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)

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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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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