her right – the BSO had previously placed the violas there – led to some muddiness in the middle voices. Alsop wisely went immediately into the second movement, which was stürmisch indeed until the beautiful cello-and-viola section, which seemed to come from another planet (again, though, the violas’ position meant the cellos nearly drowned them).

      The complete mood change of the third movement was well handled, with the horns outstanding and the lithe ländler rhythms nicely shaped. But again, Alsop introduced uncalled-for rubato from time to time, missing the overall shape of the movement, which is more than a disconnected series of marginally related episodes.

      The fourth and fifth movements proved the most effective. In the gorgeous Adagietto, for strings and harp, the BSO’s outstandingly warm string sections shone, and Alsop let the music swell and subside naturally. And the finale was given a strong, propulsive flow as Alsop kept its sections moving smartly into each other, leading to a stirring brass choir and satisfyingly dramatic conclusion.

      In all, Alsop offered a meticulous Mahler Fifth, with very good attention to detail but little sense that she has a personal overview of the grand shape of the music. She is certainly a conductor to watch – in fact, one who is very enjoyable to watch. And she seems to have a genuine vision for the future development of the BSO. Now she needs one for the music as well.

(++++) SCARINESS AND SILLINESS

666: The Number of the Beast. Point/Scholastic. $14.99.

Curses, Inc. By Vivian Vande Velde. Magic Carpet/Harcourt. $6.95.

One Beastly Beast (Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales). By Garth Nix. Illustrated by Brian Biggs. Eos. $15.99.

The Scary States of America. By Michael Teitelbaum. Delacorte Press. $7.99.

      Frightfulness and funniness go together surprisingly well: a lot of scary stories depend on elements that, considered objectively, are silly, so an author who wishes to can emphasize either the fearful or the funny. These collections of stories offer shivers from a variety of different angles.

      666: The Number of the Beast is entirely on the dark side. There are 18 original supernatural stories in this anthology, gathered into three groups of six each (6-6-6, that is), under the headings of “Evil,” “Darkness” and “Beasts.” The book is intended for older teenagers and young adults, and some of the authors apparently decided that that justifies going for pure shock value: Christopher Pike’s “Saving Face,” which includes a horror-movie-inspired (and rather disgusting) torture scene, is the most extreme example. Interestingly, it is followed by the shortest and most subtle story in the book, Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Little Sacrifice,” whose implications are far more frightening and far more a part of the real world than the overt violence in Pike’s tale and others. There’s something for every fright fan here, from the demonic possession of Heather Graham’s “If You Knew Suzie,” to the transformation and possible madness in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ “Empire of Dirt,” to the SF dystopia of Joshua Gee’s “Incident Report,” to the Poe-esque madness of Robin Wasserman’s “Scapegoat,” to the ghost entrapping the living in P.D. Cacek’s “La Fleur de Nuit.”

      Vivian Vande Velde also has a story of a ghost seeking a living person to take her place in Curses, Inc. Originally published in 1997 and now available in paperback, this collection shows its age in some ways, as in the title story, whose protagonist connects to the Internet by dialup modem. Vande Velde aims for readers as young as 12 and keeps her frights more modest and laced with occasional humor than do authors seeing older readers: the title tale here has a neatly amusing twist ending, and “To Converse with Dumb Beasts” is out-and-out hilarious. There are 10 stories in all, including “Past Sunset,” the one in which a ghost seeks a replacement. Vande Velde’s end notes are interesting both for background and for showing that an author does not always know which of her tales are most effective: she gives short shrift to “Remember Me,” for example, but this tale of lost (or stolen) identity is both clever and a real chiller.

      There’s nothing chilling at all in One Beastly Beast (Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales), perhaps because Garth Nix intends this book for ages 7-11. But there’s plenty of fun in the four brief fantasy adventures here, including “Blackbread the Pirate,” in which a boy enters a world of swashbuckling rats – real rats; and “The Princess and the Beastly Beast,” in which Princess Rinda has to decide whether to jump into the maw of the beast of the title. Then there’s the tale of the aliens who want to kidnap, or maybe adopt, “Bill the Inventor.” And in “Serena and the Sea Serpent,” the title character befriends a fierce monster and finds herself turned into…a penguin. Brian Biggs’ amusing, cartoonlike illustrations of all these characters add to the book’s considerable charm.

      There’s not much charming in any of The Scary States of America, according to Michael Teitelbaum, who offers “50 Weird and Terrifying Stories Based on True Events.” Teitelbaum creates as his narrator a spook chaser named Jason Specter, who had an experience inside a weird locker in fourth grade and has collected stories of the paranormal from around the United States ever since. Once you get past the gimmick of one story per state, the tales themselves are pretty straightforward, and some are just dull; the book as a whole deserves a (+++) rating. Each tale is introduced with a brief fact about the state – but you’ll be disappointed if you expect a connection between the real-world information and the made-up stories. For South Dakota, for example, the opening statement is about the carving of Mount Rushmore, but the story is about a woman who finds her husband cheating and kills him. The Hawaii fact mentions Pearl Harbor; the story involves the skeletal ghosts of a long-ago battle won by King Kamehameha. The Nevada fact mentions weddings in Las Vegas; the story is about dreaming of a fire before it happens. The chapters are all brief and easy to read, and the book may be an enjoyable accompaniment to a lengthy family drive around the U.S. But it’s really not particularly scary.

(++++) FANTASTIC TRAVELS

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. By James Gurney. Andrews McMeel. $29.95.

Ilario: The Stone Golem—A Story of the First History, Book Two. By Mary Gentle. Eos. $14.95.

      James Gurney’s tales of Dinotopia are unending feasts for the eyes, even if the underlying stories tend to be rather thin. Gurney’s newest book, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, actually has some clever writing here and there: “Bix, my faithful ally, was a diminutive Protoceratops, the size of a sheep and the color of a musk mallow, with a fearless heart, a creaky voice, and an old-style kindliness, like a parrot raised in the company of Presbyterians.” But even the more-interesting portions of the narrative take a back seat to the magnificently realized portraits of intelligent dinosaurs living and interacting with human beings. One of the extraordinary things about Gurney’s oil paintings is the way he painstakingly shows the faces and bodies of the humans, bringing out their personalities and peculiarities expertly through form and expression – and then applies exactly the same techniques to the dinosaurs. The result is a visualization of equals, drawing readers inexorably into the isolated island world of Dinotopia with a believability that the entirely fantastic plots of the stories could not otherwise achieve. Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara is a very handsome book, of coffee-table size and with an included “Traveler’s Map of Dinotopia” from the “Global Geographic Society” that provides additional background for the story. The pictures are full of surprises. One, for example, appears to show a large and fearsomely clawed dinosaur threatening a man and a much smaller dinosaur – but the caption reads, “Bix admires the claws of Henriette, the Therizinosaurus.” The dinosaurs’ anatomy is beautifully rendered, the colors are gorgeous in indoor and outdoor scenes alike, and the book is such a visual pleasure that it is tempting just to look at it without reading it. There is a story, though, about a journey from the more-familiar realm of Waterfall City to the land called Chandara, which has been cut off from contact with the rest of Dinotopia for many years. The delights and hazards of travel get their full due here – with an approach somewhat reminiscent of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires – while the maps and carefully painted scenes sweep the reader into a story whose impossibility does not deter Gurney from making it seem plausible.

      The second and concluding book of the adventures of Ilario is a fantasy, too, but Mary Gentle makes no particular attempt to render it realistic – she makes it clear that this is an alternative history. The first book of this pair, Ilario: The Lion’s Eye, detailed the early adventures of the sexually dual-nature Ilario, a would-be artist who seems male but is so fully female that he/she becomes pregnant and, at the end of that book, gives birth. The second book, Ilario: The Stone Golem, gets more deeply into court intrigue and political machinations, with the golem of the title being created in Carthage as a weapon – and painted by Ilario so he can show it to those living elsewhere. The alternative world here is being as unalterably changed by one Master Gutenberg as the real world was; and the various plots and counterplots are nothing special. The book deserves a (+++) rating for its strong style, for Gentle’s success in making Ilario an interesting character and far more than the mere King’s Freak he becomes for a time, and for involving Ilario in family issues that prove as complex and troubling as matters of state. Ilario’s hermaphroditic nature is more than a curiosity: it is crucial to the plot and the eventual resolution of the tale. Ilario proves to be, to those around him, very much a special case, not only in sexuality but also in law. The overall structure of Gentle’s story, though, is less special than its central character.

(+++) KISS, KISS, KILL, KILL

A Killer’s Kiss. By William Lashner. William Morrow. $24.95.

      Anyone familiar with William Lashner’s noir hero, Victor Carl, will understand from the start of A Killer’s Kiss that there will be no happy ending. Carl will survive – this is the seventh book featuring him, and it only makes sense to assume that there will be an eighth, although Lashner says he plans to give the character a rest for a couple of years. But it is safe to assume that Carl will be damaged both physically and emotionally by the end of the work, eventually coming to terms with yet another sorry circumstance in his life.

      This is exactly what happens. The interesting thing in Lashner’s books about Carl, a small-time Philadelphia criminal defense lawyer, is not the grand overview of the plot but the details through which things work their way to the inevitably downbeat ending. In A Killer’s Kiss, the basic story involves Carl’s former fiancée, Julia, who jilted him and married a urologist named Dr. Wren Denniston – who, we learn in the first chapter, has just been murdered. This is awkward for Carl, since Julia happens to be in his bathroom taking a shower when two detectives arrive with the information about the killing and the news that Carl, because of his prior relationship with Julia, is a prime suspect. Carl is innocent, of course, of everything except hoping to rekindle an old flame that, at least for him, has never quite gone out. Julia is hoping – well, just what is she hoping? That is but one of many interlocking and increasingly complex mysteries here.

      It is characteristic of Lashner’s particular variation on the hard-boiled detective-novel style that more is inevitably deemed to be better. If one narrow escape is good, two are better; three, better still. If one plot twist is good, two are better, three even better, and the almost uncountable number in A Killer’s Kiss the best yet. In reality, this isn’t quite true: there’s a point at which the reader comes to expect some new revelation, some new twist, some new character with some newly revealed ulterior motive at any moment – even if the specifics aren’t clear until Lashner chooses to reveal them. In this book, the linchpin of the plot is a longstanding, foredoomed-to-failure romance between Julia and a high-school sweetheart – a real Romeo-and-Juliet thing, but without the sex, which it turns out was thoroughly impossible for reasons having nothing to do with feuding families. This ultimate relationship is, unfortunately for the plot, thoroughly unbelievable, and the further Lashner goes with it – with trying to explain it, with using it to show Julia’s motivations and the impossibility of a happy ending involving her and Carl – the more ridiculous the whole thing gets.

      Not that it seems ridiculous when the bullets start flying and Carl, as if being under suspicion of murder in Wren Denniston’s death isn’t enough, finds himself in the middle of a convoluted international scheme that involves too much money, too many suspects and too many dead bodies. Lashner writes very well and keeps the pace very fast, and he has a way of encapsulating Carl’s thoughts that always keeps things interesting: “It hadn’t taken me more than a moment to realize he was a dramatic little snit, still on the stage all these years after his vomitous failure as Romeo, still playing the melancholy young man brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past, still waiting for the spotlight to come his way and give him another chance.” Unfortunately, Lashner’s characters – except for Carl himself – are far less interesting and far more unidimensional than the prose in which they are described; and even Carl, at least in A Killer’s Kiss, seems motivated so obsessively that the next story about him might well be called A Shrink’s Showdown.

(+++) SMALL STEPS TOWARD BIG SOLUTIONS

The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. By Laurie David and Cambria Gordon. Scholastic. $15.99.

The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language. By Kendall King, Ph.D., and Alison Mackey, Ph.D. Collins. $15.95.

      Every generation hands down its problems to its children in the hope that they will find solutions. Along with the problems come suggestions on how to tackle them – even if those suggestions have not, so far, gathered enough critical mass to eliminate the difficulties. These two books take on huge subjects – global warming and the increasing interrelatedness of the world – and suggest ways that the upcoming generation of world leaders may be able to handle these situations more effectively than the current one has.

      The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming talks directly to children about a problem that the vast majority of scientists see as a major element – perhaps the major element – of life in decades to come. Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, California moms without any particular scientific expertise in global warming, have designed their book to explain big issues in terms simple enough for even young children to understand. The basic scientific explanations are actually better done than some of the folksy attempts to make the science accessible: “If carbon dioxide were a pizza, then we are expecting the Earth to eat a whole pie rather than just one slice.” (Huh?) Still, the four-part structure of the book is good, dealing first with the science of global warming, then with its effects on weather, then with its impact on plant and animal life, and finally with things kids and their parents can do to help. The book is a rather odd mixture of scientific accuracy (a graph showing the Keeling Curve, one measure of carbon-dioxide concentration) with overly cute presentation (a section called “You Say You Want a Revolution?” and a photo of the Wicked Witch of the West to illustrate a page called “I’m Melting”). David and Gordon are, to be sure, undertaking a difficult task in explaining global warming and then trying to motivate kids to do something about it. Still, their choices of motivators may be off-putting for some families – quotations from surfer Laird Hamilton, actress Jennifer Garner and actor Leonardo DiCaprio? The final section of the book, “What You Can Do to Stop Global Warming,” unfortunately shows how little kids and average families can do: write to mayors urging them to agree to lower carbon-dioxide emissions; use compact fluorescent bulbs; take canvas bags to stores instead of using paper or plastic; suggest that your school use recycled paper; etc. These are good, solid ideas, but scarcely enough to make a dent in a global problem. Still, David and Gordon offer kids a place to start. Others will have to come up with bigger plans.

      The increasing interconnectedness of the world is a trend as pronounced and, to some people, as worrisome as global warming. It can even be argued that the upsurge in religiously inspired terrorist activity is in large part a reaction to the perceived homogenization of humanity. The way to handle the interconnection, according to Georgetown University linguistics professors Kendall King and Alison Mackey, is to accept it – and help your child participate more fully in the world of the future by learning at least one additional language. King, an expert in bilingualism, and Mackey, an expert in second-language acquisition, are themselves parents who are teaching their children multiple languages. In The Bilingual Edge, they offer assessment tools to help parents decide on their family language profiles and figure out what languages would be best for their children to learn. They suggest starting second languages as early as possible, and explain the difficulties parents will likely face as children get older, enter school, must do assignments and classroom work in English, and so on. They make suggestions about finding good teachers and learning programs, having a bilingual home, and more. The common thread in everything King and Mackey recommend is time – lots of time to work one-on-one with children; lots of time to speak a second language at home; lots of time to find ways to show kids that second languages are cool, so they will want to speak them even if their friends don’t. Stay-at-home parents who can devote long hours to second languages – especially parents from cultures in which English was not the primary language, and who therefore have relatives who can support efforts to keep children in touch with their linguistic heritage – will find many helpful ideas here. Time-pressed two-income families in which only one language is spoken will, unfortunately, get much less benefit from a book that adds yet another layer of expectation to children and parents who may understandably feel they have quite enough elements of life to juggle already.

(++++) A CONDUCTOR’S MONUMENT

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15; Boris Chaykovsky: Variations for Orchestra. Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Kyrill Kondrashin. Profil. $16.99.

      It is rare indeed for a guest conductor to produce performances as finely worked, as understanding, as closely melded to an orchestra’s abilities as these. This CD is a live recording of Kyrill (or Kiril) Kondrashin’s final performance with Staatskapelle Dresden, on January 23, 1974, and it is a superb memorial to this excellent conductor as well as a testament to the power, balance and attention to detail of which this orchestra is capable. It is a testament to the audience’s quality, too: were it not for the applause at the end of each work, there would be no way to know that this was a live performance – much less one of a symphony whose extremely soft passages are among its most distinctive and important.

      Shostakovich’s final symphony is an odd one, omitting the vocal elements of his two previous symphonies; harking back in some ways to his earliest symphonic works; including bits of Mahler, Wagner and (surprisingly) Rossini; and emphasizing the quiet rather than the grandiose. Kondrashin seems to have both a visceral and a studied understanding of the work. The first movement’s soft, delicate, sardonic opening soon builds to a strong but transparent climax as quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture flicker by. The percussion is particularly good. The second movement opens in a chorale-like, sad but not deeply tragic mode, its quietude its most impressive feature – wonderfully communicated by the excellent analog recording and fine digital transfer. The brass is especially impressive as the movement becomes a funeral march. When climaxes do come, they are precisely played and overwhelming. Grotesqueries return in the brief third movement, where violins are more prominent than they have been before. And then comes the strange finale, the composer’s last symphonic movement. It grows from yet another quiet opening, as Wagner quotations (from Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde) appear and metamorphose. The first half of the movement is mostly soft, drifting without direction, but eventually the music builds to a resounding climax – at the movement’s midpoint. This is a large and dissonant section – until snare drums, which so memorably increased in volume in the Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”), here decrease in volume and take the rest of the orchestra along. In the last part of this movement, Kondrashin seems particularly aware of the utter strangeness of this symphony, as the orchestration becomes very spare and the percussion eventually leads the audience to nowhere as the music simply disintegrates. This is a wonderful reading of a very, very unusual work.

      Boris Chaykovsky (whose name can also be transliterated “Tchaikovsky,” although he is not related to the famous 19^th-century composer) wrote his Variations for Orchestra specifically for the 425^th anniversary of the Dresden Staatskapelle – which this concert marked. This performance was the world premiere of this large-scale piece by Chaykovsky (1925-1996). The work is in some ways as virtuosic as Bartók’s much more famous Concerto for Orchestra – quite a workout for all sections. Chaykovsky creates an interesting structure: the variations occur before the theme is heard, essentially leading up to it through a series of musical hints in which different orchestral sections receive prominent treatment. The work opens almost inaudibly – the influence of Shostakovich, with whom Chaykovsky studied, is clear here – and then swells to what sounds like a “dawn” passage, after which instruments are added gradually (the very quiet pizzicato violins are a particularly nice touch). Only after about three minutes of this 17-minute work is the full orchestra heard, as bits and pieces of the theme slowly emerge. There are several reminiscences of Shostakovich, including string figurations, the angularity of some themes, and the contrast of drama and delicacy. As the thematic fragments gradually coalesce, the excitement builds – but unfortunately, when the theme finally emerges, it is not particularly inspired. The result is a piece that comes across as more clever than profound. Still, it is quite a showcase for Staatskapelle Dresden, which plays it wonderfully well; and Kondrashin manages to make this rather derivative work sound as impressive as it possibly can.

(++++) NATURE JAUNTS

Very Hairy Bear. By Alice Schertle. Illustrated by Matt Phelan. Harcourt. $16.

Beetle Bop. By Denise Fleming. Harcourt. $16.

      Parents with children ages 3-7 have two great ways here to charm and enthrall their kids with stories about nature: a narrative way and a pictorial way. Very Hairy Bear is the narrative, and it is a marvelously poetic one – without containing any of the simple rhyming poetry usually used in books for children in this age range. Instead, Alice Schertle offers such lines as: “Each summer,/ he’s a sticky, licky honey hunter,/ with his bare nose deep/in the hollow of/ a bee tree.” It’s free verse with enough occasional rhymes to give it a particularly pleasant lilt: “He eats the berries and the bushes, too./ He’s a very full/ berryfull bear.” Schertle’s description of the bear’s activities closely tracks what real-world bears do, so this book is instructive as well as enjoyable. But if the narrative romanticizes without anthropomorphizing, the lovely pastel-and-pencil illustrations by Matt Phelan do more: they make the bear look like a huge, roly-poly dog with a perpetual faint smile and thoroughly endearing habits – the picture of the blue-faced bear lying on its back in the blueberry patch, with berries stuck on the ends of its claws, is a particular delight. Phelan also gives character to the supporting cast of animals, such as fish and squirrels. The narrative starts “deep in the green gorgeous wood” and continues through the seasons, ending with the bear going to sleep for the winter with “his shaggy, raggy/ very hairy/ bearpaws/ on top of his nose.” It’s a treat for any time of the year.

      Beetle Bop, in contrast, has no real story. Denise Fleming simply describes these insects, using more-traditional rhyming poetry to talk about “brown beetles,/ green beetles,/ not-often-seen beetles.” It is the visual impact of her book that is the point: not only “brown” shown in brown and “green” in green, but also the words “not-often-seen” shrinking from a large “n” to a much smaller one. And the pictures in this book are quite amazing. Created by pouring colored cotton fiber through hand-cut stencils, they show all sorts of beetles in all sorts of situations – including danger (a bird and a frog are shown as they are about to eat some). There are flipping beetles and flying beetles, beetles hiding in a crack just beyond a child’s toes, glowing beetles and crashing beetles, beetles of all colors and many sizes, tumbling all about: “Bark beetles,/ sand beetles,/ fill-up-your-hand beetles.” This book is a riot of color and a celebration of the beauty of nature – a feast for kids’ eyes that will hopefully serve as an introduction to insects as an important element of the Earth’s bounty. Fleming points out at the end, in a page that parents can read to and interpret for young children, that beetles “are one of the largest groups of animals on Earth. Some are pests, some are friends.” The ones Fleming portrays in Beetle Bop seem not only friendly but also quite magical.

(+++) SINGLE PANELS, MULTIPLE LAUGHS

F Minus. By Tony Carrillo. Andrews McMeel. $12.95.

Brevity 2. By Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry. Andrews McMeel. $12.95.

Monkey Business: Another Cartoon Collection by The Flying McCoys. By Glenn and Gary McCoy. Andrews McMeel. $12.95.

      The single-panel cartoon is as venerable as they come: the very first continuing comic, Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, was single-panel. Single-panel strips today have evolved into something between editorial cartoons and traditional sequential, multi-panel strips that build to punch lines. Close to Home and The Far Side are the prototypes of the modern single panel – and all the cartoonists in these three collections derive their humor from the same mixture of surrealism and the incongruity of everyday modern life.

      F Minus is frequently clever, relying as much on Tony Carrillo’s pointed writing as on his art, which has an old-fashioned look to it. Carrillo’s panels are long – each will fit into the space of a traditional newspaper multi-panel strip – and Carrillo generally takes good advantage of this letterbox format. For example, one panel shows the traditional castaway on a tiny desert island, thinking the single word, “Figures…” – as a boat carrying a large tiger drifts in from the far right side of the panel. Carrillo’s humor runs to the decidedly odd. A man gives his wife flowers and a card that reads, “Your pros still outweigh your cons. Happy anniversary.” An executive emphatically cancels his appointments by bricking up the door to his office. Two normally dressed people wander into a panel in which all the other characters wear only undergarments, leading to the logical question, “You folks ain’t from around here, are ya?” A perfume salesman recommends a fragrance to a customer with the pitch, “Nothing is more romantic than a gift that says, ‘I want you to smell like this.’” A man observes, “There goes the neighborhood,” as all the other houses go by on trucks. A child’s backpack bears a sticker saying that his parent is employee of the month at the office. These are all skewed versions of everyday life. The best of them require a little thought before you get the joke – which makes it funnier when you do figure it out.

      The Brevity panels by Guy & Rodd (as they sign themselves) are more immediately clear, and are in the more-traditional square format. The second Brevity collection is as consistent as the first, with an ongoing “a little bit beyond Close to Home” approach. In one panel, a film credit reads, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film. Except the ones we ate.” A poodle looks in a mirror and exclaims, “My God, I am one of those foofy little dogs.” A penguin says to another, “I wish that camera crew would leave so we could start partying again.” A baby in a crib says to another, “Hey kid, what are you in for?” There are recurrent parodies of Sesame Street (in one, kids descend through Oscar the Grouch’s trash can and find him living in a palatial underground home), Star Wars, American history and life in Hell (in one panel, the demons buy Satan a fur coat as a gag gift). And some stuff is strange just for the heck of it, such as “fortune kung pao broccoli,” invented “before cookies became the norm,” and the original title of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, “War & Peace & Cabbage.” Some of the humor misfires by being juvenile or simply unfunny, but a lot of it is on target.

      The Flying McCoys also uses square panels, drawn in a different style from those of Brevity – with more-exaggerated appearances of the characters. But the humor is in a similar vein. Monkey Business is an all-color collection – a nice touch, since the color emphasizes the weirdness. Among Glenn and Gary McCoy’s ideas are a true “gated community,” in which every person has a gate around himself or herself; “barnyard awareness ribbons” for animals (a tuxedo-clad pig wears one for swine flu, an elegantly clothed chicken sports one for bird flu, and so on); and a couple whose appearance matches perfectly, but for different reasons: her shirt says “baby,” with an arrow pointing down, while his says “beer.” Some of the puns are really groaners: “A reptile dysfunction” refers to a snake that won’t get itself up for the traditional snake charmer. But some ideas are genuinely clever, such as a “jog-thru window” at a health store (that one might actually catch on). And then there are the bits of social commentary, as when a doctor tells a patient, “True, laughter is the best medicine, but it’s not covered by your HMO.” The appeal of Monkey Business – and of Brevity 2 and F Minus – will depend on how closely the cartoonists’ sense of humor matches your own. If none of these books seems the slightest bit funny to you, you can always look for Blondie or Beetle Bailey.