Another Budget of Newbery Honor Books
Aug. 18th, 2023 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerGalloping onward in the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s!
The official ALA list records Harold Courlander as sole author of The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories, although the cover of the book lists George Herzog as co-author. Judging by the notes in the back, Herzog collected many of the stories, but Courlander may have been the one to write them up for American children.
A charming collection. This includes a couple of Anansi stories, and I was delighted that in one of them, the person he’s trying to trick turns the tables on him! I always found trickster figures who always succeed in their tricks a bit tiresome.
I went into Mabel Louise Robinson’s Runner of the Mountain Tops: The Life of Louis Agassiz with the very vague idea that Louis Agassiz was “that racist Harvard guy?”, which is not inaccurate, but certainly incomplete. Louis Agassiz was a Swiss naturalist who revolutionized the study of fossil fish, popularized the idea of the Ice Age, and refused on the grounds of his deep religious belief in the special creation to believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In middle age, he became the professor of botany and zoology at Harvard, founded a museum that thrust Harvard to the forefront of natural history in the United States, and also promulgated racist theories, including the idea that the offspring of interracial couples were generally sterile.
Robinson devotes one page to this topic. The reason she’s concerned that her readers may not care for Agassiz is the whole evolution thing, and at least twice she suggests, wistfully, that if only Agassiz had gotten the chance to work with Darwin, then just possible he might have changed his mind… I mean, sure, maybe, I guess. It does not in all honesty strike me as particularly likely, but who doesn’t understand the impulse to want one’s fave to be on the right side of history?
Last but not least, Mabel Leigh Hunt’s ”Have You Seen Tom Thumb?”, quotation marks included in the title as this was THE question on everyone’s lips in 1843, when General Tom Thumb (ne Charley Stratton) made his debut at Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. He was not only an extremely tiny person, barely above two feet tall at this time, but an immensely talented performer, the Shirley Temple of his age: at five years old he danced, he sang, he performed comic repartee. And not only on stage: he bantered with the rich and famous, becoming a great favorite of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington, whom he first met while wearing his Napoleon costume. “I’m thinking about Waterloo,” Tom Thumb told the Duke, with a sigh, and at once they became fast friends.
Later in life, he married the equally tiny Lavinia Warren, and with Lavinia’s little sister and a little man called the Commodore, they went on an around-the-world tour. (Tom Thumb and Lavinia attempted avidly to matchmake the other pair, but to no success.) What an exciting life!
I have three 1940s Newbery Honors left, and one week to finish them! WILL I MAKE IT? Go go go!
The official ALA list records Harold Courlander as sole author of The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories, although the cover of the book lists George Herzog as co-author. Judging by the notes in the back, Herzog collected many of the stories, but Courlander may have been the one to write them up for American children.
A charming collection. This includes a couple of Anansi stories, and I was delighted that in one of them, the person he’s trying to trick turns the tables on him! I always found trickster figures who always succeed in their tricks a bit tiresome.
I went into Mabel Louise Robinson’s Runner of the Mountain Tops: The Life of Louis Agassiz with the very vague idea that Louis Agassiz was “that racist Harvard guy?”, which is not inaccurate, but certainly incomplete. Louis Agassiz was a Swiss naturalist who revolutionized the study of fossil fish, popularized the idea of the Ice Age, and refused on the grounds of his deep religious belief in the special creation to believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In middle age, he became the professor of botany and zoology at Harvard, founded a museum that thrust Harvard to the forefront of natural history in the United States, and also promulgated racist theories, including the idea that the offspring of interracial couples were generally sterile.
Robinson devotes one page to this topic. The reason she’s concerned that her readers may not care for Agassiz is the whole evolution thing, and at least twice she suggests, wistfully, that if only Agassiz had gotten the chance to work with Darwin, then just possible he might have changed his mind… I mean, sure, maybe, I guess. It does not in all honesty strike me as particularly likely, but who doesn’t understand the impulse to want one’s fave to be on the right side of history?
Last but not least, Mabel Leigh Hunt’s ”Have You Seen Tom Thumb?”, quotation marks included in the title as this was THE question on everyone’s lips in 1843, when General Tom Thumb (ne Charley Stratton) made his debut at Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. He was not only an extremely tiny person, barely above two feet tall at this time, but an immensely talented performer, the Shirley Temple of his age: at five years old he danced, he sang, he performed comic repartee. And not only on stage: he bantered with the rich and famous, becoming a great favorite of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington, whom he first met while wearing his Napoleon costume. “I’m thinking about Waterloo,” Tom Thumb told the Duke, with a sigh, and at once they became fast friends.
Later in life, he married the equally tiny Lavinia Warren, and with Lavinia’s little sister and a little man called the Commodore, they went on an around-the-world tour. (Tom Thumb and Lavinia attempted avidly to matchmake the other pair, but to no success.) What an exciting life!
I have three 1940s Newbery Honors left, and one week to finish them! WILL I MAKE IT? Go go go!
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Date: 2023-08-19 10:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-19 11:19 am (UTC)