How NOT to Learn to Sail

I've reviewed some nonfiction by Gary Paulsen here in the past, and thought I'd try one of his novels this month. But I ran out of time. I meant to read Harris and Me. It got wonderful reviews, and I know I'm going to like it when I do get to it. In the meantime I'll review his nonfiction, Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats.

It's a short book - 103 small pages, and the subtitle is somewhat misleading. Paulsen doesn't really give us the full story of his life on boats. He tells how he bought his first sailboat and taught himself to sail, and a little about other boats he's had, trips he's taken.

"...learn to sail.
No problem...
How hard could it be?...

... by the end of the first day I had still not left the harbor and was tied up to the courtesy dock... True, the trip had been a series of calamities punctuated by terror, and I had only come a total of about three hundred yards from my home dock.

But still, I had traveled, and I was in a different place and had gotten there by sailing..."

That's from the chapter, "First Boat." In "Lost at Sea" Paulsen writes, "But it was never really dangerous. I was never at risk except from my own idiocy. It's true you can drown in a cup of water, but you really have to work at it, and the same thing was true of my experience. Looking at it one way, I was working at destroying myself, and the boat worked equally hard at saving me. Had I done nothing but crawled down inside the boat and sucked my thumb -- which had occurred to me -- I would probably have survived just fine."

Actually it was dangerous sometimes: "The wind hit the boat with a demonic shriek, screaming, roaring, driving spray into my eyes and blinding me. I felt the boat go over on her beam and slide sideways. I was thrown off the boat, hanging in my lifeline and harness on the down side, dangling across the deck and in the water, disoriented, upside down, then right side up, the wind a wild howling filling my ears, my mind, my soul, and with the sudden onslaught of wind came the waves.

They were true monsters, steepsided, galloping, twenty, thirty feet high, almost vertical walls with breaking tops that caught the boat and held her down on her side with me in the water, clawing to get back on, ripping my nails, cutting my hands, now fighting to live, not obey the call of the sea, nothing noble or high-flown now but just to live, get on the boat and live. Even while I fought I remembered the tales of boats found sailing on their own with their owners...hanging off the stern dead in their harnesses because they couldn't get back on the boat before hyperthermia stopped their ability to function and they drowned."

The book is too short. I liked it, but I wanted more. Paulsen kind of leaves you hanging at the end - "That night I decided: Someday I would try the one great passage of the sailor's world. Someday I would try to sail around Cape Horn."

Fine. I'd read it that story too.

So, you've got a camera...

Perhaps you received a camera recently as a gift and its a fun toy but you're wondering what you can really do with it besides taking the obvious snapshots of friends, family, and your pets for posting online. Or maybe you've had your camera for a while and have sort of run out of ideas for what to do with those pictures. While there are plenty of books and websites that will tell you how to manipulate your digital photos with various software programs, or how to improve your picture taking with new angles and special gear, all you really need is a fresh, playful approach to rethinking what you can do with what you already have.

What you want is photojojo!: insanely great proto projects and DIY ideas by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen.

This is exactly the kind of book I wish I had back in the day, and one that should be considered as part of a package when giving a camera to a teen. The book has dozens of quick, cheap, and easy ideas for how to take unique pictures with any kind of camera, including film cameras, and unique ways to display them. Most of the craftier project require simple tools and materials – a cutting blade, tape, markers, paint, materials generally recycled – while a good deal of the tools and projects for taking pictures can be assembled on the fly or made with things lying around the house.

For less that a couple bucks worth of materials from a hardware store you can make a string monopod to help keep your camera steady and a portable tripod that screws onto the top of a soda or water bottle, both of which will fit in your pocket and easily replace a bag full of expensive equipment. And if you can gather a couple dozen clear empty CD cases you can make a photo mural display that actually makes for a pretty cool way to show off your photos.

There are some way-out-there projects as well that require additional skills and materials – like making a photo messenger bag with photo-printed cloth and a bit of sewing, or the photo lamp project that requires some simple wiring – but it's totally accessible and the final projects look awesome.

The book is divided in to two parts, the first half is projects for displaying photos and the second half focuses on taking pictures. One of my favorites is the idea of taking pictures of strangers in exchange for lollipops. The idea is to create a series of portraits (which you can later arrange in an awesome CD mosaic frame, of course) that forces the photographer to try and capture something more than a simple "say cheese" moment.

I think with teens a lot of time they would take more interesting pictures if they had some guidance, but most books on photography tend to either be dry and technical, or don't manage to convey the idea that photography can be fun. This isn't a technical manual, not by a long shot, but it does have enough to give a budding (or bored) photographer something to jump-start their creative juices.

If you know (or are) a teen with a camera who doesn't really know what to do with it, photojojo might just be the next book to read.

photojojo!: insanely great proto projects and DIY ideas
by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen
Potter Craft / Random House 2009

They also have a website with cool tips and idea and a store that sells nifty photo-related stuff as well (including the book):
http://photojojo.com/

The Young Inferno by John Agard

The Young Inferno by British poet John Agard, illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, is a modern retelling of the story written centuries ago by Dante Aligheri. This up-to-date retelling is written in rhyme and illustrated in graphic-novel-like style. While some of the details of the original Inferno have been altered, this version will give you a clear idea of what the story is actually about.

Rather than being escorted by Virgil, the main character – a teenage boy in a hoodie – is escorted through the various levels of hell by Aesop, author of fables. The rhyme is readily understandable, with an occasional Britishism (e.g., "trainers" instead of "sneakers") to make things interesting. Here's a sample from the start, so you can see if it might be your cup of tea brimstone:

In the middle of my childhood wonder
I woke to find myself in a forest
that was – how shall I put it – wild and sombre.

No sign of light. Not a star twinkling.
The whole thing was kind of creepy and crawly.
I still shudder in my trainers, just thinking

of those scary monsters lurking in the leaves,
and death itself putting on a grinning mask
and rehearsing its whispers for the breeze.

Full of humor and wit, this interpretation of Inferno may not stand in as a substitute for reading Dante's classic, but it will certainly convey the sense and feeling of the original classic in modern terms.

Amazon Adventure

As kids, many of us fantasized about exploration of undiscovered territories, whether that meant Antarctica or Mars, mountains or jungles. Many folks grow up to realize that there aren't that many untouched places left on planet Earth, and that the risks in getting to and exploring the ones that are still unexplored are great. One way to feed that need for exploration is to read about others who have set out to see what they could find. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann is one such story that will transport you to another time and place, one of countless dangers and endless possibilities.

Grann's book is mostly about Percy Fawcett, an explorer who favored small expeditions to unmapped territories. He made several expdetions into the Amazon before disappearing there, along with his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell, in 1925. The story also follow's Grann's own quest to follow in Fawcett's footsteps as much as possible and try to discover whether Fawcett's obsession and goal, a great civilization in the middle of the jungle that he called "Z" ever actually existed.

The Lost City of Z is full of adventure, from the rivalries that existed in the world of exploration in the early 1900s, the history of the Royal Geographical Society, to the dangers that explorers faced in the Amazon, everything from hostile tribes to deadly insects, fish, and snakes. We learn of Fawcett's history and eccentricism, how he was seemingly indestrictible, and how he inspired others to follow him into the unknown. Fawcett's life and story were the basis for quite a number of novels and movies, including a book where Indiana Jones comes across Fawcett on one of his quests. The difficulty of exploration in this time period, when modern conveniences such as GPS and lightweight equipment were not available, is truly felt in the descriptions of the daily drudgery that was endured by any member of a Fawcett expedtion.


When Fawcett and his party disappeared in 1925, it was big news. Many other explorers mounted their own expeditions to find him, or at least find out what happened to him (most theories had him being captured and killed by one of the area tribes). While there were clues and conflicting stories, no one was able to bring back definitive word of Fawcett's fate, and some of the parties didn't return at all.

In this book, Grann puts together Fawcett's story, the stories of explorers who tried to find him, and his own search for the truth about Fawcett, taking him from interviewing Fawcett's relatives and into the Amazon itself to look for clues. The Lost City of Z is as suspenseful as any fictional adventure story and really allows you to get a feel for what Amazonian exploration was like. It doesn't matter that Grann doesn't find out the truth about what happened to Fawcett, you don't really expect him to. This book is all about the journey, and what a journey to go along on.

Note: I listened to the audio version of this book, but also took the book out of the library so that I could check out the pictures. The audio was good, but a few of the Brazilian place names were mispronounced, which I only knew because my wife speaks Portuguese. The audio would be a great way to pass the time on a road trip, even one that's not quite as eventful as the journey described in this book.

Cross posted at Dwelling in Possibility.

The Future Is Now

So it's 2010. Now that we're all living in the future, we should probably do some brush up reading about it. Ender's Game: Battle School (by Yost and Ferry) is the adaptation of the first part of Orson Scott Card's neo-classic Ender's Game about young Ender Wiggin, who is drafted into the rigorous Battle School by somewhat insidious military masters in hopes that Ender is the prodigy who can save earth from an imminent invasion by a horde of incoming aliens. Focusing on the first part of the novel allows a deep exploration into Ender's battle not only with his peers in the school (in some particularly thrilling zero-gravity tactical exercises) but also his struggle to heal the scars of psychological torture left by his monstrous older brother.

The companion piece to that little beauty is Ender's Shadow: Battle School (by Carey and Fiumara), also based on the opening chapters of Card's original, which in this case follows Bean, a supporting character in the narrative of the main novel. Bean grows up on the hard streets, where he shows his innate intelligence by simply surviving, until he's noticed by those some military schemers and taken into battle school, where his destiny parallels Ender's own, in a slow build towards an inevitable meeting. Much of the suspense in Bean's story comes from the mystery of his origins and the realization on the military's part that Bean might be too smart for the battle school.

Each books tells a grand story on its own, but taken together, they reflect common themes more powerfully and create a sense of a huge universe and a sweeping adventure in the making. The art in each also works beautifully to counterpoint the differing tones. Ferry's art on Ender's Game is clean and slick, but with expressive faces and incredibly polished action. Fiumara gives Ender's Shadow a dirty grit that captures the sense and danger of the streets.

Welcome to the future and happy New Year.

If you live in the Tempe, AZ area then check this out

Changing Hands Bookstore and Hoodlums Music and Movies present YAllapalooza 2010, a literary musical extravaganza featuring live bands, pizza, games, prizes, and a chance to mix and mingle with your favorite YA authors and get books signed! We’ll have a live game show that tests contestants’ knowledge of young adult and middle grade literature with games GUARANTEED to amaze and amuse. Los Angeles authors include Cecil Castellucci, Carol Snow, Blake Nelson, Andrew Smith, Mark London Williams, and Amy Goldman Koss. Arizona authors include Janette Rallison, James A. Owen, Angela Morrison, Janni Lee Simner, Tom Leveen, Tony Carrillo, Aprilynne Pike, and Jon Lewis. Bands to be announced.

It's scheduled for this weekend!

Purple Heart by Patricia McCormick

Purple Heart by Patricia McCormick
"When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero.

There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces together.

Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf, and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was. But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is guilty is very complicated indeed."- summary from Amazon

I picked this up from my shelves to read recently mainly because I'd been reading a LOT of more light-hearted novels and so felt I needed something more serious to kind of balance it all out. I've also read a tiny bit of McCormick before ("Cut" and her story in "Up All Night") and was excited to read this new book of hers. This is a great book and is written so well. It's told in third person but mainly focuses on Matt and his story is so compelling. There's a bit of a mystery to it as Matt is trying to put the pieces back together of just what exactly happened to give him the head injury. The first half of the book details his recovery and the second half deals with him getting back out into the war. I don't think I've read a story about a soldier in a war, especially one still going on, and it hits you emotionally, reading about what these soldiers go through. This book opened my eyes and gave me a new-found appreciation for soldiers going into war. The relationships between everyone are clearly defined and the interactions are written realistically. This is definitely a book that needs to be read by everyone, no matter what age.

Irredeemable by Mark Waid and Peter Krause

There was a moment in Superman III when the briefest window of potential in an otherwise dismal film raised open. When Superman was divided into two halves - one purely good, the other purely evil - viewers glimpsed the possibility of a once pristine superhero devolving into a malevolent ultra-human. Blink during the film (or sleep, which wasn't hard to do in Supes III) and you'd miss Christopher Reeve in a dirt-encrusted Superman leotard getting drunk and generally causing mid-grade havoc.

Fortunately, the potential lost on film has been recaptured by writer Mark Waid and artist Peter Krause in Irredeemable, a new graphic novel compilation released by fledgling Boom Studios. Waid is incredibly well-known in the comics field, graduating from the ranks of DC Comics' editors to become one of its most prominent writers. His forte, or at least so says the conventional wisdom, is writing modernized, action-oriented superhero stories that somehow manage to stay true to the traditions of the classic characters he's assigned. Over the years, Waid has revitalized The Flash, Superman, the Fantastic Four and others. None of this work, however, can prepare you for what he has done with Irredeemable. Inscrutably, this writer of classic, traditional comics has taken the Superman tradition and twisted it straight to hell.

Imagine if Superman became totally corrupted - not by some rainbow variety of kryptonite or by some stock villain of the week, but by something far more common and insidious - the common man. Imagine having super hearing, only to always hear every snarky, sarcastic, hateful comment uttered by an otherwise "adoring" public. And imagine trying to live a normal life when the paparazzi can just never, ever get enough of you. Think Brad and Angelina have it bad? How much worse would it be if they had super powers?

None of the traditional Superman iconography is present in the book, but it doesn't have to be. By decontextualizing the Superman character (referred to in Irredeemable as The Plutonian) readers get a clearer "take" on the man-god than could ever be accomplished within one of the Man of Steel's actual books. In many ways, Superman's costume and image engender so many pop culture-driven connotations there is really no way to critically examine such a character. So Waid has done the next best thing by giving readers a Superman they can deconstruct.

Most comics fans will recognize that many of the themes, techniques and characterizations in Irredeemable have been seen before, most notably in Alan Moore's Miracleman (Moore's take on the Captain Marvel story) and Watchmen (where Dr. Manhattan represents the loss of humanity that comes from gaining super powers). That is not to say, though, that Irredeemable is a cheap copy or stylistic cheat of some kind. Far from it. Consider it instead a kind of amalgamation: one part gee-whiz-bang-pow locomotive of an action story, another part cultural commentary, and a third part subversion of the archetypal superhero motif. Read it...trust me...and don't even THINK about watching Superman III on cable this weekend.

Cross-posted at PastePotPete.

Measured in Millimeters

Like most of the rest of the civilized world, France uses the metric system. So diminutive Toby Lolness, the protagonist in Timothee Fombelle's fantastic Toby Alone (translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone), is described as "one and a half millimeters tall." That's better than "3/32 of an inch," although I had to wonder how the people of Toby's world, who are confined to the landscape of a single tree, ever figured out what a millimeter was.

Toby's world is one in which water runs like rivers through the canyons created by tree bark's texture, in which birds are almost immeasurable monsters that descend from the sky like a mythical dragons, in which everyone lives on or in or at least fastened to one truly enormous (to the little people anyway) Tree. The Tree provides everything. Of course there are those who appreciate what the tree gives them, and then there are those who just want to exploit the Tree for their own gain. Sound familiar?

Toby, our 1.5 mm hero, is on the run, being hunted by nearly every other citizen of the Tree (all of whom are in the single digits, millimeter-wise). Toby's parents are in prison and some of his closest friends have turned on him. Why? Because Toby’s father is an inventor who has discovered an almost magical source of energy within the Tree's sap, an energy source that, if harvested, may cause irreparable damage to the Tree. Toby's father, more concerned with the health of the Tree than with the benefits his discovery could bring to the Tree's people, refuses to reveal the secrets of the energy source. Led by big time construction contractor Joe Mitch, the people of the Tree turn on Toby's father and drive him into exile amongst the distant lower branches. Down there, Tree people must contend with the savage Grass People who constantly threaten to invade the Tree—at least that’s what Toby has heard. But finally, Joe Mitch considers exile not punishment enough for the Lolnesses and Toby's parents are captured and Toby is left to flee on his own.

Toby's adventure is well-paced and while the narrative jumps around quite erratically in time, its elements unfold organically. The reader sweats and pants along with Toby whether he is fleeing or facing his enemies, in either case relying on superior cleverness to defeat them. Each time someone betrays Toby, the reader feels the knife in his own back. Toby also grows organically, becoming, by the end, an almost entirely different character. And yet the change occurs so subtly that it's difficult to pick out a single point in the narrative where the change takes place. Toby's world is masterfully presented and de Fombelle has no end of fun in finding tree corollaries for many of the technologies that we larger people (measuring approximately 1,753 millimeters) enjoy. While we milk cows, the Tree people milk insect larvae. While we have bulldozers, the little tree people breed and train giant weevils. The reader begins to believe that if people really were that small they could indeed live off the bounty of such a tree. Thousands of species, after all, do exactly that. De Fombelle seems to understand bugs and vegetation well enough to make the story perfectly believable.

I did find some of the themes of the book cause for . . . maybe not concern but at least careful consideration. Toby's father does not exactly act as a censor of information; he promises not to stand in the way of other scientists and inventors who seek the secrets of the Tree's sap. But I wonder what his moral obligations are regarding this information. While of course I agree with the book's environmental message that the Tree should not be mindlessly and limitlessly tapped for its energy, I don't like the idea of an elite individual privy to knowledge which isn't shared with the larger populous. Still, that Toby Alone's plot centers on such an issue is laudable. It's one of the more complex treatments related to science and environmentalism that I've seen in a book for young people and it certainly leaves the door open for debate on what's right.

I also found the violence in the book mildly disturbing. While in general de Fombelle seems to emphasize the use of brains over brawn, and his good and noble characters usually fret over situations in which they must hurt people in order to survive, there are also instances of particularly brutal violence being treated as funny, as a kind of slapstick pratfall which might leave every bone in your body bruised or broken. Again, this inconsistency is at once unsettling and an invitation to the reader to consider the consequences of physical confrontation.

The book has a satisfying ending, but leaves a number of unanswered questions likely to be addressed in the forthcoming sequel, Toby and the Secrets of the Tree.

Crossposted at Critique de Mr. Chompchomp

Say hello to my literary friend: interviews with Al Pacino

I love reading about the creative process. I'll devour critical analyses of writers I've never read (and some times never heard of). I feel cheated if a DVD doesn't have a commentary track. If I like something, I want to know how it came about.

A lot of artists (in the broadest sense) try to write about their own creative process. One of the best is Stephen King's semi-autobiography On Writing, but then again, writers should be good at putting their process into words. Musicians generally fail at this; visual artists do somewhat better. But the absolute worst tend to be actors, who combine a thin level of intelligence with an over-inflated sense of self and a deep-seated belief that, to put it rather crudely, their own farts don't smell.

But there are exceptions, and one of them is Al Pacino.

There's no denying his status (he's played Michael Corleone, Frank Serpico, Tony Montana, Big Boy Caprice and Satan) but what Lawrence Grobel's collection of career-spanning interviews makes clear is that Pacino is both talented and extremely intelligent about his craft Al Pacino, the book, is as surprising at Al Pacino the actor.



Pacino started as a theater actor, and even after movie stardom he continues to tread the boards. He's knowledgaeble about Shakespeare, understands the core of contemporary drama and has even financed and directed a couple of films based on stage plays, unreleased until a recent DVD box set.



The interviews span his career from the late 70s to the mid 00s. His perspective matures as he does, and changes dramatically when he has children. There are personal, gossipy bits, but the book is mostly interested in finding how Pacino the person channels into Pacino the actor, and how that actor views his craft.



All teenage boys know Pacino from Scarface, even if it's only from the omnipresent posters or quotes ("Say hello to my li'l friend!") that have permeated hip-hop culture. They might even know him from Heat, or the classic Godfather films. What they might not know is how far from the "real" Pacino these characters truly are. The man revealed by these interviews is both talented and lucky, that's true; but he also, even as he closes in on age 70, continues to challenge himself. Not many of his status, in any field, dare to do the same.