What Captured My Attention This Week

Jan28

This article about a ballet star who experienced burn-out, at age 21: “Dance is a real calling . . . because you not only have to be an athlete, of course there’s also the artistry that’s involved. There’s no such thing as perfection. You have to let it devour you.”

This short Academy award nominated movie definitely worth watching: The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.

Washington Times: Values voters with big families favor Santorum. I favor Santorum. We’ll see how it all goes.

This rumination on awkwardness and its ramifications: “There can be no community without passage through awkwardness, and real community is always worth it.” ~Kirk Bozeman

The Oxford Chronicles by Sarah Clarkson at the Rabbit Room. Color me green with envy.

“I greet you tonight from that Rabbit Room, the one in the Eagle & Child Pub, right in the heart of Oxford. The room where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and a small host of thinkers like them tossed thoughts and growing tales back and forth amidst many pints and much laughter. The room in which the stories that shaped us all had at least a little of their making.”

Saturday Review of Books: January 28, 2012

Jan27

â€œI figured I would have read so many books by now that I would have some measure of wisdom. But really, it’s hard to feel wise while raising kids. And there are so many more books to read.â€ ~Edward Petit, The Bibliothecary

So, feeling quite unwise, and with so many books yet to read, not to mention Bible study to do, and children to raise, here’s this Saturday’s edition of the Saturday Review of Books. Come one, come all.

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. 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 link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/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.

1954: Books and Literature

Jan26

The National Book Award went to The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. My mom once took a course in Modern Jewish literature, and I typed her papers for her. I learned all about Saul Bellow, Nathaniel West and Bernard Malamud by osmosis, so to speak, enough to know that Malamud would be my favorite of the trio. In fact, I actually read Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) and at least started Augie March, but Bellow didn’t interest me.

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature: And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold. Krumgold’s story of a boy growing up in a shepherding family in New Mexico moves much too slowly for today’s children. But it’s still a good book.

Published in 1954:
Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Does every American teenager read Lord of the Flies in ninth or tenth grade? And what do they learn from it, I wonder? I remember the story as a wonderfully vivid illumination of the doctrine of original sin and how we are all idol worshippers at heart. But I don’t know if even my daughter got that out of it when she read it a couple of years ago.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya. Semicolon review here.

The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis. Maybe my favorite of the Narnia books. Some people accuse Lewis of being racist in the book, portraying Arabic-style cultures as evil and depraved. But I see the story as a contrast between freedom and slavery, and it doesn’t matter the exact cultural tradition of the people that embody those two ways of living.

The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, first two parts of The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. All I can say about this item on the list is that 1954 was a very good year–and 1955 with the completion of the trilogy will be even better. I discovered Tolkien when I was a teenager, in his first phase of “coolness”, and these books and a Bible are the books I would most want to have with me on a deserted island or anywhere else.

Katherine by Anya Seton. I read this historical fiction classic about Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, mistress and then third wife of John of Gaunt (14th century), a few years ago. It was a great book, and I recommend it.

1955: Events and Inventions

Jan26

January, 1955. The Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army seizes the Yijiangshan Islands from the Republic of China (Taiwan). The United States Congress authorizes President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use force to protect Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China.

January 22, 1955. The Pentagon announces a plan to develop ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) armed with nuclear weapons.

February 19, 1955. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) is formed. SEATO’s members include Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

February, 1955. Nikita Krushchev becomes the new leader of the Soviet Union, replacing former premier Georgi Malenkov.

May 14, 1955. Eight Communist Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union, sign a mutual defence treaty in Warsaw, Poland, called the Warsaw Pact. The nations, in addition to the Soviets, are Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany, Rumania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

July 18, 1955. Walt Disney opens his new amusement park, Disneyland, at Anaheim near Los Angeles, California.

July 18-23, 1955. The first Geneva Summit meeting between the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France is held in Switzerland.

September, 1955. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, President Juan Peron is overthrown and General Eduardo Lonardi becomes provisional president.

October 25, 1955. The U.S. Air Force concludes an eight year investigation of the phenomenon of “flying saucers” and UFO’s and concludes that alien spacecraft do not exist. Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles: “On the basis of this study, we believe that no objects such as those popularly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States. I feel certain that even the Unknown 3% could have been explained as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been obtained.”

November 1, 1955. The Vietnam War begins between the South Vietnamese Army and the North Vietnamese Army with their allies in the south, the Viet Cong. Ngo Dinh Diem has declared himself president of South Vietnam and seeks to unify the country under his rule. Communists in the south are imprisoned or killed by Diem’s government. North Vietnam is willing to hold democratic elections to unify the country because the communists under Ho Chi Minh are assured of winning any election. Diem seeks to eliminate communism in the south.

Children’s nonfiction set in 1955:
Back of the Bus by Aaron Reynolds. Reviewed at True Tales and a Cherry on Top.
Rosa’s Bus by Jo Kittinger. Reviewed at Booktalking with Anastasia Suen.

1954: Events and Inventions

Jan25

February 23, 1954. Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser becomes premier of Egypt. He will rule Egypt as a virtual dictator until his death in 1970.

April, 1954. The new Salk polio vaccine is being tested on nearly one million children in the United States. It is hoped that the disease will be eradicated by the use of this vaccine.

May 6, 1954. British medical student Roger Bannister runs the mile in under four minutes, three minutes, 59.4 seconds to be exact. No one thought the mile could be run in under four minutes, and some predicted that the exertion of attempting it would kill the runner. Bannister says afterward that he was “prepared to die.” Roger Bannister’s account of his historic run.

May 7, 1954. Vietnamese rebels, mostly Communist, capture the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu. This defeat for the French may end the French presence in Indochina.

June 27, 1954. Guatemalan President Jacobo GuzmÃ¡n is deposed in a CIA-sponsored military coup, triggering a bloody civil war that continues for more than 35 years.

June 27, 1954. The world’s first atomic power station opens at Obninsk in the Soviet Union, proving that nuclear power can be used for peaceful purposes.

July 21, 1954. A peace conference at Geneva divides Vietnam along the 17th parallel of latitude, sending French forces to the south, and Vietnamese forces to the north, and calls for elections to decide the government for all of Vietnam by July 1956. Communist guerilla leader Ho Chi Minh will lead the North Vietnamese section of the country, while Emperor Báº£o Äáº¡i appoints NgÃ´ ÃÃ¬nh Diá»‡m as Prime Minister of South Vietnam.

October 20, 1954. Texas Instruments announces the development of the first transistor radio.

November, 1954. The U.S. National Cancer Institute claims that there is a link between cancer and cigarette smoking.

December 24, 1954. Laos gains full independence from France.

1955: Arts and Entertainment

Jan24

Tennesse Ernie Ford has a huge hit with the song 16 Tons:

Tennessee Ernie Fordâ€™s version was released on October 17th 1955. Nine days later, it had sold 400,000 copies. By November 10th, it had sold another 600,000 to become the fastest-selling million-seller in pop history, a record it retains to this day. By December 15th, it had sold two million. It was Number One for seven weeks before being displaced by Dean Martinâ€™s â€œMemories Are Made Of Thisâ€. Whoâ€™d have thought there was so much gravy in a singalong about the unrelenting grinding misery of coal mining?

When somethingâ€™s that big a hit, itâ€™s easy to be dismissive, but, in fact, itâ€™s very deftly done. Thereâ€™s a whole world captured in that line about owing your soul to the company store. In many mining communities, workers lived in company-owned housing, the cost of which was docked from their wages, and what was left was paid in â€œscripâ€ â€“ thatâ€™s to say, company-issued tokens or vouchers that could only be redeemed for goods at the company store. To the unions who fought and eventually defeated the system, it was a form of bondage in which it was impossible for workers to amass any cash savings: there was no future except the next paycheck to be spent on next weekâ€™s over-priced necessities at the company store. ~Mark Steyn Online

1953: Events and Inventions

Jan24

All year, 1953. The First Indochina War: French forces continue to fight the Viet Minh independence movement in Vietnam. The French have been fighting to retain control of the Indochinese countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam since the end of World War II.

January 14, 1953. Communist leader and war hero Josip Broz,also known as Marshal Tito, is elected president of Yugoslavia. Tito is a dedicated Communist, but he and the other leader of the Communist bloc, Josef Stalin, are openly estranged and at odds with one another.
Tito’s message to Stalin in : “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (…) If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”

March 5, 1953. Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years, dies of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 73.

April 25, 1953. Scientists Francis Crick and James D. Watson of Cambridge University in England publish their discoveries of the double helix structure of DNA.

May 29, 1953. Sir Edmund Hilary of New Zealand and Nepali Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

June 18, 1953. Army leaders depose King Faud of Egypt and declare Egypt a republic.

July 27, 1953. The Korean War ends after three years of fighting and over two million lives lost. United Nations, South Korea, the United States, People’s Republic of China, and North Korea sign an armistice at Panmunjom.

August 8, 1953. Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.

August 19, 1953. The United States and the United Kingdom help to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and retain Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne.

November 9, 1953. Cambodia becomes independent from France.

Alexander McCall Smith: The Wodehouse of the Twenty-first Century

Jan24

O.K., it’s not quite the same; I realize that. Wodehouse is more wordplay and wit and laugh out loud. But McCall Smith’s books, especially the 44 Scotland Street stories, have the same sort of quirky characters going about their daily business and getting themselves into and out of scrapes that Wodehouse portrayed so well. P.G. Wodehouse and Alexander McCall Smith both have a well-developed sense of human absurdity, but they are gentle with their characters, even when those characters act in ridiculous ways or make very poor decisions.

At any rate, I had such a good, thoughtful, gentle time reading the two latest books in Mr. McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series this week: The Importance of Being Seven and Bertie Plays the Blues. Bertie is a wise and innocent little boy with a very foolish and over-bearing mother. Angus is a middle-aged artist who hopes that a vacation in Italy will help him to recapture the optimism and sense of possibility of his youth. Domenica is an opinionated and somewhat bossy woman who generally knows what she wants but is wise enough to compromise when necessary. Matthew and Elspeth are an ordinary young couple who are about to be presented with an extraordinary parenting challenge. And Antonia, well, Antonia is a “man-eater.” These and other lovely (and not-so-lovely) people are thrown together in and out of 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh, “a city with two identities: one respectable, the other quite the opposite.”

“It is a good general rule to allow everybody to go through the dooor before you. People who do this are usually much appreciated for their manners, but may not get very far in life, owing, perhaps, to the number of doors through which they do not ever pass.” The Importance of Being Seven, p. 34.

“Talking to Domenica sometimes required one to think really hard—rather harder than he was accustomed to thinking. She was like sudoku, in a way—not that he should make that comparison openly.” The Importance of Being Seven, p.146.

“Angus, and indeed many others, assumed a particular facial expression when reciting Burns. It was a very curious expression: one of reverence mixed with a look of satisfaction that comes from finding that one can remember the lines. Perhaps it had its equivalent elsewhere, she thought; perhaps there was a universal face that people put on when they quoted their national poets—if they had them. Some nations had no national poet, of course; they had an airline, perhaps, but not a poet.” Bertie Plays the Blues, p. 11.

“And signs telling one to go slowly in the dark or in fog irritated Angus almost as much as the signs that warned people not to approach cliff edges. In his view, it was up to the individual whether or not to approach a cliff edge; it was not the Government’s business.” Bertie Plays the Blues, p.120.

“Irene was typical of the excessively pushy mother, but for all the complications that brought, it was infinitely preferable to the mother who did not love her children at all. Love sometimes needs to be redirected; love sometimes needs to be told that it is swamping or overwhelming its object, but it should never be locked out entirely, never be told to go away.” Bertie Plays the Blues, p.190.

1953: Books and Literature

Jan23

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison wins The National Book Award for 1953.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Not my favorite Hemingway. I can appreciate Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, but the whole man against nature angst of Old Man and the Sea is way outside my enjoyment zone.

The Christopher Award, presented by The Christophers, a Christian organization founded in 1945 by the Maryknoll priest James Keller, to honor books, movies and television specials that affirm the highest values of the human spirit”, is given to the book Karen by Marie Killilea. I read the book Karen, written by her mom about a girl who lives with cerebral palsy, when I was a teenager, and I found it quite inspiring. Cerebral palsy was a much misunderstood condition, both then and even now, and it was educational for me to read about Karen and her family, dedicated Catholics who were determined to help Karen to grow up to be the best that she could be in spite of her physical challenges.

Ann Nolan Clark’s The Secret of the Andes wins the Newbery Medal. Charlotte’s Web wins a Newbery Honor. This year of Newbery picks is often cited as a mistake by critics who think it evident that Charlotte’s Web is the better book and should have won the Newbery. I don’t disagree, but I have read Secret of the Andes. It’s a fine story and works quite well as a read aloud. Ms. Clark should be accorded due respect for her writing and not always compared to E.B. White.

Sir Winston Churchill wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Also published in 1953:
Journey Cake, Ho! by Ruth Sawyer. A picture book based on the story of the Gingerbread Boy, but set in Appalachia with a “journey cake” substituting for the the gingerbread boy.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Can anyone recommend (or not) this acclaimed novel?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. My mom took a Jewish American literature class in graduate school when I was a teen, and read some of her books, including this one by Saul Bellow. I can’t say I understood it or liked it at the time. I wonder what I would think if I read it again now.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Classic science fiction, dystopian fiction, and indictment of book-burning and censorship.

The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler.

After the Funeral and A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie.

The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. The Robe is one of my all-time favorite books, and it became the number one bestseller of 1953. The novel tells the story Marcellus, a Roman tribune who ends up carrying out the crucifixion of Jesus and winning Jesus’ robe as the soldiers gamble at the foot of the cross.

The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. My favorite scene from Narnia is in this book: Puddleglum and Eustace and Jill are trapped underground in an kingdom ruled over by the Green Lady (the White Witch again), and they are about to be spellbound by her fascinating voice. Then Puddleglum says:

“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

Go, Puddleglum!

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming. The first James Bond novel.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Miller’s play uses the Salem Witch trials as a metaphor for and illumination of the McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activites (U.S. House of Representatives) blacklisting of suspected communists in government, entertainment and business. Its initial production on Broadway in 1953 won a Tony Award.

Set in 1953:
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, 2008. Recommended at Literary License.

Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park. Semicolon review here.

Penny from Heaven by Jennifer L. Holm. Reviewed by Miss Erin. Also reviewed at Jen Robinson’s Book Page.

1952: Events and Inventions

Jan23

February 6-7, 1952. King George VI of the United Kingdom dies at age 56, and Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth II. (Photo: Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh on a rail car in Canada.)

February 26, 1952. Prime Minister Winston Churchill announces that the United Kingdom has an atomic bomb.

July 23, 1952. General Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the real power behind the coup, bring about the overthrow of King Farouk of Egypt. King Farouk, known as “The Playboy King”, abdicates and sails away on his luxury yacht.

August 11, 1952. The Jordanian army forces King Talal to resign due to mental illness; he is succeeded by his son King Hussein of Jordan, age 16.

September 2, 1952. Dr. C. Walton Lillehei and Dr. F. John Lewis perform the first open-heart surgery at the University of Minnesota.

October 20, 1952. The Uk declares a state of emergency and martial law in Kenya due to the Mau Mau uprising.

November 1, 1952. A small island off Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean is the site of a U.S. nuclear test explosion of the new hydrogen bomb. It is believed that Soviet scientists will soon produce their own H-bomb.

November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democrat Adlai Stevenson to become the president of the United States.

December 10, 1952. Dr. Albert Schweitzer receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a doctor in French Equitorial Africa. He intends to use the prize money to set up a leper colony.

In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. Although a polio vaccine is under development by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, and another by Dr. Albert Sabin in Cincinnati, a polio vaccine will not be announced until 1955 nor widely administered until the late 1950’s/early 1960’s. I was born in 1957, and I remember being taken to the health clinic at City Hall to get my polio vaccination and also a smallpox vaccination when I was about four years old. I’m sure my mom and other parents of her generation were quite thankful for the protection of a vaccine against the double scourges of smallpox and polio. (Photo: An “iron lung” was used to help some polio victims breathe.)