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Poetry Friday: Carl Sandburg

Jan5

Tomorrow, January 6th, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. So I thought today would be a good Friday to post something by and about Sandburg. I’ve already posted my favorite Sandburg poem, Arithmetic, here. I found this poem tonight:

“Joy” (1916) by Carl Sandburg

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere–
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

I like those last two lines.

Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Dec15


Two books set during World War War II: One takes place in California and Arizona; the other book is set on the other side of the country in North Carolina. Sumiko is twelve years old and lives with her aunt and uncle and cousins on a flower farm; Anna Fay is thirteen and has become “the man of the house” since her daddy’s gone to fight in the war. Both girls are typical older children, responsible, obligated to grow up fast and take care of younger brothers and sisters. Both girls use gardening as a way to work through their problems and challenges. And each must face her own war, her own imprisonment, and her own fight against ignorance and prejudice.

Sumiko, heroine of Weedflower, is a Japanese-American girl; her parents are dead, and she faces prejudice against “orientals” from the beginning of the story when she is dis-invited to a birthday party for a girl in her class. The challenges only get worse after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and all the residents of Japanese descent on the West Coast are gathered and sent to internment camps. Sumiko, her aunt, her two older cousins, and her little brother are sent to Poston in Arizona. There Sumiko must learn to survive and even overcome the heat, the dust, the hostility of neighbors, and even the threat of succumbing to “the ultimate boredom.” The latter is her grandfather’s term for the temptation to give up, to lose your dreams, to surrender hope, a temptation that Sumiko must face and defeat if she is to win her war.

Anna Fay, the main character in Blue has a battle to fight, too. A polio epidemic has invaded western North Carolina in 1944, and Anna Fay’s little brother Bobby falls victim to the dread disease. Later in the story, Anna Fay herself must battle polio, even as she worries about her daddy fighting Hitler in Europe and about whether her family will ever be together again. Anna Fay is trapped in the polio hospital just as Sumiko is trapped in the internment camp, and Anna Fay faces boredom and prejudice, too. The discrimination comes when Anna Fay becomes friends with a “colored girl” who also has polio, but the two girls can’t convince anyone that they should be allowed to share a hospital ward as well as a friendship.

I thought both of these books were excellently well-written. Blue goes for the tear-jerker, drama reaction; the writing in Weedflower is a little more restrained. Sumiko is the stereotypical Japanese, determined to keep her emotions under control and her tears hidden; Anna Fay is comforted by her friend’s word picture of a God who saves each person’s tears in a bottle on a heavenly window-sill. (Anna Fay’s bottle is blue.) Each girl compares herself to a flower: Sumiko is a weedflower, a flower of the field that is both beautiful and resilient; Anna Fay is sometimes as fragile as a mimosa blossom and other times as tough as wisteria.

These books would work well, paired, in a unit study on World War II to give students a good picture of different aspects of the time period. Other World War II books for girls:

Denenberg, Barry. Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.
Denenberg, Barry. One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938.
Greene, Betty. Summer of my German Soldier.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941.
Rinaldi, Ann. Keep Smiling Through.

Weedflower and Blue also have another thing in common; both books are nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Dec5

This afternoon Brown Bear Daughter inhaled this story of a little Jewish girl who survived life during World War II in the Lodz ghetto, and I read it myself in one sitting a few days ago. It’s not a long read, 227 pages, and the prose text is arranged in an almost poetic form such that each page only has about a hundred words. So it doesn’t take long to read, but it does pack an emotional punch.

Ms. Roy wrote the book based on the true story of her Aunt Sylvia Perlmutter, who was one of only twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto in Poland. If you read the introduction or know anything about the Holocaust, you know from the beginning that there are difficult things coming in this book. I hesitated to give it to my eleven year old daughter because I didn’t know how it would affect her emotionally. However, she read it, said it was a good book, and didn’t seem too disturbed. I was the one who mourned as I read for all those children who didn’t survive —and even for those who did.

The Jewish refrain in relation to the Holocaust is, “Never forget!” However, we’re always only one generation away from forgetting what horrors man can perpetrate upon other men. I don’t know what at what age a child is old enough to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, but I agree that we must not forget that “civilized” man is only one step away from barbarous acts of cruelty. And at some point even our children need to know that sin and evil are real.

They also need hope, and Jennifer Roy manages to tell a story that is filled with tragedy and yet leaves the reader with hope. As the story begins in the fall of 1939, little Sylvia is four and a half years old. On January 20, 1945, the day after she and her family are liberated from the ghetto, Sylvia celebrates her tenth birthday. By the time she is ten, Sylvia has seen and experienced things that most of us have, thankfully, only read about. She goes on to live a full life, marriage, a son, grandchildren. For over fifty years she doesn’t talk about her experiences during World War II. Finally, she tells her niece in a series of telephone interviews what she remembers of what happened to her and her family during the Holocaust.

It’s a story worth reading and remembering.

Again, this book is one of the many good books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt

Nov10

Better late than never, I just finished reading my fifth book for Carl’s RIP Reading Challenge, the challenge that was supposed to be done by the end of October. Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure how “gothic, scary, moody, or atmospheric” it is. I’d describe it as more Victorian meets Post-Modern, and Victorian wins —maybe.

This tension between Victorian ideals and post-modern cynicism runs through the book because it’s really set in two time periods. A pair of 1980’s academics are investigating a mystery involving a pair of Victorian poets. The world of post-modern academia is shown to be cutthroat, sexually confused, and filled with social and intellectual angst. The Victorian literary world, on the other hand, is depicted as genteel, sexually confused, and filled with religious confusion and doubt. It’s the sexual confusion that’s the common denominator. For instance, witness this conversation between two female/feminist scholars:

Maud: Just at the moment, I’m trying celibacy. I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.

Lenora: Oh, I did, for a month, back in the fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and should give myself up. So I found Mary-Lou.

The Victorians aren’t much better, but if I go into the details of their tangled affairs, I’ll give away some of the mystery. So, I’ll let it suffice to say the Victorian poets are no more straightforward and unambiguous about love, sex and marriage than the post-modern academics.

Another theme is that of how over-analysis destroys life. The Victorians analyze their faith and weaken its power to comfort or guide behavior. They also engage in the much more concrete destruction of life as they dissect insects and sea creatures and then use them as images and symbols in their poetry. The modern-day academics feel they must know every detail about the lives of the poets, but realize that in dissecting the biographical materials, they risk destroying the life of the poetry. The most intelligent of them also see that self-analysis, ala Freud, has inhibited the ability of men and women to respond to one another naturally almost to the point of extinguishing the possibility for romance. To the very end, the book explores the tensions between autonomy and commitment, between romantic idealism and hard-headed realism, between fatalistic determinism and individual choice.

Finally, though, it was the mystery that kept me reading. These Victorians and denizens of academia were foreign to me, even though I understood some of their concerns. I was, however, quite interested to find out the answers to various mysteries and questions raised in the course of the novel. In fact, I understood the characters’ obsession with finding out, with knowing the ending to the story, as well as I understood any of the complicated motivations in the novel.

One of the Victorian poets is writing a poem based on the myth of Melusina, a sort of mermaid/water spirit. The words that the other fictional poet writes about the Melusine myth are also true of this novel:

What is so peculiarly marvelous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic —and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales —the best of them— are solid— depicting the life of households and the planning of societes, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.

Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. It was made into a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Aaron Eckhart, and Jeremy Northam in 2002. I found the book to be intriguing and mysterious, even if the characters were a bit too tangled up in their post-modern anxieties and inhibitions to be truly sympathetic. If you’re looking for a “literary mystery,” it’s much better, and less gory, than The Dante Club, which was the first of my RIP books.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Oct25

A quotation on the back of the book jacket from a reviewer refers to Mr. Ishiguro’s “inimitably out-of-kilter vision.” THose are just the words I was looking for as I read this book —out-of-kilter. I find that frequently as I read more recently published fiction, in the last fifty years say, I feel a sense of culture shock. These people in I’m reading about are off-kilter, not quite insane, but not thinking logically, not quite right. Eldest Daughter says it’s a feature of post modern fiction and post-modern culture. I guess I’m just a modernist, or maybe Victorian.

Anyway, I picked up When We Were Orphans at a used book sale because I enjoyed Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go so much. I didn’t enjoy this book as much. The narrator was . . . odd. (It must be the week for odd. See this review of The Book Thief.) Christopher Banks, the aforementioned narrator, is such a distinctive personality that it is hard to decide, but I almost convinced myself that Ishiguro was trying to make Banks the embodiment of what was wrong with the British attitude toward the world, and particularly China, prior to World War II. Banks is blind, majoring on minor issues that don’t seem at all minor to him, while the world around him is a literal war zone. The British, too, were blindly crying out “Peace, Peace!” when there was no peace. Then again, Banks’ blindness has to do specifically with his parents and his orphaned state. The British government wasn’t searching for its lost parents. So the analogy only goes so far before it breaks down.

Mr. Ishiguro tells a good story and creates intriguing characters, even if his protagonist does have a bit of a bug in his brain. The other characters in the novel are believable, but negligible. Christopher Banks is the center of interest. The setting for the second half of the story is Shanghai, 1937. Wartime Shanghai is vivdly portrayed, even though the person doing the portraying is somewhat myopic. Somehow the author manages to enable us to see through his narrator. And that vision leads to an ambiguous ending in which Christopher Banks believes he has finally found out what happened to his parents, but I’m not so sure I’m buying the story. So we’re left with more post-modern ambiguity. It’s pretty good slightly off-kilter ambiguity, as evidenced by the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out two days later, if you like that sort of thing.

If you’ve never read anything by Ishiguro, I recommend Never Let Me Go. (Semicolon review here.) If you like that one, and if you like off-center, you’ll probably enjoy When We Were Orphans, too.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Oct22

This was an odd book, so odd that I probably wouldn’t have managed to get very far into it if it hadn’t been recommended so highly by so many people. I’m a straightforward, A-Z, kind of gal. Give me a story that starts out “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after.” Or not happily. Tragedy is OK, too. But I like it straight and plain-spoken, or maybe poetic, but not a strange, episodic story narrated by the Grim Reaper himself.

Except I did like The Book Thief, so I’m confused. The book starts out with this comforting announcement:

* * * HERE IS A SMALL FACT * * *
You are going to die.

It ends with Death Himself beng confused and “haunted by humans.”

So, make what you will of that, and decide whether or not you want to read an odd book about Death and the Holocaust and World War II and bombs and Germany with lots of cursing, mostly in German, and lots of the aforementioned death, mostly of everybody in the book. It sounds depressing, but it’s not really. It is gritty and the tiniest bit hopeful, but not too. I can’t decide if kids will like it or not. I don’t think my kids would care for it. But some might. Or this might be the sort of book that will win lots of awards because it’s written in a different, literary sort of way and it’s about a Serious Subject, but it’s mostly loved by librarians and teachers. I can see high school teachers assigning this book in literature classes or history classes.

If I sound ambivalent, it’s because I am. Help? Someone else tell me now that I’ve read it why it was that you liked it so much.

Visit Semicolon’s Amazon Store for more great book recommendations.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Oct16

With the ‘domestic epic’, a sweeping drama set against a carefully studied social background, she broke a new ground. Undset turned away from the sentimental style of national romanticism and wanted to re-create the realism of the Icelandic sagas and write so vividly, that “everything that seem(s) romantic from here – murder, violence, etc becomes ordinary – comes to life,” as the author explained. . . . Undset’s emphasis on women’s biological nature, and her view that motherhood is the highest duty (to which) a woman can aspire, has been criticized by feminists as reactionary. —Kirjasto

I’m not surprised that feminist critics might not appreciate Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. What a story! I actually began reading this story of a medieval Norwegian mother and wife a long time ago, but found myself unable to stay with it. This time I read it in three separate paperback books, The Bridal Wreath (Part 1), Mistress of Husaby (Part 2), and The Cross (Part 3). I think the three separate books made it more digestible and less intimidating. Anyway, this time I not only read the entire book, over a thousand pages, but I enjoyed it so much that I plan to add it to my list of the 100 Best Fiction Books Ever Written.

The Bridal Wreath tells the story of Kristin’s childhood, her growth into womanhood, her betrothal, her sin and loss of honor, and her marriage. For better or for worse, the decisions that Kristin makes in this first book determine the remainder of the events of her life and her willfulness in choosing her own husband throws a shadow over even the happiest of times in her later life. Kristin is a likeable protagonist, but very much a fallible one. Book 1 of this trilogy is about rebellion and how easy it is to fall into sin, how justifiable it seems. The story also demonstrates how one sin leads to another and “what a tangled web we weave.”

Nevertheless, Kristin becomes The Mistress of Husaby, the medieval estate of her husband, Erlend. She gives her husband sons, seven sons. They are rich in land, in friends, in family. But their character, or lack thereof, comes back to haunt the two of them and their marriage again and again. Having started off on the wrong foot, so to speak, Kristin and her husband can never manage to live in harmony for long. Erlend is careless and untrustworthy, just as he was when Kristin married him. Kristin is often shrewish and disrespectful in response to her husband’s irresponsibility. Still they build a marriage that, just barely, outlasts the storms of adultery, abandonment, imprisonment, sickness, and disgrace.

In Book 3, The Cross, Kristin is getting old for a woman of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She’s in her forties as the story progresses. Her sons are growing up, and her husband is growing old. Kristin must learn the lesson of self-denial and letting go of those whom she loves fiercely and somewhat possessively. Perhaps as my children grow up and begin to leave the nest in little ways, I identify with Kristin in this book most of all. She wants so much to shield her sons from harm and from difficulty, but most of all from themselves and the trouble they will bring upon themselves by their own sins and bad decisions. Oh, I do want the same thing.

“When you yourself had borne a child, Kristin, methought you would understand,” her mother had said once. Now, she understood that her mother’s heart had been scored deep with memories of her daughter, memories of thoughts for her child from the time it was unborn and from all the years a child remembers nothing of, memories of fear and hope and dreams that children never know have been dreamed for them, until their own time comes to fear and hope and dream in secret —

But Kristin learns that her sons have their own dreams and their own unwise decisions to make. And she can only pray for them and leave them to the mercy of God. She comes to realize, too, that her own prayers have always been answered by a faithful God, that she has always been in His hand, even when He allowed her to follow the sinful desires of her own heart.

Never, it seemed to her had she prayed to God for aught else than that He might grant her her own will. And she had got always what she wished—most. And now she sat here with a bruised spirit—not because she had sinned against God, but because she was miscontent that it had been granted her to follow the devices of her own heart to the journey’s end.

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Oh, that the Lord would say “no” and put a barrier in my way when I ask Him for what I think I want but what He does not will. And I pray the same for my children. But sometimes He sees that we need to experience the fruits of our willful decisions before we can see clearly that His will is best.

Kristin Lavransdatter is a wonderful book for wives and mothers especially, for those of us who sometimes struggle with those roles and who often delight in the same. If it’s slow going at first, please persist. The language is beautiful, but somewhat archaic and stilted. I think you’ll find the book worth getting through any initial difficulties.

Visit Semicolon’s Amazon Store for more great book recommendations.

Before There Were Blogs

Sep30

Nowadays for snippets of information, household tips, news analysis, and humorous and autobiographical stories, I go to the internet, usually to blogs. Ten or more years ago I had a subscription to Reader’s Digest. It served much the same purpose, “an article a day of enduring significance.”

Dewitt and Lila Wallace founded the Reader’s Digest Association in 1922.
Their vision for the company was based on a simple notion that people did
not have enough time to read all that was being published, and that people
needed a reading service that selected editorial material to inform, enrich,
entertain and inspire.

The result of the Wallaces’ vision was a pocket-sized magazine, sold at an
annual subscription that would provide an article a day of lasting
interest – and of enduring significance – in condensed form. Today the
magazine offers a mix of engaging original and republished content to appeal
to contemporary tastes. It is the largest-selling magazine in the world,
published in 48 editions and 19 languages, and sold in more than 60
countries.

So how much “enduring significance” did those Reader’s Digest articles contain? Well, it just so happens that I have a lot of those old magazines collecting dust on a top shelf in my bedroom. I thought it would be fun to look at one every now and then and see how significant and enduring it was.

Reader’s Digest, September, 1974.

Current events: a compilation of articles and opinions on the possible eminent impeachment of Richard Nixon (didn’t happen), another on the “rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army” (whatever happened to Patty Hearst?), and still others on busing, Teamsters and the underworld, and the real cost of foreign aid. All of these pieces, while maybe of some historical interest, are dated, not enduring.

“The Colonies Must Be Punished!” by O.K. Armstrong is one of a series of articles, called Great Moments in American History: Bicentennial Feature; this particular article deals with the reaction in Britain and the colonies to the Boston Tea Party. I remember the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. On the Fourth of July, 1976, I was on my way to a youth evangelism conference in Dallas/Fort Worth. For a long time after that, through college, I had the T-shirt with bicentennial colors to prove it. Date yourself; where were you in July 1976?

Back to Reader’s Digest, September, 1974, there are some useful tips on how to make your houseplants behave, how not to get gyped by your auto-repairman, and how to reduce college costs. There’s the obligatory diet article, called “Beware the Diet Saboteur.” “Thousands of people are unable to reduce, obesity specialists find, because their kinfolk knowingly or unknowingly undercut their efforts.” The “psycho-analyze yourself” article is called “What Are You Afraid Of?” and gives us eight suggestions for coping with fear.

Merle Haggard and Sheik Ahmed Zaki al-Yamani get biographical profiles, not in the same articles.

The “special feature” at the end of the magazine is “Solzhenitsyn: Conscience of a Nation.” Enduring significance, yes.

He does not want his country remade in the image of the modern, free-enterprise West. In fact, to some of his admirers, this fierce clinging to everything Russian, including the old concepts of the Russian earth, Russian people, the spiritual values inherent in backward Russia, is one of his limitations as a man and a writer. But it is also one of his greatest sources of strength.

Finally, there’s a kidlit note:

Statement on the copyright page of Toolchest by Jan Adkins: “We have gone to considerable difficulty and expense to assemble a staff of necromancers, sorcerers, shamans, conjurers and lawyers to visit nettlesome and mystifying discomfort on any ninny who endeavors to reproduce or transmit this book in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the publisher. Watch yourself!”

By the way, Toolchest is a beautiful, old children’s book. It’s out of print, but available used from Amazon.

Two Books by Nevil Shute

Sep27

On the Beach by British author Nevil Shute was published in 1957, the same year I was born. It tells the story of the last survivors of a nuclear war that has left enough radioactive fallout to eventually blanket the entire globe and annihilate all humankind. Almost the last inhabitable places are near Melbourne in southern Australia. The book is set in and near Melbourne and begins with T.S. Eliot’s famous words:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river . . .

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


On the Beach may be the saddest book I’ve ever read. I’d add it to my list of Best Tear-Jerkers, but it’s not exactly a tear-jerker. It’s just ineffably sad. The world is ending with a whimper, and Shute describes the effect of that sort of hopeless situation on a group of rather ordinary people. I have a few quibbles with the way he describes it all; I think there might be more religion, and more violence at the same time, in such a world, but maybe it would be just as Shute says. I hope I never live in such a time and place to find out. This book was fascinating, in a morbid sort of way, but it’s as close as I want to get to the edge of hopelessness.

Nevil Shute Norway was an aviation engineer who started his own aircraft company and worked on the development of secret weapons for the British during World War II. Before and after the war, he worked as a novelist and wrote a total of twenty-four novels. He’s said to be better at plots than at characterization, but I found his characters in On the Beach and A Town Like Alice, the other of his books I read, to be quite memorable. Commander Dwight Towers of the U.S. Navy is a law-abiding faithful Dobbin of a ship’s captain who nevertheless is attracted to Moira, an Australian party girl. Jean Paget, in A Town Like Alice, is a heroine of uncommon depth and character although it takes a war and the Australian outback to bring out all the resources she finds within herself.

I must say something more about A Town Like Alice, especially since it was my favorite of the two books by Nevil Shute that I read. If the the two books have a common theme it’s that of ordinary people responding to extraordinary circumstances with courage and ingenuity. Much more upbeat than On the Beach, A Town Like Alice is a novel in two parts. The first part is about Jean Paget, one of eighty women captured by the Japanese on the Malay pennisula and then marched from place to place because their captors don’t know what to do with them. (This first part of the novel is based on a true event that happened in Sumatra rather than Malaya.) The second part of the story takes place in Australia as Jean comes to see that she is more than just a survivor; she’s also a builder, able to grow and thrive in the Australian desert.

Engineer Nevil Shute Norway does know how to tell a good story. I recommend both of the books I read. Just don’t choose On the Beach for a day when you’re already depressed about life and the world in general. It’s more appropriate for the times when you’re feeling a little cocky and need a bit of a sobering reality check. A Town Like Alice is useful for inspiration and a good, decent story.

On the Beach and A Town Like Alice have both been made into movies, each one twice in fact. The 1959 version of On the Beach starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astair, and Anthony Perkins. Nevil Shute hated the movie, but it made him famous and probably scared the heck out of a whole bunch of people.

Links:
Nevil Shute Norway Foundation.
Will Duquette at View from the Foothills has reviewed several of Nevil Shute’s novels.

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Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Aug16

If you’re interested in carrier pigeons, or pet birds, or India, or birds used in war, this Newbery award book from 1928 might just fit the bill. Yes, it’s somewhat dated in style and content. Yes, the first half of the book is a nature story reminiscent of Jean Craighead George’s books such as The Other Side of the Mountain, and the second half changes focus and deals with themes of fear, war, and religion. Yes, the narration jumps back and forth from the boy who owns and trains the pigeon to Gay-Neck himself telling his own story by means of “the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of imagination.” Yes, its audience would probably be limited, but I think there are some children and adults, especially nature lovers and bird lovers, who would really like this book.

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born near Calcutta in 1890 and came to the United States at the age of nineteen. So, I’m fairly sure he gets the atmosphere of life for a boy in early twentieth century India. Mukerji wrote other nature stories, including Kari the Elephant and Hari the Jungle Lad. In Gay-Neck, Mukerji gives a lot of information about pigeons and about training pigeons, and he imparts that information by means of a fascinating story of the adventures of one particular pigeon, Gay-Neck or Chitra-griva.

The descriptions of the pigeons’ defense against their enemies, eagles and hawks, and of their capacity to deliver messages even in the midst of battle are detailed enough to make the reader feel as if he could go out, purchase a pigeon, and begin training tomorrow. And it sounds like fun. As an adult and a non-animal lover, I’m sure it’s not that simple, but don’t be surprised if a child, after reading this book, wants his own bird to train and watch and admire.

Gay-neck is admirable. Even when he gives in to fear after a deadly encounter with a predatory hawk, and again after his war experiences, Gay-Neck is able to make a comeback. “Love for his mate and the change of place and climate healed him of fear, that most fell disease.”

The story does take place in India, and it’s filled with lamas and monks and Hindu or Buddhist prayer and meditation. If that’s going to bother you or confuse your child, but you still want a book about training pigeons or about India, try something else. However, if you can appreciate the story as a picture of another place and another time, a vivid portrait of a boy and his pet bird, and a good imaginary tale of India and its culture and a childhood in the Indian countryside, you should enjoy this book

Gay-Neck is a good homeschool book. It would make a fun read aloud for children who haven’t been spoiled by too much action in TV and movies. Gay-Neck has lots of action, war and predators and natural disasters, but the reader or listener must have an imagination to appreciate the story. Gay-Neck would be good to read during a science study of birds or ecosystems, or as we’re doing, during a study of India and its culture. The boy in the story spends most of his time with his pigeons, caring for them and training them, and he learns a great deal about birds and about communication and about fear and courage. I can see a homeschooled child making the raising of pigeons a cross-curricular project and learning more than just how to train birds, too.

Finally, I leave you with a sample of Mukerji’s observations on nature, especially animal life:

I thought, “The buffalo that in nature looks healthy and silken, in a zoo is a mangy creature with matted mane and dirty skin. Can those who see buffalo in captivity ever conceive how beautiful they can be? What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature–which is worth a hundred in any zoo–must derive their knowledge of God’s creatures from their appearance in prisons! If we cannot perceive any right proportion of man’s moral nature by looking at prisoners in a jail, how do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?”