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osprey_archerThree final Newbery Honor books from the 1930s, and then I am giving the project a rest! …Until my weeklong sojourn in my hometown just before Thanksgiving, at which point I will be plundering the Purdue Library’s Newbery holdings, because you have to get these things where you can get them.
Armstrong Sperry’s All Sail Set is a boy-meets-boat adventure. Our hero falls in love with the clipper ship Flying Cloud while it’s still a mere model on the shipbuilder’s desk, watches it built from his perch as shipbuilder’s apprentice, and then sails with it on its maiden voyage! This is his strongest relationship in the book; the human characterization is mostly forgettable. Sperry repeatedly references Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, which perhaps I ought to read.
Cornelia Meigs’ Swift Rivers, on the other hand, is a boy-meets-raft adventure, in which young Chris floats a passel of logs down the Goose Wing River to the Mississippi, where they are bound into a raft and acquire a pilot. Wonderful detail about the craft of piloting on the Mississippi, further enlivened by Chris’s intense-friendship-at-first-sight with a passing stranger who initially mentions the possibility of floating trees down the Goose Wing in spring flood, then runs into Chris as Chris is putting this plan into action and of course joins in.
However, the racial attitudes that are unenlightened even by the low standards of the 1930s. “Indians are good haters,” Meigs informs us, and one important subplot involves a mixed-race character who has quarreled with his best friend and struggles to forgive him, a conflict which the other characters express in terms of whether his French or his Chippewa blood get the upper hand.
I’m not surprised that they published this in the 1930s, but I am startled that it was reprinted in 2004.
In comparison, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History was a pleasant surprise. “Surely, though perhaps I speak with partiality, there is no history more thrilling and delightful than that of China,” Seeger writes in the introduction, which is exactly the attitude that I want from any writer of nonfiction: yes, please tell me about the country that you love with a swooning passion!
The version I read is an updated 1962 edition, which adds a couple of chapters at the end about World War II (in 1934, when the book was published, Japan had invaded Manchuria but not the rest of China), the following Communist revolution, and what happened after, bringing the text right up to the 1962 present with the comment, “Whatever the causes, there has been a lack of food; there has not been famine, as in the old days when millions of people died in one province while there was plenty of food in the others. This time the whole country has hungered, so we hear.”
This is a reference to the Great Leap Forward, which, as people in the west would later hear, caused one of the biggest man-made famines in human history. That “so we hear” suggests an awareness that we are not, in fact, hearing all there is to hear; that history cannot be properly told “until time has done its work and the shape is firm and clear.” And yet where do you stop a comprehensive history if not the present, even if you don't know what present events mean - even if you're not yet sure what those present events are?
Armstrong Sperry’s All Sail Set is a boy-meets-boat adventure. Our hero falls in love with the clipper ship Flying Cloud while it’s still a mere model on the shipbuilder’s desk, watches it built from his perch as shipbuilder’s apprentice, and then sails with it on its maiden voyage! This is his strongest relationship in the book; the human characterization is mostly forgettable. Sperry repeatedly references Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, which perhaps I ought to read.
Cornelia Meigs’ Swift Rivers, on the other hand, is a boy-meets-raft adventure, in which young Chris floats a passel of logs down the Goose Wing River to the Mississippi, where they are bound into a raft and acquire a pilot. Wonderful detail about the craft of piloting on the Mississippi, further enlivened by Chris’s intense-friendship-at-first-sight with a passing stranger who initially mentions the possibility of floating trees down the Goose Wing in spring flood, then runs into Chris as Chris is putting this plan into action and of course joins in.
However, the racial attitudes that are unenlightened even by the low standards of the 1930s. “Indians are good haters,” Meigs informs us, and one important subplot involves a mixed-race character who has quarreled with his best friend and struggles to forgive him, a conflict which the other characters express in terms of whether his French or his Chippewa blood get the upper hand.
I’m not surprised that they published this in the 1930s, but I am startled that it was reprinted in 2004.
In comparison, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History was a pleasant surprise. “Surely, though perhaps I speak with partiality, there is no history more thrilling and delightful than that of China,” Seeger writes in the introduction, which is exactly the attitude that I want from any writer of nonfiction: yes, please tell me about the country that you love with a swooning passion!
The version I read is an updated 1962 edition, which adds a couple of chapters at the end about World War II (in 1934, when the book was published, Japan had invaded Manchuria but not the rest of China), the following Communist revolution, and what happened after, bringing the text right up to the 1962 present with the comment, “Whatever the causes, there has been a lack of food; there has not been famine, as in the old days when millions of people died in one province while there was plenty of food in the others. This time the whole country has hungered, so we hear.”
This is a reference to the Great Leap Forward, which, as people in the west would later hear, caused one of the biggest man-made famines in human history. That “so we hear” suggests an awareness that we are not, in fact, hearing all there is to hear; that history cannot be properly told “until time has done its work and the shape is firm and clear.” And yet where do you stop a comprehensive history if not the present, even if you don't know what present events mean - even if you're not yet sure what those present events are?
