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Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared To Dream. Tanya Lee Stone. 2009. Candlewick. 144 pages. [Paperback is coming in February 2010.]
July 1999 One woman stands alone, off to the side of the crowd. She paces back and forth--agitated, excited, impatient. From the back, it is hard to tell her age; her faded brown leather jacket and blond ponytail reveal nothing. But if she were to turn to glance at the group of women on the observation bleachers behind her, you would see the lines of time etched on her face. You would see a smile tinged with sadness. Although the women behind her huddle close like sisters, sharing a chuckle, a tease here and there, a knowing look, it is not at her expense. They understand her need for solitude. This is an emotional time for all of them, but perhaps especially for her, Jerrie Cobb. It was Jerrie who led them in a quest to live their dreams, Jerrie who first believed they had a shot at all this, Jerrie who still, to this day, is fighting for her dream. Nearly forty years earlier, it was Jerrie who thought she would be exactly where Eileen Collins is right now: inside a NASA craft, about to fly into space.
This one should be a must-read. It is one of those books where I learned how much I just don't know. The story of these women--of Jerrie Cobb especially--was an amazing one. A book that left me a little shocked, disappointed, and more than a little sad. Why didn't I know her story? their stories? How could I not have known that there were women involved in the space race?! That there were women--really qualified women--that were being denied the chance to be astronauts because they were women. Of course there were a few reasons given as to why they were being denied. But some of these "excuses" really shocked me. I guess I'm a bit naive.
Almost Astronauts is well-written. It's simply fascinating. Very compelling. Not all nonfiction has the same quality as fiction. That can't-put-it-down factor that makes a book really good. That makes a book a must-read.
It's great to shed some light on this important subject that isn't talked about enough. I'll keep this one in mind - it sounds like an informative read!
Oooooo ! I think so too ! It goes on the wish list... if I am lucky I will be able to get it in March for my b'day!! Not all that far away. Thanks Becky!
holy cow Becky! just went to amazon ... that is expensive for a book that can be read in one or two sittings!! ...but I put it on the wish list cause I really do think i would like to read this..
Kramer, Clara. 2009. Clara's War: One Girl's Story of Survival. HarperCollins. 352 pages.
Loved, loved, loved this Holocaust memoir. If it was up to me, it would be required reading. (Come to think of it, there are a lot of books I'd have as required reading.) This all too true story is haunting and brilliant. Very powerful. Here's the description from the back cover--I've tried and failed to write one of my own, but I kept getting stuck:
Clara Kramer was a typical Polish Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara's family was taken in by the Beck, a Volksdeutsch (ethnically German) family from their town. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. His wife had worked as Clara's family's housekeeper. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families. Eighteen people in all lived in a bunker dug out of Beck's basement. Fifteen-year old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she spent in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life, from the house's catching fire to Beck's affair with Clara's cousin, from the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp. Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent collection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
What did I love about this one? The honesty and vulnerability of it. It's very straight forward. The truth alone--without embellishment, without drama--is enough to convey the emotional story.
It had come to this for our family. The unthinkable. That some of our family would survive, perhaps not at the expense of the others, but with the knowledge that we couldn't save them.
The only thing that kept me sane was going to school. The churches had large libraries, as did some of the schools. There were also private libraries. Almost every day I made the rounds. The former nuns and Mr. Appel, the old Jewish man who ran the private libraries, expected me and saved books they thought I might like. This was the year of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens; and of course the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Gogel. I picked books by their length and their weight. The longer and heavier the better. More and more, I tried to shut out the world with literature.
In this way we learned that the Pole or Ukrainian who might turn us in would not be a stranger. They would know us. Their children would be our classmates, their fathers would know our fathers, and their grandfathers would have known our grandfathers. I suppose, in the end, it made no difference if you were betrayed by a friend or an enemy. It really only meant that your heart might break a little more in the moment before you felt the bullet.
Obviously, this is a powerful story. It's a story about life and survival. It's a story about humanity--at its best and worst. The portrayal of the Becks--for better or worse--proves just that. What makes a man good? It's an emotional read--no doubt--with just as many losses as triumphs. (In one of the last chapters, the reader learns that of the 5,000 Jews living in Zolkiew, only 50 survived.) But it is a hopeful story as well. One of strength and endurance.
Very touching review, Becky. Watching the interview with Clara was poignant. So glad you included and shared that with us. I simply cannot imagine the hardships suffered by so many. It's important that we read these diaries and remember and try to prevent such atrocities from happening again. And yet they do. I want to read this and glean some of the hope that Clara possessed.
I had not ever heard of this book, but it sounds like a must read in terms of Holocaust literature. I am really glad you thought so highly of it, and will be putting it on my wish list. Thanks!
This book is a 1969 Newbery Honor Winner. And it's easy to see why. What should you expect from this one? Why should you read it? Well, Lester has woven together compiling primary sources into a book that is powerful and moving. The thing that impresses me most about the book is its richness. It presents first-hand accounts, primary sources. Accounts from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stories from slaves and ex-slaves. Stories from men and women. These stories don't need a lot of dressing up. They don't need to be sensationalized. In their very simplicity, they speak volumes.
To be a slave. To be owned by another person, as a car, house, or table is owned. To live as a piece of property that could be sold--a child sold from its mother, a wife from her husband. To be considered not human, but a "thing" that plowed the fields, cut the wood, cooked the food, nursed another's child; a "thing" whose sole function was determined by the one who owned you.
To be a slave. To know, despite the suffering and deprivation, that you were human, more human than he who said you were not human. To know joy, laughter, sorrow, and tears and yet to be considered only the equal of a table.
To be a slave was to be a human being under conditions in which humanity was denied. They were not slaves. They were people. Their condition was slavery.
They who were held as slaves looked upon themselves and the servitude in which they found themselves with the eyes and minds of human beings, conscious of everything that happened to them, conscious of all that went on around them. Yet slaves are often pictured as little more than dumb, brute animals, whose sole attributes were found in working, singing, and dancing. They were like children and slavery was actually a benefit to them--this was the view of those who were not slaves. Those who were slaves tell a different story.
This is an incredibly powerful book. I often read excerpts to my eighth graders when they are studying slavery. It is a must-have in a media center.
One of the slave narratives that Lester uses is that of Solomon Northup. As a middle schooler, I read an adapted version of his story called In Chains to Louisiana. It had an enormous impact on me but it's now out of print. When I read Lester's book, I instantly connected to it because it contains sections I remembered from reading about Northup.
This sounds like a very raw and intimate book. I think it sounds very interesting, and I would love to read it. Thanks for the great review, especially the quote, it really gives a flavor of the writing style and voice of the book.
Rubin, Susan Goldman. 2009. The Anne Frank Case: Simon Wiesenthal's Search For The Truth. Illustrated by Bill Farnsworth. Holiday House. 40 pages.
I love finding great nonfiction picture books for older readers. Especially if they're Holocaust-related. Though this one is an illustrated book, don't mistake it for being for too young a crowd. The text is rich in detail. (And the content naturally leads itself to an older crowd--upper elementary to middle school, perhaps.)
One night in October 1958 at nine thirty, the phone rang in Simon Wiesenthal's apartment in Linz, Austria. "Can you come at once to the Landes Theater?" asked a friend, who sounded upset. Simon's friend told him that he was attending a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. But it had been disrupted. "Traitors! Swindlers!" a group of teenagers had shouted at the actors, booing and hissing. The show had stopped as demonstrators dropped leaflets from the balcony that read: This play is a fraud. Anne Frank never existed....
The book follows what happens next. It follows Simon Wiesenthal's quest to "prove" that Anne Frank did exist. His goal? To find the Nazi SS officer who captured the Frank family. It's a journey that would take him several years. But that was part of his life's goal: to find Nazis and bring them to justice.
The book is interesting--as you'd expect it to be--and it's very beautifully done. I loved the ending as well.
When a fellow survivor from Mauthausen congratulated Simon on his detective work, he said, "If you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" Simon replied, "When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers...But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"
I read Anne Frank when I was in school but it did make me realise how it must have been for her growing up and keepin her spirit high in such times. I would really like to read this book.Thanks for the review.
Ganeri, Anita. 1996. The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
Inspired by Benjamin Britten's piece, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, which was composed in 1945 as an introduction to orchestral music, Anita Ganeri has written this informative yet fascinating guide to the orchestra. The accompanying CD is narrated by Ben Kingsley. He "gives listeners a lively guided tour of Britten's music, describing the sounds made by each instrument." The book is full of information, but it is accessible. It is a lot more entertaining than I thought it would be! If you'd asked me beforehand, I would have bet it would be boring and dry. But it's far from that. The CD and book complement one another well. It is not a recording of the book itself. It stands alone--could stand alone--from the book. And the book could be read and appreciated apart from the CD. However, it only makes sense to give both a try! You might find yourself preferring one over the other. After all, we all learn differently.
Opdyke, Irene Gut. 1999. In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer.
I did not ask myself, Should I do this? But, How will I do this? Every step of my childhood had brought me to this crossroad; I must take the right path, or I would no longer be myself. You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis, all at once. One's first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence. Now I was making plans to... (142-143)
In My Hands is nonfiction--a memoir--and it's a powerful one. Full of descriptive images you might wish you'd never seen. But it's an important work, a necessary one. Our narrator, Irene Gut, was a Polish girl--a young woman training to be a nurse when the war burst into her life. The conflict between Germany and Russia stripping her of her childhood in more ways than one. Her account of what happened during the war years are powerful and haunting. But there is nothing over-the-top either. It's straightforward, spare, even.
This is her description of the purging of the Poland of Jews (I believe we're speaking of the ghettos.)
The gates were dragged open, and the Jewish prisoners were forced out through a gauntlet, while the guards beat at them with their rifle butts. An old man, tottering with a cane, was not fast enough, and a guard shot him on the spot. In vain, women tried to protect their small children from blows, men tried to shield their old fathers. But every time someone stumbled and fell under the beatings, shots rang out. The street was paved with bodies, and still the Jews were forced to march out over them. We watched this from our windows in a paralysis of horror. We could do nothing but watch. We could not even pull back from the glass to keep hidden. An old rabbi carrying the Torah stopped to help a young woman with a shrieking toddler, and all three were shot. A graybeard in a faded uniform of the Polish army from the last war limped past the guards, and he, too, was not fast enough. The sun shone down on all of them, and the dust settled in pools of blood. By this time, the four of us were crying uncontrollably. Helen was on her knees, sobbing in her mother's arms. Janina turned her face away. But I watched, flattening myself against the window. As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird. (116-117)
This is how she sums it up, "We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, "Behold. This is the worst thing man can do."" (118)
Have you thought about writing an article for a children’s magazine? Maybe you have an idea, but you’re not sure how to go about it. Here are some tips.
Step One. Choose a topic. It should be something that many children will be interested in. But it should also be something you know about or are interested in learning more about. Animals, sports, famous people, science and how-to articles are all popular choices.
Step Two. Narrow your topic. Concentrate on just one aspect of it. I wanted to write an article about birds. I’d just returned from Florida, so I decided to concentrate on the birds I saw in one place, Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. This was still too broad a topic, so I honed in on how different birds there eat. The article, “Dinner at Ding Darling,” was published by Children’s Digest.
Step Three. Research your article. Use both online resources and books and articles. Editors like a mix of print and Internet sources in a bibliography. Look for interesting little tidbits that will appeal to kids. Find facts with wow appeal and yuck appeal. Kids like the amazing as well as the gross.
Step Four. Organize your research. Jot down the main points you want to make, then go through your notes and plug them into your outline. It doesn’t have to be a formal outline. It just needs to get your thoughts in order. I love outlines. Once my outline is done, the article seems to almost write itself.
Step Five. Write the article. Decide what age you are writing for, then try to keep your writing on that level. Don’t talk down to kids but try to use words that age child would know and understand. Keep your sentences simple and fairly short. Use short paragraphs. Children are intimidated by large blocks of type.
Step Six. Revise and edit your article. To make sure it flows smoothly, read it aloud to yourself. That will enable you to notice the rhythm and to find repeated words. Be very sure there are no errors in spelling or grammar.
Step Seven. Research the markets. Get a copy of Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market or research children’s publishers online. Make sure your article is the right length, for the right age, and on a topic the magazine uses.
Step Eight. Submit your article. Then get busy writing another one.
Sound simple? Try it! With a little work and practice, you can be successful at writing articles for children.
***************** About the Author: Pat McCarthy is an instructor for the Institute of Children’s Literature and the author of over a dozen books for children.
Learn more about her books at her blog. If you have a question about writing for children, e-mail Pat at [email protected]. More resources for children’s writers will soon be up on her blog.
Every summer handfuls of students from the CNMI head to the mainland to compete in various activities. The students who participate in Little League have gotten press, both locally and nationally, with televised games and some commentary. But there are students who get less recognition and yet who succeed each summer in improving the image of the CNMI among their peers and the adults who spend long hours involved in the activities.
Forensics and Thespian students head out with their lines memorized, their songs humming in their ears. They have worked on their sense of timing, the dramatic pause. They speak their parts in clear, unaccented English, setting aside their island-style patter for after their performances.
The thespians start their work Monday, June 25th, in Lincoln, Nebraska, perfoming their monologues, mimes, solo musical pieces and other performances for their individual evaluations, and then working together as a group to perform a one-act play that other thespians from around the country can watch and enjoy.
And the forensics students just finished their hard work in Wichita, Kansas. I don't know all of the results, but I heard that several students finished in the top 100. Ryan Ortizo of MCS finished in the top 40. And the star CNMI student this year was MHS student Rachel Reyes, who finished 9th in storytelling among all of the students from around the U.S.
Imagine a CNMI student finishing in the top 10 of any academic competition open to all U.S. students! That's what Rachel did. Congratulations to her and to all who helped make her success possible (like Harold Easton, MHS drama teacher).
And thanks to Rachel and the other students for the positive image you help share about the CNMI as unofficial summer ambassadors.
0 Comments on 101. The CNMI's Summer Ambassadors as of 6/23/2007 6:02:00 PM
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Sounds like a great book...adding it to the list!
Wow - I had no idea. I'm going to have to read this one. Thanks.
It's great to shed some light on this important subject that isn't talked about enough. I'll keep this one in mind - it sounds like an informative read!
Emidy
from Une Parole
Oooooo ! I think so too ! It goes on the wish list... if I am lucky I will be able to get it in March for my b'day!! Not all that far away. Thanks Becky!
holy cow Becky! just went to amazon ... that is expensive for a book that can be read in one or two sittings!! ...but I put it on the wish list cause I really do think i would like to read this..
I will rally buy this book, sound like a good story about these women dream.
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I totally agree! It is a must read. Thank you for featuring one of my favorite books of 2009!