J's Pages

by Sarah Masters Buckey

This is one of the American Girl History Mysteries. It's the tale of Elisabet Holder, an eleven-year-old Boston girl whose father has been impressed by the British navy in 1814. Her mother is dead and her guardian decides to send her off to live with and aunt and uncle in New Orleans. When she arrives there, she learns that her uncle has died while she was en route and that he has left behind a mystery--a map of the surrounding bayous that would be worth a pretty price to the local government, smugglers, and perhaps the British army. The mystery unravels while Elisabet struggles to make the transition from the daughter of an upper class Boston merchant to a working class, orphaned shop girl. While I was delighted to read a story that wasn't set on the Eastern Seaboard for a change, the story itself is rather pedestrian. Neither the characters nor the story drew me in, and the descriptions of the setting seemed rather lackluster. Still, it serves as waiting room material.
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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by Russell Freedman

This book attempts to share what live in the "wild west"--western America in the 19th Century--was like in words and photographs. (Nice photographs. The photos are the book's strongest feature.) It's an interesting volume, though I found the text rather lacking. It pulls in some anecdotes and gives some descriptions, but it never really grabbed my interest in the way a good story would have done. I think that a few years ago I might have rated this book higher, but now it just seems to me to be good waiting room material. That's the curse of Sonlight Curriculum at work.
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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by Richard L. Neuberger

This is an account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, written in 1951. I had mixed feelings about it. The storytelling is quite engaging, and Mr. Neuberger did a nice job of making the characters more real. However, he is also quite jingoistic, and I had to roll my eyes when he would praise this event or that discovery. I mean, I love my country and all that, but the first sighting of, say, the Columbia River by an American isn't really that big of a deal in the history of mankind. Anyway, if you can get over that flaw in the book, you should check it out. It does a good job of recounting the journey and it made me hunger to find out more about the expedition. If that doesn't make a good children's history book, what does?
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Labels: CheckItOut

by Margaret Hynes

See my review of Deserts below and replace the word "deserts" with "polar lands".
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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by Nicola Davies

Another discovery book, this one is about--you guessed it--deserts. Overall, I find the book to be mere waiting room material. But there's nothing wrong with that. The photography and design is very good, though the info supplied is rather lightweight. One nice feature is some craft pages at the end of the book.
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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by Deborah Lock and Lorrie Mack

For the most part, reading my kids' books is a chore. Many of the volumes are well written, good quality books, but the bottom line is that they're children's books. They don't satisfy my grown up intellect, nor do they usually offer the entertainment I get from literary brain candy. There are exceptions of course, the most frequent being what the wife calls discovery books. Discovery books offer lots of pictures, peppered with little factoids. If the young'uns leave one sitting around, I'll invariably pick it up and start perusing it. Anyway, Forest is such a discovery book, published by the masters of discovery books Dorling Kindersley. The book is about forests, of course, with colorful spreads about each type of forest in the world and the creatures that inhabit them. (You also have the obligatory environmental pages, to indoctrinate your children into saving the planet... or at least limit their depredation of the same.) It's a really nice book, though the pre-press artist in me would quibble on some of the photo montages. Hopefully, you have kids, so you'll have a perfect excuse to check it out.
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Labels: CheckItOut

by Ann McGovern

This book is three biographies in one, telling the tales of three Native American leaders. Well, actually, using the word "biographies" might be stretching it a bit. The focus of the book, and the common theme of the three stories, is how those leaders attempted to keep the United States government from stealing the land of their respective peoples. The book starts out with the story of Osceola, the Seminole who gave the U.S. Army a run for their money through the Florida swamps in the 1830s. Next is the story of Tecumseh, who tried to unite the tribes east of the Mississippi in the 1810s to resist the flood of white settlers invading Indian lands. The final story is that of Cochise, the Chiricahua Apache who was equally competent in keeping peace or making war in the 1860s. Each story was interesting to read, even if they did make me feel ashamed to be an American. Even though the tales are simplistic from an adult point of view, I think it's worth checking out, either for a quick read or to share with the kids.
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Labels: CheckItOut

by Margaret Landon

This is the tale of Anna Leonowens, who was hired in 1862 to teach the children of the King of Siam. (or Thailand, to use the country's current name) If I'm not mistaken, this is an update of a 1943 book that itself was an adaption of Anna's own two volume memoirs. Anyway, as one involved in teaching English in a foreign land, it was interesting to read the adventures of a fellow expatriate 140 years ago. Some things, like the cultural misunderstandings and wonders of being in a foreign culture, haven't changed. It's really worth checking out for a taste of overseas living.
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by Susan Wise Bauer

The conclusion of The Story of the World takes us from 1850 to 1994, with a brief mention of September 11th, 2001 in an afterword. The reason Ms. Bauer stops short is that the big events of the 21st Century are essentially current events, not historical ones which folks can look at with a full perspective. I suppose that's why my history books in school never went past the Vietnam War. (Not that it mattered, we were always behind at the end of the year.) Anyway, Modern Age is true to form, presenting historical events as a story. It was interesting that the further I got into the book, and hence the more familiar I was with the historical events described, the more critical I got. But this is a book for kids after all and one should expect a certain degree of simplicity. So check it out.
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Labels: CheckItOut, StoryoftheWorld, SusanWiseBauer

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

This is one of those books that just sucks me in and causes me to neglect my daily chores to read just one more chapter. I wasn't expecting this, really. I mean, I like Walt Wangerin's work, but I'm not a big fan of his. But then I just devoured this book. The reason, I suspect is the source material. Paul is a fictionalized tale of the life of the apostle Paul. As such, it naturally draws its plot from the Bible, from the book of Acts. In my opinion, Acts is the most readable book of scripture, so it makes sense that I would also enjoy reading this one. Mr. Wangerin embellishes the tale with appealing characters--fleshing out the names of those early saints into people whom you might encounter in your own church. Of course, the tale is also enhanced by liberal quotes from Paul's letters, dramatized to give a sense of how Paul's own understanding and teaching might have developed. Perhaps I should give this book another reading, and pay closer attention to the book's theology instead of just the literary aspects. Maybe it would make it less enjoyable. Either way, I think I'd like to get Paul on my shelf.
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Labels: OnMyShelf

by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

This must be my day for depressing books. This morning I finished Nory Ryan's Song and tonight I finished Mao. This book is one that shook my faith. Not my faith in God, but rather the belief I have that truth will win out in a person's lifetime. It's a belief that charlatans will eventually be exposed, the incompetent eventually replaced and the tyrants eventually overthrown. According to this biography, Mao Zedong is all three. He's presented as a power hungry slob who sacrificed millions--comrades and strangers alike--in his quest for power and glory. And many of those dreams failed, in part due to the poor management and understanding of Mao and his cronies. I was not very far into the book when I started hoping that someone would take a gun and just shoot the jerk. Of course, Chairman Mao died in his bed and is still hailed as a great man. (He even has his picture on all the money!) It just ain't right. Anyway, though I would say that this book is worth checking out, I should also say that this book has a definite bias. Ms. Jung and Mr. Halliday really have nothing good to say about Mao and at times it seems like they're reaching as they recount Mao's transgressions. (For example, they speculate that "Mao may have helped cause Stalin's [fatal] stroke." Pure speculation, methinks.) Still, if even half of what they claim is true, Mao should be replacing Hitler as the evil icon of the 20th Century.
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Labels: CheckItOut

by Patricia Reilly Giff

This is one depressing book. It's the tale of a girl, Nory Ryan, who suffers through An Gorta Mór--the Great Hunger--of 1845-1852. The Ryans, like their neighbors, are poor and in debt to their English landlord, Lord Cunningham. Life is hard as they struggle to make ends meet. When disease decimates everyone's potato crops, it becomes unbearable. The story is rife with sorrow and disappointment, as if the author is kicking the characters when they're down. But then, a famine is hardly a time of joy and contentment. Depressing as this book is, I would still have to tell you to check it out, if for no other reason than it will truly give you a feeling of what life was like for the folks back then.
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Labels: CheckItOut

by Alex W. Bealer

This one's a short little non-fiction book, subtitled "The Cherokees and the Trail of Tears." That's about the size of it. The book gives a short description of the Cherokee nation and how they adapted to the arrival of the Europeans. It also briefly tells the tale of how the descendants of those Europeans totally screwed the Cherokees and forced them to move away from their homeland under truly awful conditions. As I was reading the book, it made me wish that the British had won the Revolutionary War. Anyway, I would only rate this as waiting room material, even though this is a part of American history that should be told. I suppose it's better than nothing.
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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial