Happy As Kings

Don't know much about history

At Boston.com, Jeff Jacoby writes about the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) report that states, Less than one-quarter of students perform at or above the Proficient level [in history] in 2010. Some people may yawn at the idea of history, but without knowing where we've come from, we can't easily map a plan for where we're going, or know how to choose among the plans made for us by our elected officials.  I think it's cultural and educational neglect to ignore the wonderful stories, tales, reports and adventures of our forbears, ancestors and great-ancestors.

At the risk of being insensitive, and at the risk of leaving more children with poor instruction on the story of how we all got to where we are, we don't have to rely on schools.  Families: parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, can do it themselves, even without homeschooling.  I'm not talking about drilling kids after school and killing even more initiative, just about spending our dollars where they'll do more good.  Historical fiction isn't "history," but it can encourage a love of where 'we' came from, and inspire our kids to know more.

• Instead of one Wii game, buy a biography:  for youger kids, one such as Abraham Lincoln by the d'Aulaires will do.  If you can afford an Xbox game, you can afford The Story of Mankind, the first Newbery Award winner.
• If straight-up history isn't your thing (at the moment), try fiction.  Rosemary Sutcliff's Dragon Slayer, among many others, is a retelling of the epic poem, Beowulf.  The imagination's dressing up of Grendel's attacks on the halls of Hroðgar, Grendel's mother's revenge for the death of her son, and Beowulf's final act as dragonslayer have as much adventure as repetitive video games. Ask the librarian for other good historical novels.
• If reading isn't your thing, try movies:  The Clan of the Cave Bear, Spartacus, Cleopatra, I Claudius, King Arthur, The Mists of Avalon, El Cid, Becket, Ivanhoe, Robin Hood (whether in tights or not), John Wycliffe, Joan of Arc, Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula, The Agony and the Ecstacy, A Man for all Seasons, La Reine Margot, The Three Musketeers, The Crucible, Rob Roy, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Horatio Hornblower, Shaka Zulu, The Alamo, Gone With the Wind, Young Winston, Wild Bill, The Last Samurai, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Battleship Potemkin, All Quiet on the Western Front, Schindler's List, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Patton, Exodus, The Right Stuff, Che, Full Metal Jacket, Taxi Driver, Milk, All the President's Men, Frost/Nixon, Munich, Charlie Wilson's War, Black Hawk Down, The Queen, Flight 93, The Social Network.
• If being a sofa spud isn't your thing, try joining a Civil War reenactment group.
• If staying in one place isn't your thing, try audio books while driving in the car.
• Visit museums.
• Research your family's genealogy.

History is all around us. Don't shortchange your kids/grandkids/neices/nephews by staying in the thin edge of today.  We're more than the surface.

 

Quick list of resources from top search results from Google:

Authors

• Louisa May Alcott
• Scoular Anderson 
• Pearl S. Buck   
• Frances Hodgson Burnett  
• Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire
• Esther Forbes
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 
• Washington Irving
• Scott O'Dell 
• Elizabeth George Speare 
• Gene Stratton-Porter
• Roberg Louis Stevenson 
• Rosemary Sutcliff
  
• Mildred Taylor 
  
• Geoffrey Trease 
• Barbara Tuchman 
  
• Laura Ingalls Wilder  
  
• Jane Yolen 
  

 

Outlets

• Barnes & Noble 
• Beautiful Feet Books 
• Bellerophon Books 
• Bluestocking Press 
• Dover Publications  
• Historical Paper Dolls   
• Horrible Histories 

 

 Overviews and lists

• About.com:  Children's Books -- Historical Fiction  
• Historical Fiction Network:  Favorite Historical Novels for Children 
• Library Booklists:  Historical Fiction for Children  
• Scholastic:  Why & How I Teach with Historical Fiction 

 

Feel free to add your own titles, authors, outlets and links in the comments section since this entry is only the work of a few hours and I know I've missed much.

Read a book some people would like to ban, ...

... a cookbook.

A War on Good Taste, 31 Dec. 2010, Wall Street Journal

You see, the Barefoot Contessa is peddling disease and ruin, having published one of the unhealthiest cookbooks of the year.

Or at least that's the story published in a number of newspapers, thanks to columnists reprinting the "findings" of a "report" put out by a Washington activist group that styles itself the "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine." A spokesman for the group denounced Ms. Garten and other celebrity chefs, such as Gordon Ramsay of "Hell's Kitchen" fame, for using "some of the worst possible ingredients." Among the poisonous compounds enumerated? Butter and cream.

I'm not in favor of unlimited butter and cream.  To be healthy, we 'just' need balance, in our food and in our lives (not always an easy thing to do).  

I'm also not in favor of mistreating food-production animals, but perhaps a good life on a well-maintained family-type farm would be preferable to no life at all (not that the non-existent animals would know)?  Or maybe I just like a world in which there are nosy brown-eyed cows gathering along a fence to watch any out-of-the-ordinary event (such as a person walking along the road).  Without a use for these cows, it's unlikely that humans would go to the trouble of keeping them around and we'd crowd them out like we do the other earthlings for which we have no specific use.

I don't own any of Ina Garten's cookbooks, and my cookbook shelves are over-full, but I may have to make room for one more.

NaNoWriMo

Contemplating  National Novel Writing Month

I've always immersed myself in the Big Planning Production of novel writing and have some well-structured, peopled, and staged books ... in my head.  They can keep me endlessly entertained.  I think, this year, I may just try the write-it-and-see-what-happens method of novel writing.  At least, that way, I'll have something concrete to work with, and not just my own Brain TV version.

Just do it.

Early human development

I don't remember how I found the book, but I was lucky that the library had it.  I'm just finishing Dr. Ian Tattersall's slim-but-rich volume, The World from Beginning to 4000 BCE, and like with many of the fiction authors I enjoy, I need to read more of his work.  Again, I lucked out. 

I also hope to read more from the series that Dr. Tattersall's book is a part of: The New Oxford World History.  I hope the other writers have writing styles as readable as Dr. Tattersall's.

The follow sites are listed in the 'webliography' of The World from Beginning ...

Anatomy and biology

• Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections

• The eSkeletons Project

•  Becoming Human

• The Human Origins Program (Smithsonian)

• Institute of Human Origins

• The Leakey Foundation

• National Geographic Outpost:  In Search of Human Origins

• The Neanderthal Tools Project  (site says "technical difficulties" but maybe it will be active later -- the page listed in the book is available through the Wayback Machine)

Fossil & archaeological sites

• Atapuerca world heritage site  (in Spanish; the English page is no longer available; Google Translate)

• Boxgrove Home Page (England)

• The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc (France)

• The Cave of Lascaux (France)

• Dmanisi Site (Georgia -- the country, not the American state)

• Great Archaeological Sites (France)

• Koobi Fora Research Project (Kenya)

• Krapina.com The world's largest neanderthal finding site (Croatia)

• The Peking Man World Heritage Site at Zhoukoudian (China)

• Sterkfontein caves (the page listed in the book is available only through the Wayback Machine)

Human Genome

• Human Genome Project
• MendelWeb
• PubMed (search system for biomedical articles)

Primates

• PrimateLit

Charles Darwin

• The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

New author

Tana French  In the Woods and The Likeness

I bought a hardback.  It's just as expensive as a movie (and I have to find someplace to put it afterwards), but with books you get more time-value for money. 

I wish Ms. French a long career because I want more.

Potter fixation

21 days (at the moment)

 

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

Where did A Common Reader go?

I was just updating some URLs and I went to the site for A Common Reader.  As you'll notice if you click on the link, the page "cannot be displayed."  I tried the Wayback Machine and the page archives stop last March.  How did I not notice?  Has life been that hectic?

In desperation, I combed the catalog basket for a recent copy of the catalog -- there aren't any.   I found a July 2004 copy, and called the phone number -- no dice.  I did a web search on the address and saw another phone number.  I called it, but it's disconnected.

I loved getting A Common Reader catalogs (I just found one from 1998), and because one notices Events rather than Nonevents, the catalog not showing up didn't make an impression until just now.  I am so sad.  I thought they'd be in business forever.

---------------------------

Update, 20 minutes later:  My goodness, the company went bankrupt.

• Common Reader goes bankrupt

Now I feel guilty as well as sad, and I want to yell, "Come back!  I'll never go to Borders again!"

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More at Hruminations

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And other people also collected their catalogs, and mention my 'other catalogs,' Bas Bleu and Chinaberry.

That Rabbit Girl

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About the only thing I feel 'good' about, is that I never ordered from Amazon instead of A Common Reader.  I did go to the library, but I only ordered Amazon books that A Common Reader didn't sell.

Still, I'm bereft and have already noticed the stages of grief:  shock, sadness, and anger so far.  I've found all my back catalogues (and am mourning the stack I recycled a while ago) and have them next to me.

Dave Barry has a blog

I didn't know Dave Barry had a blog.  And how did I find out that he does have one?  [looks off into distance and affects a casual air]  Oh, he ... told me.  That's right, Dave and I talked blogs -- in person.  Me, --- and what, 600 of his closest friends?  (I was ticket #616)  It was a book signing for his latest tome.

See, I told you I saw Dave.

Btw, if you get a chance, go see him.  He's funnier than most comedy acts I've seen, both on tv, and live.

Biblioholism

After Younger Daughter took her half of the bunk beds and installed it in her Cute Career Girl Apartment, I finally had room for new bookshelves.  I suppose if I stopped buying books then I wouldn't need new bookshelves, but, like, that's never going to happen, so I'm glad I've got more space.

The Man of the House, ably assisted by Junk Yard Thug (who didn't mind hammering in the least), assembled the six sections of the new shelves.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The new shelves improve the look of the tv-room/office.  I can actually see the books and notebooks I need to work with, which is a wonderful change.

Seeing the new shelves got me to thinking about where I could put other new bookshelves.  They improved that room so much, that I thought they'd improve the other rooms, too.  So I did a survey of the house to see where I could put more bookshelves.

The entryway's taken, so they can't go there.

We've already got some in the living room, so there's no space for more shelves there.

The available wall in the basement's in use.

And the computer books are on the other basement wall.

The bedroom's full.

And the spot outside the bedroom door is taken.

The porch has some of the children's books, the gardening books and the cookbooks.

The spare room has the rest of the children's books.

The bathroom's taken.

The utility room and the sewing area seem to be in use.

There are books in the garage.

And even one on the exercise bike.

Someone around here seems to have a problem.  I guess I'm just going to have to put an addition on the house so I can fit in more bookshelves.  (yes, I use the library -- they know me by name)

I injured myself reading

You know you're getting on in years when a long stint of reading makes you break out the arnica gel.  Not only did (No-I'm-Not-Telling) suffer at the end of The Half-blood Prince, I did, too.  For me it was the size of the book.

Almost 20 (!!!) years ago I developed tendinitis in my thumb from a marathon unpacking session after one of our moves.  The house we'd moved into was 'quaintly' laid out (chopped up into small rooms) and so a lot of the boxes had to be left sitting right in the way of people attempting to enter the house through the front door -- good thing we were all a lot smaller back then because we couldn't open that door very far. 

it was up to me to clear the way since I'm the one who decides, for the most part, where everything goes when we unpack.  I cleared the hallway and most of the kitchen that day, and the next day couldn't move my thumb without it feeling as if a large sharp needle was poking straight into the large joint of my thumb every time it moved.  I went to the clinic and returned home with what the kids dubbed The Claw:  a bent-aluminum splint held in place with an elastic bandage, a contraption meant to keep my thumb still while the tendon healed. 

This was in 1988, and I still have The Claw.  I still use it, too, because every time I overuse my thumb, the tendinitis comes back.

Last night I sprinted to the end of The Half-blood Prince, and the strain of holding up the book was too much for the thumb.  I went to bed with that familiar needle-pricking sensation.  Ow.  I guess from now on I should only read when I'm riding the exercise bike -- the one I insisted have a book rack.  At least then I don't have to support a book, plus I get a work-out.

I would say it bites to get old, but when you consider the alternative . . .