Archive | June 2006

Boys’ Week: Nine Series for Nine Year Old Boys

I received a request via email for a list of book suggestions for nine year old boys. So I immediately turned to my resident expert, Karate Kid, and asked him for ideas. All the books he named were series books, and I remembered that nine year olds in general, girls and boys, tend to like series. Actually, adults do, too. Isn’t it nice to find a dependable author that you know you will enjoy? Taking a chance is sometimes fun, but a series is comfortable. So, here are nine series for nine year old boys, with thanks to Karate Kid for many of the suggestions:

1. The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. Oldies but goodies. Brothers Frank and Joe have some “swell” adventures, and it’s all good clean fun.

2. Geronimo Stilton All the books are said to be written by Geronimo Stilton himself, a mouse journalist who has adventures and solves mysteries. My urchins are eating them up, but I think they’re a little cheesy —just like that joke. These books were originally written in Italian and translated into English (and many other languages). They’re best-sellers in Italy and across Europe. Maybe that’s why I find them weird.
Scholastic Publishers’ Geronimo Stilton site

3. Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erikson. I’m much more a fan of Hank the Cowdog, maybe because he and I share a Western (Texas) heritage. I’m from West Texas; author John Erikson lives in the Texas Panhandle near Amarillo. I think Hank the Cowdog is funny, and there are now 48 books in the series, enough to keep any nine year old busy until his tenth birthday.
Hank the Cowdog’s Official Website

4. The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I really like the Boxcar children, four orphan siblings who, in the first book, live on their own in an old abandoned boxcar. I remember thinking that it would such an adventure to live in the woods in a boxcar and have to figure out how to take care of my younger sister.

5. Magic School Bus by Joanna Cole. The Magic School Bus books are a bit busy, but a great introduction to an assortment of science topics. Ms. Frizzle is the kind of teacher I would like to be.
Scholastic’s Magic School Bus website.

6. Childhood of Famous Americans by various authors. If you can find the old hardback, usually ex-library, editions of these biographies, they’re worth collecting, not for monetary reasons, but because they were and are good reads. The books were somewhat fictionalized, and they focus mainly on the childhood years of the famous figures who are te subjects of each book, but again they’re just good books. Especially the older ones, and the ones written by Augusta Stevenson.
A chronological listing of the books in the series.

7. Magic Treehouse by Mary Pope Osborne. Jack and Annie via their “magic treehouse”, travel back in time and meet famous people and observe or participate in world-changing events. They also work with historical figures to solve a mystery.

8. Tin-Tin by Herge. Karate Kid also devours these comic book adventures from the 1930’s. Tintin is a Belgian reporter whose adventures take him around the world.

9. Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol. Leroy Brown, better known to his friends and family as Encyclopedia, is the brains behind the solution of many a mystery in Idaville. He helps his father the police chief solve his cases, and when he’s not reading the encyclopedia, he solves mysteries for his friends for a nickel a case. Or maybe it’s a quarter. No matter, it’s a good deal because Encyclopedia Brown always gets his man.

Although I could have listed more, I limited myself to nine. So, what series of books would you recommend to a nine year old boy?

Boys’ Week at Semicolon

Jun4

I’m declaring this to be Boys’ Week at Semicolon because:

1) My first little boy, Computer Guru Son, just graduated from high school, and I can’t believe he’s practically grown. If having a six foot tall eighteen year old son won’t make you feel humble, nothing will.
2) My second little boy, Karate Kid, is afloat amidst a sea of sisters, and he could use a week of attention focused just on boys.
3) I want to write about boys, which should be reason enough.

So, we’re going to discuss boys’ toys, boys’ books, and living with boys. Feel free to chime in with any thoughts you might have on the subject. Goodness knows, I’m no expert on boys. When my first boy was born about eighteen and a half years ago, I said, “But, Lord, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout raisin’ no boys!” I’ve learned a little since then, but only a little. Boys are still aliens to some extent to the mind of this girl. But they’re good aliens. I like them. Really.

So let’s have some fun talking about boys, and if you are one, be sure to explain yourself to the rest of us who are in the other half of the human race.

This and That

Jun3

Here are links to a few articles and essays that have caught my eye in the last week or two:

Children Are the Good Life by Roberto Rivera y Carlo. In which Mr. Rivera reveals his ambivalence about the boom in books and movies about autistic children and reminds us that children are an unqualified blessing, whether or not they can shoot a basket.

Theodore Dalrymple says what I’ve always believed about addiction to drugs, but he says it with more authority than I can since he’s a doctor. “Contrary to the orthodoxy, drug addiction is a matter of morals, which is why threats such as Mao’s, and experiences such as religious conversion, are so often effective in ‘curing’ addicts.”

An article on the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe and one author’s attempts to ascertain the details of Poe’s demise.

An excerpt from Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption by Laura J. Miller.

SETHSA

Jun2

If any of my readers are planning to be at the SETHSA (Southeast Texas Homeschool Association) conference this weekend, I’d love to meet you. I’ll be working registration Saturday morning and wandering around, penniless but happy, the rest of the weekend. Come up and tell me that you’re a Semicolon fan, and I’ll try to give you a (small) token of my appreciation.

Waking Lazarus by T.L. Hines

Jun2

O.K., so I was fairly sure I had figured out who the bad guy was about three-fourths of the way through the book, and I was right. There were still other questions that kept me reading. And there were some things I never did figure out about this book.

Waking Lazarus by T. L. Hines is a CBA thriller, published by Bethany House, publication date, July, 2006. Its themes and plot elements are a mixture of child abduction, paranoia, miracle working, and resurrection from the dead. In fact, the novel begins with this line: “The first time Jude Allman died, he was eight years old.” How’s that for a hook?

Jude Allman dies a few more times over the course of the novel, and in order to do so, he must first, like Lazarus in the Bible, be raised from the dead. In fact, the recurring motif in the book is life and death. What does it mean to be alive? Can someone who is dead come alive again? What about the spiritually dead? Can those who are mentally exhausted and spiritually dead be revived? If the events in this novel were to be believed, there are formerly dead people, and nearly dead people, and mostly dead people, walking around all over Nebraska and South Dakota, the novel’s setting.

Jude Allman fits all three categories, and he’s also paranoid, believing that “they” are watching him, out to get him. His paranoia becomes a part of the mystery in the story since the reader is never sure whether he’s getting a true picture of what’s happening in the novel or a picture distorted by mental illness. It’s a made-for-TV movie in which no one is who he seems to be and not even the main character, Jude, is sure that what he’s experiencing is real.

Waking Lazarus never does deal with the deeper questions of why some people get a miracle and others don’t, or why Jude gets resurrected and others die. Nor do the characters in the novel take too much time out for pondering the meaning of life; they’re too busy responding to the bad guys and saving the kids. Still, Waking Lazarus tells a good story and the underlying Christian worldview is evident but not obtrusive.

The story is taut and free of dangling plot strands. The characters act, well, weird, but that’s because most of them are somewhat mentally unbalanced. I did have a few questions at the end of the novel, but you may not want to read them until you’ve read the novel itself:

Why does Ron suddenly recover from his mental illness, if that’s what it is?
Why does he have to touch people to get a message?
How did he lose his memory?
Why was being Jude so traumatic for Mr. Gress?
Why does he keep counting things? Is counting a symptom of paranoia?

Come back and tell me about it after you read the book.

Oh, I received a free advance reading copy of this book from Bethany House. Thanks, guys.

Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larson

Jun1

“As we watched from the porch were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good,’ we thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.'”

The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history was not the one that hit New Orleans last year. It was the Galveston hurricane of September 8,1900; author Eric Larson calls it “Isaac’s Storm.” (Hurricanes did not begin receiving official names from the U.S. Weather Bureau until the late 1940’s.) Isaac Cline was the chief weatherman for the U.S. Weather Bureau on Galveston Island in the year of the hurricane.

This history is not the best organized one I’ve ever read. The narrative skips back forth from Thursday to Saturday to Friday and back again. However, I did learn some fascinating facts about the Galveston Hurricane and about Isaac Cline:

1) Before being sent to Galveston, Isaac Cline was stationed at Fort Concho in West Texas, a fact which is of interest to me because I was born and grew up in San Angelo, Texas, the town that formed in the shadow of Fort Concho.

2) On Galveston Island at least 6000 people died in the hurricane, possibly as many as 10,000. Records were not carefully kept, and the dead had to be buried or burned rather quickly to prevent disease.

3) In 1891 Isaac Cline wrote that “[t]he coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to causes known in meteorology as accidental.” The two hurricanes of which he wrote struck Indianola, Texas in 1875 and again in 1886. After the second hurricane, the town was abandoned.

4) After the Indianola hurricanes, the residents of Galveston did make plans to build a seawall, but it was never built—until after 1900.

5) The storm surge in 1900 covered the island with water, uprooted trees, toppled houses, and carried masses of debris that did as much damage as the water itself.

6) Isaac Cline’s pregnant wife, Cora, died in the hurricane, and Cline’s brother, Joseph, who also worked for the Weather Bureau, became estranged from Isaac apparently as a result of the events of that day.

The most interesting aspect of the story was the failure of the U.S. Weather Service to warn Galveston of the approaching hurricane. Weather forecasting methods were not as sophisticated or accurate as they are now, but other problems included a rivalry between the U.S. Weather Bureau in Cuba and Cuban weather forecasters and a reluctance to frighten the public with possibly false alarms. In fact weather forecasters were not even allowed to use the word “hurricane” in their forecasts without permission from Washington. This failure followed upon the the failure of the weather service to warn the public of the Blizzard of 1888 and both caused people to further lose faith in the ability of the weather service to predict storms and precipitated changes in the organization and leadership of the weather bureau in order to improve its performance.

Nevertheless, we are dealing with some of the same problems today. When is it prudent and/or necessary to tell the people of a large metropolitan area to evacuate in the face of a possible hurricane? How accurately, even now, is it possible to predict the path of such a hurricane? Can we trust the instructions given by government bureaucrats, or should we trust our own judgment? Even as the freeways backed up and became impassable in Houston before Rita, we were being told not to leave yet, but rather to wait until the next day. Was this advice, heeded by hardly anyone, good or bad? Would it really be possible to evacuate Galveston Island and the coastal areas behind the Island and up towards Houston in the face of a major storm? Would people listen to evacuation notices, or was Rita the “false alarm” that would cause people to stay home and take their chances rather than face gridlock and dehydration and gas lines on the freeways again?

Lots of unanswered questions even 100 years after the Galveston Hurricane that practically destroyed that city once. By the way, hurricane season in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico officially begins today.