MarysLibrary

6th Grade Summer Reading

Wilhelm and I spent the last while in Massachusetts visiting with my family and attending a memorial service for my sister's husband. Like so many trips this one had its high points (visiting with our grand-nieces, watching planes and helicopters take off and land at Marlboro Airport) and low points (renovated cabins in some United planes that raised the seat so that my feet don't reach the floor, East Coast humidity.)

Two of our nieces will be attending the Advanced Math & Science Academy (AMSA) charter school in the fall, and they have shared with me their summer reading lists. I'm not convinced these are the very best books for a rising sixth grader to read, but some of them are ok and some are splendid choices.

Here's the 2012-2013 6th Grade Reading List:

World Literature (REQUIRED)

The Essential Homer: Selections from the Illiad and the Odyssey, translated by Stanley Lombardo

Summer Reading (REQUIRED)

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes / Coerr 

FICTION (PICK ANY 1) :

Maniac Magee / Spinelli

The Watsons go to Birmingham / Curtis

Hatchet / Paulsen

The Monkey King’s Daughter / T.A. DeBonis

 The Devil’s Arithmetic / Yolen

 REALISTIC FICTION:

 Out of my Mind / Draper

 Saving Sky / Stanley

 CLASSICS:

 The Red Pony / Steinbeck

 Old Yeller / Gipson

 FANTASY:

 The Boggart / Cooper

 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH / O’Brien

NONFICTION:

 Lafayette and the American Revolution / Freedman

 A Night to Remember / Lord

The Amateur

Bill Clinton wanted Hillary to run against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary this year. Some friends were witness to their argument about it.

"I've had two successors since I left the White House - Bush and Obama - and I've heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I've heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president - none whatsoever. Obama doesn't know how to be president. He doesn't know how the world works. He's incompetent. He's . . . he's . . .  Barack Obama is an amateur."

Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, couldn't resist taking the label for the title of this book about Obama's dysfunctional presidency.

Klein discusses the intense conflict between Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the Obamas from Chicago, and the president's first chief of staff, Rahm Emaneuel, also from Chicago. He reveals that Michelle Obama, far from being uninterested in politics as has been reported, is deeply involved in the decision-making in the West Wing.

Obama's unusual isolation was described by numerous people whom the author interviewed, including retired Marine General James Jones, who was Obama's first National Security Adviser, and Bill Daley, who was his second chief of staff. He quotes from published interviews with dozens of people who worked in the white house under Obama, many of them astonished at the combination of ignorance and naivete the administration exhibits.

This is a tightly written book, well organized, with references for everything the author claims. It's not very long and it tells the inside story of the train-wreck that has been Obama's presidency so far.

2012  No 82

 

Cover Her Face by P D James

Realizing I had not been keeping up with new P D James mysteries I was going to check where I left off with the series and continue from there. Then I found that I have read the first book, Cover Her Face, only once and that was in 1985, so I decided to go back to the beginning and re-read the whole shebang.

Cover Her Face is, of course, a quotation from John Webster's play, written in 1612, The Duchess of Malfi. (That's something else I haven't read in a very long time.) "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young." If I recall, the duchess, a widow, was secretly married to a courtier and was killed by her brothers who wanted her money, didn't want her marrying someone beneath her in rank, and were lusting after her themselves. I decided to keep this in mind as I read to see if it yielded any clues to the murderer. The play has, if I recall, an underlying theme of lycanthropy, but I didn't think that would apply to this mystery. (It doesn't.)

The situation as the book opens in very cleverly set. The Maxie family lives in a crumbling but beautiful old family manor but they haven't enough money to keep it in repair. Old Mr Maxie is bedridden and not expected to live long. He is cared for by his loving wife, his daughter, Deborah, a widow, who is an editor in London, and the family maid, Martha, who has been with them for decades.

Down for the weekend are the son and heir, Dr Stephen Maxie, Deborah, a nurse, Catherine, with whom Stephen had an affair and who is still in love with him, and Felix, who has been courting Deborah for some time without actually asking her to marry him. There is the possibility, then, of two proposals during the weekend.

There is a proposal, but it is not what the family expected or hoped for. Sally Jupp is a gorgeous young woman who has been living at a nearby home for unwed mothers where she had a son. (The home is run by a woman named Alice Liddell of all things, but that has nothing to do with the story.) Sally has been placed as a maid in the Maxie household and is causing a good deal of friction there, so when Stephen announces that he has proposed to her everyone is appalled. Soon Sally turns up dead and there are plenty of suspects. It is when Felix sees her body that he says "Cover her face."

A made-for-TV movie of this story appeared 23 years after the book, which was published in 1962. I watched the DVD and loved it, especially Roy Marsden as Dalgleish, the detective. However, the plot was changed quite a bit and that annoyed me. The casting was superb, including the supporting actors.

And the tie to Webster's play? Well, there are some connections but I can't tell you what they are or they will give too much away. And none of them would help you figure out whodunit.

2011  No 205

legless, unloving, infamously chaste

‘Leigh Hunt writes rather charmingly about a fish,’ [Belinda] said aloud, ‘Legless, unloving, infamously chaste’; she paused. Perhaps it was hardly suitable, really, and she was a little ashamed of having quoted it, but these little remembered scraps of culture had a way of coming out unexpectedly.’ – Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle

The Duchess of Malfi

As I was reviewing the P D James mystery, Cover Her Face, which takes its title from The Duchess of Malfi, the Jacobean tragedy by John Webster, I was reminded that I hadn't read that play for a very long time. So I picked it up and was immediately engrossed.

We who are not specialists in the 16th and 17th century forget there are some other playwrights who in their day almost rivaled Shakespeare in popularity and some of whose works were performed at the Globe. This play was a great success when it was first performed in 1614 and for a long time after.

The play takes place in the early 1500s and the plot is simple: the brothers of the widowed duchess of the title are anxious that she should not marry beneath her as they are very proud of their noble line. They are in Italy but are from Spain (as were the Borges, were they not?) These brothers, the Duke and the Cardinal, are cruel and overbearing. In their mind a sister had no right to her own choices.

They are also less than eager to see her marry because they want her money and there are hints at an incestuous thread in there as well. They go off to Rome and in their absence, being a strong woman, she defies them and marries the man she loves, Antonio Bologna. Their spies tell them about the marriage and the three children it yields and eventually the duke arrives back in Malfi for the reckoning.

Among the other things I had forgotten about this play is that it is a Senecan tragedy (as is Titus Andronicus) and the end of the play leaves the stage awash in bodies and blood. A bit more drama than I care for in my dramas. Also there is a character called Headache (Malateste.) The language is witty with quick exchanges between characters and many puns, as we see in Shakespeare. And lots of tension. Will the brothers find out about the marriage? What will they do about it? Not the sort of thing one wants to see (or read) every day but the language is splendid and the duchess is a remarkable character. I would love to see it on the stage.

2012  No 81

Annie Leibovitz' Pilgrimage

For years I subscribed to Vanity Fair and Vogue primarily for the essays of Dominic Dunne and Christopher Hitchins and the photographs of Annie Leibovitz. Her work is so clever you can recognize its quality even if, like me, you are a philistine in photographic matters.

Philistine or not I do believe I can spot an unusually skilled photographer. A guy who worked at the Passaic Herald News when I was a reporter there, Bill Ballenger, always seemed to me to stand out. Sure enough, he now works for the National Geographic and his photographs are superb. A young photographer I've encountered recently, Sarah Schecker, is obviously above the norm.

But there's nobody like Annie Liebovitz. Here's the summary of the book in the Spokane Public Library online catalog:

Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. The first place was Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls.She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud's final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. Once she got there, she was drawn into the wider world of the Concord writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson's home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of the Beaux Arts sculptor Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln's portraits have been saved. Lincoln's portraitists--principally Alexander Gardner and the photographers in Mathew Brady's studio--were also the men whose work at the Gettysburg battlefield established the foundation for war photography. At almost exactly the same time, in a remote, primitive studio on the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron was developing her own ultimately influential style of portraiture. Leibovitz made two trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to the other photographer on her list, Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years. The final list includes Georgia O'Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

To see some of the photos from the book go to Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, which has most of them posted as a teaser. You need the book itself to get the full effect of her views of Emily Dickinson's house and the compass Lewis and Clark took with them on their famed voyage west and the rest of her work.

2012  No 80

 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

It has been a very long time since I first read this book, the 1962 novel that made Muriel Spark famous. It must be the movie I'm remembering when I try to bring up the story and its meaning because the book surprised me when I read it the other day. I didn't remember the subtleness under its seeming superficiality or the extreme complexity of the character Sandy, one of the girls in Miss Brodie's "set."

It's a book about a very progressive teacher at a conservative girls school in Edinburgh in the 1930s and her unorthodox teaching methods. She would write a long division on the blackboard (in case the class was interrupted by a visit from the headmistress) and then ignoring math told the girls about her summer vacation in Italy. She had the girls prop up their history books and told them how Mussolini had solved the unemployment problem. She took the girls to the theater, museums, movies, and on an excursion through the poorer sections of the city. She had them to tea and told them about her sex life.

Six girls have been chosen by Miss Brodie as her particular pets, the creme de la creme. When they leave the lower school and no longer have her as a teacher she continues to influence them in many ways. But one of them eventually betrays her to the headmistress, a woman who had been wanting to find an excuse to fire Miss Brodie even though she is still in her prime.

The structure of the book is unusual, something else I had not noticed before. It takes place all at once - an effect produced by constant shifting from the present to the medium future, back to the present, to the far future, back to the present, to the medium future again, and so on. At the beginning of the story we know that someone in the Brodie set has betrayed their teacher but it isn't until two thirds of the way through the book we discover who did it. And it isn't until the end that we learn exactly what she did.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has made its way onto many lists of the best novels of the year, decade, and even the 20th century. I used to wonder why. Now I know and I hope to have time to watch the movie and then read the book again and perhaps even look out some literary criticism about it. Meanwhile you need to read it.

2012  No 79

Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the EIS

The Parable of the Clinician and the Epidemiologist

The brown river usually flows lazily through the middle of town. But today it is a torrent carrying human bodies. Some, still alive, are gasping for air and thrashing the water.

Approaching the river to enjoy lunch on its banks, two doctors, horrified by what they see, begin to haul people out of the water. There are no signs of violence, but the victims' eyes are glazed, their weak pulses racing.

The doctors cannot keep up with the flow of bodies. They save a few and watch helplessly as the others drift beyond them.

Suddenly, one of the doctors lowers an old man to the ground and starts to run. "What are you doing?" yells the other doctor. "For God's sake, help me save these people!"

Without stopping, she yells back over her shoulder, "I'm going upstream to find out why they're falling in."

This is the epigraph of Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks, a history of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a part of the US Centers for Disease Control. It summarizes, I think, the sort of thing EIS doctors do and the resentment they sometimes feel from doctors who are trying to stem an Ebola epidemic in the Congo or a flu outbreak in Hong Kong.

Epidemiology is inherently interesting. Every incident is a sort of medical detective story, as recognized by Berton Roueche in his now-famous book, The Medical Detectives, a book that was published in 1980 but is still relevant enough to have provided the plots for numerous House episodes. I used to look for Roueche's "Annals of Modern Medicine" columns in the New Yorker knowing they would be entertaining as well as puzzling and sometimes shocking. They usually told of an at least marginally heroic doctor who was able to figure out why two patients had turned up in the local hospital having turned blue, or why a man had grown three breasts, or why another man had the hiccups - for 27 years.

Books like this usually describe less than a dozen cases in depth but Pendergrast's book is a history of the EIS and so he tries to give the reader a feeling for the constant motion of these doctors (and later nurses, veterinarians, nutritionists, etc.) as they respond to one case after another. An entire family is in the hospital near death. Navajos in the Four Corners Area are succumbing to an unidentifiable respiratory problem. A little girl rapidly goes into multiple organ collapse for no apparent reason. Staff and patients in an African hospital are contracting a horrifying disease that is killing more than 90% of those who have it.

Sometimes the doctors are successful, as they were with the Four Corners problem. Working with the medicine men of the Navajo tribe, who say that legend connects this problem with very wet springs and the many small animals that come down out of the mountains to eat the abundant food produced, they were able to identify a hantavirus spread by the urine of mice. You don't have to have mice running around your house to acquire this - the urine dries and much later the dust kicked up by cleaning house spreads the virus.

Pathologists recognize a virus akin to Marburg and Lassa Fever and trace it to the area of the Ebola River after which it is named. They are able to trace a patient's meal of fast food hamburgers contaminated with E coli. After years of detailed record keeping they connect Reyes Syndrome with aspirin given to children.

Sometimes they are unsuccessful. They are unable to explain why patients and staff at St Elizabeth's hospital in DC are stricken with an unusually deadly respiratory illness. Or why the same illness fells a number of people in Pontiac, Michigan, some years later. In that case they were ultimately successful in identifying a virus that was killing veterans at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia, the same virus they had found at St Elizabeth's and in Pontiac years before. They named the condition Legionnaires Disease and there are still many cases each year in the US.

The book is an institutional history so there are a lot of names and a good deal of information about funding and reorganization as well as the stories of men and women rushing in the middle of the night to some small American city or an almost inaccessible African village. But the dozens of one-page stories about what the doctors of the EIS actually do - stories we don't usually read about in the news - gives the reader a good idea of the hard work and ingenuity of these people who work so hard to help keep us all a little safer.

2012  No 78

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

Someone in my online Trollope group recommended this novel as something a Trollope lover would like and she/he was right. The book, though written some 50 years after most of Trollope's novels, and being, of course, Edwardian rather than Victorian, captures much of the day to day life of people living on a country estate and in London in a time that presages great change.

The main character in the novel is Chevron, a house that is much beloved of Sebastian, the young duke who has inherited it and all its appurtenances. Chevron is based on Knole House where Vita Sackville-West grew up, a house she loved more than any human I think, but property that she couldn't inherit as it had to go to the next-in-line male. She and her husband, Harold Nicholson, later bought Sissinghurst and created there one of the finest gardens in England.

The Edwardians starts out with a flash of glamor and scenes of Sebastian with the people who work on the estate - whose parents and grand-parents worked there for Sebastian's father and grandfather. A big house at the turn of the 20th century was like a small town with its own carpenter and blacksmith and gardeners and a crowd of indoor servants to take care of the house as well as the people who lived and visited there.

The only non-U visitor at the house is Leonard Anquetil, an explorer who sees Sebastian's life stretching out in meaningless sameness if he doesn't somehow break his attachment to the house. He warns Sebastian but it's too late. The young duke has fallen in love with a married woman, one of his mother's "friends." The fashionable women of his mother's set don't have real friends. The have acquaintances whose personal lives provide the gossip that is the main activity of these women when they aren't buying clothes and planning parties and engaging in love affairs with other people's husbands.

The novel was published in 1930 and so the author knows as she writes about the years from about 1905 to 1910 what lies ahead for Sebastian and the other characters, who believe their world will never change except to add the occasional auto or telephone. But there are hints that things are changing already. The head carpenter at Chevron tells Sebastian, with tears in his eyes, that his son doesn't want to take his place but rather is going to learn to repair cars. The patronistic system with its firm class determinations is nearly over.

I loved this book as did the public when it was published as the author bragged to Virginia Woolf. However, the plot isn't particularly complex and the characters are not very three-dimensional. A good overview of the book can be found at Wikipedia.

2012  No 77

 

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

Christopher Benfy could not write a boring book if he tried and he has three previous books to prove it. These are narratives about Emily Dickinson and other figures of her time, eccentrics in Japan during the Gilded Age, and the months Degas spent visiting relatives in New Orleans in 1872-3. All three are at least four-star productions.

Now in Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay he has written a book that is more personal than the others, a thoughtful book in which he talks about his family and how he discovered their stories by accident or by intent. His mother was a Quaker from Cameron, North Carolina, where the sand hills segue into the Piedmont, and where the kaolin is so pure they transported tons of it to England in the 18th century to make high-quality porcelain.

His father escaped to England from Berlin as Hitler was coming to power. His father's family was very wealthy and powerful in pre-war Germany (they owned the largest publishing company in the country) but his aunt and uncle, the Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, left the country with nothing and made a new life for themselves at Black Mountain College near Asheville in North Carolina. Benfey skillfully ties the many strands of his family together as they intersect.

When I lived in Durham years ago I drove around the country roads of central North Carolina and visited potters working out of a chinked cabin on a home-made wheel. One center of pottery making is Jugtown, NC, where the pot on the right was made. The families there have been making pots since well before the Revolutionary War and their work was breathtakingly simple and beautiful. Benfey meets some of the new generation of potters from that clay-rich area who are making pots that are anchored in that history but moving in new and creative ways.

This is a slow-moving book as it wanders through the author's youth and travels and talks about art and how important it is to all of us, not just the people creating it. He brags about his grandfather, who was a brickmaker and mason. He tells of a short teenage apprenticeship to a pottery-making family in Japan. And he makes his reader slow down and think. The subtitle of the book is, Reflections on Art, Family, & Survival, and it is exactly that.

2012  No 77