(++++) ALMOST-HUMAN ANTICS

Third Grade Mermaid. By Peter Raymundo. Scholastic. $12.99.

Bunny vs. Monkey, Book Two. By Jamie Smart. David Fickling Books. $7.99.

     The troubles and travails of everyday life for those in the six-to-10 age group seem somehow easier to handle when kids realize that other creatures have the same kinds of problems, and they find ways to solve them. Mermaids, for example, go to school, have to master spelling tests, want to be “in with the in crowd,” have annoying mer-brothers and well-meaning but overly pushy mermaid moms, and have to cope with bullies and with the responsibility of pets. It just so happens that when mermaids have all this to deal with, the bullies are sharks and the possible pet is a ton-and-a-half mutated shrimp to which the annoying mer-brother is allergic. But hey, not everything can be the same above the sea and under it. Just most things. Peter Raymundo, whose Third Grade Mermaid is the start of a series, makes mermaid Cora fully human in her concerns and worries but sufficiently, well, fishy in her appearance and surroundings so that kids will enjoy what she goes through even though they would not like to go through the same things themselves. Although not quite a graphic novel, Third Grade Mermaid tells its story in pictures as much as in words: it is supposed to be Cora’s diary, which she has to write and draw in because, as her mer-mother explains, “It’s enchanted. And because you willingly put pen to paper, from now on you’ll be compelled to write in it.” This eventually turns out to be a white lie, or the mermaid equivalent of one; young readers will likely realize this quickly but won’t care, since without Cora (who is a bit lazy when it comes to school work, which includes writing) feeling she has to chronicle her adventures, there would be no book. Cora’s problem is that the only thing she really wants to do is perform with the junior version of the Singing Sirens – she is absolutely crazy about the Singing Sirens themselves, because they look so gorgeous all the time and “when you have scales with that much shine, who needs to spell?” Unfortunately, Cora’s poor spelling test results in her being bounced from the team unless she can take the test again and do much, much better – get an A, in fact. That means studying really hard, which is not an appealing prospect; and to make matters worse, if Cora does not bring her grade up and get back on the team, her place will be taken by Vivian Shimmermore, who is the actual younger sister of the grown-up Singing Sirens. Cora has a bad case of jealousy where Vivian is concerned. She also has difficulty focusing and concentrating. And then there is the small matter of the gigantic shrimp. He started as a little shrimp, but after Cora rescued him from the “dumping zone” where “humans dump their toxic barrels of sludge,” he got sludged and started to grow and grow and grow and become anything but shrimpy. He is, however, extremely salty, so Cora names him Salty and figures out how to get rid of him when he starts hanging around all the time. But then she feels bad about that, even though Salty has caused her mer-brother’s face to swell up like crazy, which Cora doesn’t feel too bad about. Eventually, Cora gets Salty back, does her studying, gets a great spelling grade, and realizes that she doesn’t really care about the Singing Sirens anymore and is just fine letting Vivian be on the team instead. There is also a whole sequence involving Vivian’s birthday party and a volcano, which fits the story just about as well as everything else does. In fact, Raymundo throws a lot into this first book about Cora, giving himself plenty of ways to develop stories about her in the future and giving readers lots of possibilities to consider. The whole thing is, as Cora would say (and does), “shellfishalicious,” which translates to “very silly in ways that are different from readers’ everyday lives but close enough to be immediately recognizable.”

     The happenings in Bunny vs. Monkey are less likely to be ones with which readers are personally familiar, since they involve various monsters and absurd mechanical and electronic creations and a genius skunk who invents a lot of the odd stuff and a megalomaniacal monkey who wants to take over the forest and a perfectly reasonable if not-quite-heroic bunny who would prefer that all the animals be left alone to get on with their sylvan lives. The second Bunny vs. Monkey book, like the first one, is essentially a set of silly good-guy-vs.-bad-guy tales. It is not a single extended graphic-novel-style story but something closer to traditional comics: Jamie Smart creates a series of two-pagers, each of them not much longer than a newspaper comic strip. Also, although there is some variation in panel size, most of the panels are square or rectangular instead of being created in the multiple sizes and shapes of cutting-edge graphic novels. The result is a kind of comfortable familiarity surrounding the hijinks of Bunny, Monkey, Skunky, Le Fox, destructive and occasionally dancing robot Metal Steve, the always-cooking-and-baking squirrel Weenie, and the baby-like Pig, and the rest of the forest denizens – such as Action Beaver, who has had a few too many bumps on the head, does not say any words (uttering only grunts and odd exclamations), spends most of his time banging into things, and in one especially amusing story here is temporarily turned into a genius by one of Skunky’s inventions. Actually, there is a kind of meta-story involving Skunky in this second volume, involving the inventor’s creation of a doomsday device that Skunky comes back from the future (via a time-travel device) to tell himself  to keep away from Monkey, who otherwise “enslaves us all, and turns life into a nightmare!!” Skunky has some trouble sorting out what future Skunky wants done or not done: “I must not have done what I told me to do! RRGHH! Why didn’t I listen?” But everything involving the device works out just fine in the end, which is not really the end, since the final portion of this book includes the forest folk stumbling upon something even scarier than crazed robots and monster pants: humans. And in fact, doomsday device aside, everything does not work out just fine after all, since it turns out the “hyooomanz” have some plans that may spell doom of a different sort for everyone readers came to know and love in the first two Bunny vs. Monkey books. Stay tuned for sure – there is clearly a great deal more to come.

(++++) OPERETTA BYWAYS

Romberg: The Student Prince. Dominik Wortig, Anja Petersen, Frank Blees, Arantza Ezenarro, Vincent Schirrmacher, Wieland Satter, Joan Ribalta, Theresa Nelles, Christian Sturm; WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and WDR Funkhausorchester Köln conducted by John Mauceri. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 16. Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $12.99.

     The eventual metamorphosis of operetta into modern musical theater is more evident in retrospect than it was while it was occurring. But every once in a while, a look back at specific works designed as operettas provides an especially clear hint of the evolution of one form into the other. Take Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince as an example. On the one hand, it falls, from its title onwards, squarely into the operetta genre, alongside other fish-out-of-water works such as Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin, Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent, and – particularly directly in plot, if not in parallelism of title – Lehár’s Der Zarewitsch of 1927, which, however, Romberg’s work anticipates by more than two years. On the other hand, The Student Prince was constructed and performed explicitly as a Broadway show, created at the behest of Broadway’s famed Shubert brothers, and was not only Romberg’s most successful work but also the longest-running Broadway production of the 1920s: Show Boat (1927), sometimes erroneously stated to have attained that honor, ran for 572 performances, but The Student Prince ran for 608. The new CPO recording, nicely sung in English by a mostly German (and operetta-steeped) cast, and conducted with considerable assurance by Yale-trained John Mauceri, shows a work quite clearly straddling the operetta and Broadway-show genres, filled with an unending flow of lovely (if sometimes treacly) melodies, and carrying within itself the seeds of its own forgettability. Again, this is only in retrospect: what made The Student Prince so popular in the years right after World War I was its combination of nostalgia and heartbreak, its portrayal of a forever-shattered, royalty-ruled world whose denizens experience the sort of emotional anguish to which “commoners” could readily relate. Like the later works of Lehár and, in particular, Der Zarewitsch, this Romberg work is one in which the demands of leadership, of aristocratic rule, must overcome the desires of one’s heart; it is a story in which the course of true love never does run smooth – and, indeed, must be reduced in the end only to memories of a time gone by and, like the elegant society in which the work is set, never to come again. Romberg’s librettist, Dorothy Donnelly, handles this bittersweet story – based on and mostly faithful to a 1901 German play called Alt Heidelberg – quite skillfully; and Romberg himself keeps the musical spotlight quite clearly on the prince, Karl-Franz (Dominik Wortig), and the innkeeper’s daughter, Kathie (Anja Petersen), whom he comes to love. They get pretty much all the emotion here, and there is no clearly delineated “second couple” providing a foil for the primary one – with the result that the focus on the soon-to-be-parted lovers is all the stronger.

     Donnelly and Romberg even explore a bit of the reality of the politics and romantic dalliances of Old Europe by having Karl-Franz eventually return to rule his (fictitious) nation and marry Princess Margaret (Theresa Nelles), whom he does not love – while the princess far more easily sheds her own dalliance with Captain Tarnitz (Christian Sturm), because, after all, it is one thing to flirt and have an affair here and there before settling down, but quite another to fall deeply in love with one’s soulmate, as Karl-Franz has the misfortune to do. And it really is misfortune: the operetta’s conclusion, in which Kathie nobly does the right thing for Karl-Franz and his country by falsely claiming to have a beau of her own and to be leaving for Vienna to marry him, leaves both principals thoroughly unsatisfied with the understanding and acceptance that they will, and must, follow their own destinies, but that each is giving up the greatest love he or she will ever know. That is a very late-Lehár conclusion, but Romberg handles it in his own way, and a very effective way it is. Yet The Student Prince is too much of its time to have the staying power of Der Zarewitsch or, for that matter, Friederike or Das Land des Lächelns, which are also bittersweet tales of mismatched and eventually parted lovers – for the specific circumstances of Romberg’s work are an integral part of what made it popular, while the settings of those by Lehár are ultimately incidental to their central human stories. Still, from a strictly musical standpoint, straddling as it does the worlds of operetta and Broadway musicals, The Student Prince is very much worth hearing, its sheer melodic flow carrying listeners along in much the same way it must have enchanted audiences 90-plus years in the past – for all the differences of 21^st- and 20^th-century circumstances. Romberg’s music as a whole is overdue for reconsideration – perhaps this very fine recording will be the harbinger of the re-exploration it deserves.

     John Philip Sousa’s operetta music could use some re-hearing, too – the “March King” wrote a great deal more than marches, including some 15 operettas (not all of which he completed). The 16^th volume in the excellent Sousa wind-music series on Naxos, led by Keith Brion with his usual spirit and attentiveness to detail and balance, in fact has a strong focus on Sousa’s operettas: more than half the music here comes from them. The longest work on the disc by far is an extended set of selections from The Charlatan (1898). It shows Sousa to be much indebted to Sir Arthur Sullivan (he admired and made some arrangements of Gilbert and Sullivan works), but still able to put his own stamp on the tunes, which sound quite effective in band rather than orchestral guise (this is the second volume of this series featuring the very-high-quality Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy). Also here are two pieces from Sousa’s last, unfinished operetta, The Irish Dragoon (1915) – the spirited Overture and a short Circus Galop, neither of which has been recorded before. In addition to those two world première recordings, this CD contains two others: Tyrolienne (1880-82), a set of variations on a French folk song, and Homeward Bound (c. 1885), a recently rediscovered and somewhat patched-together piece that may contain only Sousa tunes or may be one of his medleys of popular music of the time. And then there are works that show how adept Sousa was in multiple musical forms: I’ve Made My Plans for the Summer (1907) is a pleasant waltz featuring a solo cornet; Pushing On (1918) is a wartime march song; On the Tramp (1879) is a very early march, whose title is a phrase that at the time meant “out of work and looking for some”; and The Triumph of Time (1885) is a powerful parade march. The remaining two works here, both from 1918, have some particularly interesting history. Wedding March was written to replace the popular German wedding marches by Mendelssohn and Wagner at a time when anti-German sentiment ran particularly strong. And the version heard here of The Star-Spangled Banner, created by Sousa in collaboration with famed conductor Walter Damrosch, was intended to standardize a highly patriotic song that had been recognized for official use in 1916 but would not become the United States’ national anthem until 1931. This long-running Sousa sequence continues to establish the composer’s considerable abilities in many musical forms, operetta definitely included. It is also true, though, that the series confirms, without necessarily intending to, that calling Sousa the “March King” was apt: although his non-march works are uniformly well-made and show rhythmic vitality and an adept disposition of instruments, they are neither as distinctive as his marches nor as clearly indicative of his considerable talents as a composer.

(++++) BIRDS AND OTTER BEINGS

Otter Loves Easter! By Sam Garton. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $9.99.

Dill & Bizzy: Opposite Day. By Nora Ericson. Illustrated by Lisa Ericson. Harper. $17.99.

Bizarre Birds. By Sandra Horning. Scholastic. $3.99.

     Sam Garton’s charmingly naïve character, Otter, who showed her love of Halloween in an earlier book, now proves just as loving and just as confused where Easter is concerned. This is strictly a child’s version of a secular Easter, where the love is of baskets, eggs, rabbits, chocolate, jelly beans and such. Otter’s Easter haul, displayed across two pages in Garton’s always appropriate illustrations, includes small, medium and large chocolate eggs, additional eggs in a basket, a bag of jelly beans, a gold-wrapped chocolate bunny, and a pair of bunny ears. The fun of all the Otter books lies in how the endearingly anthropomorphic title character interacts with her friends, all of them stuffed animals, treating them as if they are alive. That is indeed what happens in Otter Loves Easter! But here Otter’s behavior leads to a clear lesson learned about selfishness and sharing. Otter Keeper (the human with whom Otter lives) says Otter must share the candy with her friends, but Otter explains, “I couldn’t share my eggs. They were mine!” Otter tries to give up some candy, really she does, but “sharing is very hard” and “eating chocolate is very easy.” So soon enough, Otter, who is always plump, is looking even plumper as she gorges herself on chocolate and is too full for breakfast and feels “a little sick.” After a nap, Otter realizes that she really should have shared with her friends, so she determines to “save Easter,” dons the bunny ears she received, and becomes “the Easter Otter!” The result is a wonderful Easter egg hunt in which, of course, Otter’s stuffed friends cannot really hunt for anything. But Otter makes sure that Pig, Teddy and Giraffe all “find” eggs, and even Otter Keeper gets one, and of course everything ends happily as the stuffed animals “share” their eggs with her – since, after all, they cannot really eat them. Otter’s misadventures always end pleasantly, and the “learn to share” lesson here is delivered amusingly enough so young readers may actually pay attention, even when chocolate is at stake.

     The lesson of Dill & Bizzy: Opposite Day is that sometimes friends can like things that are, well, opposites. This is the second book by sisters Nora and Lisa Ericson to feature Dill, “an odd duck,” and Bizzy, “a strange bird” who seems, based on his distinctively odd appearance, to have escaped from a zoo run by Dr. Seuss. In the first book, the two met and became best friends; but in this one, the friendship is put under strain. What happens is that the birds’ routine goes awry one morning when Bizzy wakes up before Dill instead of afterwards. Bizzy, who is a bit of a ditz, decides that must mean it is Opposite Day, and starts insisting that everything be done backwards: morning dinner instead of breakfast, a fast morning run instead of the birds’ usual slow wake-up waddle, and so on. Dill has soon had more than enough of this and says he does not like Opposite Day and wants things quiet, but Bizzy says that, since this is Opposite Day, that must mean Dill loves Opposite Day and wants a loud dance party. Dill simply  cannot get through to Bizzy, who insists on everything being the opposite of normal, to the point of the birds brushing dust on their faces before bed instead of washing them. It is only when Dill realizes that if it is truly Opposite Day, then the two birds must be the opposite of best friends – that is, worst enemies – that Bizzy agrees it cannot be Opposite Day anymore. So all ends happily, if with a rather large helping of bemusement, until, inevitably, Bizzy wakes up the next morning with his feet where his head usually is and vice versa, and declares it is going to be Backwards Day. What happens next is left up to suitably delighted young readers to figure out for themselves.

     Dill and Bizzy are purely fictional – especially Bizzy – but there are some strange real-world birds out there. And in a new Scholastic Level 2 Reader called Bizarre Birds, Sandra Horning explains about and shows some of them. There is the hoatzin, which smells like cow poop and has chicks born with claws on their wings; the ribbon-tailed bird of paradise, some of which have tail feathers almost as long as a baseball bat; the oxpecker, which lives on top of large grazing animals and eats their parasites – and their earwax; the California condor, whose wings can be up to 10 feet wide; the common tailorbird, which makes a nest by gathering green leaves, poking holes in them, and sewing them together with spider webs or thin plant strips; and others. To keep the book easy to read, the type is large and the amount of information small, but there is enough here – both in words and in photographs – to intrigue budding naturalists and encourage them to seek out more-in-depth information on wonders of the real world of animals in other books. The Level 2 books are designed for developing readers in first and second grade, but any child with an interest in unusual creatures will likely enjoy this one, whose photos will attract younger children and whose text, although simple, gives enough information to get older kids interested in finding out more about the 14 birds shown here – and the many others, including quite a few strange ones, that can be discovered in other books.

(++++) BUNNIES AND BEYOND

How to Be a Bigger Bunny. By Florence Minor. Illustrated by Wendell Minor. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $14.99.

Whose House? By H.A. Rey, adapted by Lay Lee Ong. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Farm Babies. By H.A. Rey, adapted by Lay Lee Ong. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

     Bunnies are inevitably endearing in books for pre-readers and the youngest readers; like other animals that may be somewhat less adorable in real life – mice, for example – rabbits are a staple of works intended to use adorableness to help lessons be communicated gently. But the portrayal of bunnies in kids’ books varies widely: some are thoroughly anthropomorphic, while others are shown highly realistically even though their behavior may have distinctly human elements. The latter approach is the one taken by the wife-and-husband team of Florence and Wendell Minor in How to Be a Bigger Bunny. All members of the rabbit family here – Nibbles, Wiggles, Giggles, Jiggles and Tickles – really look like rabbits, and they move like them, too, as they scamper about in the meadow. But Tickles, the smallest of the five, does not get to go along on the bigger bunnies’ adventures: she tends to be overlooked. That is a highly human thing to do, and the fact that Tickles walks around carrying a book makes her even more like a human child. She is absolutely adorable when drawn sitting propped up against a tree (in a distinctly un-rabbit-like posture), reading stories – from which she takes lessons about never giving up, acting like a bold pirate, and “How to Think Your Way out of Tricky Places.” Sure enough, all the stories’ ideas are soon put to the test, as Tickles’ four bigger siblings get trapped in a log in which they are playing when a rock rolls down the hill and plugs the log’s open end. There is not much to the story, really – of course Tickles will figure out how to rescue her family, and of course at the end they will say they will always take her along when they play from now on – but the application of the stories’ lessons is amusing, and the contrast between the human-like approach to the bunnies' predicament and the lovely pastoral setting in which the story takes place makes this an especially endearing book. Tickles does not get to be a bigger bunny physically, of course, but she grows larger in her siblings’ eyes through her determination, and at the end is seen dreaming of being a huge bunny, wearing a cape and zipping about to save her family “from danger everywhere.” Wish fulfillment, for sure, and all in a good – and particularly attractive-looking – cause.

     Bunnies also appear in one of two new lift-the-flap books created by Lay Lee Ong from stories created long ago by H.A. Rey of Curious George fame. These are clever adaptations of books that have timeless elements but also show their age in some ways. Whose House? comes from Anybody at Home? (1939). Farm Babies is derived from Where’s My Baby? (1943). The bunnies appear in the first of these, when kids lift the flap of the page opposite the words, “Look in this hole –/ What can it be/ That lives deep down/ Under this tree?” The three under-flap rabbits are drawn in pleasantly cartoonish fashion and are seen smiling happily, with very human expressions, at the reader. The somewhat dated nature of Whose House? is clearest on pages where humans and their lives are involved. The car that emerges from a garage is recognizable, if old-fashioned, but the gas pump outside the garage is a design that no 21^st-century child is likely ever to have seen. The airplane that comes out of a hanger has two propellers, not jet engines, and passengers are seen boarding it by walking outdoors and climbing steps – a real rarity of a scene nowadays. And when two trains come out onto railroad tracks, both are being pulled by smoke-emitting steam engines – another real rarity. The “house” idea for people, animals and inanimate objects is still a charming one, and Rey’s illustrations are not only attractive but also quite reminiscent of those in his better-known books. But parents may have some explaining to do about the pictures that do not include rabbits, birds, bees and other wildlife.

     Farm Babies requires less explication. Here too the animals are drawn in Rey’s distinctive style and sport expressions that are human-like but not overdone. And some of the pages have little lessons within, such as a chance to practice counting: “Cluck, cluck, cluck!/ Calls Mother Hen./ Help count her chicks/ From one to ten.” Lifting this book’s flaps reveals not only barnyard creatures but also some found indoors: “Mother Cat’s kittens/ Have soft, warm fur./ She licks them clean,/ They meow and purr.” The only page in this book that harks back strongly to the time the original was written is the final one: “Here a mother sits –/ She’s about to read a book./ But where are all her babies?/ Just open up and look!” This mother – holding the original Rey book from which Farm Babies is taken – is dressed in distinctly old-fashioned style, sitting in a chair with knitting beside her, and turns out to have, when the flap is lifted, six kids (three boys and three girls) who all seem to be more or less in the four-to-10 age range. One boy has an old-fashioned slingshot in his pocket, while another is carrying a propeller-driven toy airplane, and the ways in which the boys’ outfits and girls’ outfits all match are attractive but certainly not in contemporary fashion. The book as a whole is fun, though, and so is Whose House? Neither of these works has the timeless quality of the Curious George books (although they too contain many now-archaic elements that are, however, rendered unimportant by the underlying charm of the stories). But both lift-the-flap books are pleasant for a young child to read and interact with – or enjoy while sitting on a parent’s accommodating lap.

(++++) FORM FOLLOWING FUNCTION

Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History. By Walter Dean Myers. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. Harper. $17.99.

Muhammad Ali: A Champion Is Born. By Gene Barretta. Illustrated by Frank Morrison. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     Creators of children’s books understand, intuitively or through studying the medium, just how different an impression they can make on impressionable young minds by the way they tell stories and illustrate them. Both Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History and Muhammad Ali: A Champion Is Born are hagiographic; both tell the stories of men who, if they were really as portrayed here, would be several cuts above the human race, never mind the mass of humanity; both assiduously avoid exploring any flaws of their subjects, or even mentioning anything negative in more than a passing way; both are aimed, officially, at ages 4-8; and both are intended for young black readers and their families – there is no reaching out to a wider audience here. But the two books’ different forms, both in narrative and in illustration, stand in stark contrast, and reflect in important ways the men about whom the works are written.

     The differences, abundantly clear from the books’ covers, persist throughout . Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History is all done in sepia tones. On the cover, Douglass, shown front and center, is looking past the reader, as if toward a far horizon where the world will be different and he will have had a major role in shaping it. The book has extensive narrative for a work aimed at a very young age group – in fact, it is probably more appropriate for ages 6-10 than for 4-8. The late Walter Dean Myers packs a lot of information into Douglass’ story, carefully avoiding any significant mention of positive actions by whites in Douglass’ life in order to keep the focus on slavery and Douglass’ escape from and transcendence of it. Thus, for example, Myers writes of the time Douglass’ owner, Hugh Auld, turned Douglass over to the cruel Edward Covey to be harshly disciplined; but only readers who go beyond the entire book’s narrative and past the timeline and bibliography will discover, at the work’s very end, the document with which Auld freed Douglass – in 1846, a year after Douglass wrote his autobiography but long before he had accomplished many of the things for which he is remembered, and even before Douglass was known exclusively by that name (he changed it to Douglass from Bailey; both names appear in Auld’s document). Nor does Auld’s wife, Sophia, get much credit for instilling in Douglass what became his lifelong preoccupation with reading and writing – although she is at least mentioned. In any case, the book proceeds with page after page about Douglass’ thoughts and deeds, with Floyd Cooper’s finely detailed illustrations resolutely keeping Douglass looking ahead to a better time, or askance at his own – there is not a single picture in which Douglass looks directly out at the reader. The hyper-seriousness of Douglass is communicated again and again, both through the text and through the illustrations, and he is repeatedly pictured as wise – the contrast between Cooper’s renderings of Douglass and abolitionist John Brown, who are shown on the same page, is particularly striking. Myers knows his history, and some elements of the book may even surprise adult readers, such as the comment that Southern states began to secede from the union in 1860 rather than 1861 (South Carolina issued its declaration on December 24, 1860). As a study in serious, even studious dedication to change, of a man who understood how to make common cause with others – Douglass was an early advocate of women’s suffrage – Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History is a book of considerable power that tells its story with strength and dedication.

     Muhammad Ali: A Champion Is Born is as different as can be imagined. This is the tale of someone who made his living through strength of a very different sort, with his fists, by beating people up physically (within an established set of rules, to be sure). It is a story with little nuance (at least as Gene Barretta tells it), and one whose bright red-and-yellow cover fits it perfectly. Right there on the cover, the only thing to see besides words is Muhammad Ali staring directly at the reader with intensity bordering on hostility, if not outright hatred, and getting ready to throw a punch (or just having thrown one). The whole book gets right to its topic with fight scenes and comic-book language: “POW!” in 1964; “POW! POW!” in 1965; the famous “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” comment in big, bold type in 1974; and “POW! POW! POW!” in 1978. And then Barretta and illustrator Frank Morrison flash back to 1954, when Ali (then using his birth name, Cassius Clay) was 12 years old and had his bike stolen. This is the linchpin of the story, the moment when, Barretta says, Cassius Clay started on the road that would eventually make him heavyweight champion of the world. The angle is an unusual one for an Ali biography, and is clearly intended to involve young readers in the story – and this book is written at a level that does fit the 4-8 age group quite well. Morrison’s art is interestingly exaggerated: on one page, people’s heads are too large for their bodies, so the reader is drawn to their faces; on another, facial features are barely suggested and the stance of a character is accentuated, so the eye goes to the whole body and its posture and the character becomes a type rather than an individual. Young Cassius Clay, however, is distinct and distinctive throughout, and his facial expressions are highlighted again and again – although at times his face is downplayed so readers focus on specific things he is doing, such as running alongside a school bus or dodging rocks thrown at him by his brother, Rudy. This is a book about Cassius Clay the boy, once it gets past its opening pages about Muhammad Ali the man; but it does contain two back-of-book pages with more information about Ali’s later life. There is very little about the major controversies surrounding him, although some are mentioned in passing; unfortunately, there is also very little about his later years, when he developed Parkinson’s disease and became a role model for others suffering from it – a more-valuable and likely more-lasting contribution to the world than winning boxing matches. Muhammad Ali: A Champion Is Born will be interesting for young readers who already look up to Ali and who may want to become fighters themselves, but it pays little attention to the fight of his life – against the disease that finally took it – in its determination to present a big, bold POW of a story.

(++) PROBLEM SOLVED?

The Cancer Revolution: A Groundbreaking Program to Reverse and Prevent Cancer. By Leigh Erin Connealy, M.D. Da Capo. $25.99.

     What should the penalty be for doctors who knowingly withhold cures form patients, dooming them to a long and agonizing struggle with a curable disease – a battle that eventually ends in avoidable death? Proponents of “alternative,” “holistic,” “integrative” and “naturopathic” approaches to deadly diseases such as cancer – which is actually a constellation of diseases, not a single one – cleverly avoid answering this question. But it is highly germane – because if there in fact exist approaches to living that are certain to “reverse and prevent cancer,” as the subtitle of Leigh Erin Connealy’s book says, then surely it is a criminal matter, or at the very least one worthy of loss of medical license, for a doctor not to deliver these “proven” cures and prevention strategies. However, like every other purveyor of non-traditional medical approaches to serious disease, Connealy fails to issue a clarion call for de-licensing, prison or other punishment for doctors who, sworn to care for and cure to the best of their ability, fail to “reverse and prevent cancer” in the “proven” ways that Connealy puts forth.

     The reality, of course, is that none of the methods in The Cancer Revolution or other works of this type is proven to “reverse and prevent cancer,” and authors like Connealy, one and all, are trading in the fear and worry that inevitably accompany a cancer diagnosis, making a nice living for themselves by suggesting that they have solutions that the medical profession as a whole – whether from venality, profit orientation, being in collusion with pharmaceutical firms, or being involved in some other anti-wellness conspiracy – fails to supply. Taking advantage of patients this way makes for good profits from books and “alternative” treatment centers – Connealy’s is called the Cancer Center for Healing. But all this self-proclaimed certainty is, at the very least, as unseemly as advocates of non-traditional approaches to disease claim traditional medicine to be.

     What is so irritating about the anti-traditional-medicine claims is that there is no non-commercial reason for them. In general, doctors treating cancer with chemotherapy, radiation and other standard approaches not only acknowledge the value of supplementary use of nutritional and lifestyle changes, but also encourage them actively. And many professed opponents of traditional approaches to cancer – including Connealy – actually acknowledge the importance of traditional medicine, saying that it is not the whole answer or the only answer but that it is a necessary component of cancer treatment. The two sides are not really two sides after all – except at their fringes, they represent differences in emphasis rather than exclusionary approaches that demonize anyone with whom they disagree.

     Seen in that way, The Cancer Revolution, despite its vastly overhyped title and subtitle, could be viewed as a sensible, useful and potentially very helpful aid in cancer treatment, although it scarcely offers a cure or a guaranteed remission. But Connealy insists it is more than that – it really is a revolution, one known only to her and other cognoscenti. It is extremely hard to accept this. In 2015, a notorious-in-some-quarters scientific meta-analysis of cancer studies discovered that some two-thirds of cancers result from chance – random cellular mutations about which people can do nothing – and that only about one-third are preventable through lifestyle modifications such as avoiding smoking (lung cancers) and being careful about sun exposure (skin cancers). Unsurprisingly, the publication of the carefully peer-reviewed study provoked howls of outrage and numerous hastily assembled counter-studies – there is a huge “cancer industry” out there, and the advocates of non-traditional approaches are a big part of it. A lot of the objections to the scientific analysis proffered notions of known contributory factors to diseases (including cancer) as underlying causes – a good keep-the-money-flowing approach, since so many of these factors are unavoidable and therefore shade into the realm of “bad luck.” Connealy, for example, mentions “excessive exposure to electromagnetic fields” (you will know the exposure is excessive if you get cancer); “geopathic stress” from “energies within the Earth that are created by underground cavitations, streams, and other geological features” (completely unavoidable); “foci infections,” which are “concentrated and localized pockets of infection that don’t show up on routine lab tests” (a recipe for expensive tests, including “alternative” ones, or unending fear); industrial toxins (“ubiquitous in our air, food, and water supply,” and thus unavoidable); and so on. And then there are the equally ubiquitous factors that go with living in a modern First World country, earning a living and raising a family: Connealy warns that “to prevent or fight cancer, you must also resolve the stress and emotional conflicts in your life.”

     Despite all this, “preventing cancer doesn’t need to be complicated,” asserts Connealy. You need specific tests that she recommends to find propensity for cancer, not actual cancer. You need the specific approach to whole-body health that Connealy advocates. You need “groundbreaking cancer treatments” such as “autohemotherapy” (taking blood, exposing it to ultraviolet light and ozone, and putting it back) and “intravenous curcumin therapy” (getting this component of turmeric not as a spice but intravenously). You need nutritional guidance and unending adherence to a diet filled with “anticancer vegetables,” “‘clean’ animal protein” (free-range and free of hormones of antibiotics and, as Connealy does not say, the most expensive available), “green vegetable drinks made from such foods as wheatgrass and nonstarchy vegetables,” and so forth. You also need detoxifying treatments such as coffee enemas, “liver flush cleanses” and “EDTA chelation therapy” using a specific synthetic amino acid. And of course you need exercise, an end to stress (never mind the possibility that these treatments may themselves send your stress levels through the roof), meditation, Qigong and Tai Chi and aromatherapy and laughter and a specific “transpersonal coaching and beneficial strategy that I would highly recommend.” Throw in a hot bath every night while you’re at it. Get lots of sleep and make sure it is restful – practice “proper sleep hygiene” (but don’t let the requirements raise your stress level), assemble a “successful support system” to guide you to wellness, and on and on and on and on.

     Connealy omits any mention of the financial cost and amount of time needed to do everything she recommends – and her recommendations are so enormously time-consuming and so different from most people’s everyday lives (and so far outside many people’s budgets) that she can always claim, if her approach fails, that the patient did not do enough of what she says or did not do it with sufficient exactitude. Unsurprisingly, Connealy’s practice is in alternative-medicine-loving California – she neglects to explain how people who live in, say, Kansas or Alabama might implement her extensive recommendations. Indeed, the time commitment that Connealy insists is necessary is really extraordinary: her step-by-step, day-by-day outline of what to do to be part of her “Cancer Revolution” is off-putting in the extreme. One single day, for example, includes five to 20 minutes of “oil pulling,” plus tongue scraping, plus drinking eight to 16 ounces of lemon or vinegar water, plus doing a coffee enema, plus “30 minutes of yoga, Qigong, stretching, walking, or another exercise,” plus “30 minutes of meditation, journaling, or prayer,” plus taking two specific capsules – all before breakfast. The rest of that single day is planned just as precisely.

     Add the extensiveness, precision, and time requirements of Connealy’s ideas to the enormous stressors these gigantic lifestyle requirements will likely produce – coupled with the insistence on stress reduction – and throw in the substantial cost associated with many of her recommendations, and what you have in The Cancer Revolution is a recipe for failure. Not in every case – Connealy cites anecdotal examples of the success of her approach with specific patients – but in a large, large number of cases. And this does not even get into the issue of the highly specific food-purchase and food-preparation requirements that are integral to Connealy’s ideas. People diagnosed with serious cancers (not all cancers are serious or at serious stages) will understandably grasp at any straw that holds out hope, no matter how strange, off-putting, costly, hard to comprehend, or scientifically shaky – hence, for example, the great excitement over using peach and apricot pits to produce laetrile and “cure” cancer, especially in the 1970s. Laetrile sometimes worked, which is no surprise: the placebo effect produces improvement, or even cure, in up to 30% of people given completely inactive substances. The Cancer Revolution includes some sounder-than-laetrile science, all jumbled together with standard elements advocated by non-traditional health practitioners (specified dietary regimes, specified forms of stress reduction, specified daily life regimens). Some desperate people will benefit from what Connealy offers. Whether that makes her approach “groundbreaking,” or a solution of any sort to people’s desire “to reverse and prevent cancer,” is another matter altogether. But the book is carefully written to insulate Connealy from any potential action against her if people try to incorporate her ideas into their lives and nevertheless find her prescription ineffective.

(++++) HANDLING THE ORCHESTRA

Smetana: Má Vlast. Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Jakob Hrůša. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).

Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1-4; Tragic Overture. Philharmoniker Hamburg conducted by Simone Young. Oehms. $19.99 (3 CDs).

Barbara Harbach: Orchestral Music III—Symphonies Nos. 7-10. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Angus. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     Although he is only 35, Jakob Hrůša has spent the better part of a decade honing his interpretation of Smetana’s Má Vlast, which he has conducted with various orchestras of varying size, from the full-Romantic-scale to 50-or-so-member almost-chamber groups. Hrůša’s interpretation will surely evolve further over time, but at this point its outlines are already clear. It is a robust and stately reading of this massive score, with tempos on the distinctly slow side but without any feeling that the music drags. And it is a rendition in which the concluding, paired tone poems, Tábor and Blaník, get more than the usual amount of attention and emerge, as a result, as the true climax of the sprawling cycle, a capstone rather than the afterthought that the duo can become when conductors focus more strongly on the grandeur of Vyšehrad, the elegant tone painting and flow of Vltava, the drama of Šarka, and the simplicity and mellifluousness of Z českých luhů a hájů. Hrůša’s fully formed reading (at least in its current state) is impressively communicated on a new Tudor SACD on which he leads the Bamberger Symphoniker. Hrůša has conducted ensembles all over the world in this music, from Prague to Seoul, and seems unfailingly to bring forth the tone poems’ smooth flow, melodic beauty and rhythmic propulsiveness. That is certainly what he does here, and the warm strings and fine winds and brass of the orchestra give the performance an overall warmth that stands the work as a whole – and its individual component parts – in good stead. The flow of the river Vltava past the ruined castle of Vyšehrad is suitably dramatic here, and the central lyricism of Šarka is particularly well contrasted with the dynamism of the conclusion. The loveliness of the fields and meadows in Z českých luhů a hájů provides just the right respite before the intensity and strength of the concluding Tábor and Blaník, whose mythic qualities are bound up in expressive strength that the orchestra brings forth to very fine effect. There are a few conductors who, over many years, made Má Vlast a centerpiece of their careers, notably Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996) – who, like Hrůša, was Czech and seemed to have a natural affinity for Smetana’s music. It remains to be seen whether Hrůša will have a lifelong involvement with this cycle’s combination of high art and intense nationalism. At this stage, that certainly seems likely; and even if later performances contain refinements beyond those in this one, Hrůša’s reading with the Bamberger Symphoniker will stand as a very worthy and often compelling version of the music.

     Far more conductors make their way through Brahms’ symphonies than Smetana’s masterpiece, but there is always room for new interpretation in a Brahms cycle – and almost always something worth discovering. In the case of Simone Young’s cycle with the Philharmoniker Hamburg on Oehms, the occasional pleasures and glimmers of insight do not quite overcome a rather ordinary overview of the music, and a rather old-fashioned one as well, paying little heed to recent discoveries regarding appropriate “period” approaches to these works. As a result, this set of performances from 2007 (No. 1), 2008 (No. 2), 2009 (Nos. 3 and 4), and 2010 (Tragic Overture) gets a (+++) rating. There are quite a few pleasures here, but they are scattered rather than consistent, and some elements of Young’s interpretations will be effective only for limited audiences. The first movement of No. 1, for example, is quite slow; whether it works will depend on whether a listener finds the overall pace plodding or lyrically evocative. The best single word for the overall feeling of this movement, whether it brings a positive reaction or a negative one, is “sober,” and that, indeed, is reflective of Young’s approach to the symphony as a whole. Sometimes the solemnity fits – the finale is well-handled – but at other times, it mixes uneasily with the music, as in the third movement, which is marked grazioso but scarcely feels graceful here. The other symphonies are also mixtures of the more and less effectual. In No. 2, the first two movements are quite expansive – all the more so because Young wisely includes the exposition repeat in the first movement – while the third does lighten up a bit; but the finale here is so rushed that the orchestra seems to struggle to keep up, and clarity is lost as a result. The Tragic Overture appears as a filler on this disc, nicely played but not especially compelling. The performance of No. 3, like that of No. 1, contains nuances whose success is a matter of opinion. For instance, the first movement strides forth boldly and with more potency than in the hands of conductors who proclaim the opening chord and then immediately slow down for emphasis – but in the transition to the second subject, Young pulls back on the tempo for no apparent reason and with no justification in the score. The best movement here is the finale, which moves ahead smartly until eventually subsiding in a convincing way. As for No. 4, it is the blandest reading here, with nothing outlandish but little that listeners will find surprising or controversial. The final variations are well contrasted, and the very end does have a kind of tragic majesty, but the rest of the interpretation, while perfectly fine, is nothing very special. Listeners with only one or a very few recordings of the Brahms cycle may nevertheless appreciate this one for some of Young’s interesting and unusual approaches – and the three-CD set’s reasonable price.

     The symphony as a form continues to attract composers of all sorts, and Barbara Harbach (born 1946) seems especially interested in it, having composed 10 symphonies to date. The four most recent (2014-2015) are heard in world première recordings on a new MSR Classics CD featuring the London Philharmonic Orchestra under David Angus, and all four are well-constructed and show considerable ability in handling large orchestral forces. Harbach appears frequently on this label – this is the 11^th CD devoted to her music and the third focused on her orchestral works – and inevitably shows a sure sense of style, and comfort with modern compositional techniques without slavish devotion to them. The four symphonies here are four cases in point: each is in the traditional (indeed, rather old-fashioned) three movements, each lasts 15 to 20 minutes, each is programmatic, and each sounds different from the others but recognizable as Harbach’s for those familiar with her style. The title of No. 7 (“O Pioneers!”) inevitably recalls Copland, but the music does not: the work includes material from Harbach’s 2009 opera based on Willa Cather’s novel, and manages to evoke an earlier time and place in America without sounding particularly derivative. No. 8 (“The Scarlet Letter”) is a three-movement portrait of characters in Hawthorne’s novel, with “Hester” seen in rather formulaic fashion, “Chillingworth” rendered with suitable emotional turmoil, and “Dimmesdale” given what sounds like a rather too-heroic portrayal. No. 9 (“Celestial Symphony”) is drawn from Harbach’s music for the silent film, The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ, and is the most interesting symphony here: dramatic and heartfelt as appropriate, with a strong sense of form that comes through even if a listener does not know the titles of the movements (“The Annunciation,” “Celestial Vaults” and “Temptations”). No. 10 is a strictly political work (“Symphony for Ferguson”), commissioned after riots that occurred after a petty criminal was shot and killed, possibly without sufficient justification, by a police officer. Clearly intended as a work of healing, the symphony is overdone and obvious in its inclusion of everything from Battle Hymn of the Republic to St. Louis Blues. Harbach is a skilled composer, but certainly no Charles Ives. Yet in this case it would not have hurt for her to have considered and perhaps used as a model the Ives movement From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose, in which the hymn In the Sweet Bye and Bye gradually emerges while train passengers absorb the news of the sinking of the Lusitania. There is both subtlety and directness in Ives that never quite emerges in Harbach’s symphony. This is a (+++) CD with numerous interesting elements, but in the long run will mostly be attractive to listeners already familiar with Harbach’s music and perhaps involved in collecting as much of it as possible.

(++++) A THIS AND A THAT

A Greyhound, a Groundhog. By Emily Jenkins. Illustrated by Chris Appelhans. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

What This Story Needs Is a Bang and a Clang. By Emma J. Virján. Harper. $9.99.

     Simple, sweet, and celebratory of the power of both friendship and language, Emily Jenkins’ A Greyhound, a Groundhog has no plot at all – and does not need one. It is all word play interpreting animal play, starting right on the first page, which says, in totality, “A hound. A round hound.” Chris Appelhans’ picture shows a greyhound curled tightly into a circle, not identifiable as a dog, much less a dog of a specific type. But by the next page, the hound unfolds, all long-necked elegance; and on the page after that, there is nothing to be seen but a hole in the ground – with the words, “A hog. A round hog.” And then, on the following page, the groundhog appears, and once that happens, the two soon-to-be-friends stretch and yawn in their own individual ways, and the text starts to mix things up verbally: “A groundhog, a greyhound, a grey little round hound.” Play and good-natured chasing ensue, the illustrations bursting with lively activity and the text shaped to match the action, as when words are typeset vertically and in curves to accompany a scene of the two friends chasing each other (or themselves) in circles. This is a perfect read-aloud book, because the words’ round sounds abound, all the way until – near the end – some butterflies astound. The book simply ends, since without a plot, there is no particular need for a story arc – and that is just fine, because if ever there was a book likely to make kids ages 3-7 listen all the way through and then clap their hands in joy and say, “Again!” it is this one. Parents had best be prepared to explore this non-narrative story some more and still more, from its open to close…as around and around and around the book goes.

     The easy-to-read “Pig in a Wig” books by Emma J. Virján may not have the panache and sheer exuberance of A Greyhound, a Groundhog, but they have pleasures of their own – including a host of amusing sound effects in What This Story Needs Is a Bang and a Clang. Here the titular pig, wearing her usual high-piled bright red wig, is inspired by musical scores and old-fashioned vinyl records to build a bandstand and prepare “to conduct the Pig in a Wig Band.” As the band members show up, so do their instruments’ sounds: “a twang, a tootle, a ping, a boom, a brup, a jingle, a doom-doom-doom” (the last of those from a plucked double bass). Soon there is a motley but apparently tuneful collection of instruments being played by a variety of animals: bear, dog, cat, monkey, turtle and more with flute, trombone, triangle, cymbals – and a cow brings a cowbell, of course. All is going well until a mouse shows up with “a squeak,” that being the sound of the mouse himself rather than that of his instrument, which is a mouse-sized tuba. The mouse’s appearance frightens the cymbal-playing elephant, and soon all the animals are rushing higgledy-piggledy around the stage with “an EEK, and a SHRIEK,” and other highly unmusical noises. But not to worry: the Pig in a Wig insists that “the show must go on” and must include the mouse, who, after all, only wants to play in the band. So the animals march back to the stage and bring along sounds including “a tish, a tootle, a bwap, and a boom,” and the concert evokes “a clap, clap, clap” from the animals that have helpfully shown up to be the band’s audience. A slight story whose sounds can make it fun to read aloud – or can be fun for early readers to figure out and read on their own – What This Story Needs Is a Bang and a Clang offers good fun and a good sense of the rhythm that words, like music, can have…in their own way.

(++++) FOR THE LITTLER KLUTZES

My Clay Critters. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $14.99.

My Egg Carton Animals. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $12.99.

     There is nothing particularly complimentary about being called a klutz – derived from Yiddish, the word means someone who is awkward or clumsy. But the charm of calling a company Klutz lay in the implicit notion that we are all klutzes, one way or another, and can nevertheless make interesting things with our hands if guided carefully enough and given all the things we need for our projects. Maybe “Un-Klutz” would have fit the concept better, but it would not have been as much fun as a name. And now that Klutz operates within Scholastic rather than as a separate, independent company, it is showing that even very young children can be klutzes – or Klutzes, or Un-Klutzes, as you wish – by offering crafts-project kits intended for kids as young as age four. (Traditional Klutz products are generally best for ages eight and up.) My Clay Critters and My Egg Carton Animals adhere to the basic Klutz philosophy of simplicity and amusement – with a touch of additional cuteness thrown in. And, like Klutz “books-plus” products for older kids, these contain clear, easy-to-read-and-follow instructions plus all the items necessary to create a batch of adorable homemade playthings.

     My Clay Critters starts, not surprisingly, with clay – the air-dry type, not the kind that needs to be baked. Six rolls are included, in different colors, along with a 28-page book that gives typically simple Klutz instructions for making 10 different ocean-dwelling creatures: sea turtle, crab, fish, octopus and more. In deference to the age range for which My Clay Critters is intended, the focus here is on manipulating, working with and forming the clay, using the included shaping tool: the potentially over-challenging elements of these brightly colored projects, such as fins and tails, are provided as pre-cut shapes, and screw-on eyes (with insertion points not sharp enough to injure young craftspeople) are included as well. In making the octopus, for example, kids actually make only the octopus’ body, then attach pre-cut tentacles to it and press eyes into the clay to give this critter a more wide-eyed expression than any octopus outside a cartoon will ever have. As it typically does, Klutz throws in an offbeat fact here and there to enliven the proceedings further – for instance, that a group of crabs is called a cast. For each critter, the book shows the finished project, the specific items needed to make it, and then how those items are put together – with everything in easy-to-read language and big, bright illustrations. The clay-working techniques that kids learn here will stand them in good stead when they move on to do other, self-guided projects on their own or in school: My Clay Critters can be a good foundation for further adventures in simple sculpture.

     You would think that if My Clay Critters starts with clay, then My Egg Carton Animals would start with an egg carton. But that is not quite the case. Egg cartons vary a lot, after all: some are cardboard, some are foam, and they come in different colors, with different sorts of printing on them – and may be easy or difficult to cut apart into individual egg cups. So in this case, Klutz provides a kind of idealized egg carton for kids’ projects, in the form of 12 cups that look a lot like the ones in which eggs are packed but that have no printing on them at all and are designed to be easy to break apart and use to build the six farm-animal projects explained in the instruction book (sheep, chicken, goat, cow, and so forth). The plainness of the egg-carton-like basic cups here is wholly intentional, since My Egg Carton Animals includes four colors of paint (and a paintbrush), cotton balls for wool and such, a tube of glue, a dozen googly eyes, and – as in My Clay Critters – lots of punch-out items for animal features that would otherwise be difficult for young children to make, such as wings, ears, tails and horns. The reason the 12 included cups make only six animals is that all the projects here start with gluing two cups together by attaching their rims to each other. That provides the basic shape that kids then decorate with paint, cotton and punch-outs. There is typical, age-appropriate Klutz humor here to keep things interesting, such as the suggestion to make a goatee for the goat. And there is nothing stopping ambitious kids from moving on from the Klutz egg cups to actual pieces of egg cartons in order to create additional creatures – although ambitious young craftspeople will quickly find that everyday egg cartons do not come apart or go together in paired cups as neatly as do the ones that Klutz provides. Still, by the time they finish My Egg Carton Animals and My Clay Critters, young children will know enough about doing these crafts projects so they can strike out on their own with a reasonable expectation of success – and not feel like klutzes at all.

(++++) STILL TO COME?

The God Wave. By Patrick Hemstreet. Harper Voyager. $15.99.

     Originally published last year and now available in a new paperback edition, Patrick Hemstreet’s debut novel, The God Wave, still seems both as prescient and as in-the-moment as when it first appeared. The first book of a trilogy – the second, The God Peak, is expected later this year – The God Wave remains chillingly realistic. The title does not refer, except perhaps obliquely, to the Higgs boson, known as “the god particle,” but instead is a reference to a biological rather than physical phenomenon. This is a brain wave, so far undiscovered, that operates above the measurable frequencies of alpha, beta and gamma waves and that can lead to manifestation of superhuman abilities (which Hemstreet says are really human abilities) in the 90% of the brain that generally goes unused (that 90%-of-the-brain-is-unused notion is a fiction, but one of such long standing that Hemstreet’s employment of it is not too big a strain on one’s credulity). The idea of discovering something new in the human body is scarcely far-fetched – consider, for example, the very recent discovery that the body contains a previously unknown organ called the mesentery. Yes, the presence of tissue connecting the abdomen to the intestines has been known for some time, but the realization that the tissue is a single organ rather than a series of similarly functioning but discrete clumps is a new one, requiring scientists and physicians to look at this part of the body in a new way.

     Something along those lines is what happens in The God Wave, although matters are understandably ratcheted up quite a bit for the sake of drama. The primary characters here are well-meaning, if flawed, scientists; and yes, they are types to some extent, but Hemstreet does a good job of humanizing them. One is idealistic Chuck Brenton, a neuroscience researcher at Johns Hopkins who is looking for real-world applications of brain waves. After all, if they can move the needle during an electroencephalogram, why not use them to drive cars or paint pictures? Back here in the real world, there are already experimental systems that let quadriplegics and other severely physically limited people use their brains for certain types of functionality. Hemstreet’s creation of a desire by Brenton to go just a bit beyond that readily passes the believability test. The problem for Brenton is that math is not his expertise, and he needs help using very complex aspects of it to turn brain waves into commands and actions.

     That is where MIT professor Matt Streegman comes in. A borderline misanthrope and a genius in his own field, Streegman hears an interview with Benton and thinks immediately of how Brenton’s research, if pushed just a bit further, could benefit Streegman’s wife, Lucy. She is hospitalized and comatose, but has active brain waves. Perhaps Brenton’s findings – aided by Streegman’s math expertise – could let Streegman communicate with Lucy. Besides – and, yes, this coincidence does strain credulity a bit – it just so happens that Streegman works not only in higher mathematics but also in robotics.

     Anyone who remembers Edgar Allan Poe’s deeply chilling “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” will see just how wrong things could go in this scenario, although that is not quite the way they actually do go wrong. (In fact, Lucy more or less disappears from the story after being used to set up Streegman’s background. A little more attention to her would better have humanized her husband.)

     It is the partnership of Brenton and Streegman that gets the book going; and if the scene-setting is a touch on the slow side, it helps to remember that this is, after all, the start of a three-book series. The two men form Advanced Kinetics, gather the usual variegated mixture of subjects – gamer, artist, martial-arts specialist, construction worker – and engage in intense research. And fault lines between the researchers develop soon enough. Brenton’s goal is to aid the handicapped and make sea and space exploration easier and safer. Streegman, far less altruistic and more focused on a big financial payoff, is quite willing to get military rather than medical backing for their lab, and his stronger personality soon leads to the involvement of one General Howard, who really is a cardboard character: he gets the lab working on complex research, for military purposes, with the super-secret Deep Shield, and Brenton does not realize what is happening until there is no turning back. But the test subjects themselves (Lanfen, Mike, Mini, Sara and Tim) know that military control of their growing abilities can lead to disaster, and those newly developed capabilities give them powers of which even Brenton and Streegman are unaware. No, this is no Frankenstein or R.U.R., but Hemstreet calls up elements of those tales as the plot of The God Wave enmeshes the characters more and more tightly. The book fits firmly in the SF/action genre while raising the sorts of questions that only the greats in that field raise consistently: philosophical queries about individuality, creativity, and what it means to be fully human. Hemstreet also manages to employ some sly humor from time to time, with references to films ranging from The Matrix to Independence Day to Transformers. The result is a provocative novel that is not only fast-paced and fun to read but also unusually thoughtful and involving. And its cliffhanger ending is quite well done and flows naturally from what has gone before, rather than having the tacked-on quality so common in “stay tuned” conclusions. It will be most interesting to see where Hemstreet goes with his premises and characters as this trilogy continues.

(+++) INTENDED CONSEQUENCES?

Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out! Games, Songs & Stories from an African American Childhood. By Patricia C. McKissack. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. Schwartz & Wade. $24.99.

     The way to perpetuate racism is to insist, repeatedly and at every turn, that the first thing people should notice and pay attention to is the color of someone’s skin. It helps to dress the concept up in flowery language when possible: “affirmative action” rather than “preference based on skin color” is a popular example. But the underlying idea is the same: skin color comes first and everything else comes later. There is certainly justification for Americans of African descent to believe they are entitled to redress longstanding societal imbalances by showing the many highly positive accomplishments of people with darker skin – but even that notion, fraught with the slippery concept of “entitlement,” is a less-than-forthright one. By definition, and often by design, race-based labeling is exclusionary, creating a them-vs.-us world in which any possibility that we are all “us” remains remote and sometimes becomes increasingly so. Thus, for example, museums dedicated to the African American experience are intended as uplift for African Americans but, despite any politically motivated rhetoric to the contrary, are not intended or expected to draw crowds of people of other races, ethnicities and skin colors.

     Missed opportunities to produce a more colorblind world for our children are particularly sad, because even if we accept the notion that our current world remains hopelessly mired in racial identification despite the enormous (although scarcely complete) progress of recent times, there is always the hope that things may be better for the next generation – if, ideally, there is willingness to hold one’s long-held resentment in check for the sake of trying to improve the future. And this is the reason that the new book by Patricia C. McKissack, illustrated by Brian Pinkney, is at the same time so wonderful and so disappointing. The contents – games, rhymes, songs, folk sayings and folk tales, and much more – are often wonderful; but the way they are presented, the unending emphasis on looking at this material first and foremost through the lens of skin color, is a deeply disheartening way of guiding today’s young children to a future filled with feelings of victimization rather than hope.

     Take, for example, the presentation of The Ballad of John Henry. Imagine the effect on two children of different races hearing this story, becoming involved in the man-against-the-machine narrative (which still has great resonance today), and learning at the end of John Henry’s tragic but noble death in representing humanity against the soulless power of machinery – and then learning that John Henry was black. That would be a marvelous teachable moment for both children, because the focus would be on John Henry’s humanity, the way he stands for all people in a time of job loss and automation, the way he stands up for what it means to be human – not black, pink or purple with polka dots, but human. However, that is not what McKissack offers. “John Henry is an African American folk hero,” she states at the start of the first paragraph of her introduction. And: “An African American railroad worker named John Henry actually lived,” she says at the start of the second. So for African American children, we now have a meaningful story – but for others, either nothing or a story about someone “not like me.” That is how racism flourishes.

     Or take McKissack’s retelling of a story of Br’er Rabbit. McKissack trots out the old canard that Joel Chandler Harris, the journalist who brought these stories to widespread attention, was merely a white man perpetuating stereotypes by using “historically inaccurate language patterns” for the characters. McKissack deliberately ignores the fact that Harris lived on a plantation for four years during and after the Civil War, spending much of his time with the slaves because he felt like an outcast himself, being red-headed and Irish at a time when there was considerable discrimination against the Irish and their Catholic religion. Harris specifically named several slaves who told him the Br’er Rabbit stories, and said that he wrote down the tales as they were told to him. Certainly it is possible that Harris was misstating or misremembering in later years, but that is by no means certain. But McKissack does not want to accept the Harris stories, and prefers to rewrite her Br’er Rabbit tale as if told by someone with very good vocabulary and standard-English expressiveness: “They slipped under the fence and proceeded to fill their bellies full of the vegetables.” The rewriting is certainly her prerogative, and she is scarcely the first to do so; but her main objection, that the stories were popularized by someone with the “wrong” skin color, is racist. Nor does she mention Harris only in this connection. In discussing Paul Laurence Dunbar, McKissack mentions that Dunbar not only wrote in standard English but also used dialect, which “was authentic” rather than “stereotypical” like that employed by Harris. So a line such as “Bees gwine to ketch you an’ eat you up yit” is fine when written by Dunbar, but virtually identical lines by Harris are unacceptable because Harris was white. That is racist.

     McKissack is a first-rate writer and recounter of stories. She is also mired and enmeshed in a time far distant from that in which today’s children, of any color, are growing up, and her perceptions are shaped by the fact that when she “was growing up in the 1950s, the southern United States was mostly segregated.” That was an absolute fact of life 60-plus years ago. And the trials and troubles faced by African Americans even today – and not only in the southern United States – are also a fact of life. But the desire to perpetuate resentment of a society that no longer exists is a deeply unfortunate one; the wish to have young children today see marvelous cross-cultural and cross-racial stories, songs, rhymes and fables only or primarily through the lens of skin color, is a deeply distressing one. The items in this book are stated to be “from an African American childhood,” which specifically means from McKissack’s childhood; and as formative bits of nostalgia, they certainly have their place in her life. But our children’s lives can be better than McKissack’s, no matter what color our children’s skins may be, and that is an attitude wholly missing in this skin-color-first collection. Hopefully McKissack does not really believe that today’s children live in a world like the one in which she grew up. It is depressing that she wants to perpetuate that world rather than put it behind her and help give today’s young people a better one.