osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: genevieve foster

In under the wire, I have completed the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s! *spikes football*

Genevieve Foster’s Abraham Lincoln’s World, like her earlier book George Washington’s World, is not, as you might imagine from the title, about daily life in the immediate environs of the future president in question, but about what was happening all around the world during his lifetime. In Lincoln’s case: Steamships were being invented! Italy was being united! Canada was fretting over whether the United States was maybe going to invade, since it had this whole standing army left over from the Civil War and everything, and after all it wasn’t that long ago that the US conquered half of Mexico…

A very lively read. Foster can’t resist going a bit beyond Lincoln’s death to touch on the endings of the various ongoing sagas: the unification of Italy, the rise and fall of Napoleon III, the execution of emperor Maximilian I of Mexico by firing squad. Then she circles back to Lincoln’s own death, ending with the observation, “only then could the people of Abraham Lincoln’s world realize how great he was. He was too tall when he walked beside them.”

Stephen W. Meader’s Boy with a Pack is a lively historical novel, studded with adventures as a fruitcake is studded with plums. Our hero, seventeen-year-old Bill, has just set out from his Connecticut home with a pack of notions on his back. He aims to walk out west, peddling to support himself as he sees the world.

He sees a bit of life indeed! This book starts out Boy Meets Dog, continues to Boy Meets Girl, saunters over to Boy Meets Horse, and then the Horse has a delightful high-stepping foal, the son of a horse who won an exciting race earlier in the book! In between assembling this ragtag band, Bill narrowly escapes robbery (twice), nearly gets mauled by a bear before a convenient trapper saves him, and helps an escaped slave along the Underground Railroad. Not bad for a summer’s work!

And finally, Eleanore M. Jewett’s The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, which is a stealth Arthurian riff! (Okay, maybe not so stealth given the Arthurian connections of Glastonbury, but it surprised me.) In the twelfth century, young Hugh and his best friend Dickon discover a secret treasure chamber in a cave under the abbey, and set out on a hunt for the Holy Grail that hasn’t been seen since the mythical days of Camelot.

These two novels are both fine, but I didn’t find either of them very memorable; the details are already slipping out of my mind.

And that’s all the Newbery books of the 1940s! Although I’d like to read the 2023 winners before 2024 dawns, I may wait on diving into the 1930s books until 2024? Or at least until after my road trip. Which begins tomorrow!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

W. E. Johns’ Biggles Makes Ends Meet, in which Bertie lands on the bad guys’ island and manages to get back off again by pretending that he is merely a daffy collector of shark’s teeth. AMAZING. A strong adventure story, tightly plotted.

Also a couple of Newbery books. Carolyn Treffinger’s Li Lun, Lad of Courage is about a boy from a fishing village who fears the ocean and thus refuses to become a fisherman. His father, angry and ashamed, sends him to cultivate rice on a mountain top, which Li Lun manages with great travail. (Hard to carry enough water to grow rice on a mountain top!) A very Newbery tale about how courage comes in many forms.

I expected Genevieve Foster’s George Washington’s World to be about daily life in colonial Virginia, but in fact it’s about world history (mostly European history, although China gets a look-in) during his lifetime, including this amazing anecdote about the Russian admiral Alexei Orlov, who defeated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Chesma. He was so thrilled by his success that he hired an Italian painter to paint a commemorative painting of the battle.

“But I’ve never seen a ship blow up,” objected the Italian painter.

“Is that all?” said Orlov. “I’ll have one blown up for you!”

And I wrapped up James Herriot’s Every Living Thing, the last of his memoirs about being a vet in Yorkshire. The end of an era… But not really the end; these are books that one could revisit again and again, and enjoy just as much each time.

What I’m Reading Now

Hana Videen’s The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, a delicious geeky collection of Old English words, discussed in chapters according to theme: food and drink, time, animals, etc, with special discussion of words whose meanings are uncertain, often because they appear only once in the existing sources. A fascinating glimpse of a lost world!

What I Plan to Read Next

All the Worrals books are now available on fadedpage.com! So of course I downloaded the last one that I haven’t read yet, Worrals Goes Afoot, although I’m torn whether to read it now or save it for my road trip… Well, I have it for when I want it!

Slowly but surely progressing through the Newbery books of the 1950s. Different Newbery decades often have different themes: the 1920s go in for surrealism, the 2010s for racial diversity - while the 1950s, you’ll be not at all surprised to hear, are big on freedom and America.

Genevieve Foster’s Birthdays of Freedom is a two-volume set, and I ended up reading both volumes even though only From Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome got a Newbery Honor. (The second book stretches From the Fall of Rome to July 4, 1776, and in case any reader is slow to understand the teleological significance of this endpoint, the title page adds, “America’s Heritage from the Ancient World.”) Lavishly illustrated. I wish I had taken the trouble to get a paper copy, as the books take a lot of trouble with the formatting, including a fascinating timeline that wraps around the sides of the page which is difficult to read in ebook format.

The subtitle of the first book is clearly misleading, as the first Birthday of Freedom is the day that “early man somehow learned to make and use Fire,” and the book includes a number of other prehistoric events, like the invention of agriculture. One presumes the marketing department though Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome sounded more marketable.

Mary & Conrad Buff’s The Apple and the Arrow is a retelling of the story of William Tell, the thrilling tale of a man who is forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head in punishment for defying a tyrant. (Important How to Be a Better Dictator lesson: don’t punish your opponents in ways that highlight their badass archery skills in front of the entire populace.)

Elizabeth Baity’s Americans Before Columbus is what it says on the tin: a history of the peoples of the American continents pre-Columbus, a companion piece if you will to Hendrik van Loon’s History of Mankind and Elizabeth Seeger’s Pageant of Chinese History.

In the last chapter, however, Baity attempts an intervention in the triumphalist 1776-as-the-pinnacle-of-history interpretation of Birthdays of Freedom and 1950s Newbery books more generally: “Tribes were driven on death marches from their lands to distant areas that were little better than concentration camps. Every effort was made to destroy the Indians’ social and religious patterns. This is a story every American should know, for the sake of our national conscience, and it is a story that few of our history books tell.”

A lot of the 1950s Newbery books are concerned with American identity. (Actually, one could argue more broadly that the Newbery Award, across time, is concerned with American identity, and that’s one reason why the award has remained so true to histories and historical fiction for so many decades. Will have to consider this at greater length.)

Many of the 1950s books fit into the general image of the 1950s as a rah-rah-AMERICA decade, so it’s interesting to find this one voice insisting that American Indians are an integral part of that story, no matter how many books ignore or belittle them. “These truly American people who were the real discoverers of America are not only a part of our country’s past but will also play a significant role in the drama of its future.”

My dad retains his borrowing privileges at the Purdue Library, so naturally that was my next stop in my quest for obscure Newbery Honor books. Upon arrival, I discovered that they have moved their children’s section, and it now resides in a dimly lit second-floor annex tucked behind the bound periodical stacks. It would be a tremendously atmospheric setting for a Possession-style movie about literary detective work…

Anyway: the fruits of my plunder!

Mary & Conrad Buff’s Big Tree, a short book about the long, long life of a redwood tree. I loved the conceit of this book, the point of view of the tree standing sentinel over the centuries, but for obvious reasons (the book is from the 1940s) the natural history is out of date - very much of the “predators are BAD” mindset. To be honest I think the Newbery committee should eschew giving awards to science books: their information will inevitably become outdated like this.

Genevieve Foster’s George Washington, one of THREE (!) George Washington books to win the Newbery Honor. (One of the others, George Washington’s World, was also written by Genevieve Foster.) A short and snappy biography with rather lovely illustrations in a style reminiscent of Katherine Milhous’s The Egg Tree.

Anna Gertrude Hall’s Nansen. Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea that Nansen was an arctic explorer, but it turns out that he was so much more than that! One of those nineteenth century dynamos who apparently doesn’t need to sleep, Nansen led an expedition across Greenland, revolutionized oceanography with his groundbreaking theories about polar currents, designed a ship to withstand polar pack ice to follow those currents and prove those theories, attempted to reach the North Pole only to be defeated by the terrain and spend nine months basically hibernating in a tiny hut lit only by seal blubber, with nothing to eat but bear stew and bear steaks…

(Unsurprisingly, he was quite depressed for a few years after this adventure, not that it slowed him down one jot.)

He also wrote a steady stream of books about his adventures and his scientific theories, became a leading voice in Norway’s separation from Sweden, and headed a diplomatic mission around Europe to ensure that this separation didn’t blossom into all-out war. During World War I he used his diplomatic experience to help maintain Norway’s neutral stance; after the war he headed a commission to resettle refugees and exhorted the League of Nations to send aid to starving peasants in Russia.

This time, his efforts failed: the League refused to send famine relief. Many of the member nations would have watched every peasant in Russia starve rather than aid the Bolsheviks in any way.

(This book was published in 1940 and there is something deeply poignant in the author’s wistfulness for the League project. It had definitively failed at that point, but you feel that she empathizes deeply with Nansen’s yearning that it could work, that we might stop war.)

Nansen worked with the American relief committee instead, only to be partially stymied by the catastrophic damage to Russia’s railroad system, which meant that the donated food often couldn’t make it to the starving people. But he never gave up, and basically worked himself to death at the age of 68.

An absolute powerhouse of a man. I probably never would have encountered him without the Newbery project as impetus, and I’m so glad to have made his acquaintance.