Reading About the Titanic

Sep12

On April 15, 1912 the luxury liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. 1595 passengers and crew died. Only 745 people were saved. For some reason, more than almost any other tragedy or shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic has inspired dozens, maybe even hundreds, of books, movies, poems, and other media. Here’s a list of a few of the Titanic books for children and young adults:

Children’s fiction:
Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Treehouse Series, No. 17) by Mary Pope Osborne.
Dear America: Voyage on the Great Titanic, The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, R.M.S. Titanic 1912 by Ellen Emerson White. 13-year old Margaret Ann, a London orphan, is hired as companion to accompany the rich American lady, Mrs. Carstairs, on the Titanic to America. Reviewed at Reading Junky’s Reading Roost.
I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912 by Lauren Tarshis. Reviewed by Becky at Young Readers.
Titanic by Gordon Korman. A series of three books about four young passengers and their adventures aboard the doomed ship. The titles are Unsinkable, Collision Course, and S.O.S. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
No Moon by Irene Watts. Louisa, a nursemaid, overcomes her fear of the ocean and sails with her charges to New York aboard the Titanic.
Back to the Titanic (Travelers Through Time) by Beatrice Gormley.

Young adult fiction:
Fateful by Claudia Gray. Paranormal romance with werewolves, danger, and the Titanic. Reviewed by Christa at Hooked on Books.
Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck. This one has a prophecy/supernatural angle, too. It seems to go with the territory. Mistress Amanda and her maid, Miranda, are almost identical in appearance, and Amanda exploits the resemblance for her own ends. However, when the two young ladies board the Titanic for their journey to America for Amanda’s wedding, they are unaware of how much is about to change for both of them. Reviewed at The Shady Glade.
Titanic Crossing by Barbara Williams.
Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn. Spiritualism and the Titanic. The Taylor sisters deal with their mom’s profession as a spiritualist, and in the process they meet up with many of the most famous characters of the age: Harry Houdini, Nicola Tesla, John John Astor, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Guggenheim and others. Lots of discussion of supernatural communication with the dead and whether or not spiritualists are truly gifted or fraudulent. I read this one just a couple of weeks ago, and I find it has lodged itself in a place in my mind. I keep wanting to look up more about Tesla in particular.
SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting. Typical teen romance-type novel with good historical detail. There’s a steward who foresees the disaster because of his supernatural “gift.” And there’s an underlying theme of class war and class distinctions just as there was in the movie, Titanic.
Titanic: The Long Night by Diane Hoh. Scholastic, 1998. Two couples face their fates aboard the Titanic.
Remembering the Titanic by Diane Hoh. Sequel to Titanic: The Long Night.

Nonfiction:
The Heroine of the Titanic by Joan W. Blos. A picture book about the “unsinkable Molly Brown.” Reviewed by Sally at Whispers of Dawn.
The Titanic: Lost and Found (Step-Into-Reading, Step 4) by Judy Donnelly. We have a copy of this beginning reader, and it’s a good introduction to the subject.
The Titanic Coloring Book by Peter F. Copeland. A Dover Publications coloring book.
The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic by Allan Wolf. Due out October 11, 2011.
Titanic (DK Eyewitness Books) by Simon Adams.

April 15th of next year (2012) will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It’s quite likely that more books, both for adults and for children, will be making an appearance in commemoration of that tragic event. If you have any suggestions to add to the above list, please leave a comment.

1912: Books and Literature

Sep12

Gerhart Hauptmann, a German playwright, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His most famous play was called The Weavers about workers struggling for their rights. I read the play a long time ago for a class in college, and thought it was forgettable. However, it is significant in that the play has no hero or central character. Hauptmann was attempting to dramatize “The Weavers” as a group who are suffering from poverty and oppression. You can read more about the play here.

Riders of the Purple Sage is Zane Grey’s best-known novel, originally published in 1912. The events in the novel take place in 1871; the book itself is an early and influential example of the Western fiction genre.

Tom Swift was the main character in a series of books, mostly popular with boys, that featured an intrepid and adventuresome boy who tires out all the latest gadgets and inventions. The first series of Tom Swift books began being published in 1910, and by 1912 you got exciting titles such as:
Tom Swift and His Air Glider
Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight
Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera
Tom Swift in Captivity
Tom Swift in the City of Gold
The books were published by Grossett and Dunlap, conceived by Edward Stratemeyer, and written by various writers hired to write “Tom Swift science adventures” from 1910 to 1941 (for the first series)–a total of forty volumes in all. Has anyone ever read one of these Tom Swift adventures?

Childrean’s and Young Adult books set in 1912 (but not including books about the Titanic):
Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson. About a strike in the early 1900â€²s, the early days of labor organizing. The girl who is the main character is afraid that her mother and older sister will be hurt or even killed as they participate in a strike.
The Tempering by Gloria Skurzynski. The Tempering tells the story of Karl Kerner who must choose between leaving school for a life in the steel mills or continuing with his education.
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. Five young Jewish sisters-Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie–live with their family in New York’s Lower East side. Follow along as they search for hidden buttons while dusting Mama’s front parlor, or explore the basement warehouse of Papa’s peddler shop on rainy days. The five girls enjoy doing everything together, especially when it involves holidays and surprises.
The Good Master by Kate Seredy. Young Jancsi and his cousin Kate from Budapest race across the Hungarian plains on horseback, attend country fairs and festivals, and experience a dangerous run-in with gypsies. This children’s story is set in Hungary just before World War I.
Surviving Antarctica by Andrea White is actually set in 2083, but it’s the story of how some future young people who live in a media-driven culture take part in a contest to re-create Scott’s doomed 1911-1912 expedition to the South Pole.

Labor, and unions, and the proletariat, and ways of relieving poverty and the oppression of the working class were all big issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as you can see from the literature of and about the time period. But, as evidenced by Tom Swift and his ilk, many people were quite optimistic about science and invention and the natural tendency of mankind toward progress to alleviate these problems and usher man into a golden age of brotherhood and the end of poverty. That was before the Great War.

1912: Events and Inventions

Sep11

January 1, 1912. The Republic of China is officially established. Emperor Pu Yi abdicates the throne.

March 27, 1912. The first of the famous cherry trees that beautify Washington D.C. were planted on this date in 1912 by First Lady Helen Taft and the Japanese ambassadorâ€™s wife, Viscountess Chinda.

April 15, 1912. RMS Titanic,a passenger liner, strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, and sank, resulting in the deaths of 1,517 people.
Pictures of the Titanic and of some of its passengers:

May, 1912. Italy and Turkey continue to make war, with Italy bombarding the Dardanelles and occupying the Greek island of Rhodes.

May, 1912. In the House of Commons, the British government passes a bill to grant Home Rule (semi-independence) to Ireland. Northern Ireland, also called Ulster, which is mostly Protestant doesn’t want to be a part of a mostly Catholic independent Ireland. The Home Rule bill will be put into effect in 1914, then suspended for the duration of the war (WW I), then reinstated in 1918 as a part of the British plan to draft more soldiers into the war from Ireland.

May, 1912. The first issue of the Bolshevik (Communist) newspaper Pravda is published in St. Petersburg, Russia. Pravda means “truth”.

June-September, 1912. Amateur scientist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum gather fragments of a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. A reconstruction of the fragments comes to be known as The Piltdown Man believed to be the skeleton of a primitive man 50,000 years old. In 1953 the Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a forgery consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a modern human.

September-December, 1912. The Balkan League—Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro–goes to war against Turkey (Ottoman Empire). This conflict is known as The First Balkan War.

October, 1912. Turkey, busy in the Balkans, signs a treaty to end its war with Italy.

November 5, 1919. Woodrow Wilson is elected the first Democratic president of the United States in more than twenty years. His rivals Taft, the Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt, running for his own Progressive (Bull Moose) party, split the Republican vote. Labor Union leader Eugene V. Debs is the nominee of the Socialist Party of America.

1911: Events and Inventions

Sep11

All year: The French and the Germans squabble over influence in Morocco. In November, the Germans finally agree to recognize French influence in Morocco in return for territory in the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo. The crisis leads to Britain and France making a naval agreement where the Royal Navy promises to protect the northern coast of France from German attack.

March, 1911. The British announce plans to build five more Dreadnought battleships for the Royal Navy in response to German naval expansion.

May 25, 1911. Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz is forced by the rebels to resign from office. Francisco Madero takes over as provisional president. Diaz leaves Mexico a few days later for exile in France. At the beginning of the year, President Taft sent forces to the Mexican border to guard the border territory from the unrest in Mexico, and in April U.S. troops entered Mexico to quell the rebellion.

July 24, 1911. Hiram Bingham rediscovers the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains in Peru.

August 22, 1911. The theft of the Mona Lisa is discovered in the Louvre. (It was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed.)

September, 1911. Italy declares war on Turkey (Ottoman Empire). In November, Italy annexes Tripoli and Cyrenaica and wins a decisive victory over Turkish forces in North Africa.

November 1, 1911. The world’s first combat aerial bombing mission takes place in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. An Italian flier drops several small explosives.

December 14, 1911. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his party become the first men to reach the South Pole five weeks ahead of British Captain Robert F. Scott and his team who reach the South Pole in March, 1912. Tragically, Scott and his men do not survive the journey back to their base camp on the coast of Antarctica.

December, 1911. Scientist Marie Curie wins an unprecedented second Nobel Prize “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”.

December 29, 1911. Dr. Sun Yat-sen is elected president of the newly declared Republic of China. In October, Pu Yi, the five year old emperor of China, surrendered his power and agreed to grant a constitution.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in August, 2011

Sep11

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen. Semicolon review here.
Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen. Semicolon review here.
What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen. My review at The Point: Youth Reads.
Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic by Suzanne Weyn.

Adult Fiction:
Love, Charleston by Beth Hart Webb. Semicolon review here.

Nonfiction:
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild. Semicolon review here.
Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purpose of God by David Platt. Interesting, but hardly radical.

I think I read more books than these in August, but these are the only ones I remember or have records of. Oh, well, out of sight, out of mind.

Reading about The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Sep10

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three who generally who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. Many of the workers could not escape the fire because the managers and owners had locked the stairwells and emergency exits.

Here are a few fiction books that dramatize and memorialize this horrific tragedy:

For children:
Lieurance, Suzanne. The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (Historical Fiction Adventures).
Eleven-year-old Galena and her older sister, Anya, are Russian-Jewish immigrants living with their parents in a one-room tenement apartment in New York City. Six days a week the girls walk to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Each morning Galena asks to see the pictures of family members inside the gold locket Anya wears around her neck before she and her sister part to work on different floors.
Littlefield, Holly. Fire at the Triangle Factory. (A Carolrhoda On My Own book).
In 1911 New York City, Jewish Minnie and Catholic Tessa can only be friends at the factory, but this friendship pays off when the famous and tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire takes the lives of many of their coworkers and threatens theirs.

For Young adults:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses.
Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan and her family are grateful to have finally reached America, the great land of opportunity. Their happiness is shattered when part of their family is forced to return to Ireland. Rose wants to succeed and stays in New York with her younger sister Maureen. The sisters struggle to survive and barely do so by working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Davies, Jacqueline. Lost.
Essie, 16, sews all day for pennies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to help feed her fatherless family and now to forget her little sister’s death. Then the fire happens.
Friesner, Esther. Threads and Flames.
Raisa has just traveled alone from a small Polish shtetl all the way to New York City. She finds work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sewing bodices on the popular shirtwaists. And she falls in love. But will she survive the fire?
Haddix, Margaret Peterson. Uprising.
Ms. Haddix gives the story a human face by making it the story of three girls: Bella, an immigrant from Southern Italy, Yetta, a Russian Jewish immigrant worker, and Jane, a poor little rich girl who becomes involved in the lives of the shirtwaist factory workers in spite of her rarified existence as a society girl. Semicolon review here.
Hopkinson, Deborah. Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909. (Dear America Series)
Angela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory.

For adults:
Weber, Katherine. Triangle.
Not only about the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, this adult novel is also about music. And itâ€™s a history mystery. Recommended.

Saturday Review of Books: September 10, 2011

Sep9

“The primary duty of literature is to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed.” ~Stephen King

If you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1909: The Arts

Sep9

Director Sergei Diaghilev brings his Ballets Russes to Paris featuring the dancers Vaslav Njinsky and Anna Pavlova and with choreographer Michel Fokine and designer LÃ©on Bakst. The Ballet Russes is regarded by some as finest ballet company of the twentieth century. When Diaghilev died in 1929, the ballet company was broken up, and the dancers scattered to other companies.

In December 1909, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright completes the famed Robie House in Chicago, one of the most important buildings in American architecture.

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is premiered in New York City on November 28, 1909.

1911: Art

Sep9

The “Blue Rider” group of artists led by Kandinsky and Franz Marc, has its first show in Munich Germany in September, 1911. This one is called Improvisation 19:

'Kandinsky, Improvisation 19, 1911' photo (c) 2008, Sharon Mollerus - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Kandinsky also wrote a treatise called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Here are a few sample quotations from Kandinsky’s writing:

“Must we then abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions? . . . There is no must in art, because art is free.”

“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hands which play, touching one key or another, purposively, to cause vibrations in the Soul.”

“Let the viewer stroll around within the picture, to force him to forget himself and so to become a part of the picture.”

“I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could.”

I think he’s trying to communicate something, but I’m not sure what. Kandinsky also wrote to Arnold Schonberg and said that he was trying to do in painting exactly what Schonberg had already accomplished in music: “The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.”

1911: Popular Music

Sep8

Mark Steyn on the #1 Hit of 1911: Come Josephine in My Flying Machine.

NPR story on the song of the decade, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”:

More Popular Songs of 1911:
“I Want A Girl (Just Like The Girl)” by William Dillon and Harry Von Tilzer.
“(On) Moonlight Bay” by Edward Madden and Percy Wenrich.
“Oh, You Beautiful Doll” w. A. Seymour Brown, m. Nat D. Ayer.