Maine Humanities Council

Winter in Maine fuels a hunger for gardening that becomes nearly all-consuming by March. This can affect children, too, and A Seed is Sleepy—by Diana Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long—can do much to alleviate it. Long’s pictures of familiar and unusual plants, from the bean to the date palm (an extinct plant brought back to life by a scientist who planted a few seeds found in an excavation) are stunning botanical illustrations and typical of Long’s ability to engage children while delighting the adults doing the reading. The narrative describes how seeds of all different kinds begin their lives: in the safety of fruit, as gynosperms (naked seeds from non-flowering plants), floating on ocean currents, and scattered by wind, animals, and even shoelaces.

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Just from its title one can deduce how complicated J. Robert Oppenheimer’s legacy is.  We all know him as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, but that oversimplifies this complex genius and the work he produced. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin tackled a huge subject in Oppenheimer, and produced an engaging, comprehensive biography, one that won the Pulitzer Prize.

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Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane was a heart-racing, breath-taking psychological thriller, that I could not put down (truly). Forego the new movie, of the same name, and read this thriller about an asylum for the the criminally insane. It’s 1954, and U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule have arrived on Shutter Island where a patient has gone missing. Teddy and Chuck must navigate the terrain of the island and the maddening tone of the asylum community to identify sanity and make it out alive. This book kept me guessing to the very end.

(Recommended by Annie Medeiros)

The Nine Pound Hammer, John Claude Bemis’s first book of his Clockwork Dark series (released just last year), shows a new direction that middle grade/young adult fiction is heading in. It is an adventure story taking place in the 19^th century South where swamps, nearly endless forests, and very odd but interesting people tend to rule. At the start of the book, the twelve-year-old orphan Ray sneaks away from his sister and fellow orphans who are being taken to new homes on an ornate train. He is following the pull of a loadstone that his father gave him before disappearing years go. The loadstone will help him, his father said, and Ray believes in it enough to wander for days without food or shelter in a wilderness. Ray eventually meets up with a traveling medicine show and learns about the Gog, a person of tremendous evil who intends to rule the world through an all-powerful machine. No one knows what the machine is, though a previous one was destroyed by John Henry. Bemis peels back myths to reveal an alternative reality, a world of powerful yet secretive Ramblers and the Gog’s demonic agents. Their battles are the backdrop of many American tales with the fate of the world in the balance. › Continue reading

Two books from the MHC’s recently created New Books New Readers series “Carrying the Past” suggest themselves as appropriate for winter reading:  So Far from the Sea and One Candle.  Eve Bunting, the author of both stories, is outstanding in her ability to create thoughtful stories that address hard topics with warmth and hope.  Both books address this issue in our theme of “Carrying the Past”:  What do we choose from our past to preserve as a family or cultural memory?  Both stories are told in first person by a child experiencing a tradition that the family wants remembered from their past.

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From Dawn to Dusk (Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, illustrated by Mary Azarian) depicts rural Vermont life throughout the seasons with a twist: the storyteller is a girl with four siblings who is trying to convince the boys in the family that it really is good growing up in the Northeast Kingdom. When they challenge her with things that aren’t fun (the freezing toes while sugaring, the tedium of picking stone, the winter that lasts forever), she reminds them of the good things (the warm sugar house and Aunt Eunice’s doughnuts, the killdeer and swallows spotted in the spring fields, and the fun of skiing off a barn roof). Natalie Kinsey-Warnock’s prose is sparse and bears a New England dry wit. Mary Azarian’s illustrations are beautiful and folksy, evoking a strong sense of place with the feeling of each moment and season. With whimsical anecdotes on every page, From Dawn to Dusk shows children how to find fun, excitement, and beauty in everyday life.

(Recommended by Diane Magras)

The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, a new biography released this year, provides an interesting look at another strong woman in FDR’s life.  Many of us think of Eleanor Roosevelt as perhaps as the only one in this role, but Frances Perkins also provided a formidable presence.

Perkins grew up in Maine and Massachusetts, graduating from Mt. Holyoke in the early part of the twentieth century. She was drawn to the urban labor issues of the day, especially after experiencing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. After seeing that firsthand, she dedicated her life to labor issues, including the shorter workday, giving workers a voice in the labor arena, fair work practices for women and children, and other important topics.

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Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh’s story of four generations of male Waughs, is fascinating mostly for the insight it gives readers into the development of his most famous relative, Evelyn Waugh.

He starts at the beginning with Evelyn’s grandfather, Alexander Waugh, known to all the family as “the Brute” for his sadistic behavior (he once made his wife hold still so that he could swat a wasp that had landed on her face with the butt of a whip; both the wasp and the whip caused the poor woman some pain).

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Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, is well known for his exploration of America’s ongoing interest with the Civil War book Confederates in the Attic. Since then, however, he has gone on several more journeys into the past, both literally and figuratively. The most recent history travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, offers readers an entertaining and informative look at the adventures (and misadventures) of several early explorers in North America and the impact they had on the Native American population.

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