"The Company We Keep," "How to Live," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Thursday March 31, 2011 GRAPHIC NOVELS NA NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Douglas Wolk There are comics for every age, even the very youngest readers. Agnes Rosenstiehl's "Silly Lilly" books, about a playful little girl observing her environment, are brief, simple, incredibly sweet and thoroughly in line with the sensibilities of 3-year-olds for whom recognizing every word in a word balloon is a real accomplishment. "What Will I Be Today?" (Toon, $12.95) finds Lilly experimenting, over the course of a week, with roles she might assume someday. On Tuesday, for instance, she's a city planner: She finds a couple of concrete beams with some bugs on them, sets them upright and puts them together. "Here!" she declares. "Now we have a bug city." The great kids' cartoonist John Stanley wrote (and sometimes drew) hundreds of comics from the 1940s to the '60s, most of which remained frustratingly out of print for decades. In the past couple of years, though, dozens of volumes of his work on "Little Lulu," "Melvin Monster" and other titles have appeared -- sometimes even in competing editions. "Little Lulu's Pal Tubby: The Runaway Statue and Other Stories" (Dark Horse; paperback, $15.99) collects frequently hilarious 1954-55 Stanley stories about a stout little boy with a sailor hat, his fantasy life (tiny men in a flying saucer lure him into adventures), and the social tensions that anticipate what he'll face later in life (the wealthy, spoiled Wilbur Van Snobbe is always making time with the little blonde girl Tubby likes). "Tubby" (Drawn and Quarterly, $29.95) is a pricier, more elegantly designed hardcover that includes about two-thirds of the same material; it omits a piece involving ethnic stereotypes that has aged poorly, but duplicates the best stories from "The Runaway Statue," including a magnificently surreal farce in which Tubby wakes up with a moustache one morning and ends up in deep trouble because of it. Before the Smurfs appeared in their familiar TV cartoon show (or their forthcoming movie), the little blue homunculi were the stars of a series of comics by the Belgian cartoonists Peyo and Yvan Delporte. "The Smurf King" (Papercutz; paperback, $5.99) is one of the earliest Smurf books, originally published in 1965: a sneaky, dryly nutty political satire. When Papa Smurf leaves town on business, the other Smurfs hold an election to figure out who's in charge. The winner, an ambitious fellow by the name of Smurf, sweeps into office on the strength of duplicitous campaign promises. He promptly crowns himself king. What follows is the inevitable progression of dictatorships: forced labor, the concentration of capital, extralegal imprisonments, revolutionary plots, counterrevolutionary crackdowns and ultimately "a horrible scene of smurficidal struggle," largely conducted via thrown tomatoes. Delporte and Peyo were writing for two audiences at once: Kids may see only the giddy adventure story, but their parents will catch the stinging wit beneath it. A variety show about puppets isn't the most likely source material for great comics, but Roger Langridge is the rare cartoonist with a knack for both vaudeville-style gags and Jim Henson's signature character comedy. The latest collection of Langridge's work on the "Muppet Show Comic Book, Muppet Mash" (Boom Kids!; paperback, $9.99), is his riff on horror-movie cliches, and it's so dead-on it's like having another four great episodes of the old TV series. In one chapter, the perfectly named guest star Howlin' Jack Talbot displays disturbing lupine characteristics; in another, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew decides to transplant his assistant Beaker's brain into a giant robot. Mostly, though, these stories are an excuse for Langridge to fire off a barrage of sight gags, Borscht Belt puns and daffy sketches starring characters we almost never see from the waist down. He's got the Muppet's voices down perfectly, too. Here's the Swedish Chef on what to do about Gonzo, who everyone suspects has become a vampire: "Viggle vaggle in der faische mit der goeurlic broed! Mmm-hmm." Nick Bertozzi's "Lewis & Clark" (First Second; paperback, $16.99) is a treat for history-obsessed high schoolers: a roaring, knotty, digressive account of the 1804-06 expedition to the Pacific Coast that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took on at Thomas Jefferson's behest. Bertozzi's version downplays the idea of the Lewis & Clark expedition as a great adventure, despite a few jolting moments of danger (a couple of encounters with bears, a death-defying plunge down rapids). Instead, he suggests, their trip was a perpetual battle of attrition against nature, culture clashes, human frailty, ignorance and Lewis' personal demons. This is a gorgeous book, rendered in vivid, slashing black-and-white brush strokes, with imagery that relies on vivid swaths of negative space as much as on Bertozzi's gift for caricature and page design. It takes a bit of effort to piece together its barrage of incidents, but that's what exploration is all about. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THREE BOOKS ABOUT ATHEISM Yvonne Zipp NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp Despite the number of titles published since the "new atheists" took up their battle cry against religion with Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" in 2004, there is still no core, authoritative history -- no atheist's bible, if you will. The authors of three new books all cover the more recent history of atheism and agnosticism, although none attempts a definitive look at the subject. Two of them adopt a mostly scholarly stance, while the third makes it a personal quest, informed by some rare humility. 1. "In The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism" (Prometheus, $19), S.T. Joshi profiles 14 notable agnostics and atheists from the 19th and 20th centuries. He is up front about the fact that he's not trying to be encyclopedic and has chosen his subjects based on whether he "shares an intellectual sympathy with them." They are, by and large, a fascinating bunch, including Thomas Huxley, who first coined the term "agnosticism" in 1876; writer and curmudgeon Mark Twain; "America's greatest lawyer," Clarence Darrow; journalist H.L. Mencken ; and horror writer and "patron saint of atheism" H.P. Lovecraft. The lone woman, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who took the fight to eliminate mandatory prayer in schools to the Supreme Court in 1963, "has always been a bit of an embarrassment to the atheist community," Joshi writes. "The Unbelievers" concludes with a look at the "new atheists": Sam Harris (Joshi is not a fan), Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Joshi has no patience for the religious. "Such individuals," he writes, "are free to think secretly that I am consigned to hell, just as I am free to feel silent contempt for their own irrationality and desperation." And while he claims that the battle is over and atheism has won, in the end "we may have to be satisfied with the peculiar dichotomy of an atheistic intellectual class, a wider class of the weakly religious, and an underclass of fundamentalists." Since 93 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, that's a pretty large underclass. In general, this book will be best received by those who share Joshi's -- excuse the term -- faith in that future. 2. If you're filled with rage at God, does that mean you believe in Him? That's the question at the heart of "Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism" (Oxford Univ., $29.95), by Bernard Schweizer, an English professor at Long Island University. After all, most of us don't waste energy railing at the failures and injustice of Zeus or Odin. Schweizer argues that certain agnostics and atheists belong in a separate class, which he dubs "misotheists." (I prefer Albert Camus' term: "metaphysical rebel.") Schweizer's premise is that misotheists -- such as Twain, Elie Wiesel , Rebecca West and Philip Pullman -- tend to work out their philosophical ideas through literature. Schweizer divides them into two categories: "agonistic misotheists," such as Wiesel and Zora Neale Hurston, who might want to believe in God but find it hard in the face of such earthly evil; and "absolute misotheists," such as Pullman, who find God "guilty of gross negligence." "Hating God" relies on close readings of selected texts, but Schweizer's insistence that his work is groundbreaking gets tiring. Still, I'd like to be in the room when Schwiezer informs Pullman that he actually believes in God. 3. Michael Krasny, an English professor at San Francisco State University and the host of the " Forum " public radio talk show, decries the polarized state of affairs between religious fundamentalists and militant atheists in "Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest" (New World, $22.95). Krasny, who was raised by Jewish parents, quotes novelist Julian Barnes: "I don't believe in God but I miss him." Having lost his childhood faith in college, Krasny spent years forging his own personal code, including wisdom from everyone from Hemingway to Camus. "I wanted my own set of commandments, my own ethical code, my own personal morality, my own certainty, if I could find it, without the necessity of a divinely prescribed moral platform." Along the way, he makes a case for agnosticism as more than just "cowardly atheism" and for a return to tolerance. "One principle to which I have held fast is not to belittle or be contemptuous of the faith of others." He adds two provisos: as long as people do no harm in the name of their faith, and as long as they don't try to force their beliefs, or nonbeliefs, on him. His quest is a thoughtful journey well worth taking. Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE COMPANY WE KEEP: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story Robert Baer and Dayna Baer Crown ISBN 978-0307588142 305 pages $26 Reviewed by Joseph Kanon, the author of "The Prodigal Spy" and, most recently, "Stardust" Opposites don't always attract. More often, like goes to like. Bob Baer was a near-legendary CIA operative in the Middle East (later awarded a Career Intelligence Medal) with a reputation as a daredevil. Dayna Williamson was a rising agent in Protective Operations whose training (entertainingly described here) involved Glocks and shotguns, high-speed driving and how to kill someone "by shoving a pencil up through their hard palate." When they were both assigned to a mission in war-torn Sarajevo, sparks didn't fly immediately -- for one thing, there was a Hezbollah safe house to monitor and, for another, they were both married -- but in this affectionate dual memoir, they are so clearly made for each other that it was only a matter of time. A drive along the French Riviera, some hiking in the Swiss Alps -- one thing led to another. Can one find true love in the CIA? Apparently, yes. "The Company We Keep" is a breezy, often fascinating account of this CIA romance, with tradecraft details and war stories thrown in to make it catnip for any fan of espionage fiction. Here, in fact, is the CIA that inspired such fiction in the first place -- not the Langley bureaucrats waiting out their pension time, but the risk-takers out on the edge. It's the kind of book that lends itself to casting the movie version as you read it. George Clooney has already played Bob ("Syriana" was based on Robert Baer's memoir "See No Evil"), and you can't do better than that. Dayna, reloading her Glock at 80 mph, is inevitably Angelina Jolie. And surely a star turn could be made out of Bob's irrepressible mother, Donna (she visits him on assignment in Tajikistan just to see it), if, say, Meryl Streep could be coaxed to play her. The cameo parts -- informants and Arab sheiks and Russian mobsters -- are a gold mine for character actors. The fieldwork here is heady stuff, and "The Company We Keep" makes the most of it, but the back story is the emotional cost -- the estranged families, the friends left behind, the secrecy and months of separation. Both Baers had seen their first marriages crack under the stresses and were determined to make this one work. The obvious solution was to leave the agency in 1997 for civilian life. But how do you come in from the cold? The company the Baers kept, that clandestine world of ops and assassins and louche hangers-on, is the only one they had known -- rebooting in Beirut didn't help either -- and the second, even more interesting part of the book is about how they navigated their way back. Eventually Bob became a best-selling author (and frequent media commentator), and the Baers settled in the United States and started a family. But initially they found they had left the CIA only to bring it with them -- the same shadowy world, the same operational instincts, the same occasional danger. Material is elided or hurried over; there are iffy consulting jobs (an Argentine oil company wanting to build a pipeline through Afghanistan); old contacts who refuse to believe that the Baers have really left the game; and even assassination proposals (turned down). Meanwhile, the book features so many characters up to no good that at times the entire Middle East seems like Somerset Maugham's famous description of the Riviera: "a sunny place for shady people." That the Baers coaxed a happy ending out of all this is not the least remarkable part of their appealing story, and hats off to them. But now one can't help wondering about other retired spooks and what company they're keeping these days. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top HOW TO LIVE: Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer HOW TO LIVE: Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an AnswerSarah Bakewell Other ISBN 978-1590514252 389 pages $25 WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW THAT SHE IS NOT PLAYING WITH ME?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with LifeSaul Frampton Pantheon ISBN 978-0375424717 300 pages $26 Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom. Suppose that Earth was invited to join the Intergalactic Congress of Planets, and its chair-being, Zinglos-Atheling, wanted to know more about our strange species. What one person in history would you choose to best represent humanity? On the one hand, Socrates and Jesus are a bit too saintly (or more than saintly) to be wholly representative; on the other, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are, as the saying goes, all too human. You could hardly go wrong by picking Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the subject of these two excellent books. This French nobleman retired to his book-lined tower in his late 30s and spent the next 20 years in self-scrutiny, gradually revealing more about himself than anyone had ever done before. His essays -- Montaigne originated the genre -- discuss philosophies of life, quote widely from the ancients and are full of anecdotes from Plutarch, but they also tell us that their author is short, suffers terribly from kidney stones and wishes he didn't have such a small penis. Above all else, Montaigne celebrates life in all its glorious messiness, while reminding us that nothing matters more than human connectedness and kindness to people and animals. An endlessly digressive writer, Montaigne is as much raconteur as moralist, and his book offers some of the best after-dinner conversation in the world. You can never be sure what this French humanist will say next. The innocuous-sounding "On Some Lines of Virgil" isn't about Latin poetry; it's about sex and eroticism. His greatest single essay -- and his last -- bears the majestic title "On Experience." In it, Montaigne reminds us that no matter how high our social status, we all still sit on our own bottoms. Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live," which first appeared last fall to deserved acclaim, has a slight tendency to longwindedness, and its chapter titles verge on the irritatingly cutesy (e.g., "How to live? Do a good job, but not too good a job"). No matter. The book is packed with useful information: Bakewell clarifies the nature of stoicism and scepticism, looks into the lives of Montaigne's parents, his wife and his adopted daughter, Marie de Gournay (who first edited the essays), and examines closely Montaigne's famous friendship with Etienne de La Boetie. Asked to explain why he cared so much for his friend, Montaigne could only say: "Because it was him; because it was me." No better definition of love has yet appeared. All in all, "How to Live" touches on every aspect of Montaigne's thought, life and influence, and culminates in a fascinating chapter on the complicated textual history of the "Essays." In the end, Bakewell concludes that Montaigne's greatest lesson is that "life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself" and that our troubled 21st century "could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict." Saul Frampton's "When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?" takes its Zen-like title from another of Montaigne's most famous observations. Compared with "How to Live," Frampton's is a much tighter and more elegant work, a series of historical and critical essays rather than a biography. (For a good straightforward life, the reader will still want Donald M. Frame's classic "Montaigne.") Where Frampton excels is in his sharply intelligent and sharply phrased insights: The basic human condition, he notes, is "one of grogginess and uncertainty." Who could argue with that? Montaigne, he observes, endlessly amplifies and polishes his essays until they "grow from simple distractions into a way of replaying, rewinding, and reliving his life as he lives it." Throughout, Frampton approaches Montaigne from unexpected tangents. One of his chapters likens the writer's friendship with La Boetie to a double-portrait by Holbein, another brings home the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary wars of religion and the essayist's quite reasonable fear that he might be slaughtered in his bed, and still another points out that Montaigne's estate produced wine and that the word "essay" can be translated as a sampling or tasting. Hence the author's great book could be called "Tastes by Michel de Montaigne" or "Tastes of Michel de Montaigne." To understand Montaigne's emphasis on the human need for touch, Frampton turns to proxemics, the "anthropology of people's relationship to each other in space" and kinesics, "what their movements and gestures reveal." Fundamentally, he emphasizes, Montaigne "is preoccupied with what the link between our minds and our bodies can tell us about the nature of mankind more generally." Human presence, human proximity "is thus at the heart of morality" and "the basis of happiness itself." For Montaigne, says Frampton, friends are simply "people that you go and see." Like his father, the essayist suffered from kidney stones, that most excruciatingly painful of ailments, and one that ultimately killed him. Only one of Montaigne's six children lived to adulthood. Civil war raged all around him. Yet Montaigne never surrendered to despair. Even "the stone," as Frampton shows, helped him better appreciate "what it is to be." As Montaigne writes: "Is there anything sweeter than the sudden change when, after extreme pain, by ejecting the stone I recover, in a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and so full?" This is how we should always savor our lives. But more often than not, says Montaigne, "we are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future, and deprive us of the feeling and consideration of that which is, to distract us with the thought of what will be, even when we shall be no more." Orson Welles once declared Montaigne "the greatest writer of any time, anywhere." Certainly the wise reader will use Bakewell and Frampton as springboards into the essays themselves. Almost any translation will do, whether John Florio's florid Elizabethan classic or the sensitive modern versions of Frame and Michael Screech. When we look into Montaigne's "Essays," we find ourselves. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    THE WRITING LIFE    APPS    AUDIO BOOKS    NOVELS FROM CHILDREN AND TEENS    NONFICTION CHILDREN'S BOOKS	Quick Clicks Why pay over $90 a month for Cable or Sat.TV services? Download A TV! 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"The Writing Life" and reading apps

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Wednesday March 30, 2011 THE WRITING LIFE Esmeralda Santiago NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Esmeralda Santiago The first phrase I learned in English was "I'm sorry, so sorry," the only words I could make out in a song then popular on the radio. The rest of the ballad was a garble in a female voice quavering with remorse. I was 13 and about to learn that love meant having to say you're sorry over and over again. That summer Mami decided to leave Puerto Rico for the United States. As Papi drove us to the airport, he sang along with Brenda Lee on the radio. "What does the song say?" I asked. "Lo siento," Papi said. "Lo siento tanto." Mami sat next to him, lips taut. She'd spent two weeks in New York before deciding to move there. Did she understand what Brenda Lee was helping my father say to her? Papi had chosen to send us away rather than marry her. After we waved goodbye that afternoon, neither Mami, nor I, nor my six sisters and brothers would see him again for eight years. Brooklyn was a reader's delight. The streets were labeled, the buildings numbered. Neon signs hissed and flashed over storefronts. Shadowed letters curved across plate glass windows: OPEN, CLOSED, CHECKS CASHED. Messages were scrawled over the mailboxes in the lobby of our apartment building: FOR RENT, FOR SALE, KEEP DOOR CLOSED. Posters stretched across the sides of buses, billboards loomed over roofs while smaller ones slid into channels over the seats of subway cars. COME TO MARLBORO COUNTRY, DO NOT LEAN ON THIS DOOR, NO ANIMALS ALLOWED. But for the occasional SE HABLA ESPANOL, most of the signs were a jumble of advertising, warnings and, sometimes, necessary information. NO STANDING, NO LOITERING, NO ENTRY, PULL HERE FOR EMERGENCY BRAKE. More mysterious were the graffiti sprayed on walls, scratched through layers of paint on the steel beams holding up the tracks of the elevated train, or carved in deep furrows on wooden school desks. I eventually learned they were curses. The brick building near our school was a public library. The librarian, a rosy-cheeked woman with a platinum beehive, took down the address from the electric and gas bills sent to Mami that proved we lived in the neighborhood. "Your name?" "Esmeralda Santiago." "I'm sorry?" I spoke slowly, but she didn't understand. She handed me a scrap of paper, and I wrote in the looped cursive taught in Puerto Rico's public schools. She printed my name on a card. The 17 letters marched across in increasingly smaller blocks until the final "o" was punctuation. Library cards, I thought, were designed for people with short, American names like Dick, Jane and Sally. I ambled up and down the aisles, but none of the books was in Spanish. In the children's reading room, a group had gathered at the feet of another librarian, who read and then turned the book so that the children could see the illustrations. I knelt at the back and listened to the story and saw that the drawings explained the text. This is how American children learn English, I thought, by looking at picture books. After the reading, I borrowed as many alphabet books as I was allowed. At home, I studied the drawings and memorized the names of things. "A" was for Apple, "B" for Boy, "C" for Car, "D" for Dog, "E" for Elephant. In my favorite books, all the words were related to each other. Apple, Banana, Carrot were in the book about Fruits. Doctor, Entertainer, Fireman were in Jobs. "Z" was almost always Zebra, even in the book about fruits, although in the one about jobs it was for Zookeeper. When humid August turned to cool September to brisk October, I memorized the words for boots, coat, mittens and snow. When cold November rains drenched my siblings and me on the way to or from school, I remembered sneeze, fever, ambulance, nurse, doctor and hospital. I mentally labeled everything within sight until my head was full of nouns. Then I graduated from alphabet to chapter books with an English to English dictionary alongside, reasoning that every time I looked up a word in English I could learn a few more. By the time I started ninth grade a year after we arrived in Brooklyn, I was reading at a 10th grade level. I could read, understand and spell the words but was afraid to speak them. In Spanish, every vowel and consonant has one specific sound; in English, the same vowel could have different sounds: the "a" in apple or apex, for example. The "i" in I or ennui. Consonants were sometimes silent, and sometimes not. I should never say keh-nee-feh for knife or pee-see-sholo-jeest for psychologist. During my first two years in New York, I was silent, although I had acquired an impressive vocabulary. My tongue refused to form the "th" sound. I practiced tongue twisters to help develop the necessary muscles: I thought a thought, but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I thought. My tortured diphthongs and confused vowels were a constant embarrassment, but a source of mirth to others. To avoid the laughter, I smiled as if I, too, thought it was funny. Later, I hunched over notebooks, writing out my frustration, shame and rage. I lived in those pages, in English and Spanish, where the written word said what I couldn't utter. Reading gave me language. Writing gave me a place to be myself. By the time I returned to Puerto Rico for a visit, I could read the most challenging literature in English and managed modern American slang with few stumbles. I had learned an entirely new Anglophone way of life even as my roots remained firmly planted in Spanish. "A" is for Apple, "M" is for Mango. I'm a hybrid, straddling two cultures, two languages, two lives, celebrating the growth that is inherent in all this, but aware, too, that there have been losses. "I'm sorry, so sorry." That first phrase I learned, so full of regret, still lingers. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top APPS NA NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Liz Seymour For generations, reading a picture book worked one way: Place a child on your lap, crack the book's spine, turn the pages and begin narrating the story of Curious George, Max and the wild things or Sam-I-am and his dislike of a certain breakfast. Now that ritual has been upended by the soaring popularity of young children's book apps for the iPad. Earlier this week, eight of the top 10 paid book apps on iTunes were picture books. Today's digital-native children seem keenly interested in a story told to them on a 10-inch screen with a finger's swipe to reach the next page. But wait, there's more: Pop-ups! Music! Puzzles! Matching games! You can hear a background of squeals during "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" (Oceanhouse Media, $2.99). With classic Dr. Seuss books, you touch an object on the screen and its name appears 3-D-like as a narrator sounds it out. It's a different experience for the reader used to bound books. Will they soon be obsolete as children crave more than just text from their stories? Parents also like the convenience of whipping out an iPad to entertain a bored child. As the tablet's popularity soars, predictions of the picture-book industry's doom are inevitable. But industry experts, including Jewell Stoddard, a children's book buyer at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington (D.C.), are not convinced that the rise of iPad picture book apps means the demise of book publishing. Stoddard reads four newspapers a day on her iPad, but no books. "For one thing, the interactive features are very distracting," she says. Carisa Kluver, editor and founder of Digital Storytime, a three-month-old website that reviews children's book apps, says digital and paper books play an equally important role in her home. As bedtime nears, her 4-1/2-year-old son, Van, will ask: "Can I have two iPad books and three regular books tonight?" Kluver says she spends about three hours with every children's book iPad app she reviews, rating each one on animation, sound quality and readability, among other characteristics. The best apps, she says, don't let interactive features get in the way of a good plot. "It's got to tell a story that is meaningful after all the bells and whistles have stopped," she says. She gives low ratings to apps that stop the book in the middle of a story to play a matching game or provide some other distraction. "That's for after," she says. She also resists book apps that are overly produced with the same "20 seconds of music played in the background over and over again." Here are a few picture book apps worth downloading: 1. "The Going to Bed Book" (Loud Crow Interactive, $2.99) Sandra Boynton's first digital book app is faithful to the board book experience, with interactive pop-ups on every page, almost too many. But children will love touching the hot water faucet and seeing the screen fill up with steam. 2. Dr. Seuss classics (Oceanhouse Media, $1.99 to $3.99). More than a dozen are available for download, including "The Cat in the Hat," "Hop on Pop," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Lorax." Lots of pop-up words on every page may distract some children, but the words also may inspire early readers. Either way, the animation and narration are cool. 3. "Miss Spider's Tea Party" (Callaway Digital Arts, $7.99) The lonely spider in the title doesn't understand why bugs don't want to hang out with her. This app has beautiful animation and a slew of interactive features, including puzzles and matching games that won't distract the reader. Kluver gives it a less enthusiastic review, describing the narration as "syrupy" and nixing the plot. "It creeps me out a little that she wants to serve them tea," she says. "The other bugs should be afraid of her." 4. "PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit" (Loud Crow Interactive, $3.99) This beautiful app comes as close to a pop-up book on a screen as is possible. Slide the tabs and watch Peter squeeze back and forth under Mr. McGregor's garden gate. Touch Peter or one of his siblings, and they'll squeal or gurgle. British narration and soft piano music strike the right tone. 5. "Teddy's Night and Teddy's Day" (Auryn, $3.99 each) These two apps have many interactive features you won't be able to resist before swiping to the next page. Despite that, they are sweet stories narrated by a little girl who reveals her teddy bear's secret doings. The animation is full of vivid primary colors to dazzle the youngest readers. Liz Seymour is editor of The Washington Post's Local Living section. She can be reached at seymourl(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    AUDIO BOOKS    NOVELS FROM CHILDREN AND TEENS    NONFICTION CHILDREN'S BOOKS    HALFWAY TO HOLLYWOOD: Diaries 1980-1988    HOW ITALIAN FOOD CONQUERED THE WORLD	Quick Clicks HeelTastic - Soothe, Relieve and Soften heels and feet! Watch Over 3,500 HD Channels Directly on Your Computer - Easy! Get Yours Today. Love Pasta? Cook, Drain and Serve All In One - Amazing New 5-in-1 Pasta Cooker.
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New reviews on audio books

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday March 29, 2011 AUDIO BOOKS NA NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers "THE SECRET GARDEN" By Frances Hodgson Burnett (Listening Library, unabridged, 8 1/2 hours, 7 CDs, $37; audible.com download, $25) This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden," not only one of the greatest children's novels ever written, but also one of the most recorded. At least seven unabridged versions are available, the most recent being a fine one narrated by Finola Hughes. This story of two spoiled, crabbed and crabby children; a bucolic young friend; an old pensioner; an English robin; and a secret realm of burgeoning nature draws on deep currents of comforting and exhilarating fantasy. Hughes' English-accented voice has a pleasantly low register for the general narration, and she carries off the several characters who have Yorkshire accents adeptly and with warmth and decorum. As for the children, they possess the voices of youth, becoming increasingly invigorated by their friendship and Nature -- to say nothing of the "richly frothed new milk," oat cakes, heather honey and clotted cream that become their diet. "YOUNG FREDLE" By Cynthia Voigt (Listening Library, unabridged, 6 1/4 hours, 5 CDs, $34.; audible.com download, $23.80) Thanks to his over-abundant curiosity and complications involving a Peppermint Pattie, Fredle, a young kitchen mouse, ends up alone and confused in the perilous outdoors. His adventures are many, and his ponderings on the nature of things are enchantingly skewed by his tininess. Wendy Carter reads the descriptive passages in a sweet, compassionate voice at a pace that is easy to follow. She takes on the various characters whom Fredle meets in his travels with a great deal of energy, injecting perhaps more obnoxiousness into the voices of some hostile animals than is strictly necessary. (A know-it-all field mouse and a belligerent raccoon -- country creatures both -- have somehow acquired blaring "Joisey-style" accents.) On the other hand, Carter gives a malevolent barn snake a slithering underlay of hiss that is pleasantly chilling, and she insinuates friendly, bouncing eagerness into the voice of a young female dog, a characterization that is dogginess itself. "DOCTOR DE SOTO" Written and illustrated by William Steig (Unabridged, 15 minutes, Macmillan Young Listeners, 1 CD, $9.99) This package includes a paperback edition of William Steig's marvelous picture book and a CD recording that consists of a first version read straight through, followed by a second with a bell signaling when to turn the pages. Stanley Tucci reads this engagingly wry story about a mouse who is a dentist; his wife, his assistant; and a fox, a pitiable fellow with a toothache, whom they agree to treat despite their rule against accepting mouse eaters. Tucci's pleasant American voice conveys just a hint of skepticism about the wisdom of this undertaking and projects the personalities of the three animals: the doctor, conscientious and shrewd; his wife, helpful and alert; and the fox, not to be trusted. ("On his way home he wondered if it would be shabby of him to eat the De Sotos when the job was done.") The couple's triumph is excellently summed up in the fox's last line, delivered with mouth glued shut and rendered by Tucci in muffled tones of unsuccessful dignity: "Frank oo berry mush." "FAVOURITE POEMS FOR CHILDREN" (Naxos, 1 1/4 hour, 1 CD, $14.98, download from www.naxosaudiobooks.com, $10) The 39 poems here are classics of imagination and whimsy, alive with the great and mysterious power that language exercises in -- and over -- childhood. With a couple of exceptions, the poets are British, and their verses are suffused with the golden aura of childhood's halcyon days. All but one of the nine readers here are professional actors. The poems range in mood from the stirring potency of William Blake's "The Tyger," magnificently read by Timothy West, to the inspired high jinks of Lewis Carroll's and Edward Lear's nonsense poems, and the linguistic confusion of Laura Richards' "Eletelephony." There are adventuresome pieces, such as "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens," read with intoxicating Scots brio by Anton Lesser, and many tales of busy doings. Interspersed throughout are passages of classical music. This is a recording for your permanent collection. Katherine Powers regularly reviews audio books for The Washington Post Book World. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top NOVELS FROM CHILDREN AND TEENS NA NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Mary Quattlebaum "SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS" By Ellen Booraem. Dial. $16.99, ages 10-14 Taunted by classmates for an alleged fairy sighting, Mellie Turpin, 13, has a chance to ditch her dorky reputation when her parents inherit a rickety inn in another town. But -- surprise! -- her new home brims with hundreds of "Small Persons with Wings," who demand her help in breaking a pact that curbs their natural magic. What's a mortal to do? Familiar tropes get fresh, funny play in this sprightly tale. On the way to a delightful "ever after," Mellie is turned into a giant frog, the boy next door proves to be a tech-savvy Prince Charming, and sometimes even fairies prefer an electric, bread-crisping "toadster" to their own ethereal magic. "YOU KILLED WESLEY PAYNE" By Sean Beaudoin. Little, Brown. $16.99, ages 12 and up Cliques rule the school at Salt River High, as teen private-eye Dalton Rev discovers when investigating the murder of nice-guy Wesley Payne. Wesley kept everything in the school balanced, but without him the Balls, Pinker Caskets, Euclidians and Sis Boom Bahs (also known, respectively, as jocks, rockers, brainiacs and cheerleaders) vie for power. In this clever spoof of the detective genre, Dalton may appear not so much hard-boiled as hilariously scrambled as he consults his favorite pulp novels for tips. He is helped and hindered by a siren in thigh-high boots and a pudgy sidekick named Mole. Though his cute client (also Wesley's sister) tempts him to drop the "tough-guy posturing," Dalton sticks with the case through all its plot-twisty turns, right to the heart-jolting end. "FIVE FLAVORS OF DUMB" By Antony John. Dial. $16.99, ages 12 and up Piper may be deaf, but she knows what Dumb needs: a manager who can handle the selfish, shy and seething members of a Seattle high school band with that name. Piper gets the job -- a boon because she needs something, too: her cut of the money from Dumb's gigs to help pay for college next year. This smart, lively novel captures the downs and ups of young rock and rollers -- a recording session gone tunelessly wrong, the sheer animal energy of a concert -- and charts Piper's deepening friendship with the band's geeky-cool drummer, Ed Chen. Piper deflects the prejudice of others with sly humor but must confront her own against lip-pierced Tash and pretty Kallie, the two girl guitarists. When the bombastic front man causes trouble, Piper takes charge, rocking this spirited coming-of-age story to a surprising close. "BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY" By Ruta Sepetys. Philomel. $17.99, ages 12 and up Wrenched from comfortable homes, Lina Vilkas, 15, and her mother, younger brother and a few neighbors on "the list" are transported to a barren, frozen land. Lina, a talented artist, chronicles their suffering on scraps of paper and cloth and smuggles the notes out ... but help never comes. Her father has been imprisoned, and the larger world busies itself with a distant war. Though this may sound like the latest dystopian novel, Lina's story actually takes place in 1941, against the backdrop of Josef Stalin's "cleansing" of the Baltic States. To evoke the horrors and hope of this time in Siberia, author Ruta Sepetys interviewed her Lithuanian relatives and many other deportees. Her prose is restrained and powerful, as unadorned as the landscape in which her characters struggle to survive. In this way, the occasional metaphors and descriptions shine more brightly, especially those involving a kind boy who, at various times, steals food from the guards for the sick, gives Lina a birthday gift and softly kisses her. Few books are beautifully written, fewer still are important; this novel is both. "HURRICANE DANCERS" By Margarita Engle. Henry Holt. $16.99, ages 12 and up Three main characters tell intertwined stories in this skillfully structured novel-in-poems about real-life pirates of the Caribbean. The effect: different versions of historical events rather than one fixed through a particular viewpoint as "the truth." The book opens compellingly in 1510, with Quebrado, an orphan of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, trapped on the pirate ship of brutal Bernardino de Talavera. Also on board as a wounded hostage is the cruel Spanish conquistador, Alonso de Ojeda, a man haunted by feverish visions of the Indians he killed and enslaved. When a hurricane casts them into the sea, each comes to the same island with a different attitude and skills. Quebrado recognizes his former home, with its "moist soil" and "pineapples ... like golden sunlight." But Talavera and Ojeda consider the place hostile and swampy. When the three meet again, the boy, now the one with power, must decide whether to help or harm them. Although Quebrado is fictitious, the others are historical figures, and a note in the back explains their actual fates. Mary Quattlebaum contributes regularly to The Washingotn Post Book World and teaches in the Vermont College MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Her most recent children's book, "Pirate vs. Pirate," is out this month. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    NONFICTION CHILDREN'S BOOKS    HALFWAY TO HOLLYWOOD: Diaries 1980-1988    HOW ITALIAN FOOD CONQUERED THE WORLD    LOSING GRACELAND    33 MEN: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners	Quick Clicks Discover the Secrets to America's Most Wanted Recipes Are you pregnant? Just had a baby? Click for free baby samples, magazines, coupons and more. Awesome Auger - Take the hard work out of yard work
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