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The Boy Who Drew Birds by Jacqueline Davies

Mar1

The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon by Jacqueline Davies, illustrated by Melissa Sweet.

This picture book, only 32 pages, does not attempt to even summarize the entire life of artist and naturalist John James Audubon, but it does tell of one particular episode in the life of young Audubon as he was just beginning his life’s work in the study of birds. And that’s what I learned from the book: Audubon didn’t just draw birds, but he also studied their habits and features and habitats as a scientist would.

Audubon grew up in France and learned about birds from his father. He came to America mostly to avoid having to serve in Napoleon’s army. Ms. Davies’ book tells of how John James Audubon experimented and proved a theory about birds: that many birds return to the same nest each year after migrating, and their offspring nest nearby. He confirmed this theory by banding some of the birds he was observing with a silver thread. He was the first person in North America to band a bird.

This picture book story would be wonderful introduction to Audubon’s work, but of course, the next obvious step is to look at Audubon’s paintings and drawings and become familiar with Audubon, the artist. According to the author’s biographical note in the back of the book, “His revolutionary paintings pleased two audiences: scientists, who were drawn to their accuracy, and ordinary people, who simply enjoyed the beauty of his birds.”

Melissa Sweet, who illustrated this lovely picture book, says she was inspired by another aspect of Audubon’s art: “his handwriting and the quality of the handmade papers he used.” Sweet’s art is just that, sweet, and very much in tune with the setting and the cadence of Audubon’s amateur love for birds, which became something much more than amateur, indeed a profession and an art that continues to delight today.

There’s a Dover coloring book, called Audubon’s Birds of America Coloring Book that would be a fantastic go-along with this story. And of course, nothing substitutes for a nature walk and finding your own birds to observe (and draw) in the wild.

If you are interested in purchasing ($5.00) a curated list of favorite picture book biographies with over 300 picture books about all sorts of different people, email me at sherryDOTpray4youATgmailDOTcom. I’m highlighting picture book biographies in March. What is your favorite picture book about a real person?

Marvelous Mattie by Emily Arnold McCully

Feb28

Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully.

I first heard of Margaret Knight as a minor character in Christopher Healy’s book A Dastardly Plot, the first in his new series Perilous Journey of Danger & Mayhem about a late nineteenth century girl and her mother, both of whom are inventors. The girl, Molly Pepper, is a fictional character, but the characters and events that swirl around her madcap adventures are not all fictional: Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and of course, Margaret E. Knight.

Margaret Knight was born February 14, 1838. Young Margaret began inventing useful things when she was a child, always sketching ideas and using her tools to build things. Ms.Knight grew up in near-poverty, her father deceased, and went to work in a cotton mill at the age of twelve. As an adult, Ms. Knight had many inventions and over twenty patents to her name by the time of her death in 1914, earning her the title in the popular press of the “Lady Edison.” She had to defend her work in court as a man who tried to steal her ideas said she “could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities” of her own machine, a machine that made flat-bottomed paper bags. But Margaret was able to demonstrate her capabilities in the courtroom, and she won her case.

Another picture book biography about Margaret Knight, in the Great Idea Series by Monica Kulling, is titled In the Bag! Margaret Knight Wraps It Up. I haven’t read this second picture book bio, but it looks good. I think either book would be a lovely way to kick off Women’s History Month in March or to begin a study of inventors and inventions anytime of the year. Then, as an activity or experiment, try folding and cutting a piece of paper to make a paper bag with a flat bottom, and imagine building machine that would make these paper bags for widespread use.

If you are interested in purchasing ($5.00) a curated list of favorite picture book biographies with over 300 picture books about all sorts of different people, email me at sherryDOTpray4youATgmailDOTcom. I’m highlighting picture book biographies in March. What is your favorite picture book about a real person?

Abe Lincoln’s Other Mother: The Story of Sarah Bush Lincoln by Bernadine Bailey

Feb12

Well, today is the anniversary of the birth of perhaps America’s most beloved president, Abraham Lincoln. (Only George Washington, whose birthday is also this month, rivals Lincoln in fame and veneration.) So, although I didn’t plan it, I picked a good day to have finished reading this biography of Lincoln’s stepmother and to post some thoughts on it.

This Messner biography is written for upper elementary and middle school readers, perhaps high school, although today’s young adult readers might find it a bit too unsophisticated for their tastes. The book certainly idealizes Sarah Lincoln and her stepson, Abe, while characterizing Abe’s father, Thomas Lincoln, as somewhat lazy and lacking in ambition. In this lightly fictionalized biography, Sarah Bush Lincoln is the backbone and foundation of the Lincoln family, careful to respect her husband, but always encouraging him to do more, provide more, and work harder. Abe Lincoln is the child prodigy, hard worker, and studious young man that Sarah Lincoln is proud to encourage and support.

It all makes for a very readable and interesting introduction to the life of Abraham Lincoln, and the book shows the importance of the influence of a good parent on the lives of the children. Although Abe Lincoln is the focus of Sarah’s attention and love in the book, the other Lincoln children also grow to be capable adults under the tutelage of their hard-working mother and despite the example of their rolling stone of a father. Well, mostly they grow up to be responsible adults. The book indicates that the youngest of Sarah’s three children from a previous marriage, John Johnston, is not very dependable as an adult. I looked up John on the internet and found this letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to his step-brother in 1851, about nine years before Lincoln became president. So, I’m guessing that the author of this biography of John’s mother got John’s character pegged just about right.

I also read the Wikipedia article about Abe’s father, Thomas Lincoln, and from I can glean there, Ms. Bailey’s portrait of Thomas rings fair and true. At any rate, this biography, at a little more than 200 pages, gives a brief but tantalizing view of Lincoln’s childhood and early adulthood, of his relationship with his family, especially Sarah Bush Lincoln, and of his rise to prominence. The book would be inspiring to mothers and to children as they read of the obstacles that Sarah Lincoln overcame to provide a loving home and decent provision for a husband and five children. And the book also shows the persistence and loving-kindness of Lincoln himself as he cared for his step-mother at home and even after he left home until the end of his life.

These Messner biographies are quite well written and fascinating. So far I have read and reviewed five of these biographies, including this one about Sarah Lincoln, and I read two more that I didn’t manage to review. So, I’ve read seven in all. And I recommend all seven of those I’ve read in this series.

The Little Giant: Stephen A. Douglas by Jeanette Covert Nolan
The Doctor Who Saved Babies: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis by Josephine Rich.
Antonin Dvorak: Composer From Bohemia by Claire Lee Purdy
Eloquent Crusader: Ernestine Rose by Yuri Suhl
First Lady of the Theatre: Sarah Siddons by Molly Costain
Mr. Lincoln’s Master Spy: Lafayette Baker by Arthur Orrmont.

Ferdinand Magellan, Master Mariner by Seymour Gates Pond

Feb6

Ferdinand Magellan, the man who led the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe, was born on February 3, 1480. So, happy belated birthday to Captain Magellan!

I read this *Landmark history book in honor of Magellan’s birthday. It was a somewhat hagiographic volume on the life and work of this Portuguese explorer who took a fleet of Spanish ships and pushed, prodded, and bullied the sailors and officers under his command until they reached the Pacific Ocean, through what are now called the Straits of Magellan. In fact, what most people know about Magellan, that he was the first to sail around the world, is wrong. Magellan only made it to the south Pacific island of Mactan where he was killed in a battle to invade the island, subjugate it to the King of Spain, and convert the natives, by force, to Christianity.

Magellan, at least the way Mr. Pond presents him, was a very forceful and stubborn man. Pond uses adjectives such as “resolute”, “heroic”, “bold”, “brave”, and “perhaps overzealous” to describe Magellan and his actions. In his impatient and overbearing desire to see the islanders convert to Christianity and bow to the sovereign power of Spain, Magellan rushed in to land on the island of Mactan, where the people were hostile to his overtures, and he invaded with only forty-nine armed sailors to support him. The islanders numbered in the thousands, again according to Pond, and Magellan was killed almost immediately. But one of his five ships made it back to Spain with nineteen survivors, out of two hundred sixty seven seamen who set set sail with Magellan three years before.

So, Magellan gets the credit as the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519-1522. And more than four hundred years later Mr. Seymour Gates Pond writes a book about Magellan and his “heroic courage, the ideal to serve unselfishly a great cause for mankind.” I read recently that courage is the median virtue between cowardice and recklessness, and I would tend to think that Magellan, courageous to a fault, erred on the side of recklessness. Nevertheless, his story was a fascinating look at the perils of exploration in the sixteenth century and the values of a biographer in the mmid-twentieth century. In this time of deconstruction of all heroes, I’m not sure anyone could write such an adulatory biography of Ferdinand Magellan, but I’m glad it exists. The biography is certainly informative and well-written, and as a history read-aloud it could certainly provoke an interesting discussion on leadership and courage and the value of wisdom to temper reckless bravery.

*The Landmark series of history books, published by Random House in the 1950’s and 1960’s, were a series of history books written by such famous and talented authors as John Gunther (best-selling author and journalist), Mackinlay Kantor (Pulitzer Prize winner), Sterling North (Newbery honor), Armstrong Sperry (Newbery Award winner), Robert Penn Warren (Pulitzer Prize winner), Pearl S. Buck (Nobel Prize for Literature), Jim Kjelgaard, Quentin Reynolds (World War II reporter), Van Wyck Mason (historian and best-selling novelist) and C.S. Forrester. There were 122 titles in all. For any upper elementary or middle school age student trying to get a handle on World or American history, these books are the gold standard.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

Born on This Day: Vera B. Williams, 1927-2015

Jan28

Vera B. Williams was an American illustrator and author who wrote several popular picture books for children. The two that I’m most familiar with are A Chair for My Mother, which won a Newbery Honor, and Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe, the story journal of a mother-daughter-aunt canoe trip. A Chair fro My Mother is a beautiful homely story about a girl whose family experiences a fire in their apartment. No one is hurt, but all of their possessions are destroyed in the fire. Their community and family come together to give them things to help them start again, but the one things they don’t have is a soft, comfortable chair for the girl’s mother to relax in after a hard day of work at the diner. SO the family begins to save up their money in a big jar to buy a chair for mother (and grandmother who lives with them). It’s such a good book about a working class family and about how families work together to manage their money and save for something important. I feel as if the book teaches gratitude and delayed gratification and teamwork and so much more, but in a story, not a sermon.

Ms. Williams’ bio sounds as if she led a colorful life: she helped start a “community” (sounds like a commune) in the hills of North Carolina and a school based on the Summerhill model. Then she moved to Canada and lived on a houseboat for a while, where she illustrated her first book. Oh, and she spent a month in the federal penitentiary in West Virginia after a “peaceful blockade of the Pentagon.”

“I don’t make a point of ending up in jail. But if you try to put your hopes and beliefs for a better life into effect, arrest is sometimes a hazard. As a person who works for children, who raised three children … I have to be able to say I did something to try to save our planet from destruction.”

It sounds as if our politics may differ, but I do appreciate Ms. Williams’ books.

Born on This Date: Carol Kendall, b.1917, d.2012

Sep13

The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall. The story of five non-conformist Minnipins who become unlikely heroes. The Periods, stodgy old conservatives with names such as Etc. and Geo., are wonderful parodies of those who are all caught up in the forms and have forgotten the meanings. And Muggles, Mingy, Gummy, Walter the Earl, and Curley Green, the Minnipins who don’t quite fit in and who paint their doors colors other than green, are wonderful examples of those pesky artistic/scientific types who live just outside the rules of polite society. The Gammage Cup was a Newbery Honor book in 1960.

The Whisper of Glocken by Carol Kendall. A sequel to The Gammage Cup, Whisper continues the story of the Minnipins and their isolated valley home. In this story which takes place among a new generation of Minnipins, the Minnipin valley is being flooded. Five new unlikely heroes—Crustabread, Scumble, Glocken, Gam Lutie, and Silky— set out on a quest to release the dammed river.

The Firelings by Carol Kendall is a third fantasy novel for middle grade readers and older, but it does not take place in the the world of the Minnipins. Instead, the Firelings are a group of people who live underneath a volcano and worship the fire god, Belcher. As the heretofore dormant volcano begins to erupt, a group of again “unlikely heroes” must find a way to save the Firelings.

Ms. Kendall also wrote a couple of children’s mysteries, a couple of adult mysteries, and two collections of folk tales, Chinese and Japanese. She liked to travel, but made her home in Lawrence, Kansas.

In a 1999 lawsuit, an author, Nancy Stouffer, accused J.K. Rowling of plagiarizing the name “Muggles” from her books. But Rowling’s lawyer pointed out that Carol Kendall used the name “Muggles” for one of her, very ordinary, characters many years previous to Rowling’s or Stouffer’s use of the term/name. Carol Kendall is said to have laughed at the brouhaha and said, “I’ve got no quarrel with them … There’s only so many ideas and if you have one then someone else out there probably has the same one, too.”

Quotes from Kendall’s books:

“No matter where There is, when you arrive it becomes Here.”

“When you say what you think, be sure to think what you say.”

“You never can tell
From a Minnipin’s hide
What color he is
Down deep inside.”

“If you don’t look for Trouble, how can you know it’s there?”

“Where there’s fire, there’s smoke.”

“It was easy to be generous when you had a lot of anything. The pinch came when you had to divide not-enough.”

“No hurry about opening his eyes to see where he was. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to open them anyway; and if he was alive, he didn’t feel up to facing whatever had to be faced just now. After a while it occurred to him that he had no business being dead. You couldn’t just selfishly go off dead, leaving your friends to their fate, and still feel easy in your mind.”

“[I]t came to him—–the truth about heroes. You can’t see a hero because heroes are born in the heart and mind. A hero stands fast when the urge is to run, and runs when he would rather take root. A hero doesn’t give up, even when all is lost.”

All three of Kendall’s fantasy novels for children, but especially The Gammage Cup, are not as well known as they ought to be and also highly recommended—by me.

Born on This Day: Joan Aiken

Sep4

Joan Aiken, b.September 4, 1924, d.January 4, 2004.

She was the daughter of American poet, Conrad Aiken, and her mother was Canadian, later married to yet another famous writer, Martin Armstrong. Her older sister was also an author, so the writing gene seems to have run in the family.

Joan Aiken was homeschooled by her mother until she was twelve years old. Then, she attended a girls’ school for about four years, and then she began to write. She finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen. She never attended university. She published over a hundred books in many different genres. Homeschool success story, anyone?

Her books are quite well-written, intriguing, and imaginative. The children’s books that she is most famous for, the Wolves Chronicles, are not going to be to everyone’s taste. They’re rather Dickensian, alternate history, with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe.

Take, for instance, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It’s creepy and perilous. It’s set in a sort of alternate Georgian England in which there are dangerous wolves everywhere, and everyone knows how to shoot them for self-protection, even children. Add in a villainous governess, a duplicitous lawyer, an orphan sent to a Dickensian school, and a ship lost at sea, and you’ve got Gothic for children. Just scary enough to be fun, but everything works out in the end. The other books in the series are Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966), The Whispering Mountain (1968), The Stolen Lake (1981), Dangerous Games (1999), The Cuckoo Tree (1971), Dido and Pa (1986), Is Underground (1992), Cold Shoulder Road (1995), Midwinter Nightingale (2003), and The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005).

Then, there’s second series for children, the Arabel and Mortimer books, which begins with Arabel’s Raven and continues on with twelve more volumes. (Ms. Aiken was obviously a fan of long series of books with the same fantastic setting.) I’ll read that one someday, after I finish all of the Wolves Chronicles.

Ms. Aiken was also a Janeite, and she wrote several books that were sequels to or take-offs on Jane Austen’s novels. I’d like to read one of those one day.

More about Joan Aiken:
Happy Birthday, Celebrating Joan Aiken.
Review of Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken at the blog Diary of an Eccentric.
Joan Aiken’s website.

Born on This Day: June 5th

Jun5

Richard Scarry, 1919-1994, illustrated and sometimes wrote the text for more than 300 children’s books, most of them set in the imaginary metropolis of Busytown. Busytown was inhabited by various anthropomorphic animals with names such as Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, Postman Pig, Bananas Gorilla, and my favorite, Mr. Frumble.

Scarry’s characters and stories lent themselves well to cartoons and video, and several series and individual videos were made of Busytown’s denizens. Here’s one example from Youtube; many more are available for watching:

The books are mostly a bit too busy for my tastes, but my children enjoyed them back in the day. If they are twaddle they are fairly harmless twaddle. Unfortunately, I think, some of Scarry’s stories and illustrations were edited and updated in later editions “to make them conform to changing social values.” Characters in cowboy or Indian costumes were deleted or re-clothed, gender roles were de-emphasized or switched so that girls were driving bulldozers and boys were cooking and cleaning. Such silliness.

If you want to try out a Busytown adventure, I would suggest Pig Will and Pig Won’t: A Book of Manners, Mr. Frumble’s Worst Day Ever, Be Careful, Mr Frumble, or Please and Thank You Book.

Henry James, b. April 15, 1843, d.

Apr15

“In Heaven there’ll be no algebra,
No learning dates or names,
But only playing golden harps
And reading Henry James.”
~Displayed at James’s home, Lambs House in Rye and said to have been written by Henry James’s nephew in the guest book there.

I doubt this little jingle is an accurate description of heaven, but if it were, then it would follow that even though such a heaven would be bereft of higher mathematics, it would involve a great deal of thinking. One can’t read Henry James without thinking, carefully. For instance, I found this excerpt of criticism by James, concerning William Morris’s poem The Life and Death of Jason, to be quite amusing after I thought about it and figured out what James was actually saying. (Maybe I liked it partly because I’m also not a fan of Mr. Swinburne.):

“Mr. Morris’s poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne’s enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman’s own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris’s poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.”

I want to steal (borrow?) James’s template sometime and use it in my own reviews, for example: “XYZ fantasy novel reminds me of Tolkien and Lewis, and so even though its writing has been compared in reviews to that of contemporary and less talented fantasy authors, to resemble Tolkien and Lewis is a great safeguard against modernity.”

So happy birthday to Henry James, who resembles no other author, really, and has been called by readers and critics, the Master. His books and other works do require effort and some thought to be appreciated, but that’s certainly not a bad thing. It depends on the reader as to whether you think James is worth the effort.

Links and thinks for Henry James:

William Faulkner on Henry James: “One of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

Ernest Hemingway on Henry James and his novels: “Knowing nothing about James, it seems to me to be the s–t.” Also, “he wrote nice but he lived pretty dull I think. Too dull maybe and wrote too nice about too dull.”

LOST Reading Project: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Oscar Wilde: “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”

Christopher Beha, James and the Great YA Debate: “So few other writers offer the particular pleasures that James does.”

From Portrait of a Lady:

“It has made me better loving you. . . it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”

Top 10 Henry James novels by Michael Gorra, Publisher’s Weekly.

Henry James on life: “To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.”

And, finally, a quotation that seems to epitomize James’s approach to writing and to the United States. (He moved to England and lived most of his adult life there.): “I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.”

If Mr. James’s novels may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is not an American author. And to resemble no other American author is a great safeguard against resembling Hemingway.

Born on This Day: Erik Christian Haugaard, 1923-2009

Apr13

Born on April 13, 1923 in Denmark, Erik Christian Haugaard eventually made his way to the United States and became a writer, even though he left school at the age of fifteen and left Denmark at the age of seventeen. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, young Erik Haugaard got out of Denmark just ahead of the invasion on the last ship out of Danish waters to the United States. After that he traveled some in the U.S., joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, went to college some during and after the war was over, and then began to write. An editor at Houghton Mifflin suggested that he rewrite a manuscript he had submitted and make it into a story for children. And so he wrote his first book for children, Hakon of Rogen’s Saga, a novel about the medieval ruler, Earl Hakon of Norway.

I have five of Haugaard’s thirteen or so books in my library:

Hakon of Rogen’s Saga and A Slave’s Tale are both set in Viking times, after the Christianization of Norway, but in a time when the pagan gods and customs were still in conflict with the new Christian way of looking at life. Leif the Unlucky, also set among the Vikings, is a fictionalized look at the Greenland colony of Lief Ericksson, an attempt at nation-building that did not turn out well.

Orphans of the Wind is a U.S. civil war sailing story. Haugaard’s books tend to be about young boys or girls getting caught up in the dangers and travails of war.

The Samurai’s Tale is one of three books that Haugaard wrote about ancient Japan and the samurai. The other two (that I don’t own) are The Boy and the Samurai and The Revenge of the Forty-Seven Samurai.

Cromwell’s Boy is about a young man living during the English civil war of Oliver Cromwell’s day. It’s a sequel to the book, A Messenger for Parliament, a book that’s on my wishlist.

The Little Fishes, another war story that I do not own, is set in occupied Italy with a twelve year old orphaned beggar named Guido as the protagonist.

The Haugaard book that I most recently acquired and read is titled Chase Me, Catch Nobody. Set in pre-war Germany and Denmark, Chase Me, Catch Nobody features a fourteen year old Danish schoolboy who must be at least a semi-autobiographical character. Erik Hansen (not Haugaard) narrates this story of a school trip to Nazi Germany in 1937. Erik in the book describes himself in much the same way that author Erik Haugaard reminisces about his younger self in a 1979 interview I read. Erik Haugaard the author and Erik Hansen the character are both from upper middle class backgrounds, indifferent students, ambitious to write poetry, and as adolescents “a bit of a snob.” Haugaard says in the interview that even as an adult writer what he most needs and craves from an editor is praise, praise, and more praise. Erik Hansen is self-aware enough to know and tell the reader that he is somewhat ashamed of his parents and their “lack of imagination” and middle class values, but that he enjoys being wealthy and generous just like his father and that he and his father indeed share share many of the same faults, “which is why we didn’t get along.”

I thought the book, rated YA for some fumbling talk about sex and for the very adolescent attitudes expressed in story, was very insightful as the characters, mostly Erik and his friend Nikolai, gained more and more insight into their own characters and their own ability to act with courage and conviction. The boys are tested by an encounter with a stranger in a grey raincoat who entrusts Erik with a mysterious package to deliver just before the man is arrested by the Gestapo. Then, later in the book, Erik and Nikolai are given another mission to complete that will require them to face great danger in order to possibly save a life. And through the book while Erik and his friend act with courage and determination, they are also typical teens, idealistic, sarcastic, foolhardy, convinced of their own invincibility and at the same time vulnerable and unsure of their own beliefs and convictions.

I was reminded of this book, The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club by Phillip Hoose, and I think these two books would be quite a good pair to read in tandem for a teen book club or discussion group. I wrote that The Boys Who Challenged Hitler was “an interesting and exciting portrait of youthful zeal and even foolhardiness which can sometimes trump an adult over-abundance of caution and planning” and the same could be said of Chase Me, Catch Nobody. But the discussion could also cover the possibility that such youthful enthusiasm and lack of respect for possible consequences or for the sheer enormity of the evil that was Naziism could bring many lives to ruin, as it indeed did in some places and situations in the Allied resistance during World War II.

I recommend Haugaard’s books for young adult readers who enjoy a challenging story that will cause them to think about character and philosophy and politics and see these subjects through the eyes of different people from themselves. However, as Haugaard says in the afore-mentioned interview it is much easier to see what’s wrong with the world than it is to see what’s right or to find solutions to the problems. Perhaps just seeing today’s political and social problems in a different historical setting such as medieval Japan or a Viking colony in Greenland will make us see those issues in a new way and begin to understand the path toward new solutions.

Erik Christian Haugaard also made his own translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, published by Doubleday as A Complete Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. The translation project took Haugaard three years to finish.

“I don’t know whether my own books will survive, but if I have saved any of Andersen’s stories from obscurity, I have made a contribution to English literature. Who Wouldn’t be grateful for having had such an opportunity!” ~Erik Christian Haugaard, interview in Language Arts, Vol. 56, No. 5 (May 1979), pp. 549-561.