Kids Review Books

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Fast-growing children’s reading and book discovery site BiblioNasium has launched a feature that lets kids under 13 review books (previously disallowed so kids didn’t inadvertently provide personally identifiable information). In part the impetus for the new service was evidence that kids read and respond to books recommended by their friends.

Says BiblioNasium Chief Education Advocate Adele Schwartz, “Our goal is to instill the habit of reading and to raise a generation of passionate readers.” The website, designed for children K-8, includes reading challenges, virtual rewards, online reading logs, and other features, as well as the reviews, “in a safe and private digital space.”

Currently, nearly 100,000 kids and 20,000 educators use the site and growing by about 1,000 users every week. When asked whether the future of reading and book recommendations is social, BiblioNasium founder Marjan Ghara said, “The present of reading is social.”

Among other awards, BiblioNasium is a recent winner of an EdTech Digest 2014 Cool Tools Award and a 2013 Best Website for Teaching & Learning award from the American Association of School Librarians.

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**** The Cold, Cold Ground

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By Adrian McKinty (narrated by Gerard Doyle) – In the bleak Belfast spring of 1981, hunger strikers in HM Prison Maze are starting to die. Paramilitaries are setting off bombs and gunfire rakes the streets at night. Police detective Sean Duffy–a rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary–is presented with what looks like a “normal” murder case that soon blossoms into the possibility of a serial killer at work, targeting homosexuals. At that time, homosexuality was still illegal in Northern Ireland and not tolerated. In the mix is the apparent suicide of the beautiful ex-wife of one of the hunger strikers. Mysterious mail begins to arrive. The backdrop of violence is persuasively portrayed and hearkens back to real events and people. First of a trilogy (actually, now probably a quartet).

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Planner or Pantser?

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This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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Writing with Friends

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Room at the Table, Writing, WritersFor some time I’ve felt the many rewards of having a close group of friends in our writing group, which after almost a decade we’ve finally given a name: Room at the Table. The irony is, there isn’t any more room at my dining table, where we meet, because we’ve gradually grown to about 13, though only 10 or 11 of us make each monthly meeting. The group is about equally divided between men and women, all of us “over 35,” many of us also participants in Lauren B. Davis’s estimable “Sharpening the Quill” writing workshops.

Some members say they come for the snacks, but they all come with carefully reviewed submissions by others, and we spend the next two hours discussing each others’ work. We provide enthusiasm, help people get unstuck, ask the occasional big question (Where Is This Going?) and generously share our ideas and grammatical obsessions. Occasionally, we do an exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and one such, which involved imagining the characters of a ghost story, created such enthusiasm among the three of us (at the time) that we all wrote the story, and were all published.

I’ve heard of critique groups that like to eviscerate the author. That isn’t us. This week we tried something new. Five of us did a reading of our fiction at the local library and, unbelievably, 35 people came. They applauded the stories they heard, which were quite good. They had snacks, another area of expertise. They stayed to chat. Big success. Very proud.

We Need a Word for That!

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owl, wordbirds, Liesl SchillingerCharming description of Liesl Schillinger’s book Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century in the New York Times this week, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. When confronted by some mind-freezing dilemma, did you ever say, “there oughtta be a word for that?” Well, maybe there is, in her collection of 200. Her tumblr blog is updated weekly, too.Some of her favorites are collected in the book.

Here are a couple of gems with Schillinger’s definitions:

  • Icyclist: a person who bikes in the dead of winter
  • Occuplaytion: the fanciful jobs invented for heroines of Hollywood romantic comedies
  • Nagivator: a person constantly giving directions to the car’s driver
  • Cancellelation: the joy you feel when you cancel something you didn’t want to do in the first place
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*****The Crossing

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Cormac McCarthy – Part II of McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. This book is a force of nature, describing three lengthy horseback journeys from New Mexico to bleak and impoverished Old Mexico before and during World War II. The prose mostly moves forward at the pace and with the deliberation of a man on a horse, with occasional galloping, heart-stopping passages. The poor people 16-year-old Billy Parham encounters seem mostly willing to share what they have with him, including their stories and their hard-won philosophy, while the well-off, few in number though they be, seem intent on stealing or denying him what little he has. McCarthy never tells us how Billy feels about any of this, only shows us what he does about it, as he struggles to maturity and to maintain his integrity. The detailed sense of place makes the reader feel he has been on these melancholy and bitter treks, too. A thrilling read for the purity of the vision and the power of the words. Some favorite metaphors: “As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again.” ” . . .the fence running out into the darkness under the mountains and the shadow of the fence crossing the land in the moonlight like a suture.”  And his matchless dialog, half of which is in Spanish but easy to follow.

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Oscar Winner: The Great Beauty

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The Great Beauty, Toni Servillo, Paolo SorrentinoWanted to see The Great Beauty (trailer), the Paolo Sorrentino’s movie that won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. And could have won for cinematography—in it, Rome is The Great Beauty. Nice score, too. Toni Servillo makes the essentially selfish main character actually charming.

It’s the story of Jep Gambardella, who won fame with one novelette many years before and survives as merely a social creature, someone who knows everyone and whom everyone knows. The send-ups of performance art—and artists—are genuinely funny. But most of the film is linked together only by being in some way over-the-top, with the only authentic exchanges ones Jep has with his maid. You keep waiting for Jep to wake up, because scenes’ link to reality seems so tenuous. The botox clinic, the man with the keys, the giraffe.

The disconnected scenes—from the profane to the sublime—just didn’t add up to much for me. Roger Ebert liked it better than I did. Rotten Tomatoes rating: critics (91%); audience (79%).

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The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel (trailer and other stuff here)—sold out in the local movie house playing it on two screeens—is an enjoyable romp through the Central European country of Zubrowka, obscure even by fictional standards in the early 1930’s, as an unnamed brutal regime is taking increasing power. It’s best not to fixate on Wes Anderson’s tissue-paper plot and instead enjoy the numerous cameo roles. I have to believe that working on Anderson’s movies is fun; otherwise so many notable actors wouldn’t agree to do it!

Anderson didn’t break the budget on a lot of CGI to achieve verisimilitude—the imaginary vistas fit right into this fable about a generous spirit with impeccable standards. It’s great to see Ralph Fiennes, one of my faves, in an upbeat role for a change as the hotel’s concierge, Gustave H.  The fascist peril is real, nonetheless, and marks the certain end of the world the concierge is trying to desperately to protect.

If you need a break from late winter’s interminable gloom, this movie is a lively breath of spring. Rotten Tomatoes rating: critics and audiences agree (for once): 91%. Says critic Rene Rodriguez, “the pleasure curls your toes.”

The movie is based on the several writings by Austrian novelist, biographer, and playwright Stefan Zweig, a Jew who in real life fled his country upon the rise of Hitler—first to London, then New York, and Brazil.Enhanced by Zemanta

Guilty Until Proven Otherwise

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4-28-14 update – New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that the number of innocent people on death row is about twice that of previous estimates–or about 120 of the approximately 3,000 people on death row in the United States, as reported by TIME. “Each quest for mathematical clarity only serves to underline the troubling paradox at the heart of the modern death penalty,” says reporter David Von Drehle. “We want the option of execution (every poll confirms this, even as the percentages in favor of capital punishment appear to be trending downward). But we also want certainty.”

The Michigan Innocence Clinic, a project of the U-M Law School, takes on cases of individuals wrongfully convicted in the state’s courts. The Clinic is modeled on Innocence Projects in many other states, with one difference. (Check what’s going on in your state.) It’s the only project in the country that focuses on cases that cannot be solved with DNA evidence.

In most felony convictions, DNA or other biological evidence is simply not available, so investigators must dig for other causes of how a prosecution went awry. Typical flaws in cases are eyewitness misidentification—with the shortcomings of eyewitness testimony repeatedly demonstrated—improper forensic science, false confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, unreliable or coerced police informants, and bad lawyering.

Take as an example the prosecution that sent David Gavitt to prison for 27 years. In 1985, his wife and two young daughters died in an overnight fire at their home, and David was hospitalized with burns and cuts. Police and prosecutors spent their energies attempting to prove a case of arson. Arson science has come a long way in recent decades, and many of the old theories about the burn patterns of fires as they spread have been soundly disproved. The Innocence Clinic brought modern experts into the analysis of Gavitt’s case, which convinced the current county prosecutor to drop the charges and release him from prison. Despite his quarter-century-plus in prison, he was luckier than Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted of arson in Corsicana, Texas, for a fire that took the lives of  his three tiny daughters. The faulty evidence that convicted Willingham also was refuted by subsequent, more scientific investigators, but the State of Texas refused to reexamine the case and executed him.

The Michigan Innocence Clinic has received some 4,000 applications (each 20 pages long) from inmates, and has a more than a dozen active cases. It has succeeded in exonerating eight prisoners so far. For a case that has previously been unsuccessfully appealed to be re-examined, not only must evidence must be strong, it must fit certain legal requirements. A video shows the kinds of holes in the prosecution that the Clinic uncovers.

According to an article by Alice Rhein in the Spring 2014 Michigan Alumnus magazine, a Clinic staff member is creating a documentary about one of its successful cases. He is attempting to crowdfund it, and so far has raised about a third of the projected $25,000 budget.

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**** Fighter Pilot: The Memoir of Legendary Ace Robin Olds

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By Christina Olds, Ed Rasimus and Robin Olds. Narrated by Robertson Dean. A tale of modern derring-do, with Olds–a flying ace in both World War II and Vietnam, who led that war’s most renowned air battle–fighting both the enemy and the Pentagon. The authors credit him with impeccable judgment about strategy and tactics in both the immediate flying situation and long-term for the U.S. military. His heavy drinking, failed marriages, and lack of diplomacy are glossed over as “I am who I am.” He was a larger-than-life personality, and it’s a great story. His views about Vietnam don’t square with contemporary assessments, but reflect the frustrations of military men at the time that, if the country was going to commit young lives to the effort, they should plan to win, not pull their punches.

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