Flying Colors by Robin Jacobs and Robert G. Fresson

May11

Flying Colors: A Guide to Flags from Around the World by Robin Jacobs and Robert G. Fresson.

Vexillology: the study of flags.

What a beautiful and detailed guide to the design and history of flags around the world! This book is a fairly new volume, published in London in 2017, but it has the traditional attention to style, layout, and accuracy that characterizes older, vintage books for children. (Oh, I see. Amazon says that illustrator Robert Fresson is “inspired by the work of Herge and ‘Boy’s Own’ illustrations of the 1940s.”)

I can picture children poring over this book for hours. It answers many, many questions that budding vexillologists will be pleased to have illuminated:

What is the oldest national flag in the world?
Why are there 13 stripes on the flag of the USA?
Why is the French flag blue, white, and red?
Why is there a big red circle in the middle of the flag of Japan?
What is fimbriation?
What are the saltire, the triband, and the canton on a flag?
What two flags of the world’s nations do not use red, white or blue?
What country’s flag features a dragon? A lion? A parrot?
Why is the British flag known as the Union Jack?

Not all of the countries of the world have their flags pictured and the history of that flag explained, but a majority are included. The book could also unseen index for those who are looking for a particular nation’s flag or a detail of terminology. Nevertheless, I would recommend Flying Colors for any child with an interest in geography, flags, and vexillography (the art of designing flags).

Surface Tension by Mike Mullin

May9

This YA thriller came in the mail for possible review here at Semicolon. I was in the mood for something fast-paced and absorbing, so I picked it up out of my TBR pile and read it. Although it requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief, it was high interest, and I finished the novel in one day.

“Nobody believes Jake. Except the terrorists.

After witnessing an act of domestic terrorism while training on his bike, Jake is found near death, with a serious head injury and unable to remember the plane crash or the aftermath that landed him in the hospital.

A terrorist leader’s teenage daughter, Betsy, is sent to kill Jake and eliminate him as a possible witness. When Jake’s mother blames his head injury for his tales of attempted murder, he has to rely on his girlfriend, Laurissa, to help him escape the killers and the law enforcement agents convinced that Jake himself had a role in the crash.”

I really kind of liked the book, even though I had to stretch to believe many of the things that happened to Jake. His girlfriend, Laurissa, does rescue him: at one point she carries him down a rope in her lap, rappelling from a second story hospital window. It’s the kind of thing that happens in action movies and TV shows, but I find it hard to visualize.

Betsy, the terrorist’s daughter, is part of a right-wing, anti-immigrant online group called Stormbreak, and she is also moderately unbelievable. She attempts to assassinate Jake at least twice, and both times she flakes out at the last minute. Part of the story is told from Betsy’s point of view, and I just found it difficult to understand her or sympathize with her. She and her terrorist dad attend a church called Dry Run Creek Baptist, and they somehow manage to reconcile their murdering, terrorist ways with their weekly attendance and the teaching received at that Baptist church. They used to attend Two Swords Baptist (where did that name come from?), where the pastor was sympathetic to their politics but also sort of a good guy? The church stuff was confusing and not very believable either.

At any rate, the entire book is like that, interesting but sort of hard to swallow. There’s a rogue FBI agent, also not very believable, and the things Jake manages to do, even with TBI and nails through his hand (don’t ask!) are amazing!

If you’re looking for a YA thriller, not much sex talk (but enough to make it definitely YA) and not much cursing (but enough that it was offensive and could have been left out), then this one will pass the time in the airport while you’re waiting for your flight to board. On second thought, that’s bad timing for this novel. Do not read before flying in an airplane if you have any fear of terrorists and airplanes . . .

Merlin (TV series)

May6

I’ve been watching the BBC TV series Merlin, a new take on the old Arthurian legend, for about a month now. I watch an episode or two while I cover my book jackets with Mylar plastic covers or while I process and stamp the books for my library. I’ve finished through season three and the first two epodes of season four, and I have a rather mixed review.

I wouldn’t have watched three seasons plus, 41 episodes, of the show if there weren’t something there. I have lots of questions that I would love to take up with the writers. My frequent thought is: but why don’t they just . . . ? What? Really? Why is King Uther so unreasonable, and why are many of the characters so loyal to him anyway? Why is Merlin so loyal to Arthur? And Lancelot? Oh, my goodness, what happened to Lancelot? And Morgana? How did she start out good and end up evil? The motivations for some of the characters seem highly inadequate at times. And “red shirts” and other expendable characters abound. I don’t see how Camelot has any people left; so many have died in what seems to be the end of the world, in episodes called L’Morte d’Arthur, To Kill the King, The Beginning of the End, and The Darkest Hour, among others, that annihilation can only have been avoided by a very rabbity birth rate (not shown or mentioned on screen).

Then, there are the religious/spiritual aspects of the program. The story takes place in a Camelot before Arthur becomes king. Arthur’s father, King Uther, has banned magic from the kingdom because he used it to get Arthur born (kind of like Henry VIII used the Reformation), and the results were tragic. Arthur’s mother died in childbirth to pay the price of the magic used to conceive Arthur. So, magic is bad. No, wait, Merlin has magic, and his destiny is to protect Arthur. So, magic is good, but Merlin must hide his ability to do magic because Uther is bad and will execute anyone who even has a whiff of magic. Actually, this version of the Arthurian story tries to do without any Christian symbolism or foundation and relies on good magic versus bad magic to create the conflict. The moral underpinnings of the story are a little shaky. Why shouldn’t Uther ban all magic from his kingdom: most of the magic in the show, except for Merlin’s limited attempts to fix things that go wrong, does look like a bad deal. We’ve got bad fairies and witches and goblins and unpredictable dragons and deathless, enchanted warriors and spirits that freeze people to death. Oh, and there are traitors and druids who use magic to try to overthrow Uther and kill Arthur. I’d ban all that stuff, too.

Merlin’s powers come from the “old religion” and so do the powers of other, more malevolent characters in the story. Unfortunately there is no “new religion” in this story to counter and defeat the “old religion.” And there is no God, no prayer. (Sometimes a character will accidentally say something like, “God help us!”, but it’s not meant as a real prayer.) Light holds some evil at bay. Blood sacrifice is the key to defeating other evil magical creatures. But really, there’s only bad magic, good magic, and non-magic. The “knight’s code”—which comes from who knows where—seems to be mostly concerned with who gets to be a knight and who doesn’t. Noble-born guys get to become knights; commoners don’t. Then, the writers try to stick some modern ideas and sensitivities into the mix by making some women as good at riding horses and sword-fighting as the men and by giving Arthur the idea that all men are created equal. (Except Merlin. Merlin is always and forever a servant.) Where would Arthur get that idea, other than Christianity? And where would he get the idea of sacrificing himself for the sake of the kingdom and its people?

So, why am I still watching this ridiculous and often poorly written television show? I think it’s the actors. The boy who plays Merlin, actor Colin Morgan, is adorably goofy and sincere. Each episode begins with this tagline:

In a land of myth, and a time of magic, the destiny of a great kingdom rests on the shoulders of a young boy. His name… Merlin.

And the show really is about Merlin. Arthur (Bradley James) is good-looking and brave, but it’s Merlin who captures our hearts. Merlin is committed to goodness and to protecting Arthur, and by gum, he’s going to do it, come hell or high water. Why? Because the Great Dragon told him that protecting Arthur is his destiny. So, “destiny” takes the place of God, and it’s worth sacrificing one’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

The series is fun, family-friendly (unless you hate magic and mildly scary scenes), and quite implausible if you over-think it. So, don’t think about it too much. Just enjoy the bromance between Arthur and Merlin, the slow-burning romance between Arthur and the lovely Guinevere, and the defeat of evil just in the nick of time. Oh, and the Great Dragon has a nice voice (John Hurt).

Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome

May3

After my Little Britches binge-read, I returned to the other series that is capturing my heart, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons adventures. In Winter Holiday, the Swallows—John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker—and the Amazons—Captain Nancy and First Mate Peggy—are joined by two new companions, Dick and Dorothea, aka The D’s. Dick and his sister Dot are from the big city, but they have come for a visit to the Dixon farm during the winter holidays.

The Lake District is all abuzz because it looks as if, for the first time in many years, the lake is going to freeze completely to allow for skating and winter sports all up and down the lake that is usually the site of the children’s summer sport of sailing. In spite of mumps and miscommunications and an imminent date of return to school, the children manage to have a grand adventure as they pretend to be Arctic explorers on an expedition to the North Pole.

Their role model is said to be someone name Nansen, an explorer of whom, in my ignorance, I had never heard. I looked him up, and he is a real Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, who led an expedition across Greenland in 1888-89 and also attempted an expedition to the North Pole in 1895, reaching a farther north latitude than anyone else had done at the time. Nansen’s ship was called the Fram, and the children in Winter Holiday name their Arctic vessel, borrowed from Uncle Jim/Captain Flint and frozen in port, The Fram also.

Winter Holiday is a great adventure story, and it will make even those of us who are not acclimated to real winter weather and icy adventures wish for a little bit of ice and snow to build an igloo or mount an expedition to the Pole, either North or South. It made me think of winter fondly, for a little while anyway.

Captain Nancy really comes into her own in this book as the leader of this gang of explorers and adventurers, even though she’s somewhat sidelined for most of the book. You can’t keep a good man—or woman—down, and Captain Nancy is still bossing and pushing and imagining new exploits and adventures, even when she’s physically removed from the action in the story. I also liked being properly introduced to the D’s, even though I read the stories out of order and had already met them in Pigeon Post. Dreamy, scientific Dick and imaginative writer-to-be Dorothy make good additions to the already established cast of characters.

Little Britches, or Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody

May2

This autobiographical memoir/novel is actually the first in a series of such books written by the adult Mr. Moody about his childhood in Colorado, Boston, and later as a young adult, the West and Midwest. Ralph is eight years old as the story begins, but one has to remind oneself just how young he really was as the books progress through Ralph’s long life and he takes on more and more adult responsibility.

SPOILER: Ralph’s father dies at the end of the first book, Little Britches, but not before Ralph manages to learn some very important lessons from his almost saintly father.

A man’s character is like his house. If he tears boards off his house and burns them to keep himself warm and comfortable, his house soon becomes a ruin. If he tells lies to be able to do the things he shouldn’t do but wants to, his character will soon become a ruin. A man with a ruined character is a shame on the face of the earth.

Little Ralph takes this lesson to heart, not so much because the words are so impactful, but because he sees this character-building project as it takes place in his own father. Father is straight-talking, creative and innovative, hard-working, and above all, honest. And Ralph, aka “Little Britches” as the other boys and cowboys in Colorado call him, learns to be the same kind of man his father is, with a few mishaps and mistakes along the way.

The other books in the series are:

The Man of the Family. Nine year old Ralph and his older sister, Grace, work with their mother, an industrious and faith-filled example in her own right, to take care of the family after Father’s death. They start a baking business, and Ralph finds other ways to work and contribute to the family coffers. Life is hard, but good, and the family pulls together to recover from the tragedy of Father’s death.

The Home Ranch. Ralph finds new friends and mentors as he takes a job on a ranch for the summer.

Mary Emma & Company. Mary Emma is Ralph’s mother, and the family has moved back east to Boston in this fourth book in the series. The older members of the family must find new ways to support the family, and they start a laundry business while Ralph works as errand boy in a small grocery store. Over and over again, the lessons of diligence, faithfulness, and honesty are taught and learned through experience as Ralph, Grace and Mother work through illness, accidents, and mistakes to win through at the end.

The Fields of Home. In this book, a young teenage Ralph goes to live with his grandfather in Maine for a time. I didn’t read this one because I don’t have a copy of it yet.

Shaking the Nickel Bush. In 1918, Ralph is nineteen years old, thin and losing weight. The doctor diagnoses Ralph with diabetes and sends him west to work in the sunshine, follow a very restricted diet, and hope for the best. But everyone, including the doctor and Ralph’s family, knows that a diagnosis of diabetes (pre-insulin therapy) is practically a death sentence. Ralph manages to “shake the nickel bush”, support himself, and send money home—and survive and even thrive in spite of a ne’er-do-well companion and an ornery, broken-down “flivver” (automobile). Ralph does lie to his mother in his letters, to protect her from worry, and his friend, Lonnie, is a thief and a slacker. These aspects of the story are disappointing; nevertheless, the period details and the pure adventure of two young men traveling about and supporting themselves by their own hard work and ingenuity (mostly) are worth the read.

The Dry Divide. Ralph takes a laborer’s job on a wheat farm with a very cruel and dictatorial farmer, but by the end of the harvesting season, Ralph is a young entrepreneur with a thriving business and money in the bank. He works hard and smart, and everyone around Ralph shares in the prosperity that results from Ralph’s ingenuity and tenacity.

Horse of a Different Color: Reminiscences of a Kansas Drover. In this last book of the series, Ralph is a farmer/rancher himself. I still have this one to read in the future after I get hold of a copy.

I really loved these books, as evidenced by the fact that I read six of them in a week’s time, one after the other. I would have read all eight books that Mr. Moody wrote in his extended Bildungsroman if I had owned them all. Ralph “Little Britches” Moody and his friends and companions are not always perfect—there is some swearing and gambling in some of the books, condemned by Ralph’s mom, but still tolerated—nevertheless, I wish I had known about these books when my boys, and girls, were younger. I may still send one of my young adult sons a Ralph Moody book, if I can decide which one would most capture his interest and inspire him.

Mr Yowder and the Train Robbers by Glen Rounds

Apr24

I just read through Mr. Yowder and the Train Robbers, a book I ordered on impulse from a used book seller online. What a delight! Mr. Xenon Zebulon Yowder, “the World’s Bestest and Fastest Sign Painter,” gets a summer job painting elephants on the sides of buildings, and when he goes for a vacation after completing the job, he gets mixed up with a bunch of rattlesnakes and with some ornery, thieving outlaws. The story ends in a surprise, and it’s all done in less than fifty pages, so it’s the perfect book for reluctant or beginning readers who need a quick pay-off.

And did I mention that it’s funny? Mr. Yowder reminds me of a western McBroom, the protagonist of a series of tall tales by Sid Fleischman. And I also thought about Mr. Pine and the Mixed-up Signs by Leonard Kessler, maybe just because of the sign-painting and the humor. Mr. Yowder and the Train Robbers is a bit fantastical—Mr. Yowder can talk to snakes and teach them tricks—but it’s mostly a Western tall tale with a dry humor that will tickle the funny bone of those readers who have the same sense of humor as the teller of the tale.

I have the book Mr. Yowder and the Steamboat. Now I want to add the other Mr. Yowder books to my library:

Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules
Mr. Yowder and the Giant Bull Snake
Mr. Yowder and the Bull Wagon

Ooooh, I see that there’s a collection of three of the Mr. Yowder tales in one book: Mr. Yowder, the Peripatetic Sign Painter: Three Tall Tales. I need that one, too. I love that the title uses the word “peripatetic”—an excellent word.

My library system has none of the Mr. Yowder books, and only three books by Glen Rounds, an excellent author of tall tales and stories of horses and of the old West.

Saturday Review of Books: April 21, 2018

Apr20

“Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me/From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.” ~~William Shakespeare, The Tempest

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The Bard was born around this date (baptized, April 26th) in April, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616. And Will Shakespeare, like Prospero, I’m sure, did love his books.

Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome

Apr17

Pigeon Post is the sixth in the twelve book series of novels about a group of adventurous British children who call themselves the Swallows and the Amazons (and later the D’s are added). The children–John, Susan, Titty, and Roger (the Swallows); Peggy and Nancy Blackett (the Amazons); and Dorothea and Dick (the D’s)—are living what has most recently been named a “free-range childhood.” Their parents are responsible and supervising from a distance, but the children are allowed to camp, cook outdoors, sail boats, pretend, explore, hike, and climb with only minimal adult interference. The negotiations the children go through with their parents and other adults to enable them to do these things are an important and interesting part of the story.

In this installment of the Swallows’ and Amazons’ adventures, the children have decided to form a prospecting and mining company to find gold on the nearby High Topps, a stretch of high moors called “fells” in the book. Because of drought conditions and the danger of fires, the children must go through some extensive exploration and negotiation before they are allowed to actually camp near the High Topps instead of in the Blacketts’ garden, but once they actually make camp on the edge of the fells and begin to explore old, abandoned workings or mines for gold, the story really becomes exciting. The “pigeon post” comes into play because the children use three homing pigeons to stay in touch with their parents at home and send daily status updates to keep the adults informed and happy.

The book contains a lot of mining, engineering, and chemistry information. These children are adventurous children, but they are also studious and quite industrious. In this article at a website called allthingsransome.net, The Chemistry of Pigeon Post, a fan of Ransome’s books writes about the chemistry that is explicated and illustrated in the book. Of course, even the article contains a warning, as should the book itself, probably.

“An important caution: chemistry experiments can be very hazardous and shouldn’t be performed except under well controlled and supervised conditions and preferably in a well equipped laboratory. Reading about Dick making up aqua regia and pouring it on to his unknown powder in Captain Flint’s study makes me quiver! Things were certainly different back then when it came to chemical safety!”

I don’t know what the exact balance between freedom to explore and protection should be for children, but if our children nowadays are over-protected then Ransome’s children may well have been not protected enough. They certainly do some rather dangerous things in the book and manage to survive anyway.

Pigeon Post was the book that won for its author the first Carnegie Medal. The British Library Association presented Ransome with the inaugural Carnegie Medal at its annual conference in June 1936. I thoroughly enjoyed Pigeon Post, and I think my next Ransome read will be Winter Holiday, the fourth book in the series, which is also the book that introduces Dick and Dorothea Callum. (Yes, I’ve managed to read the books out of order.) I’ve already read: Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Peter Duck, and Secret Water.

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.