Whittington

I want to post book reviews of things as I finish reading them. This one is out of order but it is short and the book is at hand. I picked up a copy of Whittington by Alan Armstrong at one of those "fill a bag for a dollar" sales at our library. Big risk there, huh? It made it into the bag because the cover picture looked, um, interesting.

My copy doesn't have the Newbery seal on it and at first I wasn't sure if it was for adults or children.

It is interesting, though not as I expected. It is a heavy-handed didactic barnyard Charlotte's Web with 16th century lore woven through (the more interesting part to me) and a strong moral lesson on the value of hard work and Learning to Read. 

My favorite parts were a quote near the end which I read aloud at lunch to Devastatingly Handsome and Mr Music, where, IMNEHO, an editor might have been useful: "He went to the side of the ship and untied the blue silk he wore around his neck. He wiped his face and tossed it overboard as a token for the cat." (Mr Music guffawed.) You will be stunned to learn, only a few pages later, that apparently his face was still intact, as we read that the beautiful Mary "touched his face gently, tracing his scar."

The other thing I liked was the listing of sources cited in the endnotes. I appreciate the author's thoroughness in listing everything from 1605 plays (the perfect date to encounter here on November 5th :) ) to The Blue Fairy Book to Robinson Crusoe and Herodotus.

The Problem with History

I like math. In math there is a right answer and there are wrong answers. I also like literature and other arts assignments. In literature and arts assignments there are a wide variety of ways to achieve excellence. But I have never been fond of history, and here is why: it is so slippery. 

You cannot just know that because someone won a war, or an election, that they were the Good Guys and that it was the Right Thing to happen. You can usually not even be sure they really won (remembering the Hanging Chad election, for example).

And now Presidents' Day. We had a lesson on it in our Notgrass Uncle Sam and You text. It turns out it really is not Presidents' Day (officially) but Washington's Birthday. It turns out that Washington was born on the 11th of February but then when he was 21 they moved his birthday to the 22nd when they changed the calendar altogether. So for a long time our country celebrated his birthday on the 22nd but then they passed a "Uniform Monday Holiday" act and moved it to the 3rd Monday of the month... which is never on either the 11th OR the 22nd. Go figure.

So, to continue the confusion, we celebrated a night early, or maybe six days late, or maybe five days early, depending on how you think of it, with this pie, which, not surprisingly given the way this holiday goes, was baked in Canada. Go figure.