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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| This Week in Books, December 17, 2017 |
| 2017-12-17 |
| Continuing the theme of gift books, let us not forget the kiddos. For the very young: The Adventures of Frog and Toad Arnold Lobel Barnes and Nobel, 2009 Short, whimsical stories about two friends, Frog and Toad. My children just adore these stories; even today my oldest will stop what she is doing to hear me read to my youngest. Sometimes she will even read the dialogue of one of the characters while I do the other. Other than one part where Toad says, 'Shutup!' during the story “The Dream”, the dialogue is totally kid safe, and the stories teach good moral lessons. This edition is a collection of three different books, sort of a Lord of the Rings for entry readers: Frog and Toad are Friends, Frog and Toad Together, and Days with Frog and Toad. Page 14 of Frog and Toad Together: "Hurry!" said Frog. The print is large and easy to read, and the picture whimsical and well done. For those who are comfortable readers: The Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times - From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor Susan Wise Bauer Peach Hill Press, 2006 I am usually skeptical of the History of Everything genre. They tend to be sweeping, skipping some events and over-slanting others. This 4 Volume set pleasantly surprised me. With the youngster in mind, there are simple maps, excellent pencil drawings and plenty of examples concerning the current topic, such as stories about Anansi the Spider, and excerpt from The Epic of Gilgamesh, introduction to Greek and Chinese letters, Ganga and Shiva, and much more. What also impressed me was the scope Mrs. Bauer attains. From Meso-America to China and Japan, and from pre-agriculture through Rome, the flow is neat, concise, well organized, and fair. There is a Judeo-Christian lean to the content, but Mrs. Bauer is completely fair to every culture and epoch discussed. Page 124-125, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of Babylon, sat on his throne and worried. He had a great empire - but what if another country attacked him? He wasn't sure that his army could defend Babylon from invaders. And he was very worried about Persia, a country to the east of Babylon. The Persians were expanding their own country. Their army was strong. He had heard frightening stories about Persian soldiers! There a map on page 125 to help locate the subjects of this chapter. Also available are work books for each volume which have questions and crafts concerning each chapter. Great intro to history. Finally, for our older readers: Starship Troopers Robert A. Heinlein Ace, 1987 I really think a person could spend a lot of time considering the content in this book, and it will get its own post later. Besides the content, it is an excellent reminder that movies do not always match books, and usually are not even close to being better. For those of you who have read Starship Troopers, you can imagine my surprise at how much not like the movie this book is. I could see where the movie got some its parts and then totally missed the point, intentionally, as I understand the movie was supposed to be a parody of sorts. Page 117-118 "If you can't listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether 'value' is a relative, or an absolute?" The whole book is like this, other than the action parts. The reader is invited to go as deep as one wants or can; a young me would have thought 'bad-ass dialogue'; me today could take this short passage to the campfire and discuss it until dawn. That said, a younger me talking about this passage with an older me would have allowed myself to be led to the deeper end of the pool, learning to swim where I could not touch. Oh, Lawdog Files - Africa Stories is now in print. Link is to the Africa Stories. This Week in Emergency Preparedness Looking at the next couple of weekends, and my availability, this is my last post for 2017 so let's talk travel. Regionally, there is a story about a traveler whose routing devices failed and he ended up in Kansas instead of New Mexico. Someone asked me, "Why didn't he just look at his map?" I replied, "Probably because nobody carries maps anymore, especially the youngers. When was the last time you went into a gas station and saw a rotary of maps?" I have a Road Atlas which has all 50 states and major metros. Used it a couple times when a routine trip hit closed roads. The electronic stuff is nice, and becoming ever more reliable, but out in the middle of bumbug Kansas, or which ramp St. Louis, always seem to be when electronics fail and we have to switch to manual. Have you checked to see if your Kidd fire extinguisher is a dud, and if so replaced it yet? Good time to check. See you all sometime in 2018. If you are traveling, travel safe. If you are hosting, enjoy the gathering. Going to be by yourself, rock it. |
| Posted by:swksvolFF |
| #3 Good for you guys! My parents were academics, so supplementation was a way of life when I was growing up. Questions they didn’t have answers to merited an immediate exploration of the Encyclopedia Britannica or my mother’s college textbooks. Nowadays my cell phone gets more exercise looking things up on the internet than making phone calls. ;-) I continued the family tradition — and drove trailing daughter #2 a bit crazy because I insisted she work to meet my standards rather than the lower standard required by her teachers to get an A. Td #1 strove always for mastery, so it wasn’t an issue. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-12-17 22:31 |
| #2 Cutthroat game of Sorry! with the kids. There was a book which just ruined that genre for me called 'A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. Maybe it is good, and if so I hope someone urges me to give it another try, but I didn't match with the tone, I already knew the content, and it was a thing so the people who thought I should read it kept hounding me until I set the book down and told them no more. The problem I had with 'Shutup!' in The Dream was not that it is inappropriate, but very appropriate as, my take on it, Toad was telling his ego to take a hike, as his ego was becoming so self absorbed his best friend was being chased away. I just switched to 'Be Quiet!' or 'Go Away!' as my prudish self did not want my pre-teen going around the classroom telling people to shutup. Wife and I had a hard talk about education and we decided we would at least supplement the kids' education. Among other subjects, I was handed History. We would read a chapter or two each night, and hit the workbooks, which are fun. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2017-12-17 20:37 |
| #1 I need to stop by Barnes & Noble to pick up the Frog and Toad collection. I remember liking it when I was young, and the trailing daughters did in their turn. Startship Troopers needs no comment — I grew up reading him, and that one is in my re-read cycle. The comments about the history book (and series) on Amazon are interesting. Apparently Mrs. Bauer wrote them to be a home schooling series, which explains additional workbooks. But volume 1 is intended for first grade, volume 2 for second grade and so forth, to build a solid foundation of historical knowledge before going into depth on individual periods in the higher grades. Unlike swksvolFF I do like broad sweep of history books, as they put more particulate knowledge into perspective. I wish I’d had these or something like it when the trailing daughters were young — I would have added it to our bedtime story list, to be read a chapter at a time. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-12-17 13:28 |