Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday March 28, 2011
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NONFICTION CHILDREN'S BOOKS
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Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
"THE UNFORGETTABLE SEASON: The Story of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and the Record-Setting Summer of '41
By Phil Bildner. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler. Putnam. $16.99, ages 4-8
Just in time for opening day: an engaging, well-illustrated chronicle of 70-year-old hitting milestones that remain unbroken. In 1941, Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games while Ted Williams finished the season with a batting average above .400. Excitement spread well beyond New York when DiMaggio's streak extended into July and the hit song "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio" played day and night on the radio. Phil Bildner recounts that Williams could have played it safe by sitting out the last two games of the season with his .39955 average rounded up to .400 for the record books. But instead he played, adding six more hits and ending the year at .406. In his last at bat, as Bildner excitedly describes it, he walloped "a double that rocketed off the loudspeaker horns atop the outfield wall and ricocheted all the way back to the infield!" S.D. Schindler's clean-lined illustrations bring to mind the pristine clarity of the baseball field; a particularly amusing one shows DiMaggio shocking a pitcher with a base hit up the middle -- right between his legs.
"ENERGY ISLAND: How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed Their World"
By Allan Drummond. Farrar Straus Giroux. $16.99, ages 6-10
Because a surprising number of illustrator-author Allan Drummond's subjects -- in picture books such as "Moby Dick" and "The Flyers" (about the Wright Brothers) -- have been visibly windswept, it seems natural that his latest book should concern harnessing the power of wind. Drummond invents a youngish native of Denmark's Samso island to be his narrator-tour guide and show why Samso, aka Energy Island, should be a model for us all, with its massive reduction of carbon emissions and wide-ranging efforts toward energy independence. The guide takes readers through Samso's initial reliance on traditional energy sources to power its lights and vehicles to the gradual adoption of alternative energy, including both small and large wind turbines.
One double-page spread contrasts the construction of a small wind turbine with a massive one that required a ship, giant trucks and two huge cranes to put it in place. Drummond fills his pages with detailed images of a variety of scenes that soften the didactic storyline, while sidebars describe a range of energy-related issues from renewable energy to climate change.
"NIGHT FLIGHT: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic"
By Robert Burleigh. Illustrated by Wendell Minor. Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. $16.99, ages 4-8
"Women must try to do things as men have tried," Amelia Earhart wrote in 1937. "When they fail, their failure must but be a challenge to others." In this picture book, author Robert Burleigh and illustrator Wendell Minor portray one of Earhart's shining successes rather than the disappearance that shocked and bewildered a world of admirers. Her "night flight" -- leaving Newfoundland at 7:12 p.m. on May 20, 1932 -- was her first solo attempt to cross the Atlantic. Earhart and her bright-red Vega were aloft for nearly 15 hours, and Burleigh conveys her subject's joy in flying, as well as how she handled a storm. "Lightning scribbles its zigzag warning across the sky," and Earhart tries to out-climb the clouds but ends up just above the ocean's surface. Minor's richly colored double-page illustrations capture the eye-catching perils of the flight as well as the heartening sight of the Irish coastline. The book ends with Earhart emerging from her Vega, having landed in a pasture ready to take on the next challenge.
"AMELIA LOST: The Life and Disappearance Of Amelia Earhart"
By Candace Fleming. Schwartz & Wade. $18.99, ages 8-12
Earhart remains a captivating figure, her unfinished life subject to both speculation and the myth-making she helped foster while she was alive. Beyond the picture-book treatment, she calls for a thoughtful biographer, one who appreciates both her accomplishments and her showmanship. She said all she "wished to do in the world was to be a vagabond -- in the air," while others claimed she used aviation "merely as a means toward quick fortune and fame." Candace Fleming, who has recently taken on the Lincolns and P.T. Barnum, seems convinced of Earhart's honest passion for flying. She describes her lifelong adventurousness, independence and "gut courage." The story alternates between Earhart's biography and the extensive search for the aviator in July 1937. Fleming suggests that Earhart could have benefited from further training, especially with her new radio system. The book includes intriguing accounts of a few Americans, including a 16-year-old radio buff, who claimed to have heard Earhart's distress calls.
"TOTALLY HUMAN: Why We Look and Act the Way We Do"
By Cynthia Pratt Nicolson. Illustrated by Dianne Eastman. Kids Can. $16.95, ages 9-12
When kids have had their fill of extraordinary accomplishment, they can turn to the perfectly ordinary activities that fill our days -- laughing, crying, yawning and so on. Cynthia Pratt Nicolson makes young readers think about actions we take for granted, tracing them back to early humans and sometimes to creatures further down the evolutionary chain. Hiccups, for example, are a useless reflex that may have occurred first in ancient tadpoles, who hiccupped in order to avoid breathing water into their brand-new lungs. Tears, on the other hand, are not found in any other species, and were apparently useful for early human bonding. The text explains scientific concepts with concision and wit, though suggestions for further reading would have been helpful. Each action described is accompanied by a playful illustration, such as the one of a girl with elephant's ears that may well inspire that familiar human impulse: laughter.
Abby McGanney Nolan is a freelance writer and editor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HALFWAY TO HOLLYWOOD: Diaries 1980-1988
Michael Palin
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's
ISBN 978-0312682026
622 pages
$32.50
Reviewed by Charles Matthews
If the name Palin makes you think of a dead parrot and a fish called Wanda instead of moose burgers and mama grizzlies, then this is the book for you.
Among many other things, Michael Palin is the member of the Monty Python troupe who played a pet-shop owner trying to persuade John Cleese that his Norwegian Blue parrot is not dead but just "pining for the fjords." "Halfway to Hollywood" is the second published volume of his diaries (the first was "The Python Years: Diaries 1969-1979"), and it covers a fruitful period in his life. From 1980 through 1988 he wrote and acted in "Time Bandits," "The Missionary" and "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life"; acted in "Brazil," "A Private Function" and "A Fish Called Wanda"; wrote a children's book and screenplays for the BBC; and served as chairman of a British public transportation advocacy group. The volume concludes with Palin setting off to follow the route taken in Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days," the start of the next phase of his career: travel writer and documentarian.
Through it all, he found time to write "over a million words of diary entries," which, he tells us in the acknowledgments, he has reduced to "something nearer a quarter of a million." So what we have here is the extensively documented life of an enormously talented and genial man who also seems to be a model husband, father, son and brother, as well as a generous and dutiful citizen. In one entry, he quotes a reviewer's observation that "there is something roundly Victorian about Michael Palin's face, a durable cheerfulness not to be found among other members of Monty Python's Flying Circus. ... Alone of the Python team he can deflate cant without venom."
Instead of venom we get wry, ironic observation, as when he writes about Kevin Kline, his co-star in "A Fish Called Wanda."
Kline, who has a reputation for scene-stealing, "is very complimentary about my performance -- 'In the scene with me I was watching you,' he admits incredulously." John Cleese, he notes, "does seem to spend an inordinate amount of his time thinking about himself -- trying to get to the bottom of why he is what he is and is there anything he can do about it?"
The diaries give us privileged glimpses of people such as Maggie Smith, his co-star in "The Missionary" and "A Private Function."
He observes, "I feel that sometimes she is going through the motions of life -- there is always a part of her -- the passionate, instinctive part which makes her a great actress -- which is in abeyance or being held in reserve -- somewhere in there, private from us all." He shows us George Harrison, who was a major backer of Python film projects, nervously helping Palin find where he's parked his car: "A bit like an animal caught in a searchlight is our George when out on the streets, and I can see him getting a little twitchy as he and I -- a Beatle and a Python -- parade up and down before the diners on the pavements of Charlotte Street."
But the diary is most revealing about Palin himself, struggling to balance the solitary life of a writer with the demands not only of celebrity but also of family, including the clinical depression and eventual suicide of his sister. We get at the essence of his character as a humorist when we writes about his initial unhappiness with the script for the most successful film in which he has appeared, "A Fish Called Wanda." When Cleese calls to talk about it, he writes," I swallow for the moment my reservations about the film itself -- well, I can't say I don't like it, that I find it everything I wouldn't write myself: hard, uncompassionate, leering. I have a feeling this is the one I shall do for money, rather than love."
He admires Woody Allen's "intelligent, perceptive, graceful" films, but finds much American comedy typified by the Bette Midler-Danny DeVito film "Ruthless People," about which he comments, "the fact that it has been so successful accords with my reading in the paper that 40 percent of students in a poll at the California State University hadn't heard of Mikhail Gorbachev." That last, though a bit of a non sequitur, is in line with Palin's general discomfort with the United States, which blazes up after John Lennon's murder ("America -- land of the free and the armed and the crazy") and in various reflections on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whom he dislikes almost as much as he does Margaret Thatcher.
Clearly, this is a book for Pythoniacs, and the ideal reader is probably an Anglophile movie buff with a side interest in the Thatcher-Reagan years. The book may be a bit of a slog for those outside this rather narrow slice of the reading public.
But a man as intelligent and witty as Palin is worth the effort of getting to know.
Charles Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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