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A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am so glad Grandma Dowdel has returned! And this is a whole new story. A new family (Grandma's new neighbors) have moved in and Grandma Dowdel helps them in her own special way. ;) I absolutely love Richard Peck's humor and character development. This book is a follow up book to A Long Way From Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, but you do not need to read the first two to enjoy this story. However, if you want a little background in the development of Grandma Dowdel, you will not want to miss the first two books. I recommend this book to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Although some of fifth graders in my class get into reading the other two books, I think the vocabulary of this book makes it more appropriate for 6th grade. But I would surely start them off with the series in fifth grade. I especially like the version on tape I have borrowed from the library.

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It Was September When We Ran Away the First Time by D. James Smith


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This trilogy (So far) really intrigues me! I stumbled upon one of D. James Smith's books way back when I started my blog. I accidently read the second book before the first, but it didn't matter. Now there is a third story about Paolo and his Italian-American family.
I love the voice of Paolo. He has some great lines in this book. (I returned it to the library, so I can't quote any...) His family life is so interesting to me. I love the big family he has.
Another point of interest to me is the historical aspects of the series. This book is no exception. The story is set in 1951 and it brings up many great topics for that time period.
I think this is a time period that would be foreign for most students in fifth grade, so I would use it in a read aloud setting. I think sixth or seventh grade students would like it as well.

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People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!

I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.

When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.

Before he married my mother, my American Indian dad had lived all over the world and had developed an international appetite. My mother was well traveled and a good cook, and she would have gladly tried her hand at ethnic cuisine, but she just couldn’t get the ingredients required. If we had stayed in New Orleans like my mother wanted, most of the ethnic essentials would have been available, but my dad’s job moved us several times, and in the late 1950’s we wound up in Pittsburgh (where people had never heard of red beans and rice or fried chicken) for three years and, a couple of moves later, we finally landed in an awful little jerkwater town in Alabama where people fried almost everything that hit the dinner table. In those pre-internet days, living in such a place meant living among people who had never even heard of tacos much less humus or mushu pork. We had to drive a hundred miles either north or south to a real city (not the one attached to the nearby military base) to buy culinary ingredients (and almost everything else), and even in those cities, there wasn’t much to choose from. We’re talking about the south in the 1960’s, where everything was either drowned in mayonnaise or deep-fat fried in lard or corn oil. I remember when I saw my first tub of yogurt in a grocery store. Eureka! In those pre-Starbucks days, my mother was considered weird for lacing her coffee with vanilla or rum flavoring and drinking it iced. At nineteen, I married my first husband, who was from Washington, D.C. He whisked me off to points north and introduced me to a world of culinary delights that I never knew existed except in my dad’s travel tales: lox and bagels, vichissoise, souvlaki, and every other imaginable ethnic cuisine in that truly international city. I had hit the mother lode! I was in absolute heaven. I was also introduced to a city where women and minorities could actually get good paying jobs and were not treated like second-class citizens. For the first time in my young life, I made friends with gay people, African Americans, and people from Japan, India, Egypt, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela. And I found Native Americans other than my dad’s family, a first. I became a hippie and ate granola. I joined the National Organization for Women and burned my bra at a rally. I loudly protested the war in Vietnam. I was reborn! It was the 1970’s and anything was possible. I gladly waved goodbye to the “good ole days.”

There was a reason why things cost less in the good ole days—people made less money than they do now. Duhhhhh! And women were paid a lot less than men as a rule. In those days, women were expected to get married, be housewives and mothers, and generally become servants of their husbands. The poor women who had to work were treated like children by their bosses and they certainly made a lot less money than their male counterparts. It was hard for a woman to become a professional like a doctor or lawyer or engineer in those male-dominated fields. Many women attended college, but they were supposed to become teachers and nurses and secretaries, and until the 1960’s, they were expected to quit working when they got married. Women in those days did not generally make large purchases such as cars and homes, and their husbands usually handled the family finances. And God forbid, if a single woman got pregnant, she had few choices: (1) an illegal back-alley abortion; (2) a shotgun wedding; (3) a home for unwed mothers. If anyone found out the truth, the poor woman was branded for life. Ah yes, the good ole days!

Whenever I receive those “good ole days” emails, I always wonder if the people sending them to me have undergone lobotomies. Don’t they remember the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam? How about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, Selma, Birmingham, Little Rock, the entire state of Mississippi? Do these people even remember the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. King? Do they remember “restricted” clubs, schools, restaurants? No Jews, blacks, Asians or American Indians allowed. I remember all of that and more.

Having grown up in the south, my memories of the “good ole days” include whites-only signs everywhere, segregated schools, the “n” word, the Ku Klux Klan, rampant racism and classism, Confederate flags, and fear—fear that the southern white Christian way of life would shortly come to end. And it did. That termite-ridden society inevitably came to a screeching halt not long after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and right about the time Johnson ramped up the bombing in Vietnam.

Short-sighted, nostalgic twits have blamed the sea change in American society on everything from Elvis to the Beatles to the mini-skirt, but entertainers and fashion trends are never the cause of societal change, they are merely reflections of it. Even though they had gone through two world wars, Americans before the late 1960’s were still rather isolationist. Except for a very small minority, they really believed in the garbage their government and their TVs were spewing into their living rooms every night. But there is a big world out there beyond our borders, and it was spilling over onto American soil and airwaves exponentially. Did eleven states suffering from social dry rot really think they could keep American apartheid alive indefinitely while the riots raged in south central Los Angeles and our nation’s capital? Did they really think they could get away with killing three freedom riders from the north and four little black girls in Birmingham and Martin Luther King in Memphis? Did men really think they could keep women enslaved in the interior when women in New York and Chicago and San Francisco were burning their bras and demanding equal rights? Yes, most of them really thought they could, until it all came crashing down on their obtuse little pointy heads and the “good ole days” were gone forever.

People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!

I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.

When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.

Before he married my mother, my American Indian dad had lived all over the world and had developed an international appetite. My mother was well traveled and a good cook, and she would have gladly tried her hand at ethnic cuisine, but she just couldn’t get the ingredients required. If we had stayed in New Orleans like my mother wanted, most of the ethnic essentials would have been available, but my dad’s job moved us several times, and in the late 1950’s we wound up in Pittsburgh (where people had never heard of red beans and rice or fried chicken) for three years and, a couple of moves later, we finally landed in an awful little jerkwater town in Alabama where people fried almost everything that hit the dinner table. In those pre-internet days, living in such a place meant living among people who had never even heard of tacos much less humus or mushu pork. We had to drive a hundred miles either north or south to a real city (not the one attached to the nearby military base) to buy culinary ingredients (and almost everything else), and even in those cities, there wasn’t much to choose from. We’re talking about the south in the 1960’s, where everything was either drowned in mayonnaise or deep-fat fried in lard or corn oil. I remember when I saw my first tub of yogurt in a grocery store. Eureka! In those pre-Starbucks days, my mother was considered weird for lacing her coffee with vanilla or rum flavoring and drinking it iced. At nineteen, I married my first husband, who was from Washington, D.C. He whisked me off to points north and introduced me to a world of culinary delights that I never knew existed except in my dad’s travel tales: lox and bagels, vichissoise, souvlaki, and every other imaginable ethnic cuisine in that truly international city. I had hit the mother lode! I was in absolute heaven. I was also introduced to a city where women and minorities could actually get good paying jobs and were not treated like second-class citizens. For the first time in my young life, I made friends with gay people, African Americans, and people from Japan, India, Egypt, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela. And I found Native Americans other than my dad’s family, a first. I became a hippie and ate granola. I joined the National Organization for Women and burned my bra at a rally. I loudly protested the war in Vietnam. I was reborn! It was the 1970’s and anything was possible. I gladly waved goodbye to the “good ole days.”

There was a reason why things cost less in the good ole days—people made less money than they do now. Duhhhhh! And women were paid a lot less than men as a rule. In those days, women were expected to get married, be housewives and mothers, and generally become servants of their husbands. The poor women who had to work were treated like children by their bosses and they certainly made a lot less money than their male counterparts. It was hard for a woman to become a professional like a doctor or lawyer or engineer in those male-dominated fields. Many women attended college, but they were supposed to become teachers and nurses and secretaries, and until the 1960’s, they were expected to quit working when they got married. Women in those days did not generally make large purchases such as cars and homes, and their husbands usually handled the family finances. And God forbid, if a single woman got pregnant, she had few choices: (1) an illegal back-alley abortion; (2) a shotgun wedding; (3) a home for unwed mothers. If anyone found out the truth, the poor woman was branded for life. Ah yes, the good ole days!

Whenever I receive those “good ole days” emails, I always wonder if the people sending them to me have undergone lobotomies. Don’t they remember the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam? How about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, Selma, Birmingham, Little Rock, the entire state of Mississippi? Do these people even remember the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. King? Do they remember “restricted” clubs, schools, restaurants? No Jews, blacks, Asians or American Indians allowed. I remember all of that and more.

Having grown up in the south, my memories of the “good ole days” include whites-only signs everywhere, segregated schools, the “n” word, the Ku Klux Klan, rampant racism and classism, Confederate flags, and fear—fear that the southern white Christian way of life would shortly come to end. And it did. That termite-ridden society inevitably came to a screeching halt not long after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and right about the time Johnson ramped up the bombing in Vietnam.

Short-sighted, nostalgic twits have blamed the sea change in American society on everything from Elvis to the Beatles to the mini-skirt, but entertainers and fashion trends are never the cause of societal change, they are merely reflections of it. Even though they had gone through two world wars, Americans before the late 1960’s were still rather isolationist. Except for a very small minority, they really believed in the garbage their government and their TVs were spewing into their living rooms every night. But there is a big world out there beyond our borders, and it was spilling over onto American soil and airwaves exponentially. Did eleven states suffering from social dry rot really think they could keep American apartheid alive indefinitely while the riots raged in south central Los Angeles and our nation’s capital? Did they really think they could get away with killing three freedom riders from the north and four little black girls in Birmingham and Martin Luther King in Memphis? Did men really think they could keep women enslaved in the interior when women in New York and Chicago and San Francisco were burning their bras and demanding equal rights? Yes, most of them really thought they could, until it all came crashing down on their obtuse little pointy heads and the “good ole days” were gone forever.