A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As generally happens when I’ve got just a few books left before I finish a decade of the Newbery honor books, it’s all Newbery all the time up in here. This week I finished three, starting with a special trip to the Indiana State Library to read Katherine Shippen’s Men, Microscopes, and Living Things. (Sadly the book-reading part of the library is not in the beautiful old building with the dark wood panel walls and the murals and the stained glass, but after I finished reading I took a stroll through the library to admire.) The book is a history of the science of biology, starting with Aristotle and Pliny, with beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Anthony Ravielli.

I also read Clara Ingram Judson’s Abraham Lincoln: Friend of the People, a biography of Abraham Lincoln. (The early decades of the Newbery are heavy on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.) Very much struck by this letter, which Lincoln wrote in the 1830s or 40s announcing his bid for re-election to the state legislature: “I go for all sharing the privileges of government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).”

Just a little surprised to see the inclusion of women! (Albeit only tax-paying white women.)

And finally, Mary & Conrad Buff’s Magic Maize, which like Dorothy Rhoads’ The Corn Grows Ripe is about a modern-day Mayan boy who is planting corn with his family. Was there a big upsurge of interest in the Maya in 1950s America? Maybe some new archaeological discoveries? (One of the side characters in this book is an American archaeologist, who makes the happy ending possible when he pays big bucks for a jade earplug that our hero found while planting some experimental corn kernels.) I realize two books is not a trend, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.

Two 1950s Newbery Honors left to go!

What I’m Reading Now

Still trucking in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. We’ve reached the North now, and are discovering that while the North is better than the South, it still falls far short of a Promised Land.

What I Plan to Read Next

Letters from Watson has inspired Letters from Bunny, a readthrough of all the Raffles stories! It doesn’t start till March 2024, which is good because it won’t overlap with Letters from Watson, but also bad because it’s so long to wait…

I’m just ripping through the Newbery Honor resources of my hometown. For some reason, this consists mainly of biographies, and somewhat to my surprise, for I don’t usually seek out biographies, I’ve actually been quite enjoying them. These are all at least fifty years old, all intensely readable, almost like novels, without footnotes (I pine for footnotes; I’d like to know exactly which parts of the dialogue are made up) and without any interest in debunking their subjects. Except perhaps Jeanette Eaton’s Gandhi, Fighter Without a Sword, I wouldn’t call them hagiographic, but they’re definitely written in the older biographical tradition where their subject is an interesting person and a role model whose faults will be noted but not emphasized.

And Eaton has the excuse that her biography was published three years after Gandhi’s assassination. The man was freshly martyred! Of course her view was reverent. And Eaton does an excellent job balancing incidents from Gandhi’s personal life (he appears to have been one of those people who makes friends for life about three minutes after arriving anywhere) with the wider story of Gandhi’s part in the struggle for Indian independence.

(At some point I ought to read a biography of Jinnah, because so far everything I’ve read/watched about the Partition is from the Indian point of view and as such Jinnah is always the snake in the garden who destroys the dream of united India.)

Then there's Clara Ingram Judson’s Mr. Justice Holmes is a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, who appears to have been the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of his day, famous for writing dissents. Judson notes that he didn’t actually dissent that often, but apparently some of them were doozies. I say “apparently” because Judson talks very little about Holmes’s cases, and I realize that you don’t want to get into a bunch of dry legalese in a children’s book, but all the same I would have liked a little more detail about the work that made him worthy of a biography.

However, the book is more focused on Holmes’s personal life, in particular his strained relationship with his father (the Oliver Wendell Holmes famous for writing the poem that saved the USS Constitution: “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!”). I particularly enjoyed the detail about daily life in Boston in the nineteenth century.

Constance Rourke’s Audubon, on the other hand, is ALL about the birds. Simply wonderful descriptions of Audubon’s bird paintings (my kingdom for an illustrated edition of this book!) and his travels in the United States looking for new birds to paint. I was devastated when it turned out that he never fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting the Rockies to paint the birds there.

When Rourke wrote, Audubon’s early years were still shrouded in mystery. (In fact, I thought they were still shrouded in mystery today, but his Wikipedia article sounds pretty certain about his origins.) Rourke outlines the leading theories at the time, but her favorite, to which she returns at the end of the book and at length in her endnote, is that Audubon was the escaped dauphin of France, who had been spirited into the Vendee and adopted by Captain Audubon to protect him from the excesses of the Revolution!

Rourke is not quite enough of a crank to assert this as fact or even to wholly believe it. Sometimes she swings toward the idea that Audubon was not the dauphin but believed he was, and rather than wasting away his life in trying to assert this claim, channeled its sense that he was special into his ferocious confidence in his own self-imposed project to paint all the birds of America.

In any case, I found the appearance of this unlikely theory in an award-winning work of nonfiction weirdly delightful - like the time I read M. Scott Peck’s book about the psychology of evil People of the Lie and all of a sudden he was talking about demonic possession. Why not, I guess! There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio!

Finally, a non-biography. Sorche Nic Leodhas’s wonderful Thistle and Thyme: Tales and Legends from Scotland is a collection of folk tales. (The copy I read is evidently a compilation of the original Thistle and Thyme with Leodhas’s earlier book of folktales, Heather and Broom. This edition was published only in England. How did it end up in a library in Indiana?)

This book has maybe the most delightful table of contents I’ve ever seen, because each entry is accompanied by a little note about what kind of story it is or at what sort of occasion it might have been told or how the author came across it: A wedding sgeulachdan from Ardfainaig in Perthshire. It was told at the wedding of a cousin of my grandfather, who told it to my father, who told it to me.

A lovely book if you’re interested in folktales or Scotland or just a good lively story, with plenty of brave clever girls and Fairy Folk. I’m planning to get my hands on more of Leodhas’s work.