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…

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.