osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2022-09-26 07:05 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2022-09-26 07:05 pm
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Last Call for Newbery Honor Books of the 1970s
Hail the conquering hero! For I have finished the last four Newbery Honor books of the 1970s.
Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Pleasures of Art is a delightful book about not only the pleasures of art, but about the fact that learning to see art more clearly and thoughtfully can lead, in turn, to a richer vision of life, and vice versa. “For not everything that is thought and felt by human beings will fit into verbal patterns; music and art are other languages, capable of shades of feeling, of nuances that may slip through the web of words.”
Allan W. Eckert’s Incident at Hawk’s Hill has a great premise: lost on the Canadian prairie in the late nineteenth century, six-year-old Ben gets adopted by a badger and spends six weeks living in a badger sett. Isn’t that delightful?
Unfortunately, the execution is pretty dry. There are a number of passages about geological history and badger habits that read like they’ve been ripped directly from a dull natural history text. Also, the badger gets shot. Reader, I should have expected this, but in my defense, Incident at Hawk’s Hill didn’t read like that kind of Newbery book! I thought the badger would simply waddle back into the wilderness, like the raccoon at the end of Rascal.
BUT NO. She gets shot. Now to be fair she hasn’t actually died yet when the book ends: the family has patched up her wounds and made her comfortable and maybe she will make it through the night, but it’s so unlikely that Ben’s father is forced to tell him that she probably won’t make it. Then there is a tender scene of reconciliation where Ben (who has hitherto had a strained relationship with his father) asks his father to help him bury the badger in her old sett if she’s fine. Which is fine! I guess! If you are more invested in Ben’s relationship with his father than Ben’s relationship with the badger! BUT COME ON.
Miska Miles’ Annie and the Old One is a picture book (with spare, gorgeous illustrations by Peter Parnall) about a Navajo girl coming to terms with her grandmother’s approaching death. Clearly in the category of “Newbery books about dead relatives” but a gentle, restrained variation on the theme.
And finally, Jamake Highwater’s Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey, one of those books where the story behind the story is more interesting than the book itself. Highwater presented himself as Cherokee, but in fact he was of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, a fact exposed in an article in the Washington Post a few years after Anpao won the Newbery Honor. Despite this high profile exposé, however, Highwater continued to work as a consultant on Native American issues, most notably for the character of Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager.
But how is the book, you ask? Well, it reminded me of Mary Q. Steele's Journey Outside, which also features a hero drifting through a series of disconnected episodes in countryside peopled by characters so flat one can only assume they're meant to be allegorical, only Anpao is almost twice as long. There must have been something in the water in the 1970s that made this sort of thing appealing to the Newbery committee.
Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Pleasures of Art is a delightful book about not only the pleasures of art, but about the fact that learning to see art more clearly and thoughtfully can lead, in turn, to a richer vision of life, and vice versa. “For not everything that is thought and felt by human beings will fit into verbal patterns; music and art are other languages, capable of shades of feeling, of nuances that may slip through the web of words.”
Allan W. Eckert’s Incident at Hawk’s Hill has a great premise: lost on the Canadian prairie in the late nineteenth century, six-year-old Ben gets adopted by a badger and spends six weeks living in a badger sett. Isn’t that delightful?
Unfortunately, the execution is pretty dry. There are a number of passages about geological history and badger habits that read like they’ve been ripped directly from a dull natural history text. Also, the badger gets shot. Reader, I should have expected this, but in my defense, Incident at Hawk’s Hill didn’t read like that kind of Newbery book! I thought the badger would simply waddle back into the wilderness, like the raccoon at the end of Rascal.
BUT NO. She gets shot. Now to be fair she hasn’t actually died yet when the book ends: the family has patched up her wounds and made her comfortable and maybe she will make it through the night, but it’s so unlikely that Ben’s father is forced to tell him that she probably won’t make it. Then there is a tender scene of reconciliation where Ben (who has hitherto had a strained relationship with his father) asks his father to help him bury the badger in her old sett if she’s fine. Which is fine! I guess! If you are more invested in Ben’s relationship with his father than Ben’s relationship with the badger! BUT COME ON.
Miska Miles’ Annie and the Old One is a picture book (with spare, gorgeous illustrations by Peter Parnall) about a Navajo girl coming to terms with her grandmother’s approaching death. Clearly in the category of “Newbery books about dead relatives” but a gentle, restrained variation on the theme.
And finally, Jamake Highwater’s Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey, one of those books where the story behind the story is more interesting than the book itself. Highwater presented himself as Cherokee, but in fact he was of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, a fact exposed in an article in the Washington Post a few years after Anpao won the Newbery Honor. Despite this high profile exposé, however, Highwater continued to work as a consultant on Native American issues, most notably for the character of Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager.
But how is the book, you ask? Well, it reminded me of Mary Q. Steele's Journey Outside, which also features a hero drifting through a series of disconnected episodes in countryside peopled by characters so flat one can only assume they're meant to be allegorical, only Anpao is almost twice as long. There must have been something in the water in the 1970s that made this sort of thing appealing to the Newbery committee.
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And then Mole and Ratty come over for tea.
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(we then did Day of the Triffids and I much preferred wiping out 99% of humanity to possibly killing off one badger)
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Did Highwater really think he was Cherokee (i.e., was it family lore à la Elizabeth Warren), or did he know he wasn't? I'm interested in people whose yearning for another identifier leads them eventually to just claim that identifier.
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Yes, there's something fascinating about people who become so obsessed with an ethnic identity that they eventually end up claiming it. Highwater (according to that Wikipedia article) claimed that he thought it would help him in his writing career, but white authors like Scott O'Dell or Miska Miles did very well with Native American-themed books, so it's hard to imagine it really helped.
The people who get caught doing this do tend to be the one who have built a successful career on it, but that's probably because they're the ones worth catching, you know? No one is going to bother writing an expose about a cashier at Arby's who loves to bang on about his Cherokee heritage, even if his coworkers are almost positive he's making it all up.
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"Yeah. Time to put in the noise-cancelling earphones."
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THE QUEST IS COMPLETED
Ok but they shot the badger? They shot the badger? What the HELL.
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The badger shooting was TOTALLY UNNECESSARY. Ruined a perfectly good ending!