Posted on by TracyC

The Talking Earth

The Talking Earth by Jean Craighead George, 1983.

Billie Wind is a Native American girl from the Seminole tribe in Florida. When the story begins, Billie has been brought before the tribe’s elders because she doesn’t believe in the tribe’s legends about talking creatures, nature spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. It was her older sister Mary who reported her to the elders, and many of the elders are also her relatives, including her uncles. At first, Billie doesn’t take it seriously. She’s always been a very practical, literal-minded girl who has questioned all of the things that her elders have told her since she was small, and she doesn’t expect their response to be very different from any of the ways they’ve responded to her youthful doubts and questions. However, this time, the elders ask her what she thinks would be an appropriate punishment for her. Billie, thinking the whole thing is ridiculous, suggests that they send her out into the Everglades alone until she finds some animals who talk to her. She expects that the elders will veto that idea because she is probably too young to go out there alone for an indeterminate period, and it’s ridiculous for anyone to expect her to find talking creatures. To her surprise, they approve of the idea and begin preparing for her journey.

Although it was her suggestion, Billie is angry because she doesn’t really want to make this trip. She asks her sister why she reported her to the elders in the first place. Mary says that, ever since she started attending the school at the Kennedy Space Center, she’s been too scientific and that, someday, she’s going to be the head of her family. When that happens, Billie will need more than science to lead a family wisely. Still, Billie is resentful.

As she sets off in her little boat, Billie reflects on what makes her different from her sister. Billie takes after her mother, who is a very practical woman (while her uncle wants to send her off on the trip with a good luck blessing, her mother provides her with food and useful tools), and her father works for the Kennedy Space Center. Both Billie and her brother chose to attend the school there, which is very modern and whose scientific principals appeal to Billie’s practical side and her desire for facts and real answers to her questions about how the world works. Billie is very concerned with the major world issues of the day, which include the possibility of nuclear war (the book was written during the Cold War) and environmentalism. These issues are far more real to her than anything in her tribe’s folk tales, and she believes in her father’s assertion that the development of space travel is important because humans may eventually need to find another planet to live on. By contrast, Mary has refused to attend the Kennedy Space Center school and is deep into the folk tales and traditions of their people. Billie looks to the future, science, technology, and the possibilities that lie out among the stars for answers, while Mary immerses herself in ancient legends and her people’s strong connection to nature and the Earth.

Alone in the Everglades, Billie listens to the calls of birds, wondering if that qualifies as “talking animals”, but she decides it doesn’t. She can make hooting noises at an owl, but it can’t speak back to her in any human language. Looking around for a place to camp, she finds a cave by noting geographical features that indicate that there is probably a cave nearby. Does that qualify as the Earth speaking to her? Then, animals around her become frightened and flee! She wishes that the animals would actually speak and tell her what frightened them, but the smell of smoke soon tells her: there’s a wildfire! Realizing that she can’t possibly paddle her boat fast enough to outrun the spreading fire, she does the best she can to wet herself down with water and take refuge in the cave.

Huddled in the cave during the terrifying fire, Billie thinks about what she knows about wildfires. She knows that occasional fires are necessary for the environment because they clear out underbrush, and that they don’t normally burn hot enough to burn the trees. She also knows that white people, who aren’t as familiar with the environment, try to clear out underbrush to fight fires, which inadvertently makes them burn hotter and makes them more dangerous. Billie also wonders whether her tribe will see the fire and try to rescue her, but they probably don’t know that she’s caught up in it because they probably think she went in a different direction.

As Billie explores the cave a little more, she finds an ancient clay bowl. At first, she thinks that means that the cave was once used as a burial place by her people, but then, she realizes that the bowl is intact. If it was meant to be placed in a burial, it would have been broken. Exploring a little further, she realizes that someone once used this place as a home, and there are other artifacts and the remains of a bed that may have belonged to a distant ancestor. She lies down to keep herself safe from breathing too much of the smoke until the fire dies down.

When it’s safe, Billie explores further, finding carved steps in the stone. She thinks about what she knows about her people’s history and her ancestors. When she goes home and tells everyone where she’s been, she plans to bring her uncle, Charlie Wind, and maybe an archaeologist to investigate this place. However, she also discovers that the ground outside the cave is still hot from the fire, too hot for her to leave. She doesn’t have much food left, and she worries that she might die in the cave before she can manage to leave. Then, she thinks about the turtle and snakes that sought refuge from the fire in the pool nearby. They could be a source of food.

Hearing a sound that makes her think that it’s a call that Charlie Wind makes, she looks around, thinking maybe he’s come to rescue her. It’s not a human, though. At first, she thinks that she sees a little person looking out of the ground, like something from one of her people’s folk tales. It turns out to be a young otter in a hole. She befriends the little otter and manages to catch some fish from the little pool that helps them to survive in the cave. The little otter shows her that the little pool is deeper than she thought, and the little otter catches another fish. It explains to Billie what happens to the fish during fires. They take refuge in underground rivers and pools. She considers whether her ancestors carved these underground rivers on purpose to bring fish to her people. Searching the cave further, she finds many more ancient artifacts from her people, including an old, forgotten medicine bundle.

The destruction of the fire makes Billie think that her father and the other scientists must be right about the Earth dying and people needing another planet to live on. Yet, she soon finds growing plants in an unexpected place. Because the trees burned, light is reaching a place where it couldn’t reach before, and new plants are growing. In some ways, nature turns out to be more resilient and adaptable than Billie expected.

When Billie finally gets the opportunity to leave the cave and go home, she realizes that her boat has burned. She salvages what she can and a few useful artifacts from the cave, and she and her otter friend set out to find another way home. Billie manages to carve a new boat for herself, witnesses the destruction of the little island with the cave that sheltered her because of white people’s development, comes to understand more about the environment and cycles of nature, and befriends an orphaned panther cub and a turtle. The longer Billie has to learn to survive by herself in the natural environment, the more she comes to appreciate her friendships with animals and to understand that she needs a connection with nature itself. She talks to them and learns to read some of the signs nature gives her. Perhaps, after a fashion, animals and the forces of nature do speak to people who are prepared to listen.

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

My Reaction

This story is marvelous blending of coming-of-age and survival!

Some other reviewers on Goodreads took offense to the repeated criticism of white people ruining things. I didn’t feel the same way. For one thing, although the main character is a Native American girl, the author, Jean Craighead George, was a white woman. I don’t doubt that real Native Americans feel the way the main character does, but the author is still the one delivering the criticism. Jean Craighead George came from a family of naturalists, so it’s understandable that she would be critical of anybody who disregards or damages the natural environment, and she might well take issue even with the society/culture she was born into because of its treatment of nature.

That leads me to my second point, which is that the criticism delivered in the story isn’t about white people ruining everything and doing everything wrong but focuses, repeatedly, on two things that white people do that trouble the main character. First, the white people accidentally disrupt the natural environment, sometimes while trying to do things that they think will help, because they haven’t studied the environment well enough to understand the effects that their choices have. The way the character notes that clearing underbrush in an effort to stem wildfires actually makes the fires worse when they happen is an example of that. Second, white people destroy parts of the environment and what should be archaeological sites because they prioritize other things, especially development and urbanization. These things, while unpleasant, are true. The story isn’t inventing these problems, just noting them.

Billie doesn’t entirely give up her belief in science. However, through her experiences in the Everglades, she does learn to understand and appreciate the world where she lives more than she did before. Although space and the possibilities of the future are fascinating, so is the Earth, and Billie comes to realize that people need to understand and take care of the world they have rather than expecting to find another one. She doesn’t believe now that there is another planet exactly like Earth anywhere in the universe, and she realizes that, rather than searching for a new, more ideal world in space, people can find what they’re looking for by changing the way they look at the world where they live.

Throughout the story, Billie combines aspects of her people’s legends with scientific concepts that she understands, like “oxidation” and “air pressure”, and she sees how scientific disciplines, like archaeology, can help people to understand the past and how life has changed. Her new knowledge of the natural world doesn’t eliminate her understanding of science but augments it. She learns to read the body language and behavior of animals, realizing that this is a form of “talking.” By the time she encounters a Native American boy on a name quest of his own, Billie realizes that she believes in her people’s stories more than she thought she did. Explaining it to the boy, who also has a very modern view of life, helps her to clarify and share what she’s learned.

Posted on by TracyC

Look Up!

Look Up! by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Raul Colon, 2013.

This picture book is about the life of Henrietta Leavitt, a “Pioneering Woman Astronomer” during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

The story says that Henrietta had a fascination with the night sky from a young age, often wondering just how high the sky was. When she got older, she formally studied astronomy, although most of the other students were men, and it was an uncommon profession for women.

After she graduated, she found a job with an observatory, although she rarely worked on the telescope. She was part of a team of other women who acted as human “computers”, doing basic calculations by hand and compiling information for others to use. Women like Henrietta were not expected to use this information themselves or draw conclusions from their own calculations, but Henrietta had her natural sense of curiosity and confidence in her ability to use her own mind.

She continued studying in her spare time, and while examining photographs of stars and doing her calculations, she began to notice some patterns that made her wonder about the explanations behind them. She studied an effect where stars seemed to become brighter and then dimmer, a kind of “blinking” effect.

She not only discovered that the existence of some of these stars had not been recorded yet, but she also found herself wondering about the pattern of this twinkling effect. Some stars appeared brighter and seemed to “blink” more slowly between bright and dim than other stars that weren’t as bright. By examining the relative brightness of the stars and the patterns of blink rate, she realized that it was possible to calculate the true brightness of the stars and use that to figure out how far away each star is from Earth. When she presented her findings to the head astronomer at the observatory, he was impressed. By using the chart Henrietta compiled, it was possible to calculate the distances of stars even beyond our galaxy. People of Henrietta’s time initially thought our galaxy might be the entire universe, but Henrietta’s finding shows that it was not and also that our galaxy is much larger than people thought.

The book ends with sections of historical information about Henrietta Leavitt and her discoveries and other female astronomers. There is also a glossary, some quotes about stars, and a list of websites for readers to visit.

My Reaction

I enjoy books about historical figures, especially lesser-known ones, and overall, I liked this picture book. The pictures are soft and lovely.

The only criticisms I have are that the book is a little slow and repetitious in places, and the subject matter is a little complex for a young audience. Some repetition is expected in picture books for young children, but how appealing that can be depends on what is being repeated. Henrietta’s work involves a lot of looking at pictures and figures and studying, so the text gives the feeling of long hours studying and “looking,” and many of the pictures are of her looking at books and examining photographs of stars through a magnifying lens. I found the story and pictures charming and in keeping with the Academic aesthetics, but I’m just not sure how much it would appeal to young children.

The story explains some of the concepts that Henrietta Leavitt developed and discovered, and it does so in fairly simple language. However, I still have the feeling that it would mean a little more to a little older child, who already knows something about astronomy, or to an adult like myself, who just enjoys the charming format of the story.

Part of me thinks that this story could have been made into a little longer book, perhaps a beginning chapter book, which would have allowed for a little more complexity. One of the issues with making the story of Henrietta Leavitt into a longer book is that, as the section of historical information says, “not a great deal is known about her life.” There just might not be enough known details about Henrietta’s life to put together a longer book.

Still, I really did enjoy the book, and I liked the presentation of 19th century astronomers and astronomical concepts. I especially enjoyed the way the story portrayed the concept of “human computers.” This type of profession no longer exists because we have electronic computers and computer programs that perform mathematical calculations faster than human beings can, but before that technology existed, humans had to do it themselves. “Human computers” had to work in groups to get through massive amounts of data and calculations, and it was long and tedious work, but their work was largely hidden from the public eye. As the story says, they were expected to do mathematical calculations and compile data, but they were compiling it for someone else’s use. Someone else would use their data to draw conclusions, and that person usually got the credit for whatever they discovered, ignoring all the people who did the grunt work that made it possible. Since women like Henrietta were more likely to be among the “human computers”, working in the background, they often didn’t get much credit for their work. The male astronomers were more likely to be the ones analyzing data and taking credit for the conclusions they drew, although they didn’t do the background calculations themselves. What made Henrietta different was that she stepped beyond the role of simply compiling information but also took on the role of studying patterns and drawing conclusions from the data she was compiling. She did all of it, from compiling data and making calculations to interpreting the data and laying out conclusions and discoveries from it.

Women once worked in similar positions as “human computers” at NASA. The 2016 movie Hidden Figures was about women working as “human computers” at NASA in the 1960s.

Posted on by TracyC

Maria’s Comet

Maria’s Comet by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Deborah Lanino, 1999.

This picture book is a fictional story about a real person, Maria Mitchell. (She pronounced her first name “ma-RYE-ah”, not “ma-REE-ah”.) Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in 1818, and she became the first female astronomer in the United States. She is known for discovering a comet only viewable through a telescope in 1847, and she also became the first astronomy professor at Vassar College. She is the namesake of the Maria Mitchell Association, a science center on Nantucket. She was also an abolitionist, although this topic is not touched on in the book. Maria’s father taught her about astronomy when she was young and encouraged her interests and career at a time when not many women were encouraged to pursue careers or higher education.

Maria’s papa is an astronomer. At night, he goes up on the roof their house to use his telescope, and he explains how the telescope works, gathering and focusing light to make distant objects look larger and closer than they would with just a person’s eyes. He especially likes to look for comets. In their time, they’re not entirely sure what comets are made of, and that’s part of what makes studying them interesting. Maria imagines what it would be like to travel across the sky with a comet, encountering the different planets.

Most of Maria’s life centers around their house and family in Nantucket. There are nine children in the family, so Maria helps with chores and tells her siblings bedtime stories. Sometimes, she and her brother Andrew go into the attic and use an old atlas to pretend that they’re explorers. When they read books, Maria likes books about astronomers, but Andrew likes books about sailors. He wants to be a sailor himself.

When Andrew gets older, he runs away from his family to go to sea on a whaling boat. The entire family is sad that he is gone, and Maria soothes her siblings by telling them stories about all of the amazing places their brother will go. That night, after supper, Maria asks her father if she can come with him to look through his telescope or “sweep the sky” as she thinks of it. For a moment, Maria thinks they will say no, but they agree. Maria wants to be an explorer of the sky, like her brother wanted to explore the seas.

Maria’s father points out Polaris, the North Star, to Maria and says that sailors use it to navigate. Maria wonders if Andrew might be looking at the same star right now. Then, she sees a comet streak across the sky.

There’s an Author’s Note in the back of the book that explains about the real life of Maria Mitchell. It has some comments about what people of her time knew and didn’t now about the planets. When she was young, people only knew about seven planets in the solar system. Neptune was discovered during her lifetime (although not by her), and Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930, after she had died. There is also a section about the astronomy terms used in the story and famous astronomers.

My Reaction

I enjoy books about historical people, although the author admits in the Author’s Note that this particular story about Maria Mitchell is fiction. I have mixed feelings about that. I don’t like to fictionalize real people, and I’m not entirely sure whether there’s any truth to the story about Maria’s relationship with her brother and how she felt when he left to become a sailor. On the other hand, I did appreciate how the book showed Maria becoming interested in astronomy by watching her father and joining him in his studies of the sky, which is apparently true. Overall, I did enjoy the story.

The pictures in the book are wonderful. They capture the coziness of an old-fashioned 19th-century home and also the wonderment of looking to the skies and imagining exploring the big, wide world and the stars beyond it.

Posted on by TracyC

Five Secrets in a Box

Five Secrets in a Box by Catherine Brighton, 1987.

This story is about Virginia Galilei (1600-1634), the eldest child of Galileo Galilei, and her perception of his work and equipment as a young child. The book has sections of historical information about Galileo and Virginia in the front and the back inside cover, although the story itself is just about Virginia exploring Galileo’s study.

Virginia, as a young child, knows that her father stays up late at night, studying the night sky, while she is asleep. During the day, she must be quiet to let him sleep. She is not really supposed to touch his scientific instruments, but she can’t resist the temptation to take a look. In her father’s study, she finds a box with five mysterious objects in it, and she investigates what they do.

One of them is a lens that makes small things look bigger. Another is a lens that makes things that are far away look closer. There is another lens that makes everything look blue and another that makes everything look red. Then, there is also a plain, white feather.

Virginia wonders what the purpose of the feather is, and she asks her father about it. He tells her that it is important to his work.

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

My Reaction

According to the historical information provided, little Virginia’s mother left Galileo and married someone else while Virginia was still young. Virginia remained living with Galileo and was close to her father. When she was 12 years old, her father sent her to a convent, which was a fairly common way for upper-class girls at that time to get an education. However, Galileo probably intended for his daughters to join the Church as nuns rather than marrying when their education was complete. The book doesn’t explain this, but Virginia and her younger brother and sister were born out of wedlock. Because they were illegitimate (born outside of a legally-recognized marriage – the word “illegitimate” literally refers to someone born outside of the law and legal standing with implications about both the legal status of their parents’ union and the child’s possible future inheritance, depending on the laws of that particular society), their social status was compromised from birth. Galileo believed that it would be difficult for his daughters to find husbands, so joining a convent and becoming nuns would provide the girls with stable lives and careers as well as an education, which is what both of them did. Virginia remained at the convent as a nun, taking the name of Sister Maria Celeste, and unfortunately, died relatively young at the age of 34. The book doesn’t say why, but it was because she contracted dysentery, which is caused by consuming tainted water or food.

The story itself doesn’t really explain the purpose of the five special objects that Virginia examines in her father’s study. Some of them are obvious because readers will recognize what they are and the way they work. The purpose of the feather is left a little mysterious at the end, but readers get the full explanation by reading the section of historical information. Galileo was studying gravity, and apparently, he dropped objects off of the leading tower of Pisa to study how long it took them to fall. A feather will take longer to reach the ground than a stone, but that’s because of air resistance. One of Galileo’s premises was that, if there were no air to produce that air resistance, the stone and the feather would fall at the same rate of time due to gravity. I think I would have preferred to have Galileo explain some of this to his daughter when she asks him about the feather, but the story ends kind of abruptly at that point, with Virginia just playing with the feather. I felt like the ending isn’t exactly an ending without that explanation.

The pictures are the main reason why I really liked this book. They are colorful and realistic, and I thought they did a great job of showing the scientific instruments of the past. I also liked some of the little details of the house included in the backgrounds of the pictures. There is a crucifix hanging on the wall behind the telescope in Galileo’s study because this is a religious household, even though some of Galileo’s assertions about the way the world works clashed with Church teachings and got him placed under house arrest. (The book says that he was “sent to prison”, but he was actually placed under house arrest rather than being sent to a prison because he was elderly and in bad health by that point in his life.)

The book doesn’t go into detail about Galileo’s arrest because that happened later in his life, but he was basically considered a heretic for his belief in Copernicus‘s theory that the sun is the center of the solar system instead of the Earth. That sounds like a rather petty charge, and you might wonder why it matters or what different it could make to religion. It wasn’t a new idea because others had reached that conclusion long before him. Copernicus was never arrested for his ideas, partly because he didn’t live very long after he published them, but his book was placed on the restricted list by the Inquisition.

The reason why the relative positions of the sun and the Earth mattered depend on whether particular Biblical passages are meant to be interpreted literally or figuratively. Under a strict literal interpretation, which was the interpretation approved by the Church at that time, the conclusion was that the Earth was the center of the solar system, so saying otherwise would be to go against the Bible and Church teaching, making it a heresy. It wasn’t so much that the relative positions of the sun and the Earth were that important by themselves so much as the act of apparently contradicting the Bible. The Renaissance era was also the era of the Reformation, where Protestants were breaking away from the Catholic Church, partly because of the questions of literal interpretation of the Bible and Church doctrine. The Catholic Church’s response to that during this period was to become more strict in enforcing moral and doctrinal standards in the Counter-Reformation, so anything that seemed to challenge these aspects of the faith was taken far more seriously during this period. This stance would shift again later in history.

The background and aftermath to this story is far more complex than the story itself, although I think part of the charm of the story is it’s simplicity. This is one particular day and a small incident, seen through the eyes of a child, even though adult readers know that there are bigger events surrounding it.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Clue in the Classroom

The Bobbsey Twins

#9 The Clue in the Classroom by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1988.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

Nan and Bert are walking to school when Bert starts trying to follow Nan, practicing shadowing someone, like his favorite comic book detective, Rex Sleuther. Nan thinks that Bert’s attempts at following her are ridiculous, especially since she already knows he’s there. Then, she spots a tall man who is really being shadowed.

The tall man keeps looking over his shoulder and ducking into doorways, like someone is after them. It doesn’t take the kids long to realize who is following him because a man in a trenchcoat, who is walking behind the tall man, keeps pausing and pretending to tie his shoe or look in store windows every time the tall man glances back. It’s not very subtle. When the man in the trenchcoat sees Nan and Bert watching him, he gives them a menacing look and seems like he’s about to confront them, but then, he leaves. They lose sight of the tall man. It’s a bizarre experience, and it ends when the kids’ mother drives up with their younger siblings and gives them a ride.

At school, Nan meets her new science teacher, and she realizes that he is the tall man who was being followed by the man in the trenchcoat. He introduces himself as Mr. Newman (ha, ha), and he seems much more relaxed than he was before. That is, until they all see the message written on the blackboard in the classroom: “Newman, give up your plans. We’re watching you.” Mr. Newman exclaims, “Oh, no! They’ve found out! They know!” (I seriously wish that at least one of my old teachers had started their first day in class by saying that exact thing.) Mr. Newman doesn’t explain what it’s about. He just quickly erases the message on the board and begins talking about the science project he’s assigning.

When Nan tells her siblings about Mr. Newman and what happened in class, Freddie says that Mr. Newman will also be teaching the afternoon science club that he joined. Mr. Newman will be teaching them about robots, and they’re going to have a meeting at his house, where Mr. Newman will show the club his inventions. Bert says that Freddie can help them figure out what Mr. Newman is doing and what and who he’s afraid of after he’s seen the projects that Mr. Newman is working on.

Bert decides to take a walk past Mr. Newman’s house to get a look at it before Freddie goes there. While he’s doing his reconnaissance, Bert sees what looks like people fighting in one of the windows. When he knocks on the door to see if Mr. Newman is all right, Mr. Newman says that he is and insists that there’s no one else there. Then, a strange woman shows up and starts asking Bert questions about Mr. Newman. She says that she’s his former boss at a computer company and wants to know if Bert saw anything in his house. She seems very interested in what he might be working on, but Bert just says that Mr. Newman was too busy for visitors.

Is this woman really Mr. Newman’s former boss, and does she have anything to do with the mysterious man in the trenchcoat? Someone breaks into the school and trashes Mr. Newman’s classroom. What is this secret invention of Mr. Newman’s that everyone seems so interested in, and why would someone threaten him over it or try to put a stop to his work?

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

My Reaction

The kids’ first thoughts about the mysterious people who are after Mr. Newman is that they might be spies, and they’re partly right. This is a matter of industrial espionage. People are after Mr. Newman’s invention because they can make a lot of money from it.

The robot Mr. Newman is building is really impressive, even by modern 21st century standards. Back in the 1980s, when this was written, a robot that large and sophisticated would have seemed almost like science fiction, although increasing developments in robotics technology would have made it seem more possible. Companies were working on developing robots during the 1980s, and Honda was working on a humanoid robot that could walk on two feet. Kids had toy robots. (I wanted one but never got one.) I don’t remember any classes for building robots for kids, but there may have been some that I didn’t know about at the time because I was still pretty young in the 1980s. In the 21st century, there are modern robotics classes for kids, and they sometimes show off their robots at competitions.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mad Scientists Club

The Mad Scientists Club Series

The Mad Scientists Club by Bertrand R. Brinley, 1965, 2001.

The Mad Scientists Club series is about a group of boys who like science and make things in their clubhouse laboratory. Their inventions are often part of pranks that they play on their town, Mammoth Falls, but the boys also use their inventions and skills to help people. People in town are aware that the boys pull pranks and stunts, but they are often unable to prove the boys’ involvement in particular pranks, and the boys typically keep the methods they use secret.

Henry is the idea man of the group, and the club’s rival is a former member named Harmon. Harmon’s cousin is still a member of the Mad Scientists Club, and Harmon likes to spy on them and pump his cousin for information so he can mess up their plans out of spite.

Each chapter in the book is its own short story about the club’s antics. Some of the stories originally appeared in Boys’ Life magazine in the 1960s. The stories are a good fit for Boys’ Life because some of the skills the boys use are skills that are taught in Boy Scouts, like what to do when someone is injured and how to tie different types of knots.

The stories reference scientific and mathematical principles, and the boys are methodical in their approaches to the problems in each story. The technology is old by modern 21st century standards (and so are some cultural references, like McGee’s closet), but the principles are sound. There are no projects for readers to do themselves in the book, but it does occur to me that these types of stories could work well with some included activities or nonfiction accompaniment.

The first story in the book was made into a live action tv movie by Disney, The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove (1971), but the movie has different characters from the ones in the book. The Disney movie uses the same set of characters they used for their movie version of Secrets of the Pirates’ Inn (based on The Secrets of the Pirate Inn). The plot of The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove is also very different from the original story because, in the Disney movie, the kids don’t know what the “monster” is at first and need to investigate it, whereas the boys in the Mad Scientist Club know exactly what the monster is in their story because they built it themselves. You can watch the movie online through Internet Archive, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find an online copy of the book.

Stories in the Book:

The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake

Dinky accidentally starts a town-wide rumor about a sea monster in the lake when he makes up a story about seeing a strange creature in the lake when he needs an excuse for arriving home late. His friends know it’s just a story, but they decide to play along and build a monster of their own out of canvas and chicken wire and scare people as a prank. Even though people in town are scared of the monster, the attention the town receives is so good for local businesses, the boys can’t bring themselves to stop their prank. Instead, they decide to make their monster more elaborate, and things start to get out of hand. How can they end the hoax while saving the town’s image and avoiding punishment?

Night Rescue

An Air Force plane explodes near the town of Mammoth Falls. The pilot escaped from the plane, but he’s now lost in the woods. The local authorities are searching for him, and the boys in the club want to help. The mayor doesn’t want the kids involved, knowing their usual pranks and stunts, but the Air Force colonel is willing to let them help, if they think they can, because he just wants his pilot rescued. The boys use a flare to determine which way the parachuting pilot would have drifted, and then, they calculate about how far he would have drifted to find him.

The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls

The boys find an old department store manikin and keep it in their clubhouse until Henry gets the idea for how they can use it in an elaborate prank on the town’s Founder’s Day. They’re going to make the manikin fly!

The Secret of the Old Cannon

The town’s old cannon from the Civil War is a local landmark now. (We don’t know what state Mammoth falls is in, but there are statues of Confederate soldiers next to the cannon.) Years ago, the town filled the barrel with cement, so it can never fire again. Around the time that the cannon was filled in, there was a bank robbery in town, and some of the boys in the Mad Scientists Club think that the money might have been hidden in the cannon before it was filled with cement. The boys try to figure out how they can prove whether or not the money’s in there without removing all of the cement. Someone else also wants to know the answer to that, and the answer may be important to the upcoming race for mayor.

The Great Gas Bag Race

Henry has an idea for a new kind of balloon that he thinks will help the Mad Scientists Club win the balloon race, but the club’s rival, Harmon, is also entering the race.

The Big Egg

The boys are digging for fossils in the local quarry when they find a dinosaur egg! At first, they’re not quite sure what to do with it. They consider selling admission for people to come see it or maybe turning it over to a museum, but Henry announces that he has another idea. Henry wants to bury the egg in the ground and see if it hatches. It seems unlikely, but the other boys agree to try it. Then, when a couple of the boys go to check on the egg, they discover that it’s missing! They bring their friends back to look at it, and suddenly, the egg is there again! What’s going on? Did someone take the egg and then return it? Is this another one of Harmon’s tricks?

The Voice in the Chimney

One day, some of the boys in the club see Harmon throwing stones at an old, abandoned house in town while some girls watch him. Wondering what he’s doing, they get closer and hear him challenging the ghost that supposedly haunts the old house, trying to impress the girls with his bravery. The boys are disgusted because they know Harmon isn’t really that brave, and they hate seeing him show off for the girls. When they hear Harmon brag that he’s going to come back to the house at night, they tell the rest of their club, and the boys decide to put on a haunted house act of their own to scare Harmon. In the process, they also end up scaring the mayor and the chief of police!

Posted on by TracyC

Fishes

Fishes by Bertha Morris Parker, 1943, 1957.

This is a reprint of an earlier book, and it’s interesting because this was part of an educational science series. The author was from the University of Chicago, and the accuracy was verified by Walter H. Chute, the Director of the John G. Shedd Aquarium at the time.

As a child, I was never particularly interested in fish. My mother had a fish tank with pet fish, but I lived pretty far from large bodies of water and never went fishing. For years, this book, probably purchased at one of the many used book sales my family attended over the years, went unread. However, as an adult, I like reading children’s books about very specific topics because they often include some fun and usual facts.

The book begins by explaining to child readers how goldfish are similar to and different from human beings. It seems pretty straight forward, but they point out some thoughtful similarities and differences. Both fish and humans need to breathe, but they do it in different ways, which is why humans drown in water and fish effectively drown in air. The book also points out that goldfish cannot move their heads independently of their bodies in the way that humans do.

In the section called “The Story of the Goldfish”, the book explains how wild goldfish were first kept as pets in China and Japan. Wild goldfish actually have a variety of colors, but hundreds of years ago in China, people liked the yellow or gold ones best as pets, and they began deliberately breeding fish with these colors, which is how they came to be known as “goldfish.”

The book defines “fish” as creatures with gills, fins, and backbones but no arms or legs. It uses this definition to separate fish from other aquatic creatures like whales (no gills, actually a mammal with lungs), jellyfish (no fins, gills, or backbone), crabs (gills but no fins, arms and an exoskeleton instead of a backbone), and starfish. It also explains the difference between fish that live in salt water vs. fish that live in fresh water.

The book explains what different types of fishes eat, how they’re born (most hatch from eggs), how they defend themselves, and how they migrate. In one section, the book explains how fish have some or all of the five senses that humans have (sight, hearing, smelling, taste, and touch), but they have them to different degrees and use them in different ways.

The book presents information about some specific types of fish, and it even mentions that some types of fish are endangered species. I usually associate environmental messages with the late 20th century, but this book discussed the over-fishing of sturgeon and the ecological dangers of erosion caused by deforestation on river banks and factory waste dumped in water in the mid-20th century.

The book ends with a list of tips for observing fish.

The book presents a pretty comprehensive beginner’s guide to fish in general, and I really appreciated the mentions of environmental issues. My one criticism is that the book could use more pictures and especially bigger pictures. All of the pictures are in full color, but most of them are rather small, just in the corners or edges of the pages, which are mostly full of text. I just think that larger pictures would be more appealing and more child-friendly. There are even places where the edges of the pictures and their captions are cut off by the edges of the book (as shown in two of the pictures of pages above), which looks clumsy and annoying. The book seems pretty authoritative, but I think it could have been presented better. I’m not sure how people who originally read this book looked at it, but I didn’t like the size and positioning of the illustrations.

I couldn’t find an online edition of this vintage nonfiction children’s book, but I did find online editions of other nonfiction books for children by the same author through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Voyage to the Planets

Voyage to the Planets by Jeff Davidson, 1990.

This was my second favorite book about outer space as a kid! It would have been the first favorite, but my first favorite had glow-in-the-dark pictures, and this one doesn’t. I bought them at the same time at a school book fair, but the one with the glow-in-the-dark pictures definitely caught my attention first. This book does, however, have pictures of the planets taken by the Voyager 2 space probe.

The beginning of the book explains a little about the solar system and its place in the galaxy and the Voyager 2 probe.

Then, it takes readers on a journey through the solar system, beginning with the sun at the center of the solar system and moving outward, planet by planet. The page about each planet explains the origin of the planet’s name in Roman mythology and gives facts about the planet, such as its size, distance from the sun, and rotation and orbit periods.

The page about Earth specifically mentions, “The Earth will only support life as long as we are careful to maintain its special conditions. If people continue to pollute the environment, the delicate balance of our planet may be destroyed forever.” Books, movies, tv shows, and teachers in public school gave us environmental messages very early in life when I was young in the 1980s and 1990s.

The book ends with Pluto as the ninth planet, which is what we were taught as kids in the early 1990s. There is no mention of “dwarf planets” or the Kuiper Belt because the book was published in 1990 and scientists didn’t find definite evidence of Kuiper Belt objects until 1992.

Posted on by TracyC

Discover the Night Sky

Discover the Night Sky by Chris Madsen and Michele Claiborne, 1989.

I bought this book at a school book fair when I was a kid, and it was my favorite book about the stars and outer space because it has glow-in-the-dark pictures. As a child, I loved anything that was glow-in-the-dark. Actually, I still do.

Every page in the book is designed to be interactive. There are pages that talk about different aspects of outer space, but the pages with the glow-in-the-dark pictures want you to guess what’s in the picture based on descriptions of it. Then, you’re supposed to turn off the light and look at the glowing picture to see what it is. You can see the what the glow-in-the-dark picture is without turning off the lights if you tilt the book and look at it at an angle or use a black light (like I did to take the pictures), but it is more fun if you really do look at it while it’s glowing in the dark. (Like other glow-in-the-dark toys, it glows better if the page has been in the light first to charge it.)

The pages after each glow-in-the-dark page have facts about the object in the glow-in-the-dark picture and an experiment for readers to do. The experiments help demonstrate the nature of the moon, stars, and planets, like what causes the phases of the moon, what causes seasons on Earth, and why you don’t see the stars during the day, even though they’re still there.

The information in the book is still factually correct, although it shows Pluto as being the last planet of the solar system. (Since people still quibble about this, I don’t consider it a big issue.) It isn’t a bad introduction to outer space for young children. The last page in the book is about the Voyager 2 space probe. Its primary mission ended around the time the book was first published, but we have contact with the space probe today (as of early 2021).

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The online version of the book doesn’t fully do it justice because you can’t take advantage of the glow-in-the-dark feature, but you can still read the text and see the experiment pages.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magician’s Company

The Magician’s Company by Tom McGowen, 1988.

This is the second book in the Magician’s Apprentice trilogy.

The story picks up where the previous book left off. Armindor the Magician, his apprentice Tigg, and their friend Reepah, who is a creature called a grubber, are on their way home with the “magical” devices that they retrieved in the last book, taking them back to their Guild for investigation. On their way home, they pass through a land consumed by civil war, and they pass a wagon surrounded by dead bodies. They can tell that the people were civilians, probably entertainers, and further down the road the find a young girl about Tigg’s age (around 12 years old), struggling along, carrying her belongings. They ask the girl about herself, and she breaks down crying, telling them how she and her family were fleeing the war, but her aunt and the other members of their puppeteer troupe were murdered by soldiers. The girl, whose name is Jilla, survived by hiding in a secret compartment in their wagon. After her aunt and the others were killed, Jilla gathered up what she could, taking the puppets that would help her to earn her living and a few other belongings not stolen by the soldiers, determined to continue her journey to a safer place, like the city of Inbal.

Armindor and Tigg have horses, and they offer to help the girl on her way to Inbal, a city in another territory. Along the way, Tigg tells Jilla the story of their previous adventures, and Armindor invites Jilla to stay with them awhile longer and even come home to Ingarron with them because it would be very difficult for a young girl to manage on her own in a strange city. Jilla is happy to stay with them because she is thankful for their help and worried about managing on her own yet.

In Inbal, Armindor and Tigg visit the sages in the city to show them their discoveries. They speak to Tarbizon, an old friend of Armidor’s, showing him what they found and explaining the threat posed by the reens, a species of intelligent but diabolical creatures that evolved/mutated from rats, have the ability to talk, use blowguns with poisoned darts, and are plotting to take over the world. (Yes, really. Even they think it’s weird.) Before they continue their journey to Ingarron, they decide to stay in Inbal for the winter because it would be difficult to travel until spring. Someone breaks into the place where they are staying and goes through their belongings. They have no idea who did it, but apparently, whoever it was didn’t find what they were looking for because nothing seems to be missing. Since they will be staying in the city for awhile, they decide to rent a house instead of staying in the guestinghouse (inn) where they have been staying.

While they are looking for a house to rent, Tigg is kidnapped. Fortunately, Reepah is able to sniff out where he is. Armindor pretends that his “magic” is what told him where his apprentice was in order to intimidate the kidnapper. Caught and frightened of the magician’s powers, the kidnapper admits that he was paid to abduct Tigg by Pan Biblo, who is the head servant of Councilor Leayzar, who is part of the High Council of Inbar and who has convinced the other sages that the reen do not pose a serious threat in spite of Armindor’s warnings. When they rescue Tigg, Tigg says that a man had questioned him about the spells that he and Armindor retrieved from the Wild Lands and Armindor would be willing to trade them for Tigg. From this information, Armindor realizes that Leayzar wants the lost technology they’ve discovered, but he can’t figure out why. It doesn’t take long for Armindor to realize that Leayzar is working with the reen. The reen have hired humans to work for them before, and they desperately want pieces of lost technology in order to gain dominance over humans.

Armindor and the others go to the sages in the city and tell them what they’ve discovered about Leayzar, and the other sages take it seriously. Some of them wonder why Leayzar would want to ally with a group that is an enemy of his own species, but Armindor says that it’s hard to say because they don’t know what the reen told Leayzar. Maybe Leayzar doesn’t understand what the reens’ full plans are and whatever they promised him in return was just too compelling to resist. At the end of the previous book, some of the weenitok gave Armindor a sealed box that they found, left over from the end of the Age of Magic. The sages decide that it’s time to open the box and study its contents in the hope of getting some answers. If the last book didn’t fully establish that their world is our world in the far distant future, the contents of the box explicitly state it.

Inside the box, there is a recorded message from the year 2003 (the future at the time this book was written, but the past to us in early 2021, and it’s interesting what this message has to say about the world in 2003). The message is from Dr. Dennis Hammond of the National Science Foundation Project for the Preservation of Civilization. He says that there has been a war between the “Pan-Islamic Brotherhood” (the closest real-life equivalent would probably be the Muslim Brotherhood, but that’s more of a social/political movement or terrorist group (depending on who you ask) rather than an official alliance of nations) and the United States and its allies, including Canada, Europe, China, and the Soviet Union (which stopped existing just a few years after this book was published in real life and would just be called Russia in 2003). Dr. Hammond says that thermonuclear war is pending, and he and other scientists are worried because they think the resulting destruction will be the end of civilization as they know it. (He doesn’t explicitly say this is World War III, but that’s basically what it amounts to. In real life, we haven’t actually had World War III yet as of early 2021, although in 2001 and the following years, there was some speculation that the destruction of the World Trade Center and other terrorist attacks might eventually lead to World War III, so it seems that the author has caught on to a source of world tension even if he didn’t predict how it would come out.) In order to preserve existing knowledge about science and world history, they made a series of these boxes containing small computers designed to last for about 10,000 years and hid them at various locations around North America (so now we know roughly where these characters are) so that future generations that find them will have access to knowledge that may have been lost. The computers even contain language tutorials just in case language has changed too much for this speech to be understandable. It’s fortunate that the early 21th century scientists thought of that because it turns out that none of the sages understood a word of what the voice in the box said. The readers now understand the full situation, but the characters don’t.

Everyone is astonished at this talking box. They’ve never even heard of such a thing, and they think that it must be a “spell” from a past “magician”, which he created to preserve his voice. They understand that the voice is speaking an unfamiliar language, and there is a picture on the included screen showing a finger poking one of the buttons in the box, so they get the idea that the box wants them to press buttons. When Armindor presses the red button indicated, the computer in the box begins a simple language tutorial, showing them pictures of familiar things and saying their names, like “sun” and “cloud.” The sages understand that they’re being taught an ancient language, and they quickly begin taking notes. Armindor is moved to tears because this is exactly what he has been hoping to discover for years, the secrets behind all of the ancient “magic.” They can tell that the “magician” who made the box was trying to teach them, and they’re more than ready to learn!

But, there is still the matter of Leayzar and the reen to deal with. When they learn that Leayzar is looking for Armindor, Jilla suggests a cover they could use to hide their identities: becoming a troupe of puppeteers with her puppets! Becoming puppeteers also gives them the opportunity to spread word of the reen threat to the public through their puppet plays.

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

My Reaction

I said in my review of the last book that Armindor and Tigg don’t find any easy answers or any miraculous device that instantly solves all of their society’s problems and launches them back into an age of technology. The computer in the box comes the closest to that, but it’s still not an easy answer because Armindor and the other magicians and sages of his time can’t understand the language it uses or how the computer works when they first find it. They understand enough to know that it’s trying to tell them something and that its creators are trying to teach them how to understand and use it, but it’s going to take some time before they reach the point where they will understand enough of the language to figure out all of the information that the computer has to share. There will be enough work cut out for future “magicians” (really, scientists) of their time, like Tigg, to figure out how the computer works, what information it has to share, and how they can teach the rest of their people what they’ve learned. It’s a turning point in their history, but it’s not an instant solution. Plus, although the characters don’t really understand it at first, the readers are told that there are other boxes that are still waiting to be found. Do these boxes all contain the same information, or are there other pieces of knowledge in each one? There are plenty of secrets for a new generation of scientist/magicians to unravel.