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Admiral Byrd of Antarctica by Michael Gladych

May23

Another Messner biography, published in 1960, Admiral Byrd of Antarctica is a solid, decent read, but not as enthralling or inspiring as other Messner biographies I’ve read. Gladych characterizes Byrd, who explored both the Arctic and the Antarctic, as resourceful, persistent, brave and somewhat driven by a desire to do something important and noteworthy.

The most celebrated event of Byrd’s life came in 1934 on his second Antarctic expedition when he spent five months alone gathering meteorological data in a base station during the antarctic winter. He almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a poorly ventilated stove. He later wrote an account of his experiences when isolated and on his own in his book, Alone. Gladych quotes Byrd saying about his motivation for manning the station by himself:

“There comes a time in every man’s life when he should take stock of himself—sort of check on his navigation, so to speak. . . . You see, it has taken me a long time to get where I am today. And we are all like aircraft on nonstop flights, with time like precious fuel which we cannot replenish. God alone knows how much time-fuel I have left, and I’d like to check my course—make sure that where I am headed is where I should be going. I can do it best alone—out there.”

p.156

I don’t know if that’s an actual quote from Admiral Byrd, or a paraphrase of something he said, or entirely made up by author Gladych. However, while the idea of checking your course by way of an extended retreat is a good one, I think it could have been accomplished with less drama and danger, to Byrd and to his compatriots who eventually had to come to his rescue. But, then, what do I know about polar exploration or the compulsion to adventure and challenge the unknown?

Admiral Byrd was one of the most highly decorated Navy officers in U.S. military history. He also got all kinds of awards and commendations from various non-governmental organizations. But the fact that his wife, Marie, stayed married to him and raised their four children by herself for a good bit of their marriage seems like the best commendation of all. She must have seen something in him. He did name a region in Antartica after his long-suffering wife, Marie Byrd Land.

Some other books about Admiral Byrd and his adventures:

  • Black Whiteness: Admiral Byrd Alone in the Antarctic by Robert Burleigh. Picture book about Byrd’s famous near-death experiment in solitude.
  • Something to Tell the Grandcows by Ellen Spinelli. Picture book. Hoping to have an adventure to impress her grandcows, Emmadine Cow joins Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his 1933 expedition to the South Pole. I have this book in my library.
  • Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Richard Evelyn Byrd.
  • Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd by Lisle E. Rose. An adult biography of the explorer published in 2008.
  • Richard E. Byrd: Adventurer to the Poles by Adele de Leeuw. A children’s biography from the series by Garrard Publishers, Discovery biographies.
  • Byrd & Igloo: A Polar Adventure by Samantha Seiple. A narrative account for children of the daring adventures of the legendary polar explorer and aviator and his loveable dog companion draws on letters, diaries, interviews, newspaper clippings, and expedition records.
  • Admiral Richard Byrd: Alone in the Antarctic by Paul Rink. Original title: Conquering Antartica: Admiral Richard E. Byrd.
  • We Were There With Byrd at the South Pole by Charles S. Strong. Juvenile fiction set during Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition.

The Winged Girl of Knossos by Erick Berry

Sep11

Erick Berry was the pen name of author, illustrator, and editor Evangel Allena Champlin Best. She wrote this book, based on the Greek myths about Icarus, Theseus, Ariadne, and Daidalos, and interestingly enough, for this female author with a male pseudonym, she turns Icarus, Daidalos’ son, into a daughter named Inas.

Inas, the protagonist of this myth retold as historical fiction, is a brave and daring character. She dives in the Aegean Sea for sponges. She assists the Princess Ariadne of Crete in her court intrigues and plots to save the life of the Greek captive Theseus. She uses the wings that her inventor father has built to glide from the cliffs down to the seashore. She is a bull-vaulter, taking part in the ancient games of skill that her countrymen celebrate. She helps her father to escape the wrath of King Minos when the king is misled into thinking that Daidalos is a traitor.

There is a bit of romance in the novel, and the characters do a bit more dithering about trying to decide what to do and how to do it than I would like. But overall the book is a lovely introduction to the culture and history of ancient Crete encased in an exciting adventure saga.

“Long, long before blind Homer sang his songs of ancient Troy, long even before Troy itself rose from the ashes of her past and fair Helen smiled from the towers of Ilium, Minos reigned in Crete. The broad halls of the palace at Knossos welcomed traders from Egypt and from Sicily, from far Africa and rain-swept Cornwall and the savage shores of the Black Sea, and Daidalos built the Labyrinth, and dark Ariadne loved the brown-haired Theseus.”

I was, of course, reminded as I read of my favorite adult historical fiction that retells the story of Theseus and Ariadne and Crete and the Labyrinth: The King Must Die and its sequel The Bull From the Sea, both by Mary Renault. In Ms. Berry’s 1934 Newbery Honor winning version of the myth, Theseus is a boorish hunk who captures Ariadne’s eye for gorgeousness more than her heart. I found this image of Theseus hard to reconcile with the suave, bold, and daring Theseus of Mary Renault’s books. Middle grade readers won’t have this problem—unless they encounter the Berry Theseus now and later try to make him into a more heroic character when they read Renault’s books.

At any rate, The Winged Girl of Knossos, long out of print and unavailable for most of today’s readers, was re-published in 2017 by Paul Dry Books in a beautiful paperback edition. This edition includes an after-afterword, called “an appreciation,” written by librarian and blogger Betsy Bird, who advocated for its reissue.

1934: Movies

Nov11

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, becomes a smash hit and the first of Capra’s great screen classics. It Happened One Night is the first film to win all 5 of the major Academy Awards – Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Gable and Colbert receive their only Oscars for this film.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck makes his first appearance in the cartoon, The Little Wise Hen.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man detective thriller novel becomes a movie, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.

In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, makes a documentary about the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party titled Triumph of the Will. The film made her famous because of the innovative techniques she used: moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography. It has become an example of excellent filmmaking used as propaganda.

You can watch the entire movie on youtube. I watched the first half hour of the nearly two hour film, and it’s worth seeing to begin to understand what a phenomenon, a cult celebrity, Hitler had already become by 1934. In the movie Hitler comes to Nuremberg out of the clouds (in an airplane), like a god. And the people, women and children mostly, line the streets and shout out their praise and adulation. The music is joyful and triumphant. Night falls on a waiting, expectant crowd who are only kept from mobbing the building where Hitler has come to stay by brown-shirted Nazi guards.

Then, dawn breaks upon rows and rows of tents where the strong young Aryan boys and men come out and meet the day. They engage in sporting contests, running and wrestling. (It is sobering to think of how many of those boys would be dead within ten years.) Later in the film, Hitler reviews rank upon rank of the “German Labor Service”, young men who have “enlisted” to build the new Germany. There is martial singing, and shouting, and fireworks, and the young men are exhorted to “work for the Fuhrer.”

Amazing stuff.

Riefenstahl wrote in her memoir about hearing Hitler speak for the first time: “”I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.” She was, indeed, a Nazi true believer, as were many, many of the German people.

1934: Events and Inventions

Nov7

February 21, 1934. Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto César Sandino is assassinated in Managua, Nicaragua by the National Guard controlled by General Anastasio Somoza García, who will go on to seize power in a coup d’état two years later, establishing a family dynasty that would rule Nicaragua for over forty years.

March 1, 1934. The Japanese install Pu-yi, once Emperor of China, as puppet emperor of Manchukuo (Manchuria). The young emperor will only be allowed to carry out Japanese policies for the former province of China called by its new Japanese name, Manchukuo.

'Hitler and Rohm, leader of the Nazi SA' photo (c) 2010, Rupert Colley - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/May 23, 1934. Outlaw bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are shot dead by police in an ambush in Louisiana. The couple had been engaged in a crime spree across Texas, robbing banks, small stores and gas stations. They also killed at least nine police officers and several civilians.

May 28, 1934. In Canada, the Dionne quintuplets are born, the first set of quintuplets to survive birth. After four months with their family, they are made wards of the King for the next nine years under the Dionne Quintuplets’ Guardianship Act, 1935. The government and those around them begin to profit by making them a significant tourist attraction in Ontario.

June 30, 1934. Hitler arrests and executes the leaders of the German Storm Troopers (SA or “brown shirts”) in what is called “The Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler has been worried about Brownshirt leader Ernst Rohm’s independence and lack of allegiance to Hitler alone. (The picture shows Hitler with Rohm who was executed on Hitler’s orders.)

July 25, 1935. Austrian Nazis assassinate chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss during a failed coup attempt.

August 2, 1934. Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany, becoming head of state as well as Chancellor.

August 18, 1934. Alcatraz Prison, built on a large rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, opens as an “escape-proof” federal penitentiary, designed to house the most dangerous of federal criminals.

'Alcatraz' photo (c) 2008, Dennis Matheson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

October 9, 1934. King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou are assassinated in Marseilles by a Croatian nationalist.

October 16, 1934. The Long March of the Chinese Communists begins. After breaking through a Nationalist Chinese blockade, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai lead the Communist First Front Army on a 600-mile journey across southwestern China. Pursued by the Nationalist Chinese Army (Kuomingtang) and dogged by poor weather conditions, food, clothing and equipment shortages, and hostile local tribes, the Communists will escape to Shaanxi Province but will lose nine-tenths of their army on the way.

Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Jun3


The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

“We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture, but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred.” —Caroline Henderson, 1934.

“We are getting deeper and deeper in dust.” The Boise City News, 1934.

“Our country has been beaten, swept, scarred, and torn by the most adverse weather conditions since June, 1932. It is bare, desolate and damaged. Our people have been buffeted about by every possible kind of misfortune. It has appeared that the hate of all nature has been poured out against us.” —John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart, Texas newspaper, The Texan, 1935.

“Three little words, achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent —‘if it rains.'” —Bob Geiger, AP reporter.

“If God can’t make rain in Kansas, how can the New Deal hope to succeed?” —A U.S. congressman on ambitious government plans to renew the soil and bring rain to the Dust Bowl.

An amazing true story. My grandparents and my husband’s parents lived in West Texas during these times and must have experienced some of the drought, dust storms, and hard times chronicled in Egan’s book. But I never heard them talk about anything like the stories in the book: dust so thick that people got lost and ran their cars off the road, respiratory diseases caused by the dust, dusters, clouds of dust so tall they blotted out the sun. I remember dust storms when I was growing up in San Angelo in West Texas, but nothing like the cataclysmic storms of the 1930’s.

Poetry Friday: Setting the Table

Jan12

Sunlight Beams onto a Table Set for Dinner
We’ve been reading a poem or two each morning from the book, My Poetry Book: an anthology of modern verse for boys and girls, selected and arranged by Grace Thompson Huffard and Laura Mae Carlisle in collaboration with Helen Ferris, illustrated by Willy Pogany. This book is the one I remember my mother reading poetry from when I was a kid of a girl.

This morning, however, I read a poem, and very mature 17-year old Dancer Daughter said, “I don’t like these kiddie poems.”

To be perfectly honest, a lot of the poetry in the book is rather sweet and sentimental, and the illustrations are, too. The collection was first copyrighted in 1934, and republished in 1956. I like it, but it may not “speak” to the young adults in the crowd. I found this one a few pages over by Dorothy Aldis, and I think everyone liked it.

Setting the Table

Evenings
When the house is quiet
I delight
To spread the white
Smooth cloth and put the flowers on the table.

I place the knives and forks around
Without a sound.
I light the candles.

I love to see
Their small reflected torches shine
Against the greenness of the vine
And garden.

Is that the mignonette, I wonder,
Smells so sweet?

And then I call them in to eat.

Delight in the quotidian. I wish my table looked like that. I wish my house were quiet, ever. We’re open 24 hours here. Oh, well, I can dream.

I’ve decided, by the way, to combine Fine Art Friday with Poetry Friday and give you a poem and a picture each Friday. This photographic print is called “Sunlight Beams onto a Table Set for Dinner” by Joel Sartore, and it’s available for purchase at allposters.com.

The Poetry Friday round-up is at Big A little a.