“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was, whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a good reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself––kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.†~~John Milton
John Milton, Puritan poet, has a birthday on December 9th.
If you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’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 you’ve written your book review. Don’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 you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’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.
From Arne and the Christmas Star, a story of Norway by Alta Halverson Seymour. Illustrated by Frank Nicholas. Wilcox and Follett Company, 1952.
Arne knew there would be stacks of flatbrod, hard and crisp and round, each piece larger than a plate. Besta baked these right on top of her well-scrubbed cookstove. There would be heart-shaped waffles, and lefse and bakelse and rosettes and all kinds of good coffeecakes. His mouth watered at the thought. If a boy hung around the kitchen at the right times, he was sure to come in for a good many samples, especially broken bits.
He knew there would also be a final scouring of the house just before Christmas, that the windows and the copper flowerpots on the window sills would be gleaming. The geraniums and begoneas would be coaxed into bloom for Christmas. And of course the womenfolk would be busy planning and preparing food to last through the Christmas season.
A friend asked me for some suggestions for a project that her church is doing to gather some gifts for young single moms in their area. Here are my favorite classic picture books for Mom and baby (or toddler/preschooler) to enjoy together:
Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. Some people think the mother in this story is way too overprotective, but I happen to think that the little ones like the idea of a Mother Bunny who will never let them escape her love for them.
Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. Another winning title from the pen of Ms. Brown.
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr.
Drummer Hoff by Ed Emberly. Drummer Hoff fired it off.
Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue? by Tana Hoban. Beautiful city photographs introduce children to colors.
The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss. Will the carrot seed that the boy plants really grow? A lesson i patience and faith.
Umbrella by Taro Yashima. A little Japanese girl longs to take her new umbrella to school but must wait until it rains.
Noah’s Ark by Peter Spier. Peter Spier is a talented illustrator, and in his books mostly the pictures tell the story. The pictures are a little too small and detailed for the youngest ones, but children will grow into this book and others by Spier.
The Gingerbead Boy by Paul Galdone. All of Galdone’s folk tale/fairy tale renderings are wonderful with big, bold illustrations and straightforward narration. These books, including The Three Bears, The Little Red Hen, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and many others, are my favorite beginning folk tale books for reading aloud to young children.
Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow. Charlotte Zolotow is another of my favorite picture book authors, and this story of a girl who is looking for a present for her mother is deliciously repetitious but also surprising. Illustrations are by Maurice Sendak.
If I were buying only ten books for a beginning library for mom and a young child to read together over and over again, these are the ten I would choose.
February 15, 1942. British-controlled Singapore falls to the Japanese advance down the Malayan Peninsula. The Allies now have no dry-dock port between Durban, South Africa and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
January, 1942. Gutzon Borglum completes the carving of four presidents on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.
February 1, 1942. Vidkun Quisling becomes Minister-President of Norway, a reward for his cooperation with the German occupation of his country. Quisling agrees to enlist Norwegians to help in the German war effort, and and Hitler promises the restoration of Norwegian independence as so as the war is won. As the war continues, quisling becomes a synonym for traitor among the Allies and the Norwegian resistance.
March 17, 1942. General MacArthur leaves the Philippines after the Japanese almost annihilate U.S. forces in the islands, but he promises, “I shall return!” Listen to a brief (five minute) story of MacArthur’s life. Bataan surrenders on April 9th, and Corregidor surrenders to the Japanese on May 6th.
April, 1942. The first T-shirts are manufactured for sailors serving in the U.S. navy.
June 6, 1942. The Japanese suffer their first major naval defeat in a battle off Midway Island in the Pacific. Some call this battle the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
July 23, 1942. A forced labor and death camp at Treblinka in Poland, built by the Germans as part of their “final solution to the Jewish problem”, opens for the purpose of exterminating all Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe.
August 19, 1942. Several thousand Allied soldiers, mostly Canadians, lose their lives in an Allied attempt at landing in northern France in the German-held port of Dieppe. The raid by the Allies is a complete failure, except as a demonstration of the difficulty that the Allies will have in re-taking Europe from the Germans.
August 23, 1942. The German Sixth Army launches an attack on the Russian city of Stalingrad. The ensuing battle is called the Battle of Stalingrad. It is the largest battle on the Eastern Front an done of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, killing perhaps as many as two million civilians and soldiers. The Russians are determined not to retreat beyond the Volga River in spite of the German bombing that has reduced the city to rubble. “Not a step back!†and “There is no land behind the Volga!” are the Russian slogans.
November 4, 1942. British General Montgomery and his Eighth Army halt the German Afrika Corps at El Alamein outside Cairo, Egypt. German General Erwin Rommel was absent on sick leave when the battle broke out.
November 8, 1942. Operation Torch, the Allied push to take over French North Africa, begins as American General Eisenhower leads the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria.
I’ve been interested for a while in reading books about Africa. If you look at the top of this page you will see a link to my pages of Books about Africa, sorted by region and then by country. So I decided to get organized in 2012 and sponsor a challenge for myself and anyone else who wants to join in.
I (we) will be concentrating on Northern Africa this year. It’s a good place to start because I think we could all afford to know a little more about this part of the world from which so much of our heritage comes and in which so much has been happening lately. In my template, there are eleven countries in Northern Africa: Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara. The challenge is to read eleven books either set in this region or written by authors from this region in 2012. I hope to read read at least one adult book and one children’s book from each country. The children’s books may be more difficult to find.
You are welcome to try any one of the following challenges—or make up your own.
1. North Africa Tour: Read at least one book from each of the eleven countries in Northern Africa. Since the challenge runs for eleven months, this challenge would entail reading one book per month.
2. African Country Concentration: Read five books set in one of the countries of Northern Africa or five books by authors from one of the countries of Northern Africa. Example: Read five books by Egyptian authors.
3. Children’s Challenge: Read five to eleven children’s books set in Northern Africa. Adults are welcome to do this challenge either with a child or not.
The Northern Africa Challenge begins on January 1, 2012 and ends on December 1, 2012. If you choose to read eleven books for this challenge, that will be one book per month. If you would like to join me in this challenge in 2012, please leave a comment. I will keep a list of challenge participants in a separate post, and I will link to your reviews, if you write them and send me links, on my Africa pages. (If you already have book reviews on your blog related to Northern Africa, those books don’t count for the challenge. However, if you send me the links at sherryDOTearlyAtgmailDOTcom, I will add your reviews to my Northern Africa page.) If anyone knows how to make nifty graphics/buttons and wants to make one for this challenge, I will be appreciative. I am graphically and artistically challenged. (Get it? Challenged? Ho, ho!) There may or may not be prizes for those who complete the challenge: I’m looking at some books related to Africa to give as prizes.
I will also be praying for the people and countries of North Africa as I read about them, and you’re welcome to join me in that endeavor, too.
February 12, 1941. General Erwin Rommel arrives in North Africa (Tripoli, Libya) with German troops to reinforce the Italians who have suffered a series of defeats by the British.
April, 1941. Greece and Yugoslavia surrender to the German army invading their countries. British troops stationed in Greece retreat to Crete and North Africa. Yugoslavian Communist Joseph Broz Tito vows to continue fighting Hitler and his Nazis to the end.
May, 1941. The Blitz, heavy German bombing of London and other British cities, comes to an end as Hitler turns his attention to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
May 19, 1941. Italian Fascist troops surrender to the British in Ethiopia, and Emperor Haile Selassie has returned to the throne of Ethiopia after having been forced into exile by the Fascists.
June 30, 1941. The Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their non-aggression pact with Stalin.
August, 1941. Churchill and FDR meet aboard the American cruiser Augusta and issue a joint declaration later known as the Atlantic Charter. The agreement brings the United States one step closer to war in alliance with Britain.
September, 1941. All Jews in Germany over the age of six are required to wear the Star of David in public as a “mark of shame.”
September, 1941. 21-year old Mohammed Reza Pahlevi is the new Shah of Iran. He promises to be a “completely constitutional monarch.”
November, 1941. The Russian winter slows the German advance into Russia and towards Moscow. The German Blitzkrieg may be frozen in place.
December 7, 1941. A day which will live in infamy. Japanese aircraft attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Eight U.S. battleships are sunk or disabled and more than 2400 people are killed. Following the attack the U.S. and Britain both declare war on Japan. Italy and Germany declare war on the U.S., and President Roosevelt returns the favor.
April 9, 1940. Germany invades Denmark and Norway, claiming that the invasion is purely defensive.
May 10, 1940. German forces invade Holland and Belgium with their Blitzkrieg or “lightning war”. Both countries have no choice but to surrender. The Germans continue on to France.
May 10, 1940. Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. On May 13, Churchill makes a famous speech in which he tells the House of Commons and the British people:
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
June 4, 1940. British forces trapped in France flee from Dunkirk. Under constant German bombardment, warships of the Royal Navy and hundreds of smaller vessels manned by volunteers from the coastal villages of Britain rescue nearly 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers from the beaches and ferry them to safety in England.
June 10, 1940. Mussolini announces that Italy will join forces with Germany; Roosevelt calls the announcement a stab in the back.
June 22, 1940. The French surrender to the German Blitzkrieg invasion. German troops entered Paris on June 14th, and now Hitler demands that the French sign an armistice in the same railroad car in which the Germans surrendered to the Allies in November 1918.
July 10, 1940. French Marshall Henri Petain establishes a fascist and authoritarian government answering to the Nazis in Vichy, France. France is no longer a republic.
July-September, 1940. The Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe sends 1000 planes daily to bomb British ports, shipping, RAF bases, and British radar installations. The Royal Air Force effectively counters the German raids in the air with the help of warnings from the British radar system. Churchill says of the Battle of Britain and the brave RAF pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
August 21, 1941. Exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky is assassinated with an ice pick by Ramon Mercader in Mexico City.
September 24-27, 1940. Japanese aircraft from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin attack French positions on the coast of French Indochina (Vietnam and Cambodia). The United States, Britain, and the Dutch government in exile respond to Japanese expansionism by placing an oil, iron ore, and steel embargo on Japan.
September 27, 1940. The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin, Germany, establishing the Axis Powers of World War II. The pact was signed by representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The three nations agree to a ten-year alliance. Later, other countries sign the pact, including Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Thailand.
October-November, 1940. Seventy people are dying every day, mainly from starvation, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Occupying Nazi troops continue to herd all Jewish Poles into the 1.3 square mile area; eventually over 400,000 Jews will be contained in the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis close the Warsaw Ghetto to the outside world on November 16, 1940 by building a wall topped with barbed wire, and deploying armed guards. Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 tells the story (in fiction)of the Warsaw Ghetto and its inhabitants and their resistance to the Nazi persecution.
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel:
John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath.
Published in 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. Over my Dead Body and Where There’s a Will by Rex Stout. Sad Cypress and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie. Native Son by Richard Wright. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.
Set in 1940: The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Semicolon review here. Against the Wind by Brock and Bodie Thoene. Reviewed by Beth at Weavings. Blackout by Connie Willis. Partially set in 1940. Semicolon review here. While We Still Live by Helen MacInnes. Sheila Matthews, a young Englishwoman is visiting in Warsaw when the Nazis invade. She stays and joins the Polish underground to fight against the German occupation. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. Atonement by Ian McEwen. Semicolon review here.
““A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly’, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.†~~Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle has a birthday this week, November 29th. In fact November 29 is also the birthday of two other favorite authors: C.S. Lewis and Louisa May Alcott. Will you be celebrating the Triple Threat birth anniversary of these wonderful authors by reading one of their many books? If so, which one?
If you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’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 you’ve written your book review. Don’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 you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’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.
January 26, 1939. Franco’s Spanish Nationalist troops, aided by Italy, take Barcelona.
January 28, 1939. German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman find a way to bombard uranium atoms with neutrons until the atoms split, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Hahn calls the discovery “nuclear fission”. It may be possible to use the energy produced by this process to make a bomb that will have immense destructive power.
March, 1939. Swiss company Nestle launches a new product in the United Kingdom, instant coffee.
March 15, 1939. Hitler enters Prague, Czechoslovakia as the German army takes over the remainder of the country.
August 23, 1939. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin sign a non-aggression pact and agree to divide Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland and Bessarabia (today Moldova), and the northeast province of Romania are to go to the Soviet Union; Lithuania and western Poland are to belong to Germany.
September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland declare their neutrality. Later in September U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt announces that the U.S. will also remain neutral in the war.
September 3, 1939. The United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany.
September 17, 1939. The Soviet Union invades Poland and then occupies eastern Polish territories.
September 28-29, 1939. Poland surrenders to Germany.
October 11, 1939. Manhattan Project. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is presented a letter signed by Albert Einstein, urging the United States to rapidly develop the atomic bomb.
November 30, 1939. Soviet forces of over a million troops attack Finland and reach the Mannerheim Line, starting the war with Finland.
If you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’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.
