(++++) REAL AND WOULD-BE CLASSICS

The Little Prince: 70^th Anniversary Edition. By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Translated by Richard Howard. Includes CDs and downloadable audio read by Viggo Mortensen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24.99.

The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers—Book Six: Day of Doom. By David Baldacci. Scholastic. $12.99.

      It is almost impossible to overstate the success and importance of The Little Prince. One of the best-selling books ever published, with more than 140 million copies sold, it is the most-read book written in French and the most-translated, with versions in 250 languages.  It has been modified, adapted, analyzed, thought and rethought, turned into graphic novels, TV shows, films, animations and more.  Its length has helped it remain popular – it is a novella, not a full-scale novel. And its overlay of mysticism, including some of what we today would call New Age thinking, has ensured its continued attraction for adults and academics. The Little Prince was never a children’s book, except on the most superficial level, but it is often sold as one, and it succeeds – more or less – on that basis, just as it does as an adult philosophical work.  The notion of an alien observing life on Earth and commenting wisely or enigmatically on it was not new in 1943, when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote (and beautifully illustrated) this work.  Jules Verne’s science fiction is a partial source for The Little Prince, but the novella’s provenance dates back even further, to Voltaire, whose 1752 short story Micromégas is one of the very earliest SF tales. The charm and naïveté (or pseudo-naïveté) of The Little Prince retain their attractiveness 70 years after the book’s first appearance, and the excellent 70^th anniversary edition from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will certainly help Saint-Exupéry’s work speak to a new generation of readers while continuing to absorb and occasionally puzzle those who know the book already.  Richard Howard’s translation is elegant and unobtrusive, moving the story along at the pace that Saint-Exupéry intended, and Viggo Mortensen’s reading – included with the book and also available as an unabridged narrative download – is subtle and stirring, if at times a trifle too overtly emotional (one of the major attractions of Saint-Exupéry’s writing is its emotional restraint, sometimes to the point of quiescence).  The Little Prince: 70^th Anniversary Edition is packaged as a gift set, but it is one of those offerings that will make as wonderful a gift for one’s own family as for anyone else.  Indeed, The Little Prince itself is a gift to the world from a writer, poet and aviator whose mysterious disappearance while on a World War II mission has only added to the mystique of his books, and to The Little Prince most of all.  What the book “means” remains an unanswered question, and that too is part of what continues to make it so attractive: it is subject to multiple interpretations, many of which feel right even if they contradict each other.  After all, as Saint-Exupéry wrote in the book’s most famous and ever-enigmatic lines, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

      There is nothing enigmatic about the rousing, explosive climax of The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, which is a smash-up of a book written by thriller author David Baldacci.  Nor is there any subtlety in the sixth and final book of this spinoff of the original The 39 Clues. And there is certainly no need for or expectation of the subtle – this is an adventure series (or series of series) above all, its multimedia platform (books, trading cards and online world) being as much the point of its existence as the specific things that happen to 13-year-old Dan Cahill and his 16-year-old sister, Amy.  The Cahills vs. Vespers sequence has involved a series of improbable thefts that Dan and Amy have had to commit because the Vespers have kidnapped a number of Cahills, apparently being clever enough to do that but not to get the desired objects themselves.  Baldacci manages to write things with what is apparently a straight face that really ought to be embarrassing. “He’s only a child.” “Now you’ve cost me my henchmen.” “This is it.” “We’re planning to destroy Chicago and we have to get a move on.” “He is a homicidal maniac. In fact, we all are.”  (Actually, that last one is pretty good, and pretty accurate.)  It turns out that the various objects that Dan and Amy have been snatching are needed to create one of those destroy-the-world doomsday machines that seem to be at the climax of far too many books and book series nowadays.  In any case, Day of Doom really is a day of doom for a number of the characters in Cahills vs. Vespers, and Baldacci certainly wraps up the sequence entertainingly in mix-it-up-and-smash-everything fashion.  The contrast between this (+++) book and The Little Prince is about as abyssal as it can be, and the notion of there ever being a 70^th-anniversary edition of Cahills vs. Vespers is laughable. But fans of The 39 Clues will certainly get their money’s worth from this sequence’s finale – and will just as surely look forward to the next sequence, Unstoppable, which will be released starting this fall.

(+++) BITS OF LOVE

An Awesome Book of Love! By Dallas Clayton. Harper. $16.99.

Nancy Clancy, Book 2: Secret Admirer. By Jane O’Connor. Illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser. Harper. $9.99.

Splat the Cat: Funny Valentine. Based on the creation of Rob Scotton. Illustrations by Joe Merkel. HarperFestival. $6.99.

      Love isn’t just in the air – it’s on the pages and in the margins and generally all over the place in these books, which find three different amusing ways to pay homage to Valentine’s Day and all things love-ly.  An Awesome Book of Love! is Dallas Clayton’s followup to An Awesome Book! Its format is much the same, its sweetness is much the same, its rhymes (and partial, not-quite rhymes) are much the same, and its sentiment is much the same. All of which is very pleasant indeed.  Much of the charm of Clayton’s books comes from his meticulous illustrations of sentiments that are, on their face, very simple. “If you were spring seasons and I was the fall/ We might never have gotten together at all,” for example, comes with two solid pages of buds and flowers and springlike sprigs (left-hand page) and brightly colored leaves of many shapes (right-hand page).  There are lots of these little items pictured.  At other times, Clayton takes just a few words – notably “I love you” – and has them fill all or most of a two-page spread. He makes readers turn some pages sideways to accommodate very tall illustrations.  He makes words out of balls of yarn, out of dripping paint, out of barely recognizable stuff that appears to be a mixture of plumbing and ductwork.  He creates characters that are little more than blobs with arms and legs (and the barest sketches of faces), and uses them to illustrate verses such as, “You make me feel younger/ You make me feel brave/ You make me feel something/ These words can’t contain” (no, his rhymes are not perfect, by any means).  And through it all, he manages to come up with some really amusing juxtapositions, imagining a robot hugging a dinosaur, a smiling ghost embracing a cloud, and so forth.  It is all in the name of love, of opposites attracting, of affirming one’s feelings to one’s beloved and to the world.  And it is all silly and cute and really kind of delightful.

      Fancy Nancy is delightful, too – she is one of the most original and ebullient characters in children’s books today – but the Nancy Clancy chapter books, intended for ages 6-10 and featuring Nancy when she is a bit older, are not quite as charming. The second of them, Secret Admirer, is a fairly straightforward matchmaking story in which Nancy and her best friend, Bree, decide to get two teenagers whom they really like to fall in love. Andy, Nancy’s guitar teacher, and Annie, her favorite babysitter, have both just gone through breakups, so Nancy decides that she will get the two of them together and sparks will fly.  This is an old plot, and Nancy’s plans go predictably awry. The book’s title comes from Nancy’s discovery of a card saying “From Your Secret Admirer” while she is shopping with her father – who explains the concept to her.  Nancy thinks this is just the thing to get Andy and Annie together, so she and Bree plot ways to make Annie think she has a secret admirer – and that the admirer is Andy.  But nothing works out as the girls think it should. Andy shows up unexpectedly when they are leaving a note “from him” for Annie. Nancy and Bree get a ride home that they don’t want, because they have made a love-related plan that requires them to ride their bikes home from school.  And so on, until (of course) Andy and Annie do meet and hit it off after all.  The plot’s predictability makes Jane O’Connor’s book less sparkly than her Fancy Nancy stories, and although Robin Preiss Glasser still has a knack for showing the characters skillfully and amusingly, she has less that is offbeat to work with here – and her illustrations are therefore more mundane. Nancy Clancy and Fancy Nancy may be the same character, but the older girl isn’t nearly as much fun as her younger self.

      Splat the Cat is fun for any age, but exactly who created Splat the Cat: Funny Valentine is a bit of a mystery. The book’s cover proclaims that it is “based on the creation of Rob Scotton,” who is both writer and illustrator of the Splat the Cat series. But no writer is credited anywhere for this book, and the illustrations are attributed to Joe Merkel (with the cover by Rick Farley).  The book is amusing, no matter who put it together (Farley also gets a “book design” credit). It is a lift-the-flap book in which teacher Mrs. Wimpydimple asks the class to bring in something special for Valentine’s Day, so Splat and his friends Kitten and Spike get together in Splat’s clubhouse to assemble a secret project. Seymour the mouse gets involved, too, and eventually – at the very end of class on Valentine’s Day – Splat reveals what he and his friends have made: a valentine for Mrs. Wimpydimple herself.  The story is a super-simple one, its main attraction being the flaps on nearly every single page – flaps that open (bottom to top, top to bottom or from the side) to reveal parts of what Splat and his friends are doing and to advance the story neatly.  A purely seasonal book, Splat the Cat: Funny Valentine may not exactly be lovable, but it is certainly likable enough, and young readers who enjoy lift-the-flaps stories will get a kick out of this one.

(+++) BEYOND THE HEROIC

Nelson Mandela. By Kadir Nelson. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $17.99.

I’ve Seen the Promised Land: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By Walter Dean Myers. Illustrated by Leonard Jenkins. Amistad/HarperCollins. $6.99.

Brick by Brick. By Charles R. Smith Jr. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. Amistad/HarperCollins. $17.99.

In the Land of Milk and Honey. By Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. Amistad/HarperCollins. $16.99

      We will know we have moved beyond race as a defining characteristic in society when people of stature are celebrated for who they were and what they did, not for the color of their skin – and when it is not necessary to have publishing-company divisions devoted specifically to people of a particular skin color or background. That day is not here yet, and neither is the day when it will become as acceptable to see minority-group heroes as complete people, as mistake-makers with flaws and uncertainties, rather than as shining beacons for everyone else who happens to share elements of their physical appearance.

      Until that day arrives, we will continue to have books published specifically for Black History Month (February) that are filled with hagiography rather than biography, such as the new Nelson Mandela and the new paperback version of I’ve Seen the Promised Land, originally published in 2004. There is no denying the heroism of Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., but they would seem more real, more human, if they were not portrayed as being quite as perfect as they are in these books. And it is not just the men – it is their history that is distorted. Kadir Nelson says that before Europeans came to South Africa, the people were “living in relative peace,” which is patently untrue: bloody tribal rivalries, raids and wars were nearly constant, and in some parts of Africa they made European conquest and the slave trade possible, as Africa leaders allied themselves against other African leaders in a constant jockeying for position and power. Later in Nelson Mandela, the statement that “the ancestors sent their daughter Winnie to stand next to Nelson” lends Mandela’s life and cause an unwarranted degree of mysticism. And as the book continues, Nelson goes out of his way to avoid mentioning others who contributed to the dismantling of apartheid: “As years passed, the world pressed South Africa to change. The new president agreed, and ‘European Only’ signs came down.” This pointedly ignores F.W. de Klerk, co-winner with Mandela of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is certainly understandable to keep a tight focus on Mandela in a book about him for young people; and Nelson’s marvelous paintings bring Mandela’s tale to life in a way that Nelson’s rather humdrum words do not.  But neither Mandela himself nor the story of apartheid in South Africa should be seen quite as one-dimensionally as it is here – not if there is to be a time when children of all races see themselves as people first and racial members second.  Beautifully made and told with the enthusiasm of a heroic fairy tale, Nelson Mandela is inspirational, as it is intended to be; but it is less than fully satisfying as biography.

      The same airbrushing is present, although to a lesser extent, in I’ve Seen the Promised Land, whose illustrations (by Leonard Jenkins) are less hyper-realistic and more atmospheric than Nelson’s and therefore give the book an even greater sense of storytelling rather than historical reporting.  However, Walter Dean Myers does a better job of placing King’s story in context than Nelson does with Mandela’s. Myers sets King’s work in the era of protests against the Vietnam War and shows how it relates to the life and beliefs of Gandhi, whose “philosophy of nonviolence [King took] into his own heart.”  Myers also highlights the contrast between King and Malcolm X, and shows how King’s approach fit into a time period when a bomb blast killed four young girls in Birmingham, Alabama, and President Kennedy was assassinated. And Myers shows some of King’s own uncertainty, notably in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in March 1968 – which turned violent and “was, for Dr. King, a disaster.” The result of Myers’ nuanced portrait of King is that King’s successes seem all the greater: he was a man who had problems, had doubts, faced uncertainties, questioned others and himself, and still persisted in what he believed was right.  Myers does not get into a number of issues and controversies about King’s personal life, so the book – which, after all, is intended for young readers – scarcely provides a complete portrait of King as a man. But it does give an effective view of King as a leader – not a perfect leader, not a perfect person, but someone real, and worthy of admiration and emulation.

      Sometimes the more-intriguing stories of struggle and survival are those of everyday people, not larger-than-life ones. Two books with fine Floyd Cooper illustrations, Brick by Brick and In the Land of Milk and Honey, provide particularly interesting historical perspectives. Brick by Brick is about the slaves whose labor helped build the White House – a little-known story that is certainly worth telling. Charles R. Smith Jr. focuses on the slaves’ hands in his narrative: “Slave hands blister under a bright, hazy sun,” and “Slave hands bleed under a hot, hazy sun,” and “Month by month, slave hands toil,” and so on. Slave owners are shown as horrible-looking: Cooper’s portrayal of them is a caricature, just as his views of the slave workers make them impossibly noble; and this is a shame, because it dehumanizes both the slave owners and the slaves themselves – who are shown as the property of twisted, deformed evildoers. The story of the slaves who worked on the White House is a fascinating one, and Smith’s back-of-book narrative explaining what happened (and how some slaves used money earned doing White House work to buy their freedom) shows that he understands the significance of the tale. The book itself, though, is more superficial than it needs to be, even for young readers; yet its handling of a little-known element of American history is worthwhile, despite the flaws of the presentation.

      Joyce Carol Thomas’ book deals with more-recent and more-personal history, being her recollection of her own family’s trip from Oklahoma to California in 1948, when she was a young girl.  California is the “land of milk and honey,” according to Daddy and Mama, and Thomas’ book makes the journey there a highly poetic one: “We ride into late afternoon/ past a snake whose body is a pen/ writing calligraphy/ on the paper-dry earth,” and “My sister unwraps/ a chopped egg sandwich./ I wash my half down/ with Grapette soda pop/ the bottle streaked with marbles of cold.”  The highly evocative writing melds attractively with Cooper’s atmospheric illustrations, which use perspective in interesting ways – one showing a coyote chasing a rabbit as the train steams past is particularly arresting. At the end of the book, Thomas, a California resident now for more than 60 years, tells a little about how things have changed, “yet the quality of light remains, and so does the vital and warm spirit of my California neighbors.” In the Land of Milk and Honey is something of a love poem to Thomas’ adopted state, and if, like other love poems, it tends to overdo some of the qualities of the beloved – qualities that in this case are further colored by nostalgia – it remains a heartfelt tribute to Thomas’ own experiences and to the many people of all colors who, like her, journeyed to California seeking a better and happier life.

(+++) IN SEARCH OF CERTAINTY

The Best Things You Can Eat. By David Grotto, R.D., L.D.N. Da Capo. $15.99.

      Our unending search for simple solutions to complex problems spawns all sorts of “this is all you need to do” books aimed at helping people de-stress, live better, have a healthier life, lose weight, become more attractive, and sprout wings and fly to the moon (well, maybe not that last one).  Now there is a book that purports to make eating – that is, fueling your body – a simple matter of following its prescriptions. The recommendations come from Registered Dietitian and Licensed Dietitian/Nutritionist David Grotto, not from a medical doctor, but Grotto repeatedly calls on readers to see doctors for a variety of reasons: “If you are reading this section [on hot peppers], right at this moment, and have an upset stomach, my advice is to skip hot peppers and go directly to the suggestions [for an upset stomach] that follow. And while we are at it, if your tummy problems persist, seek out care from a qualified health professional!”

      And while we are at it (no exclamation point necessary), take the recommendations in The Best Things You Can Eat with a grain or two of – well, maybe not salt, which comes in for a bad rap just about everywhere nowadays (even though Grotto does acknowledge its value), but maybe with a touch of vitamins A, B₁, B₂, B₃, B₅, B₆, and the other vitamins served up by Grotto in his first chapter, which has the cutesy title, “The Vita-Man Can.”  This chapter begins a section called “The Vital Nutrients,” but it is the second and third sections – “Best Foods for Whatever Ails You” and “Best in Show” – that are the meat (so to speak) of Grotto’s book.  Here you will find, for example, “Plaque Attack! Top 8 Foods for Lowering Cholesterol,” which (lest the suspense become overwhelming) are almonds, apples, flaxseeds, garlic, uncooked oatmeal, extra-virgin olive oil, psyllium husks and cooked soybeans. There is, in fact, nothing surprising on this list, or on many of the lists Grotto provides; and his write-ups, once you get past their rather hectic style, are actually pretty responsible: “Scientific evidence suggests, but does not prove, that eating 1.5 ounces per day of nearly any nut, such as almonds, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease.”  Notice – not just almonds. And eat the nuts in the context of an appropriate diet. And if you do that, cardiovascular risk may be reduced. Yes, all this is correct – if scarcely as enticing as the notion of taking a simple pill (or eating a series of prescribed foods) and magically transforming your health.

      The truth is that many Americans’ diets are pretty unhealthful, with the result that many Americans are pretty unhealthy.  Anything that encourages better eating is worth trying, and if it takes a sensationalized one-size-fits-all book title and some overly chatty writing to get people to improve their food intake, than that is all to the good.  The problem with Grotto’s book is that he often lets his style overcome his essentially intelligent recommendations. For instance, he starts one bullet-point paragraph with the words, “Chew the fat,” but the whole paragraph says to eat a diet very low in fat, and consume only certain types of fat rather than other types – there is nothing about chewing at all. And another bullet point oversimplifies a task that is very, very difficult for many people: “Shed a few pounds: Trimming off even a few unwanted pounds can improve your HDL level.”

      To be sure, Grotto’s presentation is more entertaining and effective in some sections than others. Beneath his top seven foods for stopping bad breath (apples, cherries, lettuce, milk, pears, green tea and yogurt), for example, he gives a series of honorable mentions and then the dishonorable mentions of smoking, alcohol, spicy foods, sugar, coffee, black tea, onions and garlic.  The fact that some foods in this latter group get a positive recommendation for other purposes is a trifle confusing, though.  But it points to a reality of food consumption: foods are not all good or all bad. What matters is context, overall diet, and total intake of all foods combined. You may want to eat garlic as one of Grotto’s top “flu fighters,” for instance, even knowing that it promotes bad breath.  The reality is that there is no simple, appropriate-for-everyone list of foods to eat (or foods to avoid); moderation in food intake (as in many things) is the key to better health, and an emphasis on certain types of foods (such as fruits and vegetables) with a de-emphasis of others (red and cured meats, for example) makes sense.  But extreme recommendations, demands that people make major changes in what they eat, simply produce anger and frustration and cause people to continue eating habits that, in truth, are not good for them.  Gradual improvements in diet, shifts to better eating habits rather than wholesale and quick changes, are the key to long-term improvement in nutrition and therefore in health.  The best foods you can eat are the ones that, in combination, fuel the body adequately, provide vitamins and other nutrients in sufficient quantities to stabilize and even improve health, and are enjoyably tasty enough so you do not feel deprived whenever you have a meal. The exact food mixture will vary from person to person – and there is nothing whatever wrong with that. After all, doctors offer different prescriptions for the same medical condition, depending on what is best for individual patients. It is just as important for nutritionists and other dietary advisers to pay attention to the differences among the people to whom they are making recommendations.

(++++) OLD AND NEW, TRIED AND TRUE

New Year’s Concert 2013. Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. Sony. $13.98 (2 CDs).

Salon Chromatique et Harmonique: Music of Wagner, Liszt and Rossini. Silke Avenhaus, piano. BR Klassik. $17.98.

Beethoven: Variations and Fugue in E-flat, Op. 35 (“Eroica”); Haydn: Variations in F minor; Schumann: Symphonic Études, Op. 13. Emanuel Ax, piano. Sony. $12.98.

James Whitbourn: Annelies. Arianna Zukerman, soprano; Westminster Williamson Voices; The Lincoln Trio (Desirée Ruhstrat, violin; David Cunliffe, cello; Marta Aznavoorian, piano) and Bharat Chandra, clarinet; conducted by James Jordan. Naxos. $9.99.

      Here are a number of attractive mixtures of the familiar and unfamiliar, each taking its own approach to melding the better-known and less-known and each achieving considerable success in its own way.  The January 1 New Year’s Concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic are a longtime institution not only in Europe but also throughout the world, and each and every one is a Straussfest, but the 2013 concert – the 73^rd of them – was also a celebration of the bicentennials of Wagner and Verdi, both of whom were born in 1813. Furthermore, this concert interestingly, unusually and quite intelligently showcased Josef Strauss rather than Johann Strauss Jr. Josef may have been even more talented than Johann Jr., but Josef’s death at age 42 in 1870 left the question forever unanswerable in any definitive way. What is certain is that Josef’s music consistently contains subtleties and inventiveness of harmony, organization and orchestration beyond those of most of the works of Johann Jr., and certainly Josef’s works deserve to be heard much more frequently. Franz Welser-Möst leads seven of them with the always-splendid Vienna Philharmonic, including one of the greatest waltzes of all, Sphären-Klänge, which really does sound like the music of the spheres when played as beautifully as it is here.  There are also five works by Johann Jr. (with the Blue Danube in its traditional pride of place as an encore) and two by Johann Sr. (whose Radetzky March is the other encore and the concert’s ebullient conclusion).  But this Straussfest has other elements as well – some expected (Suppé’s Light Cavalry overture) and some without precedent at these concerts (the prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin and the Prestissimo from the ballet music from the five-act version of Verdi’s Don Carlo).  Also here are Joseph Lanner’s Styrian Dances and a pleasant polka-mazurka called Unter vier Augen (“Between the Two of Us”) by Joseph Hellmesberger II, who was conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1901 to 1903 and a once-well-known operetta composer.  The bright festivity of this concert for the new year will surprise absolutely no one; nor will the excellence of the playing. But the musical mixture does hold some surprises, very pleasant ones, that make the celebration even more enjoyable than usual.  The recording does have one oddity, though: nowhere are timings for any of the works provided – a curious omission.

      What is curious about the Silke Avenhaus recital labeled Salon Chromatique et Harmonique is the musical mixture as well as the overall concept – which should whet many listeners’ curiosity. In an attempt to expand the experience of listeners’ ears, Avenhaus mixtures some moderately well-known works with some almost completely unknown ones, stirring them together into an imaginary “salon” performance akin to those in the 19^th century, in which more-elaborate and less-complex works frequently appeared together.  From Wagner’s virtually unknown Mathilde Wesendonck piano tribute, A sonata for the album of Madame M.W., which opens this BR Klassik CD, to Liszt’s monumental “Dante” sonata (Fantasia quasi Sonata from the third year of Années de Pèlerinage) at the disc’s conclusion, Avenhaus unfurls a series of loosely connected and very loosely interrelated works, playing them all with considerable panache and great stylistic sensitivity. The Wagner sonata, a surprisingly effective and well-constructed work, is followed by Liszt’s arrangement of Isoldens Liebestod, and then by Liszt’s Seven brilliant variations on a theme by Rossini, which quickly transports this recital from tender lugubriousness to bright virtuosity and display. The choice and sequencing of pieces are quirky but effective: the Rossini variations are followed by Liszt’s Nostalgic Waltz after Schubert, then by Rossini’s short Une caresse à ma femme; then it is back to Liszt for Li Marinari, a “tempest duet” (more accurately, in terms of its mood, “after the tempest,” originally for tenor and bass) that is again based on Rossini, followed by Liszt’s R.W.—Venezia. Then comes another Rossini curiosity, his Valse lugubre – which is succeeded by and very interestingly contrasted with Liszt’s La lugubre Gondola No. 1.  And then Avenhaus caps the recital with the “Dante” sonata, whose scope and seriousness dwarf everything that has come before, even Wagner’s sonata.  The works chosen here, and the order in which they appear, are unusual and may even be off-putting to some listeners in their mood changes and swoops from seriousness to lightheartedness and back. Certainly this is a highly personal CD, expressive of Avenhaus’ tastes in music and her interests in particular composers and types of piano music.  It is, in the final analysis, her extraordinarily fine, nuanced playing of all the pieces – however greatly they differ – that pulls the disc together and makes it so worthwhile.

      Emanuel Ax’s pianism is equally fine, although very different stylistically, as is the program he offers on his new Sony CD.  Ax is a considerable stylist who, at age 63, is long past having anything to prove about his technique or musicality, both of which are top-notch.  Yet he continues to explore new repertoire: he has only recently started performing Schumann’s Symphonic Études, to which he gives a sensitive, carefully balanced and highly effective reading on this disc (whose sole significant flaw is that it is somewhat too brightly recorded).  Ax is clearly a fan and advocate of the variation form, and does an excellent job of showing the ways in which all the composers here alter, reuse and rearrange their thematic material.  Beethoven’s monumental “Eroica” variations bring out all Ax’s grandeur of style and temperamental enthusiasm, which complement those of Beethoven very well indeed, as Ax shapes each individual variation to excellent effect while still building the set toward the highly impressive and extended concluding fugue.  And Ax does not give short shrift to Haydn’s variations, either: they are on a smaller scale than the Beethoven and Schumann works but are hardly less inventive, including some fascinating thematic exploration that listeners may be surprised to find in Haydn and that Ax explores fully – but carefully, with awareness of but without undue emphasis on the contrast between the composer’s choice of F minor as a key and his repeated use of an unexpected G-flat-major chord.  Variations tend to attract less attention from pianists than do sonatas, but Ax here shows that whether they are familiar or not, they can be considerable pieces in their own right and highly worthy of the attention and the excellent interpretations that he gives them.

      The familiar and unfamiliar elements of Annelies by James Whitbourn (born 1963) are different from those on the other discs considered here. What is well-known here is extramusical: The Diary of Anne Frank, which forms the basis for Melanie Challenger’s libretto. Whitbourn’s music, however – whose chamber version here receives its world première recording – will be unknown to almost everyone who hears this Naxos CD. It deserves to become much more familiar, though, because it not only bears witness to a now-familiar tale that has new resonance with every news story of hatred, intolerance and mass murder, but also is highly expressive in its own right.  Whitbourn uses the communicative techniques of both the 19^th and 20^th century in this piece, which he arranged in 2009 from his original, more extensively scored version. The chamber form of Annelies (whose title is Anne Frank’s full, rarely heard first name) uses the same complement of singers but reduces the accompaniment to the same instruments used by Olivier Messiaen when he wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps in a prisoner-of-war camp: piano, violin, cello and clarinet.  This arrangement deepens the resonance of Annelies, in which Challenger draws on Anne’s actual words, which are not heard as often as people may believe – interpretations and paraphrases are more common.  Yet none of the thinking behind Annelies, none of the connections, would have much meaning if the work itself did not communicate immediately and effectively with an audience unaware of what went into creating it.  But it does communicate, viscerally and emotionally and with strength and understated heartbreak, not only for Anne Frank but also for all the victims, young and old, of so many wars and so many other acts of violence over the years and right up to the present day.  Annelies is essentially a choral work that is not an opera or cantata, yet not really a song cycle, either.  It is more a meditation on the events that trapped and eventually doomed Anne (its final section is called “Anne’s meditation”); and, through Anne’s words, it becomes a musical thought piece about so much that is evil in the world, and so much that is good and that somehow survives even when the good people themselves do not.  Whitbourn has here created a work that is for our time as much as for Anne’s – and is likely, perhaps unfortunately, to have continued resonance in times to come, since humanity shows few signs of moving beyond the sort of thinking that caught Anne and imprinted her memory so painfully on so many who never met her.

(++++) GO, GO, GOSLINGS!

Gideon: It’s Play Time, Not Naptime! By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

Gideon & Otto: Best Friends, Lost and Found. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

Jasper & Joop: A Perfect Pair—One Tidy, One Messy. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin. $9.99.

      In real life, geese are not particularly pleasant creatures: they are noisy, aggressive and tend to poop all over the place. But in children’s books, from board books onward, they – at least in gosling form – are utterly adorable and a constant source of enjoyment. Tad Hills is probably the primary purveyor of adorableness in goslings with his duck-and-goose tales, but Olivier Dunrea creates even more goslings and produces even a bigger helping of cuteness in his many little books about these ever-adorable critters. Sometimes a single gosling is a book’s focus, as in Gideon: It’s Play Time, Not Naptime! Gideon “is a small, ruddy gosling who likes to play. All day.” And that is what this board book is about: Gideon playing constantly, even when his mother (more realistically drawn than is Gideon himself) reminds him repeatedly that it is time for his nap.  Gideon roams all around the farm where he lives, chasing a piglet, searching for eggs in the henhouse, and enjoying himself with a mole, butterflies and a beetle. Curious about everything, Gideon splashes with ducklings in the pond, listens to bees in their hive, jumps over a frog, and even plays quietly for a short time “with a small turtle.”  Eventually, not surprisingly, his mother – continuing to call him for his nap – finds that he has, on his own, gone to sleep atop a haystack. And that is the whole book – simple and charming.

      In another board book, Gideon plays with Otto, a stuffed octopus. This is Gideon & Otto: Best Friends, Lost and Found, and here Gideon’s propensity for play gets him temporarily into a little bit of trouble. He puts Otto down on a stone wall – after playing with the octopus in several different places – and tells Otto to wait for him there, which of course Otto, being stuffed, is sure to do. But when Gideon plays quite actively with two bunnies, all the activity knocks Otto off the wall and into the grass, so when Gideon comes back for his friend, Otto is nowhere to be found.  Well, there is a moment of worry for Gideon, but only a moment, as Otto reappears in an unexpected and (of course) adorable way, leading to the book’s absolutely-must-have-it happy ending.

      Jasper & Joop: A Perfect Pair—One Tidy, One Messy features two other goslings, and it is a slightly different sort of book: hardcover and thin rather than a board book and thick.  The story here is traditional odd-couple stuff, with tidy white Jasper looking on as messy gray Joop gets as dirty and sloppy as he possibly can.  Jasper watches as Joop jumps in the dirt of a flowerpot, splashes in a sloppy puddle, plays in the mud with piglets, and more. Jasper is not actually disapproving – that level of conflict is absent from all these books – but he simply goes his own way and lets Joop, who after all is his best friend, go his.  But then the two have an unexpected adventure when they provoke some bees, and suddenly staying tidy isn’t so important to Jasper anymore – and then, when they escape the bees by jumping into the pond and getting all the dirt washed off, being messy doesn’t matter much to Joop, either. Both the goslings conclude that they have had plenty of fun, and again, everything ends happily.  Cute critters enjoying themselves in simply written books with mild, non-threatening adventures – that is what Dunrea offers in these and other books about the various goslings he creates. For the youngest children, up to about age four, the easy-to-follow, pleasantly and brightly illustrated books will be plenty of fun. Kids have lots of time to learn the less-pleasant truths about geese when they grow older.

(++++) GOING TO EXTREMES

Babymouse #17: Extreme Babymouse. By Jennifer L. Holm & Matthew Holm. Random House. $6.99.

Lives of Extraordinary Women. By Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt. Sandpiper. $12.99.

      The 17^th entry in the long-running and still-amusing Babymouse series only seems to be about extreme things. Really, it is about ordinary ones: wanting to do what “everyone else does,” wanting to be accepted by peers, wanting to escape ridicule and ostracism, and wanting to participate in things at the same level as others – even if they have more knowledge and experience than you do. Extreme Babymouse is, on the surface, about Babymouse’s desire to go snowboarding, as all her friends (and frenemies) have been doing. But in typical Babymouse style, the book starts with her imagining herself as a super-duper snowboarder, only to be brought back to everyday reality when she realizes she is sitting at the top of a playground slide and stopping others from going down.  Then she hears in school, again and again, about all the wonderful things her snowboarding classmates are doing, and she feels more and more left out, especially when Felicia, who always torments her, rubs in Babymouse’s feeling of being an outsider again and again. Babymouse tries to get her mom to agree to let her go snowboarding by saying that everyone is doing it, which leads the narrator – always an amusing presence in these books – to ask whether Abraham Lincoln and R2D2 were snowboarders (the pictures of them on snowboards are among the book’s highlights).  Eventually, Babymouse does get to try the sport, having unsurprising problems getting started and finding, as usual, that her fantasy life is a poor match for her real one. Also as usual, Babymouse eventually listens to her own inner voice (something the snowboarding instructor has repeatedly urged), and Felicia (also as usual) gets her comeuppance, and everything ends happily, with hot chocolate. This is a particularly neatly-tied-together Babymouse series entry, with the brother-and-sister team of Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm using Babymouse’s well-established personality to very good effect.

      Babymouse is scarcely at the level of importance of, say, Cleopatra or Catherine the Great, but then, she is not as extreme as they were, either. The new paperback edition of Lives of Extraordinary Women, originally published in 2000, provides an excellent opportunity to revisit (or visit for the first time) some brief, anecdotal biographies of 20 notable women of ages past and recent, with an eye toward finding out about, as the book’s subtitle says, “Rulers, Rebels (and What the Neighbors Thought).”  Although many of the women about whom Kathleen Krull writes are household names – Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Eleanor Roosevelt – many others are not: Nzingha, 17^th-century ruler of what is now Angola; Tz’u-hsi, empress of China during the 19^th century; Gertrude Bell, famed explorer and a British spy during World War I; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and others. Each entry gets an amusing but respectful caricature by Kathryn Hewitt that nicely complements the short but to-the-point narrative of Krull, which is primarily concerned with humanizing these larger-than-life figures. For example, in writing about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Krull explains that “she relaxed by watching TV – with close friends she would imitate American commercials and laugh uncontrollably.”  Of American Indian leader Wilma Mankiller, Krull writes, “She and her ten brothers and sisters walked three miles each way to school (at times without shoes), wore clothes made from scratchy flour sacks, hauled water from a spring, and survived by bartering with neighbors.”  And Krull says that “the first time [Guatemalan leader Rigoberta Menchú] spoke in public, she was so nervous that she literally forgot her own name.”  Lives of Extraordinary Women is a once-over-lightly, for sure, but it skims the surface in an unusually humanizing way, showing that even such history-making women as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Queen Isabella I of Spain not only had their human side but were often dominated by it – a fine lesson for modern, would-be-extraordinary young girls (and boys) to learn.

(++++) WONDERS AND WORRIES

Stronger Than Steel: Spider Silk DNA and the Quest for Better Bulletproof Vests, Sutures, and Parachute Rope. By Bridget Heos. Photographs by Andy Comins. Houghton Mifflin. $18.99.

Scholastic “Discover More”: Sharks. By David Burnie. Scholastic. $12.99.

      Consider the barnacle, bane of boaters everywhere. So adhesive that it is virtually unremovable from ships without a huge amount of physical labor, producing a glue so strong that it adheres to rocks for its entire life and simply cannot be budged by time or tide, the barnacle is thoroughly unremarkable and a major nuisance to humans in their nautical pursuits. But think about it: a glue so strong that it is nearly impossible to remove? With a bond so tough that humans, with all their equipment and knowledge, can barely break it? Are there opportunities in barnacles – say, for super-strong adhesives for use in everything from construction to wound healing after surgery?  It all depends on how you look at what nature does – something that may seem like an irritant one moment seems to open glorious possibilities the next. And as it is with barnacles, so it is with spider silk, that staple of horror films and dread of arachnophobes everywhere, that extremely thin and sticky and irritating material that constantly gets in the way and makes it difficult to clean houses or clean out abandoned ones. But, again, think about it: a fiber one-fifth the width of a human hair that is, for its size, stronger than steel.  Doesn’t that open up some highly intriguing possibilities?  The answer is a definite “yes,” and Stronger Than Steel explores the potential of human use of spider silk in a wide variety of very intriguing applications.  Again, as with barnacles, whose glue really is being explored for multiple purposes, spider silk has the potential for all sorts of human-driven applications, ranging from – as the book’s subtitle indicates – improved bulletproof vests (more effective and lighter than the current Kevlar ones, which are very heavy to wear and transport) to stronger surgical sutures.  And so Bridget Heos tells the story of – goats. Yes, goats. Randy Lewis, the scientist at the heart of Stronger Than Steel, is working on a major issue associated with spider silk – how to produce it in sufficient quantities to make it commercially viable – by genetically implanting goats with DNA from the golden orb weaver spider, the largest web-making spider on Earth. The result of this genetic tinkering is that the goats produce milk containing proteins that can be spun into spider silk – an amazing accomplishment that will, of course, predictably upset Luddites who oppose human creation and use of genetically modified organisms.  The book discusses this issue and gives it a fair hearing, but the primary thrust of Stronger Than Steel is the amazing scientific research and development through which Lewis and others are taking naturally occurring substances and finding ways to use them to make human life much better and much safer.  The book’s photographs, by Andy Comins, add to its sense of wonder, showing everything from silkworms (whose silk has been harvested and used by humans for thousands of years, and which may possibly be induced to produce spider silk instead of their own) to a golden orb weaver spider crawling on the face of a five-year-old boy (son of a member of Lewis’ research team).  This book is part of the excellent Scientists in the Field series, and is the series’ first foray into genetics – a field inspiring controversy, legal wrangles and a great deal of misunderstanding.  What Stronger Than Steel does so well is to place genetics within the overall realm of scientific investigation, stripped of sociopolitical posturing and fear-mongering, showing the very real and very exciting possibilities of this particular branch of research.  Along the way, young readers come to understand the ways in which humans are already using insects extensively – a photo of the Korean dish beondegi, which consists of silkworm pupae, may be more surprising to many than the pictures of sheep, goats, and lab apparatus.  Hopefully families that read Stronger Than Steel will not only pick up knowledge about some amazing possible human uses of remarkable, naturally occurring substances, but also have a chance to discuss what it means to experiment with animals and insects for human benefit. That is a discussion worth having – without hysteria.

      One creature that does provoke hysterical reactions in many people is the shark, and the Scholastic “Discover More” book about these fish will certainly do nothing to dispel those responses.  Like other books in this Scholastic series, this one hits readers with lots of photos and a relatively small amount of information, packed into brief paragraphs of a sentence or two. The data are accurate but are scarcely the point of the book, whose visual impact is its main purpose – buyers even get a free downloadable digital book, Shark Trackers, with additional information and a focus on researchers who study sharks and live in close proximity to them.  Sharks itself provides the basics on this ancient group of fish: their additional sense that lets them detect electrical fields around their prey; the various ways their babies (called pups) grow and are born (some from inside the mother shark, some from eggs laid on the ocean floor, some after eating their weaker siblings before birth); the three types that are deadliest to humans (great white, tiger and bull sharks); and the various ways sharks feed (the whale shark, the world’s largest living fish, is a filter feeder that is not at all dangerous to humans).  The contrasts in peoples’ experiences with sharks are clear, for anyone who looks for them: marine biologist Mark Spalding says he has “never come close to being bitten,” but the book also includes the story of surfer Bethany Hamilton, whose left arm was torn off by a tiger shark – and who recovered, learned to paddle with one arm, and is now one of the world’ top female surfers.  Many of the photos are pretty much what a reader will expect, such as the gaping jaws of a great white shark and the gigantic tooth of the extinct Megalodon (which grew to 65 feet). But a few pictures are genuinely intriguing, such as a set of two showing that, viewed from below, a sea turtle and a surfer on a board look almost identical – clearly showing why sharks, which like to eat turtles, sometimes attack humans by mistake.  The scientific portions of the book explain about types of sharks that travel across entire oceans, habitats in which sharks live, and ways in which sharks are threatened by humans.  There is good information here, as in other Scholastic “Discover More” books, even though the material is presented rather distractingly – the book is designed more for visual than for factual impact, but it does manage to offer some worthwhile science within its somewhat over-intense design. 

(++++) ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2; Variations on a Rococo Theme; Andante Cantabile from String Quartet No. 1. Leonard Elschenbroich, cello; Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Dmitrij Kitajenko. Oehms. $19.99 (SACD).

Richard Eilenberg: Waltzes and Polkas. WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln conducted by Christian Simonis. CPO. $16.99.

Suppé: Overtures and Marches. Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $18.99 (SACD).

      The shortest, most folklike and most upbeat of Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies, No. 2, known as the “Little Russian” because of the Ukrainian roots of many of its tunes (Ukraine used to be called “Little Russia”), gets a bang-up performance from the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln under Dmitrij Kitajenko, whose Tchaikovsky cycle (which so far includes Nos. 1, 5, 6 and the Manfred Symphony) is shaping up as one of the best in recent years. Kitajenko paces the symphony beautifully and without the extraneous rubato that many conductors feel obliged to bring to it, with the result that the work flows effortlessly and very pleasantly from movement to movement.  The not-quite-slow second movement is a highlight, its sense of a “march-past” heightened here, and the sonata-cum-variations form of the finale is particularly effective, concluding in a bright burst of upbeat enthusiasm that is scarcely a characteristic of most of Tchaikovsky’s works. The additional material on this very-well-recorded SACD makes a fine contrast with the symphony. Leonard Elschenbroich is a top-notch young cellist, with smooth and even tone throughout (he plays a Matteo Goffriller instrument, which helps) and a lovely sense of proportion in the Variations on a Rococo Theme, whose wistfulness comes through clearly and pleasantly here even as Elschenbroich makes its many performance difficulties seem trivial, if not irrelevant.  The famous slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s first string quartet gives Elschenbroich, backed up by the orchestra, further chances to be emotive and involving, and he takes full advantage of them, treating this lovely Andante Cantabile as an encore from which to extract sighs of audience enjoyment – which it does.

      There are lesser pleasures to be had in the music of Richard Eilenberg, but pleasures nevertheless. Eilenberg (1848-1927) was one of many composers of dance and other light music in the Strauss family style. Some such Strauss imitators evolved their own approach to their music successfully (Hans Christian Lumbye, Carl Michael Ziehrer), but most never really made it out of the Strauss shadow. Eilenberg is one of the also-rans – which does not mean his music is unattractive but that it has little personal stamp upon it. His most-effective pieces, such as Zauberglöckchen, Polka francaise, sound so much like Johann Strauss Jr. as to go beyond homage into imitation. His two best-known works, to the extent that any of his music is well-known, are Die Mühle in Schwarzwald, a pleasant character piece described as an “Idylle,” and Petersburger Schlittenfahrt, a sleigh ride of some verve and enthusiasm that does not, however, quite compete with Leroy Anderson’s.  Both these pieces appear on the new CPO disc featuring the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln conducted by Christian Simonis (Cologne has a plethora of wonderful orchestras and fine conductors). Along with them are a series of examples of salon music – Eilenberg never denied that that was what he wrote – of which In der Waldschmiede (with its “anvils” reminiscent of those in Josef Strauss’ Feuerfest!) is a highlight, along with several tuneful marches, a very pleasant Mandolinen-Serenade (with violins standing in for mandolins and actually sounding like them), and a particularly lovely waltz called Unter Italien’s blauem Himmel (which really does sound like a tribute to Italy’s lovely blue skies). This CD, which is enthusiastically played and very well recorded, gets a (+++) rating because much of its music is, frankly, second-rate – but enough of it is lovely and sweetly-flowing to make the disc worthwhile for occasional listening, or as background music.

      The light music of Franz von Suppé is of considerably higher quality, but the new SACD conducted by Neeme Järvi also gets a (+++) rating, not because of the quality of the music itself but because Järvi drives the pieces so frantically and refuses to let them breathe. Suppé was not all frenetic themes and headlong rushes to conclusions: he wrote beautiful waltzes and effective marches, and some of his overtures (both the well-known ones and those less often performed) are constructed with skill and a fine sense of contrast. Järvi offers little of that and minimal nuance, constantly driving the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to speeds at which the musicians sometimes can barely keep up. There is no respite here, not in the famous Light Cavalry, Boccaccio, Pique Dame, Poet and Peasant or Beautiful Galatea overtures and little in Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. It is very pleasant to hear these light-music chestnuts balanced by less-known Suppé pieces, including Boccaccio-Marsch, Humoristische Variationen (which uses the same student song as in Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture, although less effectively), Marziale nach Motiven aus der Operette “Fatinitza,” Juanita-Marsch, the overtures to Isabella and Das Modell, and the brief and particularly effective Über Berg, über Thal.  And certainly the disc offers a generous helping of Suppé, nearly 80 minutes’ worth. But Järvi’s unwillingness to allow the music any expansiveness is a disappointment and an ongoing distraction from the works’ tunefulness.  “Light classics” need not be “speedily performed classics,” but Järvi seems blissfully unaware of this, giving the impression that he cannot wait to get through one piece and move on to the next. Still, at least a modicum of Suppé’s tunefulness and skill in producing effective miniatures based on themes from his stage works comes through here, and the inclusion of less-often-heard pieces makes it possible to recommend the SACD as a way to experience music beyond the “Suppé standards” that are often the only works by him that audiences get to hear. The result is a bright, very-well-recorded disc that does not fully do justice to the composer but that contains enough charming elements to make listening to it a pleasure, if not an unalloyed one.

(++++) UNEXPECTED JUXTAPOSITIONS

Viktor Ullmann: Piano Concerto; Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3. Herbert Schuch, piano; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Olari Elis. Oehms. $19.99.

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No.23, “Appassionata”; Schumann: Kinderszenen; Thalberg: Grande fantaisie sur des motifs de “Il barbiere di Siviglia”; Liszt: Totentanz. Valentina Lisitsa, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

Songs to Poems of Emily Dickinson: Settings by Aaron Copland, John Duke, Arthur Farwell, Ernst Bacon, Lori Laitman, Richard Pearson-Thomas, Scott Gendel and Lee Hoiby. Julia Faulkner, soprano; Martha Fischer and Lee Hoiby, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

      The towering figure of Beethoven looms so large over classical music that new ways to present his music – or use it to pull in audiences for other music – are constantly being sought.  One popular approach, in the concert hall as well as on CDs, is to pair a well-known Beethoven work with a far-less-known, even unknown, piece by someone else, presumably hoping that people who come for the Beethoven will also be intrigued by the other composition.  This is not a bad idea, really, but it does lead to some peculiar matches, such as the one on a new Oehms CD featuring pianist Herbert Schuch and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Olari Elis.  The featured work here – well, it is hard to tell which of the two piano concertos is featured. The first piece on the CD is the concerto by Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), a Holocaust victim whose works have mostly been lost: they were unpublished before he was sent to Theresienstadt. Works by Jewish victims of the Holocaust have attracted increasing attention in recent years, and many of them deserve it, including this rather hectic concerto, which has distinctly Mahlerian elements as well as some bows to jazz and considerable use of percussion.  The piece is interesting enough to bear repeated hearings, and Schuch makes a fine advocate for it, hammering away when that is called for and allowing brief forays into lyricism in the few places where Ullmann allows it.  But hearing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 after the Ullmann is a decidedly odd experience. The works have nothing in common beyond being concertos for the piano, and Ullmann’s piece, whatever its strengths, vanishes into insignificance when juxtaposed with Beethoven’s – a fate that Ullmann‘s work really does not deserve.  The Beethoven gets a very warm, lyrical and expansive reading here, which only emphasizes its difference from the tight-knit, very compressed Ullmann concerto.  Beethoven’s drama is quite different from Ullmann’s, more understated and all the more effective for that.  The poise, balance and delicacy of Beethoven – absent in Ullmann – are all the more apparent in Schuch’s elegant reading, in which he is supported just as well by the orchestra as in the 20^th-century work.  The result is a disc that is a curiosity more than anything else: it is unlikely to be anyone’s first choice for the Beethoven, which is available in many other very fine performances; and for those who would like to explore Ullmann’s music, it will be a hard sell – a full-price CD for a concerto that lasts just 18 minutes.  The performances here are quite fine, but the audience for the disc is rather hard to figure out.

      The Beethoven-and-others CD from Valentina Lisitsa appears to have a much clearer audience: fans of the Ukrainian pianist (born 1973), who now makes her home in North Carolina. Lisitsa does in fact have considerable technique and considerable talent, as well as a clear willingness to tackle some very difficult music. The specific pieces on this Naxos CD are not as ill-fitting as the concertos by Ullmann and Beethoven, but they are nevertheless different enough so they may give some listeners pause.  Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata gets an expansive, involved and involving reading here, perhaps a touch too intensely Romantic but certainly impressive in its sweep and intensity.  The delicacy of Schumann’s Kinderszenen is presumably intended as an aural contrast, and it does provide that, although the impression Lisitsa gives is that she is a trifle impatient with the work, really preferring to be in more purely virtuosic territory that does not require quite as much subtlety.  That means she is very well suited indeed for the demands of the Thalberg and Liszt display pieces that round out the disc, and indeed a listener will find them to be the highlights of the CD, bursting with intensity and highly attractive (if superficial) pianistic prowess.  The “Appassionata” reading shows that Lisitsa can, when she chooses, convey the depth and nuance of profoundly moving music, but on the basis of this disc, she preferred at the point in her career when she recorded these performances (2008) to move audiences to celebration of her technical and dramatic prowess, of which she certainly has plenty. Here, Beethoven is a means to an end, lending gravitas to a recital that would otherwise be perhaps a touch too much on the surface.

      The settings by eight composers of poems by Emily Dickinson represent a juxtaposition of a different sort.  Aaron Copland’s Twelve Songs of Emily Dickinson, a justifiably renowned work, is not presented in its usual form on this Naxos CD – instead, nine of the Copland settings are scattered among ones by John Duke (1899-1984), Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), Ernst Bacon (1898-1990), Lori Laitman (born 1955), Richard Pearson-Thomas (born 1957), Scott Gendel (born 1977) and pianist/composer Lee Hoiby (1926-2011), whose five settings with himself as pianist were his final recording.  The CD is arranged by topics rather than by composer or chronology of either the poems or the songs: “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Identity,” “Poems of Love,” “Poems of Death,” “Poems of Immortality,” and The Shining Place (Hoiby’s five settings).  The arrangement is not entirely satisfactory, since the placement of many of Dickinson’s poems in one or another of these categories is frequently rather arbitrary.  And the specific settings are sometimes oddly arranged: Wild Nights! appears three times, twice in “Poems of Love” (in versions by Gendel and Farwell) and once in Hoiby’s sequence.  The disc as a whole has the feeling of a potpourri rather than a carefully organized presentation: all the composers do a good job of setting Dickinson’s words, albeit in very different ways, and soprano Julia Faulkner handles all 27 songs sensitively and with fine vocal form.  But the splitting up of Copland’s settings (and the failure to include all of them as the unified set he intended them to be) and the somewhat arbitrary arrangement of the songs make the CD less effective than it might otherwise be. It gets a (+++) rating for its many fine elements combined with its several less-than-ideal presentation aspects.

(++++) MYSTERIES AND ODDITIES

Freaks. By Kieran Larwood. Chicken House/Scholastic. $16.99.

Hold Fast. By Blue Balliett. Scholastic. $17.99.

      At its heart, in its soul, Kieran Larwood’s Freaks is a tale like so many others for preteens and young teenagers: a story of being an outsider, of being left out, of desperately wanting to belong, of needing a family, of eventually finding family ties with unexpected people in unanticipated ways. But this wonderful book is so much more than that, and the reason is its largest, most sprawling and powerful character. No, not Gigantus, the seven-foot-tall powerhouse with a fondness for pigeons and a dream of becoming a romance novelist.  And not even Sheba, primary protagonist of this astonishingly involving debut novel, the hairy girl with eyes that flash orange and clawlike fingers. No, the most potent character here is the city of London, specifically Victorian London, very specifically the filthy, unutterably foul-smelling, crowded, murky, horrendous-and-marvelous-at-once city so memorably word-painted by Charles Dickens and now painted equally memorably, albeit in a very different way, by Larwood.  London is everything here: the scene, the setting, the only place where this story could possibly happen. London crawls into readers’ pores, permeating the atmosphere as surely as the foul fog that permeates London itself. This is a London so crowded, so bustling, so filthy, so jammed with ne’er-do-wells, and above all so smelly, that it takes on more life than the characters who move through it – even though they are plenty lively themselves. Freaks is the story of a group called the Peculiars, “freaks” in the parlance of the 19^th century, people with deformities who can make a bare-subsistence living only by putting themselves on display: tailed, dung-throwing, stinking Monkeyboy; slit-eyed ninja Sister Moon; pipe-smoking rodent fancier and trainer Mama Rat; as well as Gigantus and Sheba (Wolfgirl).  Like Dickens 150 years ago, Larwood, a kindergarten teacher on the Isle of Wight, expertly crafts just-bizarre-enough names for many of his characters: Grunchgirdle, Plumpscuttle, Sneepsnood. But unlike paid-by-the-word Dickens, with his very Victorian endless sentences combined into endless paragraphs, Larwood – who, after all, is writing for young book readers rather than adult readers of magazine serializations – keeps his communication clear and to the point, focusing on action and mystery and painting his amazing portrait of Victorian London almost as an aside.  Yet it is that picture of London that is more memorable than anything else in Freaks, for all the derring-do (and some derring-don’t) of the characters and all their admirable individuation.  The plot has Sheba joining Plumpscuttle’s freak show after being purchased from an even seedier one, then making a brief connection with a “mudlark” named Till – a desperately poor little girl who searches the filthy mud of the Thames for salable bits and pieces of what-have-you. When Till disappears mysteriously, Sheba and the Peculiars embark on a strange, twisting odyssey of detection and mystery-solving, and this scaffolding holds the plot together very neatly indeed while pulling in just enough real-world characters (notably Michael Faraday) to make the story plausible and almost possible.  In another universe, it would be possible. This is not a “steampunk” book, although steam power is important in it – instead, it is mystery-cum-alternative-history, with memorable characters in an even-more-memorable setting to which Larwood hints he will return in another book. Readers will hope so – and will also hope to see more of his character renditions, a portfolio of which appears at the back of the book as a most-welcome bonus. Freaks is a gem of a novel.

      A great city is central as well to Blue Balliett’s latest novel, Hold Fast, but this is a modern city and an American one: Chicago. Balliett, a more-polished writer than Larwood, at this stage of her career is somewhat too enamored of cleverness for its own sake: the first and last sections of Hold Fast are called “Ice,” and the other 12 have “C” titles (“Click,” “Crash,” “Cling,” “Clutch,” and so forth), with each word defined in several ways before each section.  As in her four previous books, Balliett looks into the past for elements of this one, which springs from a major diamond heist in 2003. But unlike her prior books, which at their best were fascinatingly art-focused, Hold Fast is essentially the simple story of a family sundered and eventually reunited, with passing and rather simplistic nods to causes of the day, such as homelessness, which Balliett sees (according to a note at the book’s end) as a simple matter of matching those without houses to abandoned and foreclosed buildings – a “solution” whose overwhelming naïveté is something less than charming.  The book itself does have charm, though, even if it comes across as somewhat too contrived.  The basic family unit consists of Dashel (Dash) Pearl; his wife, Summer; son, Jubilation (Jubie); and daughter, Early, the book’s protagonist. The mystery here emerges quickly, as Dash tosses out some apparently unimportant (but perhaps crucial) number problems from a poem by Langston Hughes, and shortly thereafter vanishes mysteriously, leaving behind a notebook containing various numbers and a final line, “Must research number rhythms.” The disappearance, the notebook and Hughes are all recurring themes here, along with the issues of what a home really is, what homelessness means, and how people make it through extremely difficult times. Balliett goes out of her way to show how wonderful homeless-shelter operators and volunteers are. “If one of you gets sick, we’ll connect you with medical care. Chicago HOPES, a wonderful after-school tutoring organization, keeps a room here with books and games in it, a place to get homework help and some one-on-one attention.” And so on. The good guys here are so good – and the bad ones so bad – that Hold Fast is more unidimensional than Balliett’s other books; and the ongoing advocacy, however well-meant and justifiable based on Balliett’s sociopolitical views, gives the book more of a pamphlet’s stridency than is really good for it.  The characters become types more than fully formed individuals as a result, and while they endure and overcome hardship, and Balliett pulls the plot strands together expertly, the overall feeling of this book is that it has a point to make rather than a story to tell.  Hold Fast has enough strong elements and fine writing to get a (+++) rating, but it is not at the high quality level of which Balliett has elsewhere shown herself capable – its story is the victim of its own good intentions.

(+++) DOGGONE WONDERFUL

The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think. By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Dutton. $27.95.

      Think about that subtitle for a moment: “How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think.”  Does that “how” seem a touch peculiar?  Brian Hare, who founded and runs the Duke Canine Cognitive Center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist at the center, here offer a combination of fascinating, research-based information on domestic canines with some statements that will seem beyond obvious to anyone who has ever lived with a dog: “Experiments have now shown that dogs use different barks and growls to communicate different things.” Wouldn’t you like to get a research grant to figure that out? Or to determine that “86 percent of people feel like [sic] they sometimes know what their dog is trying to communicate by barking”?

      Much of the book, though, is far more interesting than this example. Hare discusses some highly personal and very amusing experiences as he looked into Nicolai Belyaev’s world-famous domestication experiments involving foxes. He talks about testing the extremely rare New Guinea Singing Dog, which produces a sound “that has been described as half wolf howl, half whale song.”  He delves into friendliness as a survival trait, not only for dogs but also for bonobos (apes that have some dog-like characteristics).  He compares cooperative behavior of wolves and dogs in a chart that interestingly notes that wolves, even when raised by people, are relatively uninterested in cooperating with them – while dogs rely on humans to solve problems and are highly trainable. True, this is scarcely surprising information: Hare and Woods find themselves rather too surprised by rather too many things. For example, they note that puppies with little exposure to humans are nevertheless skilled at comprehending human gestures – but this is scarcely unexpected in light of the fact that dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years, selectively bred again and again to be cooperative with and attuned to human behavior.

      Still, some of the research reported here is highly intriguing. In one experiment, dogs were rewarded unequally when both were asked to “give a paw,” and the one that received less gave paw more reluctantly and stopped giving the paw sooner – which could indicate that dogs possess a basic sense of fairness or objection to inequality (an intriguingly human trait, if it exists).  In another case, researchers found that dogs could identify pictures of smiling faces, not only of their owners but also of other people – but only when those people were the same gender as their owners.

      “The genius of dogs is their ability to understand human communication and their motivation to cooperate with us,” the authors write. “But dogs also have biases and limitations to their understanding of how the world works.”  Well, of course; the same is true of humans.  A fascinating chart showing “dognition relative to cognitive ability in other mammals” indicates that dogs have remarkable abilities to understand an audience’s perspective, communicate vocally and with visual signs, copy others’ actions and recruit others’ help – and are at “genius” level in comprehending visual gestures and learning new words. Again, most dog owners will not be surprised at this, or at the chart’s note that dogs’ understanding of physics is “vapid.”  (So is that of most human beings.)  Indeed, Hare and Woods express an amusing level of surprise at canine behaviors that sometimes seems put on, given the authors’ involvement in serious research.  “I was shocked that dogs could be anything but beloved pets,” they write (the “I” inevitably refers to Hare, making the dual-author nature of the book somewhat awkward, if not actually suspect) – referring to dogs being unwanted predators of marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands. It is hard to believe that any adult, much less a scientific researcher, can be so surprised to learn about differing cultural and practical attitudes toward canines.  Indeed, there is nothing the slightest bit unexpected in the comment, “Dogs show an affiliation toward humans that is unlike any in the animal kingdom. They prefer humans to their own species and can behave like human infants toward their parents.”  Well, yes – we humans have bred them for exactly those characteristics. What is most intriguing about The Genius of Dogs is the discussion of experiments showing that our canine companions, in addition to being artificially moved in directions that humans prefer, may have evolved on their own in ways that created increased interdependence between them and their human partners. More intriguing than the book’s somewhat awkward subtitle is the title of one chapter’s subsection: “Did Dogs Domesticate Us?” Readers of this book will find that possibility well worth contemplating.