Man or Myth?

You may have heard of John Henry or the song of this name, about a man "who was so strong he beat a steam drill in a contest, but then laid down his hammer and died” (p. 9). Prior to reading Ain’t Nothing But a Man My Quest to Find the Real John Henry by Scott Reynolds Nelson and Marc Aronson, I had heard of the song, but didn't know much else. And I have to admit that what little I did know wasn't enough to entice me to pick up this book, until it was suggested to me by two different people and came with the recommendation that "it's great nonfic mix of music and history and folklore, all wrapped up in a mystery.”

Nelson, a historian, spent years researching the many versions of the song, determined to discover whether John Henry could have actually lived or was simply a myth. Nelson needed a few serendipitous discoveries and a lot of persistence, but he ultimately puts together the clues that point him toward the man he argues is the John Henry of the song. Recounting the discoveries that led him to conclude John Henry actually existed, Nelson's narrative touches on music, railroads, Reconstruction, and more.

Written in a conversational but authoritative style, this book is a pleasure to read. Even if you’re ultimately not convinced by every argument Nelson makes (I do think Nelson makes a convincing case that the John Henry he found is the John Henry of the song, but I’m not quite as convinced, as a non-musicologist, about all of the arguments concerning the evolution of music), the story of how he followed disparate leads is fascinating. Nelson demonstrates how he searched for primary source evidence to find John Henry, immersing the reader in the hunt for clues along with Nelson.

If you're at all interested in history and/or music, give this book a try.

When the Whistle Blows

Fran Cannon Slayton's debut, When the Whistle Blows, has garnered a lot of critical attention, earning praise all over the book world including starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. It's one of those books that you read and can't quite believe is the author's first novel. It's a beauty. You need to read it not just because everyone else loves it. Read it because this is a story that will sneak up on you and leave you with the feeling that you've just read something that has all the makings of a classic.

When the Whistle Blows is the story of Jimmy Cannon, who lives in Rowlesburg, West Virginia. It's the 1940s and the railroad is the lifeblood of the town, and it is also Jimmy's passion. He is crazy about steam trains, and he dreams of working on the railroad just like his dad, who is the Baltimore and Ohio foreman. Jimmy's dad doesn't want his son to choose this life, because he predicts that the new diesel technology will cut railroad jobs dramatically. Yet Jimmy doesn't want to walk away from the future he has always imagined. The railroad is a part of his family and his identity. Each chapter in the novel is set on All Hallows' Eve (Jimmy's father's birthday), between the years 1943-1949, so we watch Jimmy grow up from age 12 to 18. We follow Jimmy as he orchestrates pranks with his buddies, when he sneaks a look inside his father's secret society, on the day of his high school football Championship game, and one fateful night when he has a dangerous encounter with a train.


This novel is a marvelous snapshot of small town boyhood in the 1940s. Fran Cannon Slayton really makes you understand the railroad and its huge significance to the people of Rowlesburg. Even though this novel is set long ago, it has real resonance in the current economic climate since now, as then, lots of people are struggling with letting go of livelihoods that they've known for decades. Really, just as much as this is a tremendously believable and rich coming of age story, it's about change in a larger sense too, the change of a community and an entire society. Jimmy's dad tells him, "Change comes Jimmy. It'll thunder down the tracks towards you like an engine with the brakes gone out. And sometimes, there ain't a dagburn thing you can do to stop it." Jimmy learns what it means to face change and to make choices about whether to stand up against it, or to adapt and keep on moving.

Woven into all of this is Jimmy's complex relationship his father. Jimmy desperately wants to figure his dad out, but it takes him a long time to even begin to get to the bottom of his father's mysterious past. I enjoyed the structure of Slayton's book a great deal. Each chapter felt a bit like a self-contained short story, but they built upon each other and the overall effect was a richer appreciation of the characters and the family relationships. You really do get to watch Jimmy grow up, from an adventurous prankster / dreamer, into a young man who confronts loss and uncertainty for the first time. There's romance, but it's not of the lovey-dovey variety. It's the romance of the railroad. You'll feel it.

In When the Whistle Blows, there's rule-breaking and humor, loss and family secrets, all explored and mingled together with such deftness and clean writing that readers will certainly recognize Fran Cannon Slayton as a new writer to watch.

When the Whistle Blows is published by Philomel, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Summertime and I loves me some comics!

(By the way: 1--I'm sorry this is so late today, and 2--looks like I'm not the only one who thinks of comics when I think of summer. This looks like graphic novels week!)

Summer means lots of things to different folks, but for me it’s all about a fat stack of books and comics with all the time in the world to read them. Especially comics. Summertime made my father anxious, something about idle hands do the devil’s handiwork, so I always had to get a job. But no job, no camp, nothing eats up the kind of time school and school work do. So it just mean I had disposable income and time to hunt for comics.

Yeah, nowadays, American comics are kind of byzantine and dumb, and yeah, Manga provides more bang for the buck. Oh, and you don’t have to search to find an entire storyline because they have the collections readily available, both in comics shops and in bookstores. But let me give you a taste of some comics new, cool, and fresh enough you might have to do some hoofing (or at least burn a little time on your search engine) to find all the issues.


Hang on—you might say when you hear me call American comics “Byzantine and dumb” or “Manga has more bang for the buck”—What’s your beef with the good ol’ red white and blue superhero? Nothing, I say, except that today’s writers aren’t writing good stories. They’re writing fan fiction for thirty year olds. Really. I mean, I read most every Avenger story for the last twenty-five years, kept up with Green Lantern, Flash, X-Men—but I lost track of things for a year or two recently, and suddenly I have no idea what’s going on. Not just because they require arcane knowledge of story points from thirty year old comics, but also because my eyes glaze over trying to read them. They’re boring!

I remember reading comics, not knowing who the hell anybody was, and yet I was electrified by how exciting, fun, and engrossing they were. I not only couldn’t wait for the next issue, I wanted to know what had happened in the past as well. And that’s when the hunt was on.

Recently, I’ve come across several comics that are fun, though. Comics that capture the gonzo, go for broke, sheer awesomeness of simply being what they are—stories about superheroes out to save the world, two fists at a time (or whatever their superpower may be). They don’t have to solve world problems, they don’t attempt to be “serious” or “mature,” and they sure as hell avoid nostalgia. What are these titles?

Well, last month I was giving the heads up on some Greek classics, and I tossed in the Incredible Hercules as a comic worth reading. This is what I said:

“Marvel Comics’ The Incredible Hercules is awesome. It’s awesome in the way that every comic I loved as a teenager was awesome, and it’s awesome in the way I now get geeky over references to Greek mythology. Just a pure pleasure of a superhero comic, something I’m finding harder and harder to find nowadays-but that’s a topic for another post.

Suffice it to say, if you like good-old four-color two-fisted comics, this one is hard to beat. Hercules punches his way through any problem, and there’s lots of rollicking good fun in there, as he faces off against his half-brother Ares, his stepmother Hera, still holding a grudge 3000 years later, Amazons, alien pantheons of gods… Just great, great stuff.”

There’s this moment in an early issue of Incredible Hercules when Herc turns to someone quibbling with him over some story he’s telling them about his past. I’m paraphrasing, but he essentially says “Ignore continuity—this is myth, and these stories are too big to fit together nicely.” I wish every comic had that as its mantra.


Another great comic is the current run on Ghost Rider. Now, here’s a character I never cared for, but I’d heard so many good things about the current run I had to go out and see it for myself. It’s like coming home—like somebody who spent lots of time getting a fancy college degree did the whole thing so they could return home to Alabama, or Georgia, or Kentucky, or wherever their Southern roots raised them, just to shake their fists at grits and James Joyce both. It’s as if they’re writing the apocalypse while listening to Robert Earl Keene (don’t know the name? Watch the video for his "Merry Christmas from the Family" on YouTube) or Alan Moore was raised in Clinton, Mississippi.

Okay, you get the idea. But here’s the thing: Ghost Rider is fun and interesting because it’s awesomely exactly what you’d think it’d be—a dude kicking ass with a burning skull and an enormous motorcycle. Sure, there’s the occasional invocation of worldly things like a Brahmin Spirit of Vengeance atop a flaming skulled Ganesh-evoking sacred elephant, but for the most part he fights demonic truck drivers and sweaty, corrupt evil—real devil-went-down-Georgia kind of stuff. Again, awesome.

Okay, if neither over-the-top ancient mythology meets modern superheroes nor southern gothic supernatural hero horror grabs you, imagine Dracula not as the creature of the night loner cartoon he’s been made out to be, but a beguiling, uncanny, devious dictator of his own vampire army—his own vampire nation, even. Now they’re looking for a home, and have set their sights on the British Isles. Captain Britain and MI 13 (that's the pic at the top of the post) is fascinating because it does some of the exact things I complained about above—reach back into the way past for story ideas, depend on continuity for semi and even totally obscure characters—only it does them effortlessly, in ways that are captivating, mesmerizing even, and never gets bogged down in “what you need to know.”

So there you have it, three ongoing comics* that are worth buying before they are collected in books (although I think they’ve already done that with the Herc material). They’re even worth hunting down recent back-issues for. There’s some other comics that are similarly fun—the first 15-20 issues of Iron Fist, for example. I hear Agents of Atlas and Thor are also great fun. But why these and not the main titles from the big two American Comics publishers? My theory is that these comics are kind of obscure, they’re a bit of a throwaway, below-the-radar thing for the big-time editors. So the creators involved, from the writers and artists to the editors, are more free to do what they will, and they care more about telling engaging, fun stories than stories that depend on lots of “big/important” moving parts.

Anyways, take one of my suggestions, plop down with an issue or two, and take a few moments, not an hour—this isn’t rocket science and it’s no fun if you treat it as such—take a few moments to delve into some all-out fun reads.


*Here's a weird thing: I noticed that all my suggestions are Marvel Comics. I don't know why. For years I thought Marvel was doing everything stupid and DC comics were the best. Now, it's pretty much the opposite. Hopefully it'll turn around soon.

Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

Supposedly nobody outside the therapy group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn’t true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul’s hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.

Tales of the Madman Underground opens on the first day of senior year, and Karl Shoemaker has one goal: be normal.

Since eighth grade, he’s been in the school’s therapy group, the self-appointed Madman Underground. Karl is tired of being called a “psycho,” though. He hopes if he can act like an ordinary kid until Halloween, he’ll avoid getting put in therapy altogether.

But acting ordinary is hard when your life is so chaotic.

At seventeen, Karl is already a regular at AA meetings. His dad died several years ago, and his mom has become a hippie burn-out who brings home loser guys and steals Karl’s money to buy pot and party.

Besides Karl, the rest of the Madmen (and Madwomen) have parents who are abusive, crazy themselves, or just have more exciting things to do than raise kids. Tales of the Madman Underground is about kids who have to grow up fast. Their underground stretches beyond the therapy sessions; it’s the support network they’ve stitched together to look after one another: places to crash when they get locked out of their houses, the search party that forms when one of their number runs away.

With all the craziness in his life, Karl’s plan to be normal is pretty much doomed from the start, but really the plot hardly matters in a book like this. Tales of the Madman Underground takes 500-plus pages to wander through six days. It’s stuffed with flashbacks of the Madmen’s past misadventures and Karl’s half-philosophical/ half-obscene observations about everything and everybody in his little Ohio town.

Sometimes wandering seems like lost, though, and stuffed just feels bloated. Told from Karl’s first-person POV, the book includes everything he does and every conversation he has through those six days, no matter how mundane. I’m not sure what I learned from the complete rundown of his morning routine--timed to the minute--or the two pages describing him replacing an old toilet. After awhile, I started wondering if Karl--or maybe John Barnes--has undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder.

But even if the book swells with too many details, a lot of the details are sharp and well-observed. Karl’s addict mom bounces between childish manipulation, whining self-pity, and half-hearted stabs at being a real parent. When Karl deals with her, it’s with a mix of anger at how she acts and a son’s eternal affection. His teachers and the parade of fresh-from-college therapists are generally well-meaning but mostly useless.

The Madmen themselves are the best-drawn characters. As his plan to be normal falls apart, Karl begins to see what they really are: friends-by-necessity who’ve learned to trust one another, to comfort one another, and who always have time for one more wild tale.

(Cross-posted on my blog.)

Batman Variety Pack

At my library I get to look at the new teen books before they end up on the shelves. Lately, it seems as if every other book is a new graphic novel featuring Batman (or Catwoman). I have enjoyed all of them, so here is the rundown.

Batman and the Outsiders: The Snare was my first exposure to this series and it was interesting to see Batman lead a group of heroes. Chuck Dixon writes a story arc that takes place all over the globe and into space. Dixon weaves political intrigue around The Outsiders, who include the Green Arrow, Metamorpho, Batgirl and others. Part of the team is dealing with a suspicious space station, while the others are captured at a military installation in China. When they start to figure out the connection, Batman's life is endangered. This is a rollicking superhero adventure, though Batman himself does not play a huge role in it.

Batman Black and White is an anthology series originally published in 1996 (then published again in '07) with a great lineup of writers and artists. These stories are mostly dark and insular which matches the art which is exclusively in black and white. Different writers tackle various parts of the Batman legend. Most of the stories have held up over time, though a couple seem quite dated. In Volume 1, Good Evening, Midnight and Heist are two of my favorites and Archie Goodwin's Heroes won an Eisner for Best Short Story. If you haven’t seen these stories before they offer a lot of depth for Batman fans to dig through.

Batman: The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul by Grant Morrison and Paul Dini follows the rearing of Ra's grandson, Damian. His mother, Talia, is teaching Damian about the rise and near immortality of Ra's. Batman is lead into the story while investigating the death of two archeologists in Australia who were working for the Wayne Ecological Foundation. Batman doubts that his foe is dead and needs to track down the whole family. The story takes some weird side trips, but there was enough ninja fighting to keep me interested and Ra's al Ghul remains one of the most intriguing figures in Batman's history.

Catwoman: The Long Road Home by Will Pfeifer (don't worry Batman shows up) begins with the title character caught in an alternate world which she is trying to escape. In this world, Catwoman is in the middle of chaos along with other known criminals like Lex Luthor. Meanwhile, her disappearance becomes noticed and Slam Bradley is working to get her back. Batman also makes an appearance (see, I told you so) as he confronts Selina and tries to convince her she needs to change her lawbreaking ways, which does not go over so great.

Ode to a Robot

Never really invested myself in manga as much as I did in their American cousins, the comic and graphic novel, but when something special comes along, it doesn't really matter what format (or visual language) it's in. Case in point: Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka (by Urasawa). Ostensibly based on the prototypical manga and anime character Astro Boy (star of an imminent movie blockbuster, as it happens), this trades in the fun, high-energy kid-oriented adventure for a considerably more thoughtful, suspenseful and sophisticated story. Using the Astro Boy arc "the Greatest Robot on Earth" as a jumping off point, Urusawa turns this into a tense mystery and philosophical rumination on identity that is equal parts Silence of the Lambs and I, Robot.



Though only Volumes One, Two and Three of the seven volume series are available so far, we have already been injected into a near future world where robots have been assimilated into jobs as integral to everyday life as sanitation worker and policeman. Among these class of mechanical citizens are a rare breed of super-robots who have transcended their programming and have attained extraordinary levels of humanity and philosophical depth. And now, this elite breed is being hunted by something terrible and unknown, a serial killer of robots who itself appears to be robot, too. Europol Agent Gesicht, a robot detective, has been assigned to the case and in his investigation, we meet a young robot of uniquely human character, a warrior robot who yearns to break his mechanical bonds and create art, and a terrifying, broken, robot murderer who, like Hannibal Lecter, may hold the key to this new series of robot murders. At the same time, Gesicht comes up against the limits of his own robotic existence and identity and begins to uncover a solution with vast and insidious implications.

This is not a fast-moving, action-packed blow-out. But you may want to pick it up when you've had as much slam-bang Transformers actions as you can take and are looking for something with an unusual depth and power (and clean, evocative and subtle art).

If you can never get enough slam-bang action, however, there's always Green Lantern: Secret Origin (by Johns and Reis), which puts a modern spin on the classic character's history. Re-framing the tale of the fearless test pilot recruited into a galactic peace-keeping force as the story of a young hotshot's coming of age, Johns cleverly plunges the authority-averse Hal Jordan into boot camp, sticks him with a partner destined to become his greatest enemy, and throws him up against a truly ghastly enemy. The art is slick, the action is exciting and (almost) non-stop, and you even get some thoughtful characterization in the bargain. And within the story, Johns has laid the foundation for DC's huge upcoming crossover event Blackest Night. Get it while it's hot.

Motorcycle Song

What is it about Harley Davidson motorcycles? When I was at Myrtle Beach last month, Harley riders were having a spring rally. Thousands of people riding up and down the road with no mufflers or lousy mufflers. They do this every year. I'm not sure why.

I was an apprentice mechanic at a Harley shop for about six weeks when I was a teen. I saw too many wrecked bikes and people in casts. Plus, I'm a crummy mechanic. So I decided I didn't need a motorcycle.

Gary Paulsen bought a Harley when he was 56 years old. He had heart disease, and thought it was time for The Bike. He and a buddy rode from Alamagordo, New Mexico to Fairbanks, Alaska, by way of St. Paul, Minnesota. He wrote about his experience in Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir About Men and Motorcycles. He told some other stories, too. Guy stories, I'd say, for the most part.


If you've read Paulsen's Hatchet, you know he is a good writer. But in Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride, he tells of an incident in his life that certainly inspired part of Hatchet: "I was ... hitchhiking... I rode with a Hungarian refugee who had escaped the Russian brutality when they brought tanks and took Hungary. He was a short man with dark hair and dark glasses and was driving an old DeSoto at great speed, smiling and telling me of the wonders of living in America when a pheasant tried to clear the road, came through the windshield, hit his face and broke his neck and killed him. The car went off the road, but the shoulder was flat, as North Dakota road shoulders tend to be, and the car simply bounced and came to rest in a plowed field. He was not breathing nor could I feel his heart, and in fear I ran from there, covered with pheasant blood and guts, and an old lady picked me up and I worked for her until I took off with the carnival."

That's just one of Paulsen's stories. What a life and what a great storyteller. He raced the Iditarod twice! I have enjoyed a few of his novels, but his nonfiction keeps me coming back for more. I cannot get enough of it. This one is for more mature readers, in my opinion.

The Best American Comics

I have this problem with Summer Reading lists that are doled out by schools. Basically, they suck. They suck the joy of reading right down to the marrow and attempt to equate vacation time with extended education. Either schools should go year-round and quit the pretense or Summer Reading lists need to lighten up. Spend the Summer returning fun the the reading quotient, there'll be plenty of time starting in September for reading the Serious, the Dry, the Meaningful to be analyzed within inches of their pulpy lives.

I've got plenty of suggestions for alternate Summer Reading but today I want to talk about comics, and specifically The Best American Comics of 2008. I've actually wanted to talk about this for months but teetered on the edge of deciding whether or not the collection is appropriate. It's that whole chicken v. egg thing of whether or not some graphic imagery and story elements are appropriate for teens or if they're already seeing them in other places (like movies and TV) and there's little harm involved in comics that do the same thing.

Murder, sex, and drugs are involved, but these are topics often touched on in Young Adult literature. The difference is that when they appear in comics there's this feeling that somehow minors are being corrupted, that "comics" equals "funny" or "humorous" and that anything more is some grand betrayal of morals.

Editor Lynda Berry mentions in her introduction that "If this book had been in my house when I was a kid, I would have found a way to read it in secret." This is exactly what I would have done as a kid, and it got me wondering if that still isn't the best way to discover a world of comics beyond superheroes and other ridiculous over-muscled, tights-wearing vigilantes. On the other hand, shouldn't we have evolved in our thinking that kids shouldn't have to discover these things in secret? Sure, the thrill of doing something forbidden is lost, as is the wonderment that comes with discovery, but comics already have a hard enough time (though it's getting better) with acceptance that maybe that secret reading should be secret no longer.

For anyone who grew up, as I did, looking forward to the comics in the alternative weekly papers, and those who have kept tabs with small press and alternative comics, there are few surprises here. Matt Groening, Nick Bertozzi, Kaz, Jaime Hernandez, Seth, Alison Bechdel, Rick Geary, Chris Ware, Derf... the line-up reads like a brief history of 80s and 90s comics history, and the fact that these folks are still around (and perhaps to some extent largely unknown) may make a larger point about comics history in America. The fact that one "mainstream" comic was chosen - a Batman: Year 100 excerpt was chosen and pulled at the last minute by its publisher makes another point about this collection: there's still a Wild West frontier in comics.

With a wide range of styles and subject matter, the comics Barry has chosen are incredibly strong. Usually with collections like this the pieces I like are outweighed by the number I don't, but here I found only two duds and a couple of marginal pieces and the rest were solid. Subjects cover everything from the opening comic where fratricide is played as a casual punchline to the horrors of the war in Iraq from a journalist to kids playing war and discovering girlie magazines while "invading" a homeless encampment. The four panel strip format flips it's wig with surreality, the Tortoise and the Hare becomes a battle between a rock-steady drummer on the one hand and a party-hearty type on the other, a pair of nocturnal ragamuffins spending the night building a tower of boxes to play hopscotch on, young woman tries to help a drug addict, a man is sanguine about losing his love to a suicidal cult, Cupid's assistant takes over for a day and has cats mating with dogs (literally) in no time... there's something for (and possibly to offend) every sensibility, though that isn't it's purpose.

To those who have felt the short story is dead, I propose that the short story is alive and well in the form of comics. Even as stand-alone excepts from larger works, these stories deliver – not so much a punchline but a promise of a satisfying resolution.

There is always that danger that one person's "best" is another person's worst, but omnibus collections like The Best American Comics series (previous editions edited by Harvey Pekar and Chris Ware) and Flight (now in it's fifth volume, edited by Kazu Kibuishi) are a great ways to sample what's out there and explore the possibilities of storytelling that don't involve nefarious villains plotting to take over the world.

Lynda Barry's advice for how to approach the book is one I wish more adults would encourage in collections. She suggests opening the book to find something of interest – as a kid she would have tried to zoom in on swear words or crazy pictures – and start reading from there. Jump around, find what interests, read in pieces, not all at once. Linear is highly overrated and constricting, not unlike a lot of educational thinking about Summer Reading.

Lighten up and enjoy the experience.


Books mentioned:

The Best American Comics 2008
edited by Lynda Barry
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2007
edited by Chris Ware
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2006
edited by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore
Houghton Mifflin

Flight, volumes 1 through 5
edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard Books

Batman: Year 100
Paul Pope
DC Comics

No Fear Shakespeare SONNETS

I have a confession to make: I have gone batty for the Bard this month. Over at my blog, I've dedicated the entire month of June to posts for what I've dubbed "Brush Up Your Shakespeare Month." It should therefore come as no surprise to you that I'm talking about Shakespeare here as well. Specifically, I'm talking about Shakespeare's sonnets.

If you head to Barnes & Noble or to any number of online book sources, you can purchase your own copy of the No Fear Shakespeare SONNETS: The Poems Plus a Translation Anyone Can Understand. The book contains all 154 of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In each case, the actual text as written by Shakespeare is located on the left-hand page of the book, and the updated translation is on the right-hand side of the page.

Here's an example, using one of the most-recognized sonnets in the collection, Sonnet #18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")

First, the original:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The No Fear version:

Shall I compare you to a summer day? You're lovelier and milder. Rough winds shake the pretty buds of May, and summer doesn't last nearly long enough. Sometimes the sun shines too hot, and often its golden face is darkened by clouds. And everything beautiful stops being beautiful, either by accident or simply in the course of nature. But your eternal summer will never fade, nor will you lose possession of your beauty, nor shall death brag that you are wandering in the underworld, once you're captured in my eternal verses. As long as men are alive and have eyes with which to see, this poem will live and keep you alive.

As you can see, the No Fear version is not kept in verse; it does, however, render Shakespeare's poem in terms that are simpler to understand than some of Shakespeare's words. Highly recommended for anyone studying the sonnets who isn't comfortable with Elizabethan English.

Alone Across the Atlantic

Have you ever wanted to challenge yourself, to do something to see if you could do it, see if you were capable? Ever just wanted to get away from everything—REALLY get away? These questions lie at the heart of A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. Tori McClure was the first woman to row alone across the Atlantic Ocean, and this is her story.

McClure started rowing at Smith College, and had rowing mentors who had made the journey across the Atlantic. She decided to try it herself, in a 23-foot plywood rowboat she christened The American Pearl. The picture on the cover of the book, a very small boat in the middle of a vast ocean, gives you an idea of what kind of “living space” she had to work with on what was expected to be a 3-month long journey of thousands of miles. While many friends and sponsors assisted her with the building of the boat and financing for equipment, food, and other necessities, this was McClure’s journey to make alone.

McClure’s writing vividly brings forth both the day-to-day drudgery of her rowing routine, and the wonders that can be found when you find yourself alone in the middle of the ocean: being surrounded by dolphins, gazing at the night sky with no chance of light pollution to obscure the stars, coming upon a pod of whales. In describing the dangers she encountered, including a battering storm that she later found out was actually a hurricane, McClure brings to life the violence that can happen to small craft on the ocean. After reading descriptive passages about storms and what they did to her boat and her body, I was almost checking myself for bruises!


Just days after she set out, McClure lost all long-range communications, and was on her own but for a few radio transmissions with nearby boats. After her boat and her body took beatings during hurricane Danielle, she made the hard decision to set off her rescue beacon and be picked up by another boat. While she felt like a failure doing this, the months following her return to land gave her time to reflect on inner strength and what it means to face obstacles. After working for Muhammed Ali, and receiving encouragement from him, McClure made another, ultimately successful, attempt to cross the Atlantic in her rebuilt rowboat. She used what she learned from her first journey to be more prepared for her second—redundant communications systems, a lighter boat, and a padded ceiling were some of the enhancements for her second crossing.

This true story is inspirational not because it is the story of a superhuman feat, but the story of a very human one—having a goal, experiencing setbacks, and getting back on your feet and trying again. Part of being human is accepting the fact of your humanity, and defining what that means for yourself. McClure wraps the story of her finding herself into a great adventure tale. See the book’s official web site for some Q & A with McClure, videos, pictures, boat specs, and the list of books she brought along to read and listen to on her journey.