Review: Charles and Emma

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith – Deborah Heiligman (12/23/08)

Charles Darwin, back from traveling the world and collecting specimens took as his next task making a list about the pros and cons of marriage.  Once deciding it was for the best, he looked to his first cousin Emma to be his bride.  They seemed a perfect match in everything except religious beliefs.  She’d turned to it after the death of her sister, and he saw no use or evidence for it.  But he knew that his views on evolution and the absence of God in the equation would be met with controversy and skepticism.  So once married to Emma, instead of allowing their differences to drive a wedge between them, Darwin used her as an editor and sounding board, knowing that her opinions would echo those of his critics.  They were in every other way well-suited and happy, even managing to thrive after the deaths of some of their many children.

I fear this book may be one that teachers and librarians love, but kids don’t notice because it doesn’t have much obvious appeal.  It’s too much a love story to be a science story and has too little conflict to be a “great” love story.  It’s wonderfully informative about Darwin and humanizes him while never downplaying his accomplishments or his brilliance.  After having finished the book, he feels like a friend.  I really enjoyed it and read it quickly, while still being bored by parts of it.

The cover is neat, and that may help it find an audience, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to sucessfully recommend it to anyone.  I’ve seen that it’s been marketed for ages 12 and up, but I think it’s really better suited to younger students who are very strong readers.

Browsing through stuff that came in today

I usually spend the first hour of every morning opening and sorting the bins of new books.  Historically a clerical task, I’ve taken it on because otherwise I’d never know about what books we’re getting.  We no longer order for ourselves or revise the new books once they’ve been processed (double checking the work of the clerks.)  Now, everything comes in processed and we more or less are just supposed to check it in and put it out for our patrons.  I like to be the one who checks it in so that I can change any of the preprocessing that I need to and also so I can be on top of what we have on the shelves and what is being replaced and can be weeded (pulled from the shelves and deleted from the system).  Also so that I can read new YA books as they come in.  The following are two that I read during the process.  (One is a picture book, and one a book of photos, not as impressive as all that.)

Woolvs in the Sitee – Margaret Wild, illus by Anne Spudvilas

When I took a YA literature class during grad school, my professor was obsessed with picture books for older readers.  But I’ve never seen a teenager pick one up on their own let alone check it out.  This book is better than a foot tall and will not fit on my fiction shelves.  So I’m starting from a place of annoyance.  It might get a few readers if I shelve it with the graphic novels (doesn’t fit on that shelf either, it’ll be in a strange limbo for the foreseeable future), but I wonder what will be made of it?  As one can see from the title, the story is written somewhat phonetically.  It’s about a boy in a post-apocalyptic world, living in a basement, hiding from “woolvs.”  Or is he just deeply disturbed?  I think it would be good for discussion or even for a classroom.  Unreliable narrators, language, metaphor.  But for as many copies as we received, I’ve gotta get about 60 people to check this out for its purchase to be worthwhile.

Serial No. 3817131 – Rachel Papo

This is a book of photos of Israeli women in the military taken by a woman 15 years past her own service.  Some of the pictures are inspiring and some heartbreaking, some of the women are beautiful and strong and some look scared and overwhelmed, most just look bored.  I think a person’s reaction to the pictures will depend on their ideas about and experience of the military and Israel.  Yes, it is jarring to see young women going about their everyday lives with guns strapped to their backs, but soldiers are always young.  The purpose of the book seems to be to shed light on the human costs of war and to give back to the soldiers some of the individuality taken away from them by the army, but recognizing that there is a price for war isn’t the same as being against all war.  Which is a little bit what the introduction seems to be arguing for.

Review: Arthur of Albion

Arthur of Albion – John Matthews, illus by Pavel Tatarnikov

This is a big and beautiful book.  I can’t help but think it’s the kind of thing grandparents are going to be giving as a gift and kids are going to be hopelessly bored by.  Unless it finds the right kid to be completely enchanted by it. 

It’s almost an encyclopedia of Arthurian stories, with brief descriptions of people, places and objects and then a retelling of one of the related stories.  Those retellings are what might capture children.  And the illustrations really are gorgeous, especially Tatarnikov’s Klimtian women. 

I imagine this will be most interesting to kids who have already read something about King Arthur and want to know more, or that it would make for good bedtime reading.  It’s something to enjoy in bite-sized pieces.  There is a lot of fighting and beheading and dead knights, but nothing gory or gruesome.  I love Arthurian legend, and will definitely be trying to push it on my theoretical and unborn children.  I’ll be happy to have this age-appropriate book to add to that shelf.

Review: He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut

He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut: And 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know – Jessica Valenti

This book is comprised of 50 short chapters on what Valenti considers to be the most ubiquitous and damaging double standards affecting women (and men to a lesser extent) in America today.  There are about 3 pages of discussion about the issue and then a short paragraph about what the reader can do to combat the problem.

For a real-life, grown-up feminist there’s not much new here.  There were no double standards I wasn’t already aware of and no arguments about why those things are bad that I hadn’t heard before.  I think this is probably best suited to young or burgeoning feminists, people who still think that hard work is all it takes and that being one of the boys is a sucessful coping strategy.  Though there is tons of cursing throughout, and a few too many exclamation points for my taste.

That said, I had a lot of problems with the book.  I think Valenti undermines otherwise strong arguments in favor of making emotional points that sometimes aren’t true, and ignores complexity to be pithy and sometimes inaccurate.  She expects us to take her pronouncements as true without anything to back them up, she refers to a lot of anecdotal evidence and studies and someone somewheres; she needs citations.  She even puts Joss Whedon on a pedestal he doesn’t deserve and acts like Buffy was a perfect example of feminist tv (I love both Whedon and Buffy, but he shouldn’t be given a free pass: lots of his female characters are problematic.)  I guess I don’t have the stomach for printed polemics, at least on the internet people include links.

I don’t have similar problems with her blog, Feministing, maybe just because the nature of blogging is different and I’m more forgiving when I can just skip posts I’m not interested in or disagree with.