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Archive for the ‘Death is a central theme’ Category
Book review: The Last Dragon
Monday, September 3rd, 2007Book review: The Higher Power of Lucky
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Susan Patron |
| Illustrator: | Matt Phelan |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2006 |
As a lover of fairy tales, it was probably impossible for me not to love reading this sophisticated story, simply told, which pretty much turns every fairy tale convention on end:
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Highly recommended for fairy tale lovers who are somewhat more worldly (older) than is typical. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Higher Power of Lucky,The | |
Book review: A Crack In the Edge of the World — America and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
Monday, June 18th, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Simon Winchester |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2005 |
Simon Winchester begins and ends with the San Francisco earthquake (and fire) of 1906, but by the time he gets around to it the second time, he's provided descriptions of earthquakes and tsunamis throughout the world so detailed that I was almost afraid to finish the book. But how could I not? | |
Winchester's descriptions of the people and places affected are compelling. For example, the Cassandra in me was moved by the story of the fire chief of San Francisco, Dennis Sullivan, who argued "for years that the city was a tinderbox waiting to be struck.... He must have felt vindicated when, in October 1905, the National Board of Fire Underwriters declared that San Francisco's water-supply system... was in such poor shape that the hydrants would not be able to halt anything approaching a major fire." "[T]he San Francisco fires raged, at first wholly unchecked, for ... three days" after the earthquake. Within 12 hours, half of the city had been completely burned. "Time and again, since almost every one of the hydrants proved to be dry, the firemen could only look on impotently and suffer the jeers of the crowds which at first could not understand why nothing was being done to contain the inferno." Winchester's explanations of the geology are clear and frank. The appendix about the Richter Scale is worth the price of admission. Obviously, not for the squeamish. But a must-read for everyone else who lives on Earth. And not just for those who live in California. Look up New Madrid in the index.-- Emily | |
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If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Crack In the Edge of the World, A: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 | |
Book review: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Janna Levin |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | For grown-ups |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | For grown-ups |
| Genre: | Fiction, biography |
| Year of publication: | 2006 |
What must it be like to be so intelligent that you can't trust anyone enough to believe him or her? So confident that you are right and that everyone else is wrong that you ignore the woman who loves you when she tells you that you must eat (and assures you that the food is really, truly not poisoned)? What must it be like to know that you are moral, that you have saved civilization, but to be convicted of immorality and forced to deny your true self? Janna Levin (our madman who is not at all mad) worms us inside the minds of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and forces us to look out into the world through their eyes. When we hear Gödel's story, we may be tempted to think that paranoid insanity is part of terrific genius. But then what are we to think of Alan Turing (yes, he clearly was on the autistic spectrum, but he was not crazy and not harmful to himself or to others), who only wanted to solve very hard problems and love the occasional man and was forced to ingest hormones that destroyed his body and his self-respect? | |
A very sad, but important book. A reminder that we must, must, must help our gifted children find communities in which brilliant minds are nurtured and supported and cherished for their idiosyncrasies. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, A | |
Book review: Stranger in a Strange Land
Saturday, March 31st, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Robert Heinlein |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Sophisticated readers |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Sophisticated readers |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1961 |
Winner of the 1962 Hugo Award. Story of a human child, raised by Martians on Mars, who comes to Earth and starts a sexual revolution. I guess it was revolutionary for its time. But re-reading it 40+ years after its release, it strikes me as as preachy as anything by Asimov, with an attitude toward women that holds over from the fifties, and as sexually innocent (not) as The Harrad Experiment. | |
Of course, The Harrad Experiment was written more than 10 years later, so that is some proof that Stranger may have been ground-breaking.... Some have suggested that Valentine, the Martian-human Stranger is a metaphor for an Asperger-spectrum gifted learner, who groks nearly everything he studies better and faster than any other human, but who also lacks social skills and an understanding of how humans are expected to behave. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Stranger in a Strange Land | |
Book/musical news: Wicked
Sunday, March 11th, 2007 | Tweet |
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Wonderful piece about the author of the book Wicked
My now-12 yr. old has loved the musical since she first saw it when she was around 9. But we (her parents and older sister) have suggested that she not read the book until she is older, although we agree that the book is much more wonderful than the musical.
— Emily
\”Before seeing the Broadway musical “Wicked†for the 25th time, Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel “Wicked,†was in the lobby of the Gershwin Theater last month persuading people not to read it. Granted, the people were 9, 10 and 13, and Maguire was telling their respective mothers that the book could be “a destination read for freshman year in college.†But when he saw the girls’ hangdog faces, he conceded that, if their mothers read it first and approved, they might try it at 16 instead. …\”
Mr. Wicked by ALEX WITCHEL
Book review: Deep Wizardry
Saturday, March 10th, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Diane Duane |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1985 |
My daughter and I read A Wizard Abroad first (the fourth book in the So You Want To Be A Wizard series), and then we read So You Want To Be A Wizard, the first book in the series. Both stress the responsibilities and hazards of having great power. Both climax in a to-the-death battle between Good and Evil. And So You Want ..., much to the dismay of my daughter, proclaims the theme that self-sacrifice to the death is deemed a worthy and necessary outcome in certain extenuating circumstances. And that it might happen to a friend of yours. Perhaps because you need them to make that sacrifice. This is not a theme that my daughter much likes. | |
Which is why, as a project, I am suggesting that my daughter spend time looking for Christian symbolism in the novels she reads, even fluffy ones like this one. Deep Wizardry, the second book in the series, picks and chooses from the themes and plots of the others in the series. Duane is wonderful at describing young teenagers accidentally taking on more than they can really handle and then -- handling it. She's also very good at describing parents of gifted kids who really want to trust their children but have a hard time understanding what those children are capable of or what drives them. Duane's descriptions of the world and senses of whales in Deep Wizardry make it well worth reading. My daughter and I loved getting to know Kit and Nita, the young wizards, and Nita's younger sister Dairine, as well as Nita's earnest and striving parents and the advisor wizards and their interesting and talented familiars (a parrot and a dog). But, by the end of the bloody and demoralizing battle at the end of Deep Wizardry, we decided to take a break, concerned that other books in the series prove to be more of the same. I understand there are seven books in total in the series. Our recommendation: Read Deep Wizardry first. Then, read A Wizard Abroad if you are interested in Celtic myth and atmosphere, or read So You Want To Be A Wizard if you feel you need the gory details of how Nita and Kit over-promised.-- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Deep Wizardry | |
Book review: So You Want To Be A Wizard
Friday, March 9th, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Diane Duane |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1983 |
My younger daughter and I have been lucky in that we have often failed to start at the beginning of a series, and when we have, it has often worked out well for us. We read A Wizard Abroad a while back, enjoyed it, and were advised to start at the beginning of the series. If we had started at the beginning of the series -- hmm -- well, we might not have continued. Like A Wizard Abroad, So You Want To Be A Wizard stresses the responsibilities and hazards of having great power. And like Abroad, it climaxes in a to-the-death battle between Good and Evil. Unlike Abroad, but not unlike the third book in the series Deep Wizardry, and much to the consternation of my daughter, self-sacrifice to the death is deemed a worthy and necessary outcome in certain extenuating circumstances. | |
As a project, I am suggesting that my daughter spend time looking for Christian symbolism in the novels she reads, even fluffy ones like this one. I think, perhaps, she felt that this one was too fluffy to merit the death and destruction. But she/we did decide to go on to read Deep Wizardry, the next book in the series. -- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: So You Want to Be a Wizard | |
Book review: Stravaganza: City of Masks
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Mary Hoffman |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2002 |
City of Masks is about a teenaged girl named Arianna who lives in 16th century Talia, who wants nothing more than to be a mandolier, and a boy named Lucian, who lives in 21st century England, and has an incurable case of cancer. As Lucian suffers, his dad gives him a beautiful notebook from what seems to be very early Italy. When he fell asleep one night holding the notebook in his hand, he finds himself in 16th century Italy (Talia). There he meets Arianna, and learns that how he got there was by what the experts call stravagation (which is how he was transferred from his world to this new one). So quite suddenly he is thrown into living two lives, one as a sick kid in modern England during the day, and the other as a perfectly healthy young man in Talia.I recommend this exciting, kind of mysterious book for people who like fantasy and books that you don't want to put down. City of Stars is an amazing book, the first in a series of 3. It is so wonderful for many reasons, one of which is that this book surprises you, (in a good way). While you're reading it's hard to guess what is going to happen, until it does, or nearly until it does. | |
Also, I liked reading this book because there were many characters that you got to know, but not too many to be overwhelmed. Each character has his or her own personality and feelings. After reading this book I went on to read the other two books in this series right away. --Fizzy, age 12 | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Stravaganza: City of Masks | |
Book review: elsewhere
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 | Tweet |
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| Author: | Gabrielle Zevin |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2005 |
Poor Liz Hall, she is killed in a hit-and-run car crash when she is only 15, and when she wakes up, she's on a ship traveling to Elsewhere, the world after death. On the ship she meets the 6 year old captain who explains that once you die you go to Elsewhere and live backwards until you're a baby, then you sail back to Earth to begin a new life. Also on the ship, Liz meets a dead superstar and another girl named Thandi who's around Liz's age, with whom she becomes friends. Everyone else on the ship is an old person. At first in Elsewhere, Liz is angry and upset that her life had to end when she wasn't even 16 yet. She never got to fall in love or learn to drive, or anything!But as her backwards life progresses, Liz meets a boy named Owen Welles, and she starts to feel like she could enjoy her not-life. This book is not adventure-packed like some books, but it is in the mind of a girl, and with her you go through all her problems, like a boyfriend, a dog, sadness, happiness, and other things that a teenager girl would go through.I enjoyed this book very much, because you really get to know the characters and the thoughts of Liz sound like what she'd actually think. This is a new version of what happens after life that I've never heard before, and I think that it's very interesting. Before my parents let me read this they were worried that it would be too scary for me, Liz being dead and all, but it isn't like that at all. The book is somewhat sad and dreary in the beginning but it's not like it would give nightmares or something bad like that. This book really put new thoughts in my mind, new thoughts that weren't bad. I recommend this book for maybe 6th or 7th graders and up, even though I read it at a somewhat younger age. --Fizzy, age 12 | |
Parent's note: Yes, it is somewhat maudlin. The point is that even a life lived backward and without fear of death can be lived badly or well. The choice is up to every living person. | |
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If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: elsewhere | |