Posted on by TracyC

Clocks and More Clocks

Clocks and More Clocks by Pat Hutchins, 1970.

One day, Mr. Higgins finds an old grandfather clock in his attic. He likes the grandfather clock, but he wonders if it really keeps accurate time.

To figure out how accurate the grandfather clock is, he decides to buy another clock. He puts the second clock in his bedroom.

The problem is that when Mr. Higgins goes from his bedroom up to the attic, the clock in the attic reads one minute later than the one in the bedroom. Mr. Higgins isn’t sure which one is right.

Confused, Mr. Higgins decides to buy a third clock to compare to the other two. He puts this one in his kitchen. However, the same thing happens! Each time Mr. Higgins leaves one clock and walks to the next, they’re always a little different!

After purchasing a fourth clock gives him the same results, Mr. Higgins asks the Clockmaker what the problem is and he should do. The Clockmaker comes to Mr. Higgins’s house to take a look at his clocks.

When the Clockmaker compares the time on his watch to the time on each of the clocks, each of the clocks is correct. All of Mr. Higgins’s clocks are working just fine. Suddenly, Mr. Higgins knows what he must do!

Mr. Higgins goes out and buys a watch like the one the Clockmaker owns. Since he bought his watch, all of his clocks have been reading correctly, and Mr. Higgins is happy.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

This is a fun picture book, partly because even kids will begin to figure out what’s going on with Mr. Higgins’s clocks before he does. He never figures out that it takes him one minute to get from one floor of his house to the next. It doesn’t occur to him that the clocks he left behind in each room have been advancing since he walked to the next one. Even at the end, he still doesn’t seem to fully understand it. He just knows than, when he compares any of his clocks to his new watch, they’re always right! The reason why this happens is never explicitly explained. It’s just left for readers to notice and chuckle at.

Posted on by TracyC

The Invitation

The Invitation by Nicola Smee, 1989.

This fun picture book is written in comic book form. Almost all of the text is in speech bubbles in the pictures.

One morning, Leo finds an unexpected prize in his cereal box: an invitation to dinner at a fancy restaurant! He and his parents decide to accept the invitation, getting dressed up for the occasion.

The food is great, and Leo notices that there is a band playing. He asks his mother if she’s going to dance, and on a whim, she decides to dance with the waiter with the dessert cart.

From there, the evening goes from good to great for everyone! The restaurant turns into a party with everyone dancing, Leo’s mother swinging from the chandelier, and the musicians having the time of their lives!

Then, a lady who is a dancing with Leo loses one of her diamond earrings. Leo volunteers to find it for her, and it turns up in an unexpected place.

The evening is such a success that the owner of the restaurant invites them to dinner the next night, too!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It was first published in Great Britain.

My Reaction

In real life, fancy adult restaurants tend to serve foods that kids don’t like and require a level of etiquette that kids often find stifling, but in this fun, comic book style story, Leo and his parents have the time of their lives on this fun evening out! All of the adults in the story are open to some zany fun, and even the owner of the restaurant enjoys himself so much that he’d love to have them back the next day.

Like all picture books, it’s the details in the pictures that really make the story. The story doesn’t tell you that the reason why the cereal box prize was an invitation to this restaurant is that the restaurant owner also owns that brand of cereal, but it’s shown in the pictures, with his name on the box. When Leo and his parents arrive at the restaurant, the owner meets them and compliments them on their taste in cereal. Later, he’s shown eating a bowl of his cereal himself. I also loved the picture that includes Leo’s mother letting loose and swinging on the chandelier. The other people in the restaurant are also eccentrics. One of the dancing women is wearing a dress with a banana print and a matching hat with a banana on it, and while Leo is searching for the lost earring, he finds a lady in an elephant print dress and fuzzy slippers. There’s nothing dull about this elegant dinner or the people enjoying it!

Posted on by TracyC

Little Miss Curious

Little Miss Curious by Roger Hargreaves, 1990.

Little Miss Curious is a very curious person. She is curious about everything.

She wonders about all kinds of things and constantly asks questions. Most of the questions she has are silly nonsense, but Little Miss Curious can’t stop wondering things like why flowers are in beds but don’t sleep or why sandwiches don’t contain sand.

She finds out that sandwiches do have sand when Mr. Nonsense makes them, but this is the only question she gets answered in the book.

Little Miss Curious has so many questions that she decides to go to the library in town and find books that can answer all of her questions. It’s a sensible thing to do, but because books in this series are mainly nonsense, her library visit doesn’t go as planned.

Little Miss Curious takes so much time peppering the librarian with all of her questions that the other patrons get annoyed, and Little Miss Curious gets thrown out of the library.

Little Miss Curious can’t understand why that happened or why people are giving her strange looks. The book ends with her running off down the road, and it invites curious readers to wonder why and where she’s going.

This book is part of the Little Miss series. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Sometimes, books in this series emphasize morals by showing positive traits and negative ones, but even more often, the traits of the characters are played for humor, and that’s the case with this book. No morals are taught, and no lessons are learned. Miss Curious faces some consequences for wasting people’s time with ridiculous questions, but she doesn’t seem to understand the way people react to her. There is no change to her character, and the story has an open end, where readers are invited to be curious about where Little Miss Curious is going and what she’s going to do next.

Although Little Miss Curious’s curiosity goes overboard, curiosity is inevitable, and the reader can be as curious as anyone. In a nonsense book, that’s about as close to a moral as I can draw. Mainly, the book is for fun and humor. Readers can chuckle at the silly things Little Miss Curious ponders and indulge in a little curiosity of their own.

Posted on by TracyC

Fin M’Coul

Fin M’Coul retold and illustrated by Tomie de Paola, 1981.

This is a retelling of a classic Irish folktale. The story is fun and silly, but one of the parts of this story I like the best is the introduction of the Giant’s Causeway – a real place with a magical look. There’s a geological explanation of this rock formation, but this story introduces the folkloric explanation.

In ancient times, when Ireland was inhabited by giants and magical creatures, a giant named Fin M’Coul lived on Knockmany Hill with his wife, Oonagh. One day, as he is building a causeway between Ireland and Scotland, Fin M’Coul hears that another giant, Cucullin, is coming.

Cucullin has a fearsome reputation, and he has beaten up many other giants, just to prove how strong he is. So far, Fin M’Coul has been able to keep out of his way, but Cucullin is now looking for Fin M’Coul to beat him. In fact, he’s so close that there’s no time for Fin M’Coul to get away.

Fin M’Coul goes home to his wife and asks her what he should do. Oonagh says that he won’t have any peace until he gets this confrontation with Cucullin over with, but Fin M’Coul doubts that he could be a match for Cucullin in a fight. Oonagh decides that they’re going to have to defeat Cucullin with cunning rather than strength.

She quickly does a special charm to bring them success, and then, she begins setting the scene for the trick they’re going to play on Cucullin. She makes up a giant cradle and makes her husband dress in baby clothes and sit in the cradle. It’s ridiculous, but Oonagh has a plan.

When Cucullin comes, Oonagh tells him that her husband isn’t home, but she invites him to come in and wait with her and her “baby.” Not only is the “baby” astonishingly large, even by giant standards, but Oonagh carefully convinces Cucullin of the baby’s unusual strength. She tricks him into thinking that the “baby” can eat bread and cheese that’s rock hard while giving Cucullin bread with a frying pan in the center and a real stone instead of cheese. Not only does Cucullin break his teeth on these things, but if Fin M’Coul’s “baby” can eat these things, how much stronger could Fin M’Coul be?

Oonagh’s tricks allow Fin M’Coul to get the upper hand against Cucullin and defeat him once and for all!

There is a brief section in the back of the book that explains a little about the background of the legend. I love the pictures in this version of the story. Tomie de Paola books always have fun illustrations, but if it weren’t for the little people and animals in the pictures with the giant characters, you might almost forget that the main characters in the story are all giants.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Pecos Bill

Pecos Bill retold and illustrated by Steven Kellogg, 1986.

I remember this book from when I was in elementary school! This was the book that my teacher or librarian (I forget which one now) used to introduce us to the concept of tall tales. Tall tales, like the story of Pecos Bill, are a major feature of American folklore, particularly Western American folklore.

When the story begins, young Bill is traveling west from New England with his family as part of a wagon train. As they cross the Pecos River, Bill tries to fish, but an enormous trout pulls him out of his family’s wagon. Bill is rescued by a coyote, and he spends some time living and growing up with the coyotes and other animals in Texas.

Eventually Bill meets up with a cowboy named Chuck, who explains to him that he’s a human and a Texan, not a coyote. Chuck gives him some extra clothes to wear (because he’s long outgrown his childhood clothes). Chuck tells Bill that many Texans are outlaws, but they would be better if they started herding cattle and became ranchers. Bill decides to try life as a Texas rancher.

Because of his wild upbringing, Pecos Bill is able to perform amazing feats of strength, like subduing a giant rattlesnake to the point where it becomes tame and allows Pecos Bill to use him as a lasso. He also gets the hide of a monster to make other lassos to give to the worst gang of outlaws around. The outlaws are so impressed with Bill’s ability to subdue wild creatures that they agree to make him the boss of their gang, and they all become cowboys.

Bill subdues a wild horse called Lightning and uses the language of wild animals to befriend him. He leads the other cowboys on a massive cattle drive, and he creates the impossible Perpetual Motion Ranch on Pinnacle Peak.

Then, Pecos Bill meets a pretty girl named Sue and decides to get married. However, Sue’s bustle is so tight that when she tries to sit on Bill’s horse, Sue bounces in the air so high that she reaches the moon. Every time she hit the ground, she bounces into the sky again, so Pecos Bill has to lasso a tornado to catch up with her.

When they finally land, they land on top of Bill’s family’s wagon in California. Apparently, they’re still wandering after all these years, trying to find a place to settle. Pecos Bill convinces his family to settle with him and his bride in Texas.

I’m not very big on tall tales, in spite of having grown in the American Southwest, where many of these types of stories evolved, but I have some sentimental attachment to this one because it was my first as a kid. The pictures in the book are wild and chaotic, just like the action in the story.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Eyewitness Train

Eyewitness Books

Eyewitness Train by John Coiley, 1992, 2009.

I love Eyewitness Books for their collections of pictures! I always say that nonfiction books for adults need more pictures because pictures are worth a thousand words, and I love how this particular book uses pictures to explain the details of different kinds of train cars and how railroads work.

It begins with an explanation of what trains are and the history of the first railroads. Trains, which are series of linked wheeled vehicles, are older than the first steam engines and developed from chains of wagons used in European mines during the 1500s. Steam engines were developed in the 1700s, although it wasn’t until the 1800s that railroads as we know them developed and became popular modes of transporting people and goods.

The book explains how steam engines work, using pictures of model train engines with cutaway designs. Then, it explains about railroads around the world and how railways are built.

From there, the book explains about both freight trains and passenger trains. The part about mail trains reminds me of the kids’ book Mailing May. When it discusses passenger trains, it explains the differences between first, second, and third class sections on historic passenger trains. There is also a page about George Pullman, who developed luxury sleeping and dining cars catering to wealthy travelers. The level of luxury on trains could be quite impressive, and the book mentions that this is the level of luxury the passengers experienced in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, a classic mystery story that many people think of when they hear about luxury train travel.

When I was a kid, the sections about passenger trains and sleeper cars would have appealed to me the most because that is the stuff of stories, and I’ve always been a big mystery fan. However, I also find the parts about how railroads function interesting. They explain about the purpose of the signal tower and how train signal and track controls have changed since the 1800s. Earlier, I covered a different train book that showed the old, manual signals they would use, but this book covers modern methods of signaling and controlling trains as well. It also explains the evolution of train stations.

The book covers the differences between steam, electric, and diesel trains, and there are also sections about elevated trains and underground trains. There is also a section about new technology for trains and what the future of trains might be.

I also enjoyed the section about toy trains and model railroads!

The book ends with a map showing famous railways around the world, a timeline of the development of trains, a glossary of terms, and a section with sources of additional information, a list of railway museums, and recommendations for movies that include trains, including the movie versions of Harry Potter, The Polar Express, and The Railway Children.

My copy of this book included a poster about trains and a CD with train clip-art, but not all copies of this book might include the same extra items, especially if you buy a used copy. I lucked out with mine. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Big Book of Real Trains

The Big Book of Real Trains by Elizabeth Cameron, illustrated by George J. Zaffo, 1949, 1953, 1963.

This is a vintage children’s nonfiction book that’s all about trains! It was reprinted and had its copyright renewed many times, which is why I give multiple dates for the book. My edition was the 1973 printing. The pictures are detailed, and they alternate between color and black-and-white.

I thought it was interesting that the first half of the book devotes a page to explaining each specific type of train car and its purpose, so kids can learn to recognize them on sight. If you look at the bottom of each of those pages, you’ll see how they’re slowly building a complete train, from locomotive to caboose, with each new car.

There is a special page that shows the inside of a locomotive to explain each of its parts and how it functions, and there is another picture that shows the parts of a streamlined locomotive.

After the book explains each of the basic train cars, it explains the classification yard, where freight cars are assembled into trains.

I particularly liked the sections of the book that explain the signals railway personal use and all of the types of personnel who work on trains. The signals are old-fashioned manual signals, but it’s still interesting, especially if someone might be writing a story that takes place in the past on a train. Some of the jobs might also be different on modern trains, but I liked how they pointed out just how many types of people who might be working on a train. The book refers to these workers as “men”, which sounds a little old-fashioned, but I noticed that the tiny figures representing different jobs had different skin colors, even for higher-ranking jobs on the train, which is very good for a vintage book. The illustrator made an effort to show diversity! Overall, I thought their explanations were pretty good.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, although the copy is listed under an alternate title, The Book of Classic Trains.

Posted on by TracyC

The Wright Brothers

The Wright Brothers by Quentin Reynolds, 1950.

This book is part of the nonfiction history series Landmark Books, which focus on events and famous people in American history. This biography of the Wright Brothers, inventors of the airplane, is told in story format with dialog between characters. I’m not sure how accurate the dialog is, but it’s compelling way of presenting historical figures to children. I remember that I actually used this book for a report that I did about the Wright Brothers back in elementary school.

According to the story, the Wright Brothers’ mother, Susan, was responsible for inspiring their love of science and inventing things because she encouraged their curiosity and enjoyed answering their questions about how the world works, introducing them to concepts like wind resistance when explaining how birds fly and how to walk when you have to walk into the wind. Susan Wright was very good at math and had a talent for planning things out on paper that she taught to her children. She was accustomed to making her own patterns for clothes, and she showed the children how to apply similar principles to planning how to build a sled by drawing out their plan and figuring out, mathematically, the sizes of each piece of the sled. The boys learned a lot from her and applied what she taught them to their later projects, like building a wagon they could use in their first job, working for the local junk man. The boys would gather scrap materials in their wagon that the junk man would buy from them and sell to others. The junk man also gave them some supplies to work with and some tips for building their projects.

The Wright brothers enjoy flying kites with their friends, and now that they’re learning more about making things, they decide to try making their own kites. Their first attempt doesn’t work well, but by studying what went wrong, they learn how to modify different parts of the kite to get better results. Their second kite turns out better than the store-bought kites that the other boys have, and the brothers begin making and selling kites to the other boys.

When they were young, the boys were quite athletic, particularly Wilbur, who played both football and hockey. However, when he was a teenager, he was injured badly during a hockey game. A puck hit him in the face and knocked out several of his teeth. To make matters worse, the injury became infected, and the infection damaged his heart. His doctor advised him not to return to sports or athletics and not to pursue any line of work that involved hard physical work or heavy lifting to avoid further strain on his heart. It was a heavy blow, but it wad also a turn point in the brothers’ lives.

While Wilbur was resting and recovering from his injury and infection, their father gave him a drawing set and a small wood-working kit that included a book about the properties and uses of different types of wood. Wilbur had never been very interested in books before, but he discovered how useful they could be, and the boys used the new knowledge Wilbur gained in their projects. Orville made a good partner for Wilbur because he was happiest doing the actual assembly work of everything they built and had little interest in books and studying. He could handle the heavy work that Wilbur could no longer do while Wilbur studied design techniques and mapped out plans for their projects. In this way, the boys made a chair for their mother as a present. Wilbur came up with the basic concept and then discussed and worked out the plan with Orville. Orville gathered the materials and assembled the chair according to the plan, discussing the results with Wilbur. As Wilbur recovered further, he was able to get out of bed and help Orville more in their workshop in the family’s barn, but they continued to keep this partnership system that worked well for them, with Wilbur focusing on studying and planning and Orville handling the heaviest parts of the assembly.

The boys’ father was a minister, and for a time, he was the editor of a church newsletter. He gave Wilbur the job of folding the papers, with Orville helping. When they realized just how long it took to fold individual papers, they came up with the concept of building a paper-folding machine. Their machine worked incredibly well, finishing all the folding that ordinary took them a couple of days in the space of a couple of hours. Their father was amazed and realized that the boys could have a future as inventors.

In high school, Orville helped a friend of theirs, Ed Sines, with managing the school newspaper, which was printed on a very small printing press. He and Wilbur discussed making a larger press and starting their own newspaper with their friend. This was a harder job that required the boys to work with metal instead of just wood, but they accomplished it. There was one other obstacle, though. They had their own press, but before they could begin printing anything or selling advertising space in their paper, they needed to buy other supplies, like ink and paper. They realized that they and their friend would have to get other jobs to raise the money. Wilbur was the older of the two brothers by four years, and he thought he could get a job delivering groceries. However, Orville was worried that the job might be too difficult physically for his brother because it involved heavy lifting. He suggested that Wilbur get the job and then let him help with the heavier parts of the work. It turned out to be a good idea because they were able to gather pieces of news as they traveled to farms in the area and talked to people as they delivered groceries.

Their newspaper was successful, particularly after they started taking side jobs, using their printing press to print signs, flyers, and bulletins for local businesses and churches. Because it was just a small business, they underbid some of the bigger, established printers. However, the brothers soon became bored with the newspaper and printing press because what they really loved most was building things and fixing things. They sold their share in the printing business and newspaper to their friend, Ed Sines, and they decided to open a bicycle shop, where they could build and repair bicycles.

Orville had the idea of promoting their bicycle business with a bike race. His thought was that he could enter it himself and show off how their methods of cleaning and repairing bicycles improved their speed and performance. Unfortunately, the bike race didn’t turn out well. Although Orville’s bike was in excellent condition, they neglected to put new tires on it. He was just about to win when he blew a tire, and his loss of the race cost them business. People weren’t confident that they would do a good job repairing their bikes if they couldn’t properly take care of their own. However, a local businessman loved the bicycle race so much that he decided to sponsor another one, and Orville easily beat all of the other bicycles in that race. Customers’ confidence in their business was restored, and they learned that, when building or repairing any machine, they couldn’t afford to neglect any part of it or take it for granted that everything was right without checking for certain.

The Wright brothers began building their own bicycles, which they called Wright Fliers, and their mother bought an interest in the business to give them some money to get started. One of the features of their service that drew customers was their promise to repair any bike they sold for free for a full year after the purchase. When their mother died, they threw themselves even more into their business to work through their grief.

Then, Orville became ill with typhoid. It was a frightening and often deadly disease, and Wilbur and their sister Kate feared for him. The book (which was written in 1950, remember) discusses how typhoid was little understood at the time. Doctors at the time didn’t fully understand how it was transmitted. (Answer: It’s a bacterial infection spread through food or water contaminated with Salmonella Typhi. Besides vaccines, water purification methods, pasteurization of milk, and other food safety measures help prevent the spread.) They had no cure for it (which would be antibiotics later), only medicines that they could use to treat the symptoms, to try to help the sick through the worst of it. The book further notes that, by the time the book was written, most parents had their children vaccinated against typhoid and other dangerous diseases, like smallpox, but that wasn’t an option for the Wright brothers because those vaccines had not yet been developed in their time. (The book adds that, “Every single soldier in World War II was inoculated against typhoid fever, and very few of them caught the disease.” The author of this book was aware that this particular vaccine was not 100% effective and didn’t prevent 100% of cases, which is common among vaccines in general, but it was still massively effective and made a major difference in curbing the spread of the disease, even in wartime conditions, which are often unsanitary. The earliest typhoid vaccine dates back to 1896, and that was the year given for Orville’s illness, but the implication is that he caught the disease before he had access to the new vaccine. Missed it by that much.)

Orville’s illness was severe. He spent about two weeks just sleeping, and when he was awake, he was delirious because of his high fever. Wilbur and Kate looked after him with the help of a hired nurse. The doctor told them that there was little that he could do and that the fever had to “run its course.” (The book says at this point that, “You never hear a doctor say, “This disease has to run its course” today. Today doctors know how to fight many kinds of diseases, and they have medicines and drugs to kill the germs that cause the disease.” By 1950, when this book was written, the invention of antibiotics had made an enormous difference in treating infections, and the author of the book would have been aware of the difference it made in quality of life and the treatment and survival rate of diseases. However, I have to admit that it’s not true that all diseases have a cure, even in the 21st century. We have ways of treating viruses, but we still can’t really cure viruses, and most of those also have to run their course. For most of my life, people considered most viruses relatively mild compared to bacterial infections, but the coronavirus of the early 2020s challenged that assumption. It’s just interesting to me to compare these different expectations regarding illness and medicine in three different time periods: the late 1800s, the 1950s, and the 21st century.)

After about three weeks, Orville’s fever finally broke, and they knew that he was going to survive. He had lost weight, and he was very weak, and his doctor told him that he would have to rest in bed for two months. For a young man as active as Orville, that was going to be difficult, but Wilbur told him that he would read to him to keep him entertained. In particular, Wilbur had a book that he knew Orville would love: Experiments in Soaring by Otto Lilienthal. Ever since they had been making kites as boys, they had dreamed of one day building a kite big enough to allow them to fly in it, and that was basically what Lilienthal had done. Lilienthal had invented a glider. (Sadly, he was killed in a glider accident while trying to perfect his design in 1896, the same year of Orville’s illness.) Lilienthal was only one of many people who were experimenting with the concept of flight and flying machines in the late 19th century, but he had been one of the most successful with his designs up to that point. The brothers acquired other books and magazines about flight and the attempts people were making at building flying machines. Neither of the Wright brothers had actually graduated from high school, but their extensive reading and practical experimentation made up for the lack of formal education. Based on their reading, they developed a new goal: to build a glider that would fly farther than any that had so far been created.

At first, they didn’t want to tell anyone else other than their sister what they were working on because they didn’t know for sure that they would succeed, and they thought that everyone would think that they were crazy for trying to fly. A trip to the circus, where they saw an exhibit of a “horseless carriage” (an early automobile), gave them the idea that they might be able to attach an engine to some kind of glider to propel it. Their logic was that if it could work for carriages and boats, it might work for a flying machine. They imagined that an engine could propel the glider through the air as an engine could move a boat through water, and then, the flying machine would be less dependent on the wind, which could be variable.

When they had a glider design that satisfied them, they knew the only way to know for sure how well it would work would be to try it. They didn’t want to try it in Ohio, where they lived, because there were too many hills and trees that would get in the way. They wanted a flat place with few trees and where they could find a reliably steady wind. Since they had acquired their reading materials by writing to the Smithsonian Institute, they wrote to the Smithsonian Institute to ask if they had information about places with the conditions they required. The Smithsonian Institute forwarded the letter to the United States Weather Bureau, which recommended a few places, including Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. (Fun Fact: Kitty Hawk is just a little north of Roanoke Island, the site of the infamous vanished Roanoke Colony. It’s not important to the story, but I just wanted to tell you.)

As with their first kite, their first experiment with the glider was only partly successful. It glided for 100 feet before crashing. They fixed the glider and tried again, but it again ended with a crash because they couldn’t steer the glider. Just as they did with their first kite, they decided to build a new one, using what they had learned from the experiment and refining the design. They knew there were risks in their experiments because of Lilienthal’s death, but they were careful not to test their gliders at a very high altitude. They also added both vertical and horizontal rudders so they could not only steer from side to side but also move up and down, giving them greater control over the movement of the glider. What made their experiments different from others’ is that they ultimately wanted to create a “heavier than air” flying machine, propelled by an engine.

After their successful test at Kitty Hawk in 1903, in which Wilbur flew for 59 seconds, a record time, few people believe it at first. They were angry at first that their own neighbors thought that they made up the story about flying. They continued to work on their flying machine, and when they produced one that flew over a cow pasture near their town for 39 minutes, local people started believing them. Word was also spreading through the international scientific community. President Theodore Roosevelt first learned about the Wright brothers from an article in Scientific American, and he arranged for them to demonstrate their flying machine to the Secretary of War at Fort Myer, Virginia. During that demonstration, Orville flew their airplane for a whole hour, ending with a successful landing. Then, when a young soldier said that he wished he could fly, too, Orville took him for a ride with him on a second flight. The book ends with the Secretary of War hiring the Wright brothers to make bigger, more powerful airplane for the US Army, and the Wright brothers accepting an invitation to dinner from President Roosevelt.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I used this book for a school report about the Wright Brothers when I was a kid, and I think it holds up with time. Part of what I like about the Wright Brothers is their partnership as brothers. They had friends outside of the family, but their greatest friendship was always with each other because they had so many interests in common, even though there was an age gap of four years between them. They often felt like nobody understood them or their projects as well as they understood each other, and they could talk about things with each other that their other friends just wouldn’t understand because they weren’t into building things or studying technical methods and inventions. Not all siblings get along so well, but they really understood each other and complemented each other well. When Wilbur could no longer do some of the heavier work that he did when he was younger, Orville was happy to do the heavier physical work, which he preferred to the reading and studying that Wilbur discovered he really loved. They learned from a young age how to use their strengths to help each other and carry out their projects, and that’s real teamwork!

When I was a kid, I didn’t pay any attention to the About the Author section, but it’s interesting by itself. Quentin Reynolds was a famous war correspondent during World War II, which is part of the reason why he makes multiple references to World War II and World War II airplanes during the book. He also wrote other nonfiction books for adults and children, including four other books in the Landmark series.

Posted on by TracyC

Invincible Louisa

Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs, 1933.

This is the story of Louisa May Alcott, the famous 19th century author who wrote Little Women and other books for children.

The book begins with Louisa May Alcott’s birth on November 29, 1832 in Pennsylvania and explains about her parents’ backgrounds. When Louisa’s mother, Abba (short for Abigail), had first become engaged to her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, people advised her not to go through with the marriage because Bronson didn’t seem like a very practical man and nobody really expected that he would amount to much. However, Abba genuinely loved him and understood him. They shared similar ideals, including Abolitionism and the practice of service and charity to others, although they didn’t agree about everything. Bronson was a scholarly man who worked as a teacher, although he struggled to get an education himself when he was young because he was born to a family of poor farmers. As a young man, he had worked as a traveling salesman and had seen much of life across the country. He was good at talking to people and was very good at speaking to children, which led him to eventually settle down to teaching.

The Alcott family was happy where Bronson Alcott was teaching in Germantown, but the death of his school’s patron was a heavy blow. Without his patron’s backing, the school didn’t last, so the Alcott family left Germantown and moved to Boston. Little Louisa enjoyed the busy city of Boston, but the book also describes a harrowing situation in which she almost drowned after falling into Frog Pond. This incident was a traumatic memory for Louisa, but it wasn’t just the trauma that left a mark on her. The person who rescued her from drowning was a black boy. (The book uses the word “Negro.”) Louisa never knew the boy’s name, but her gratitude toward her rescuer influenced her feelings toward black people for the better at a time when the country was heading toward Civil War over the issue of slavery.

The Alcott family had ties to some important people. Her father was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody, who was instrumental in the development of kindergarten education in the United States, worked at his school in Boston. Her mother’s elderly aunt, known as the formidable Aunt Hancock, had been the wife of the famous John Hancock. However, in spite of connections, Bronson met with opposition to his teaching when parents of the students learned that he was an Abolitionist. A friend of his, William Lloyd Garrison, was almost lynched by an angry mob for airing his views about ending slavery. When Bronson admitted a black boy as a student to his school, it was the last straw, and many parents withdrew their children. Louisa later remembered discovering that her parents helped to hide runaway slaves when she was young, but it isn’t clear at which of their homes they were doing this.

After his school in Boston closed, he moved the family to Concord. He didn’t have the heart to open another school, so he supported this family through farming. They were poor and lived very simply, but they enjoyed living in the countryside. However, her father did maintain some scholarly contacts and was involved with the Transcendentalist movement. In 1843, the family moved yet again to join a community of Transcendentalists, experimenting with a more isolated lifestyle. (A footnote in the book, added decades after the original writing, compares it to the communes of the 1960s and 1970s.) However, the community was not a success. When one of the leaders of the community suggested that Bronson give up his wife and daughters to live in the style of Shakers, Bronson discussed the situation with his family, and they all came to the conclusion that this community was asking too much. Giving up on his experimental lifestyle was difficult for Bronson, but Abba’s brother understood the situation and helped the family move to a new home. Eventually, the family resettled in Concord.

Compared to her sisters, Louisa was a boisterous and temperamental child. She loved running wild in the countryside, and her curiosity and impulsiveness sometimes got her into scrapes. She wasn’t as good at housework as her older sister, Anna. However, she was always imaginative. When the family returned to Concord, Louisa was able to have a room to herself for the first time, and she used her new privacy for writing stories. She created plays for her and her sisters to perform.

As she grew up, Louisa became increasingly aware of her family’s poverty and her father’s lack of understanding for the ways of the world. Her mother was frequently worn out from trying to make do and take care of the four girls in the family. She began making plans early that she would find a way to provide for her parents and her sisters when she got older.

At Concord, her family continued their friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson allowed Louisa to read books from his library, She developed a kind of hero-worship of him as a teenager. The Alcott girls also attended a regular school for the first time. Louisa often felt awkward because she was taller than the other girls at school, but she was also very athletic. She frequently wished that she had been born a boy instead of a girl.

At age 16, Louisa began her professional life, giving lessons to Emerson’s children. She was a good teacher, although as an active person, she found quiet study and teaching for extended periods difficult. Her mind often wandered to ideas for romantic stories, and she wrote a collection of little stories for Ellen Emerson. However, the family was badly in need of money, and they had to leave Concord and return to Boston, where they would live with her mother’s brother.

In Boston, Louisa continued teaching and found work as a governess. She also picked up other odd jobs to help support her family. One of them, a job as a live-in companion for an invalid, turned out especially badly because the job had been misrepresented and turned out to be hard labor. She was paid very little for it, too. It was during this time that her father discovered the little stories that Louisa had written for Ellen Emerson. He took one of them to a publisher he knew, and the story was published. Encouraged, Louisa and her father had the rest of the stories published in a collection called Flower Fables, Louisa’s very first book.

This did not bring her instant success as a writer, though. The family’s lives were filled with ups and downs, and they moved house multiple times. Louisa left her family to pursue an independent living for a time, although she made very little money, taking teaching jobs, sewing, and anything she could find. It was during this time that Louisa’s two younger sisters became ill with scarlet fever while the family was engaging in their usual charity work. Elizabeth had it particularly badly, and her health was never good after that. Louisa rejoined the family when they once again returned to Concord, where Elizabeth passed away. Elizabeth’s death was reflected in Louisa’s semi-autobiographical Little Women with the death of Jo’s sister Beth.

The Alcotts had been such a tight-knit family that separations of the sisters were bitterly painful, but every family experiences change over time. After Elizabeth’s death, Anna became engaged to marry John Pratt. It upset Louisa because it felt like she was losing another sister. Louisa once again set out to try to make her own living, but for a long time, it seemed like nothing would go right for her. It was difficult for her to find work, and opportunities seemed to disappear when she was about to take them. At one point, she was in such despair that she even considered suicide. Fortunately, after hearing an uplifting sermon about girls who were in her position, she renewed her determination to succeed, and she received a job offer from someone she had worked for before. Meanwhile, her father was finally starting to have some success with his educational lectures, and he even became superintendent of schools in Concord.

During all of these trials and tribulations for Louisa and the Alcott family, the country was headed toward Civil War. The Alcotts were still Abolitionists, and Louisa’s father had even been involved in a riot in Boston where a mob of citizens had tried to rescue a runaway slave who was about to be returned to the slave owner. After the war started, Louisa felt the urge to do something to help the side of the Union, so she volunteered as a nurse. Conditions were rough at the hospital where she worked, and she was put to work immediately with no training. She had some talent for nursing and a good bedside manner, having nursed Elizabeth through her final illness, but nothing could have prepared her for dealing with the war wounded. It was difficult and often heart-wrenching work, and it took a toll on her own health. After only about a month of working there, she caught typhoid, and her father was summoned to come and take her home.

Louisa eventually recovered from her illness. She felt like a failure for not being able to complete the full term she had originally promised to the hospital, but her nursing experiences helped further her writing career. The letters that she had written to her family about the people she met and her experiences at the hospital were so interesting that they had them published as “Hospital Sketches”, and they were extremely popular. So many people had friends or family who had gone away to war that they were anxious to know as much as they could about what was happening to them and others like them. The success of the “Hospital Sketches” led publishers to ask Louisa for further writings.

When Louisa recovered further, she felt restless, so she accepted a position as a nurse/companion to a friend’s daughter, who was unwell but wanted to go on a trip to Europe. Traveling as a nurse/companion didn’t give Louisa all of the freedom she would have liked to see and do everything she wanted, but she did get to see many things in Europe. She was able to visit the home of the German philosopher Goethe, and she attended a public reading by Charles Dickens. During their travels, she also met the young man who would be the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women.

She started writing Little Women after she returned home from Europe, at the suggestion of her publisher, who thought that she should write books for girls. When her publisher read it, he wasn’t sure that it would be successful at first because its tone was different from the popular children’s books for girls at the time. He tested it out by giving copies to his niece and some other girls who were about the same age, and they all loved it, so he went ahead and published it. It was so successful that it provided Louisa and her parents with financial stability for the first time, and readers wanted more! Much of the story was based on Louisa’s own life with her sisters and on people they knew, but she changed some parts for the sake of the story. Since the real Louisa never married, she made up a fictional husband for her story counterpart, Jo. In the story, Jo marries a German professor, and in the sequel, she and her husband start a school for boys based on Louisa’s father’s theories about the ideal school. Many of her father’s theories about education were very progressive for the time, and since he never got the chance to try all of them, Jo and her husband did in the story.

Even though she never fully recovered her health after having typhoid, she continued to write books for children, and she visited schools to speak to children. The book explains how these other books were also inspired by aspects of Louisa’s life. She and her youngest sister, May, took another trip to Europe together. May always had a talent for art, and Louisa funded her further travels and studies in Europe. May eventually married, but sadly, she died not long after the birth of her only child, a daughter named after Louisa. In accordance with her wishes, May’s infant daughter was brought to Louisa to raise, and Louisa treated her like her own daughter, calling her Lulu as a nickname. The book ends with Louisa’s death, mentioning that she made one of Anna’s sons her heir to perpetuate her copyrights. In the back of the book, there is a chronology of events from Louisa May Alcott’s life.

The book is a Newbery Medal winner. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I bought my copy of this book at a Scholastic Book Fair back in the 1990s, but I didn’t notice until I was an adult that the book was originally published in the early 1930s. I think part of the reason why the author was interested in doing a biography of Louisa May Alcott at that particular time was that it was around the 100th anniversary of her birth. I appreciated how later reprintings of this book also tried to keep it up-to-date and relevant for modern readers, including the addition of the footnote in the book about communes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Something that shows how 19th century society was different from modern society is the qualifications required for certain types of jobs. In the past, there were relatively few professional and educations qualifications required for teachers and nurses. In the 21st century, both teachers and nurses are required to have college degrees and relevant certifications to apply for their jobs. Nobody in the 21st century gets those jobs without having the requisite professional credentials (with the exception of homeschooling families, where the teachers are the parents). It would be useless to apply for such careers without having all of the education and certification required. In the 19th century, it was sometimes more important to just find someone willing to do the job, whether they had any particular qualifications to do it or not. Where the need was sufficiently great, like in the hospitals tending to the war wounded, they would take almost anyone who showed up and was willing to take the job with the hardships and blood involved. (There is one episode where Louisa witnesses an applicant being turned down because, while this person wanted to help the war effort, they didn’t have the stomach or stamina for the demands of the job. Next to that, medical knowledge was less important.) I explained dame schools when I reviewed Going to School in 1776, and the concept still applied in the mid-19th century. Dame schools were informal schools set up by people, often women, who were simply willing to take on the job of teaching local children. They got the jobs chiefly because they were the people who were willing to do them in the area. The quality of education these informal teachers could provide varied drastically, depending on the individual teacher. Some of them were actually well-read individuals with a gift for teaching (this is what Louisa and her father were like, in spite of their relative lack of formal education), while others provided little more than day care while the children’s parents worked. In the section of this book that explains Bronson Alcott’s history, there is some discussion of how education levels and quality varied across the country in the mid-1800s.

Parts of this book and the lives of the Alcott family also offer a different perspective on what it means to be successful in life. Through most of their lives, the family has little money, and Louisa and her father often struggle to find jobs and get recognition for their work. Louisa May Alcott is famous now, but early in her life, she felt like a failure. She struggled to find and keep jobs and had health problems that interfered with her ability to find and keep work. In the end, it wasn’t having money that made her famous but her talent and perseverance. There were times when she wanted to give up, and she even felt suicidal at one point, but she kept going in spite of everything. Even her father eventually managed to carve out a career for himself that suited his real talents. Their early problems didn’t mean that they were worthless or incapable. Their talents were just unusual, and they needed time to find their proper niche in life, the right circumstances to demonstrate what they could do, and the right people to recognize and appreciate their abilities.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Maniac Magee

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli, 1990.

When the character of Maniac Magee is introduced, he is described as a legend or a tall tale. Even though he is a young boy, his origins are unusual, and people have built up stories around him. The story even admits that his personal story is part fact and part legend.

The truth is that “Maniac” is an orphan. His real name is Jeffrey Lionel Magee, and he was born a normal boy with normal parents, but his parents were killed in a trolley accident when he was only three years old. After that, he went to live with his aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania. However, his aunt and uncle had an extremely dysfunctional marriage. They didn’t believe in divorce, so they stayed married, but they lived a strange, separated life in their house. They divided their home in half so they could effectively live apart, avoiding each other most of the time. They shared Jeffrey by taking turns eating meals with him, but they never ate together as a whole family. Eventually, Jeffrey couldn’t take this weird life anymore, where his aunt and uncle never talked to each other. One day, he blew up at them at a program at his school, and he ran away.

For the next year, Jeffrey seems to have wandered around by himself. Nobody is sure exactly where he was during that year, but he eventually turned up in another town about 200 miles from where he started. He wore ragged clothes and worn-out shoes, but he greeted people with a cheery, “Hi.” One of the first people he meets is a black girl named Amanda with a suitcase, and he asks her if she’s running away. Amanda tells him that she’s not running away, just going to school. Her suitcase is full of books. Jeffrey is fascinated by the books, and he offers to carry her suitcase. Amanda thinks it’s strange that a white boy like him is in an area of town that is almost entirely black, and she asks him who he is and where he lives. Jeffrey doesn’t quite know how to answer her at first because he doesn’t really live anywhere.

He asks her why she carries so many books to school, and she explains that she has younger siblings who color all over everything and a dog who chews everything, so she feels like she has to carry her whole personal library around with her to protect it. Jeffrey begs Amanda to loan him a book. At first, she refuses because she doesn’t know if he’ll give it back, but he swears he will. After they argue about it, Amanda tosses him a book because she has to hurry off to school and can’t take time to argue anymore.

Jeffrey continues to wander around the town for several days. People begin to notice him, how he runs everywhere goes, how he’s always carrying a book, and how he shows off his sports prowess by bunting a frog during a baseball game he joins. He lives in the deer shed at the zoo and eats some of the food for the animals, although he also joins a large family at dinner one night because they’re always taking in people or inviting people to dinner, so one extra person doesn’t attract too much attention. Nobody knows what to call him, so they start thinking of him as that “maniac” and start calling him Maniac.

The bully who threw the frog at him in the baseball game gets angry because Maniac’s bunt ruined his perfect record of strikeouts, so he decides to beat up Maniac in revenge. When he and his friends chase after Maniac, Maniac runs in the direction of the invisible line that divides the town in half, into the white portion and black portion of town. Maniac doesn’t understand the division between the parts of the town, but the other kids do, and they won’t follow him across the line between their part of town and the other part of town. Maniac’s disregard of the racial separations in this town is one of the things that sets him apart from other people and accentuates his oddness. He’s not afraid to share food with a black kid, even eating over the same place where the other kid bit.

When one of the black kids fights with Maniac, trying to get the book away from him, a page is torn. Fortunately, Amanda knows immediately which of them ripped the book. Jeffrey/Maniac reassures her that they can fix the torn page, so Amanda invites Jeffrey home with her. He spends the rest of the day with Amanda and her family. In the evening, Amanda’s father offers to take him home, but Jeffrey doesn’t know how to explain that he lives the deer shed at the zoo. In the car with Amanda’s father, Jeffrey tries to pretend that he lives in a house a few blocks down the street, but Amanda’s father knows immediately that it can’t be true. Jeffrey still doesn’t understand the division in the neighborhoods in town, and the house he picked for his pretend house is in the black area of town. When Amanda’s father presses Jeffrey for an explanation, Jeffrey admits that he doesn’t have a home and explains about his past. Amanda’s father immediately takes Jeffrey back to his family’s house, and Amanda’s mother insists that Jeffrey stay with them.

For the first time in about a year, Jeffrey has a home! Jeffrey gets along well with the family and is good with Amanda’s little brother and sister. He likes reading Lyle, Lyle Crocodile to them. He doesn’t even mind taking baths with the little kids or untying their knotted shoelaces.

Maniac starts feeling at home in the black neighborhood, although he’s still regarded as an oddity. His new family calls him Jeffrey, but everyone else calls him Maniac. He is a strange kid, who turns out to be allergic to pizza and breaks out in a pepperoni-shaped rash when he eats it. He’s a very fast runner and good at sports, and he seems to have a special talent for untying knots. Because of his time spent living in a dysfunctional house where people didn’t talk to each other and his time living alone on the streets, there are many things that Jeffrey doesn’t understand about other people. He doesn’t understand social dynamics and racial issues, and it takes him some time to understand how other people look at him as well as at each other.

One day, when he’s playing with the other kids in the street, an older black man calls him “whitey” and tells him to go home, back to his “own kind.” He doesn’t believe that Maniac lives in the neighborhood. His new siblings tell the old man to go away, and the old man keeps ranting about people belonging with their “own kind” until a woman leads him away. The incident disturbs Maniac. Amanda says that the old man is a “nutty old coot” and that Jeffrey should ignore him, but the incident makes Jeffrey realize that there are some people in the neighborhood who don’t want him there. Jeffrey wants to stay with his new family, and they want him to stay, but Maniac worries that his presence is creating a problem for them. Can he find a way to truly become part of this new family he so desperately needs?

This book is a Newbery Medal winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies), and there is also a Literature Circle Guide for book groups and classrooms.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I remember reading this book in class when I was in elementary school. The story is interesting because it’s framed as a tall tale but about a contemporary boy. “Maniac” Magee is described as being a legendary child because of his unusual ability for untying knots and his strange allergy to pizza. No real human being can actually be allergic to pizza because pizza isn’t a single food. There are many different ways of making pizza using various combinations of common ingredients. People can be allergic to some of the ingredients in a pizza, but if they were, that wouldn’t be an allergy to pizza itself, and those people would also be allergic to other types of food containing those same ingredients. That’s not Maniac’s problem, though. He seems to be particularly allergic to just pizza by itself. Maniac does things that are impossible and inherently beyond the normal child in everything he is, even in his defects, a classic tall tale character. One of his famous feats, untying an infamous knot in the neighborhood, is like the legendary Gordian Knot. The story is dressed with humor and tall tale elements, but it has themes that are very serious and even heart-rending.

Tall tale elements aside, this is a story about racial issues and a lonely, neglected child who desperately needs a family and a place to belong. Because the story focuses on Maniac as a tall tale character, the racial issues in the story aren’t immediately obvious, although they begin entering the story as soon as Maniac finds his way to his new town and encounters the girl who will be his new sister. The one thing that Maniac really needs is a stable and loving home. He is an orphan, and he ran away from his aunt and uncle’s home because they were too dysfunctional. As a runaway, he wanders for a time, looking for a better home and people who really care about him. He eventually finds that loving home with a family of a different race. Some people might find it strange that he feels a sense of belonging with people who, on the surface, seem quite different from him, but a sense of family goes much deeper than surface appearances. Maniac himself, on the surface, is a very unusual boy compared to most boys in the world, but deep down, he’s still a kid who needs love, attention, a family, and a place to call home. His new family offers him all these things, regardless of how unusual he is, and what they look like doesn’t matter.

The opposition of some parts of the community messes up this loving home for Maniac partway through the story, and he runs away and spends time on his own again. For a time, he lives in the locker room of a baseball stadium, looked after by a groundskeeper who is an elderly, washed-up baseball player. The groundskeeper, Grayson, passes away during the course of the story, but their friendship helps Maniac to understand some things about people. Grayson was also a neglected child. His parents were drunks, and unlike Maniac, he never learned to read because his teachers never tried to teach him. He was placed in a class with kids who were considered unable to learn because they were troubled or had learned problems. Because his teachers never had any faith in his ability to learn, he never really tried. Maniac is like a grandson to him and opens his eyes to many things before his death.

After Grayson dies, Maniac returns to wandering again, believing that he is jinxed to lose any home he has and anybody he cares about. However, Maniac still cares about other people, and he discovers that other people also care about him. When he tries to introduce a tough black boy to some white boys he’s staying with, hoping to make a connection, it goes wrong, and Maniac starts to think it’s all hopeless. However, when Maniac is unable to help one of the white boys when he’s in trouble and the black boy saves him, the white boys come to see the black boy in a different light, grateful to him for saving one of them and taking care of them. The black boy also comes to look at Maniac differently. When he confronts Maniac about why he couldn’t rescue the boy, Maniac admits for the first time that he’s still haunted by the memory of how his parents died, and the situation reminded him too much of it, so he was unable to handle it. The black boy softens at seeing this human side to Maniac and the other white boys. He’s the one who brings Amanda to Maniac, and Amanda insists that he come home with her. Maniac hesitates at first because he thinks he’s jinxed, but Amanda won’t put up with any nonsense from him, and Maniac comes to realize that they really are a family and that he is really going home.

As a side note, I also remember my elementary school librarian reading Lyle, Lyle Crocodile to my class when I was in first grade. In fact, she said it was one of her favorite books, and she also read others in the series to us. I had forgotten that the book was mentioned in this story, which was published the year after I first heard Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, but it did bring back some nostalgia for me. When Maniac teaches Grayson to read because Grayson never learned when he was a kid, they find well-known picture books on the sale rack at the library, including The Story of Babar, Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel, and The Little Engine That Could.