easy reader

by Carl Sandburg
illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham
1922 Harcourt

Poet Sandburg was called to create these stories to amuse his own children, and in doing gave birth to a kind of American fairy tale centered on the ways and manners of the prairie folk at the early part of the 20th Century.

The stories all take place in Rootabaga Country, a place at the edge of the grasslands far from the city, where the railroad tracks zigzag and villages float with the wind. Real life hardscrabble folk with names like Rags Habakuk and Blixie Bimber run up against talking blue foxes and mystical corn fairies, and inanimate objects like skyscrapers have a railroad train for a child. Sandburg the egalitarian gives a beggar like Potato Face Blind Man the same wisdom and dignity as he gives Fire the Goat who knows the secrets of the shadows that walk along the horizon during a sunrise. Throughout, the poet's ear for country vernacular is infused with choice invented words of his own that beg to be read aloud to children who will understand them as they do "adult" words they have never heard before, simply through context.

What is immediately striking about these stories is how much resonance they hold with Baum's Oz books. But where Baum removed his wholesome heroine from her American soil for a land only reached by balloon or tornado, Sandburg offers us a place just off the edge of the map that one can purchase a ticket for... after selling all your worldly good first, however. And the wiggly line-drawn illustrations by the Petershams convey both the era and a sense of whimsy. Baum and Sandburg's tales are cut from the same country cloth and it's a shame that Sandburg's tales seem to have not garnered an equal popularity.

Rooted in the heartland of America they speak with a folksy cadence, centering on the daily events of life or dwelling in a mythical world as imagined by a farm hand two or three generations removed from city life. Innocence walks arm-in-arm with wisdom as youngsters explain the world to their adult uncles and the blind man pities those who have sight but cannot (or will not) see.

The fantastic is celebrated in these tales much the same as they are in Lewis Carroll's works and with equal success. Composed for children they retain the same appeal in their nonsense while giving children an alternate view of the world that is no less real than the one they confront on a daily basis. I only wish I'd come across these stories when I was younger and could truly appreciate them.

Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls
poems selected by William Cole
illustrated by Tomi Ungerer
World Publishing 1964
(1977 edition illustrated by
Shel Silverstein)
124 pages




Here's a little time bomb of a memory, lodged deep in my brain, springing forth like a cheerful bird on a breezy cool day when I'm lollygagging:

Nothing to do?
Nothing to do?
Put some mustard in your shoe...

For years I was certain that Shel Silverstein penned the line (and the rest of the poem to go with it) but was unable to locate it in all the usual places (Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up, &c.) Then while researching various poetry collections I stumbled onto this title and the title alone seemed to send up some kind of a warning. Once found (and read) whole dusty corners of my brain came alive. And some interesting questions as well.

Cole, who in his day worked for publishers Viking and Simon and Schuster and the Saturday Review magazine, collected themed books of poetry for children that spanned at least three decades. Collecting humorous verse from throughout the 20th Century Cole's books covered everything from the cautionary to the absurd and also the sublime to the ribald. Earlier collections in particular contain poems and images that might do more than nudge the edges of political correctness and raise a few eyebrows. The continuation of the poem mentioned above -- credited to a certain Shelly Silverstien -- continues:

Fill your pockets full of soot,
Drive a nail into your foot,
Put some sugar in your hair,
Leave your toys upon the stairs,
Smear some jelly on the latch,
Eat some mud and strike a match,
Draw a picture on the wall,
Roll some marbles down the hall,
Put some ink in daddy's cap--
Now go upstairs and take a nap.

Having satisfied one itch in the brain I was suddenly met with several more, these in the names of the illustrations. Tomi Ungerer's line drawings have the playful spirit of the book's title... and then some. There is nothing in the poem that accompanies the following illustration to explain the look of the girls face:















And yet, there it is.

Father with a cat-o-nine tails and his little Electra smirking at his attempt to be stearn with her. It puzzled me then, it amuses me now, and it's no wonder this edition is no longer in print.

For Silverstein fans this collection contains the original, slightly different version of "Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout" and a poem with some simple instructions to children on how to make a prank phone call. Not to suggest the book is all perversion and subversion, there are poems in here by A.A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ogden Nash and even Longfellow to round things out.

I look back on reading this as a child and don't feel I was in any way corrupted or had my delicate sensibilities compromised by the outrageousness contained in this collection. In fact, I think we do children a greater disservice today by sanitizing their world to the point where they stop believing we have their best interests at heart. They live in this world with us, and if we have to carve out time to discuss terrorism and famine and war and he dangers of strangers then I think we can trust them to take humorous verse in the spirit which it was once offered -- as a gift, from adults to children, to let them know that it's okay to laugh.

by Larry Gonick
185 pages
Carus Publishing 2005


Gonick, better known for his Cartoon History of the Universe books, adapts cartoon characters from Smithsonian's kid's magazine Muse into a full-length story. In the magazine this collection of muses -- archetypes of cultural figures from around the world -- live in a cartoon universe that is just a county over from Krazy Kat's Cononino and make for light entertainment.

Here, I'm sad to report, I didn't make it past the first chapter, barely to page 10. I suppose I was expecting some of Gonick's clever comic pacing to carry through to his prose but instead what I encountered was a herky-jerky wordiness that forced me to read sentences over and over. I tried reading through and found myself going back and starting over a total of three times just to make sure I wasn't having a bad day, week, month. It just didn't work for me, sometimes that happens.

I'm happy to see on the various author and magazine fan sites that kids really dug the book, found the characters both compelling and true to their natures, one even going so far as to compare it with the work of Terry Pratchett. I couldn't help thinking that it would have made for a much better graphic novel, with the details in the drawings instead of drawn out in text.

More proof that not everything for kids can be enjoyed by adults.

What If You -- Follow the Lone Cry
What If Books #2
By Laurie B. Clifford
Regal Books, 1983
97 pages

Another take on the Choose Your Own Adventure type
of books aimed at reluctant or low-interest readers, this time from a Christian
publisher.  

You are "Bubba", the middle-school son of globe- trotting parents whose
adventures take them deep into National Geographic country, this time in the
Yukon.  As with similar books, there is a basic two- to three-page premise and
then several forks in the road buy way of narrative choices that lead you flipping
pages toward one of the books 26 possible endings.

After a childhood of being dragged around the world his parents have finally
bought a house and stayed put for two years.  Bubba feels he's old enough to
stay behind while his parents go off on their next adventure but the conflict
tugging at him concerns is younger sister who sees Bubba as her emotional
anchor.  Through the various storylines Bubba is equally torn between making
the right choices and in choosing friends over family.

It's clear from the language used that the author of this book either has no
children and learned everything they know about pre-teen behavior from
watching television, or they are truly out-of-touch with their own children and
believe they are hipper than they really are.  That the ideal lead-in to a summer
hanging out with friends is described as "working our bods off all year so we can
pork out" at the local pizzeria should have turned off all but the most sheltered
of readers.

The Christian message is found mostly in the types of choices the reader gets to
make, and reinforces the idea that presumably good choices lead to happiness and
bad choices lead to death.  I kid you not.  Of the 26 endings here, 6 end in physical
pain or family misfortune, 6 are unsatisfying non-endings that leave you feeling like
you've wasted your time, and 12 lead to death for the Bubba including (with their
corresponding "message"):
Death by over-eating 3 pizzas and downing a pitcher of soda (gluttony)
Death by cobra in the cargo hold of a plane (disobedience)
Death by gold mine cave-in (greed)
Death by black widow spider bite (deception to alleviate guilt)
Death by plaster body cast (deception)
Death by drowning (arrogance, selfishness)
Death by falling off Mt. Everest (desire, covetousness)
Death by lying in the road to get run over (more deception), and my favorite
Death by having ones heart pierced with a lightning bolt by the spirit of
dream-killers and bleeding to death in bed at night. (guilt)
Ignoring the obvious messages about what a good, moral Christian would choose in
any situation, to say nothing of the bizarre endings, is a very subtle message
about what kind of a family this is and what sort of redemption is available to
Bubba.  It's hard to gloss over the very Oedipal flashback where Bubba helps
his mother deliver his younger sister in the jungles of the Philippines during a
monsoon, but it's easy to miss the message that parents like Bubba's are
doomed to misfortune 75% of the time in these adventures because they allow
their son the make (or have raised him to make) bad choices.  In fact, if they
remained a proper family rooted in one place, raising obedient children,
giving the youngest the emotional sustenance she requires so that she doesn't
rely on her brother to fill the void,  none of this would have happened.

It doesn't seem too miscalculated a jump to suggest that these books weren't
entirely aimed at the loyal Christian child but as missionary propaganda, adventure
tales meant to cull wayward sheep from their heathen (liberal?) flocks and lead
them to salvation.

Maybe that's all too much to read into a sub-par middle-school book series from
the 1980's that stalled out after four titles, found at a library sale for a quarter.  Oh,
and as for the title, the lone cry is another lonely outcast child, this one stuck in the
Yukon with her treasure-mad mountain of an uncle.  If you get far enough along
to find out who and what the lone cry is you'll wish you'd stayed behind and died a
painful death-by-root canal.

By Robert McCloskey
Viking Press edition 1943
149 pages

There's this place called Centerburg which has always appeared just off the map
from our collective unconsciousness.  It's a past where the town fathers and other
leading citizens gather at the barber shop while they let their children mind
the diner and bring petty criminals to justice at the end of a gun.  It's where
ten year old boys could take the family cart and mare into town on their own, or
tame a skunk for a pet with just a little milk, an innocent place where the idea
of factory produced homes is welcomed progress and a contest to see which old
codger owns the largest ball of string is prime entertainment for a week.  And
at the center of it all, whether witness or participant, is Homer Price.

As one of Robert McCloskey's rare forages outside the realm of the picture book
(Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal), Homer Price takes the form of
fanciful memoir, the kind of stories written of a young man's fancied retelling
of his Ohio home town.  Naturally Centerburg doesn't exist, but plenty of
Midwest towns like it did exist in the early part of the 20th century and it
breathes a homespun charm not unlike a Frank Capra film or a Thornton Wilder play.

Reading this in the late 1960's there was still a sense that these small towns
still existed, not yet gobbled up by the big cities.  I had no doubts that just
outside of Los Angeles there were dozens of these Centerburg's dotting the
landscape at the edges of the desert and the foothills of the Sierra's.  More
exciting was the prospect that out there, somewhere, a man was in need of a ten
year old boy to mind the diner while the donut machine ran amok pumping out
thousands of the golden cake rings begging to be eaten.  That a
boy could tame a wild animal made perfect sense to me as I explained to my
parents how (but not why) I could keep a pet squirrel in the closet under the
stairs.  Never mind that: we lived in a city and rarely saw squirrels; that the
closet had no light in it; that the only nuts I was able to gather for it were
from eucalyptus trees.  All that mattered to me was that if Homer Price could do
it, so could I.

The collection of stories in Homer Price are homespun and sly at times, with
only one real dud in the bunch.  McCloskey's attempt to modernize The Pied Piper
of Hamlin almost threatens to destroy everything leading up to it, but the final
story regains sure footing and brings together every major character from
previous stories to a grand finale.

Rereading it I can't help but wonder about the black people of Centerburg, only
hinted at in these stores.  They appear twice, when a poor boy finds a diamond bracelet
in a donut (and is rewarded with $100) and in the town celebration
when theBaptist choir sings out a sort of folk-blues commentary on the
town's history. It is both an accurate and sad reflection of the times
that towns like Centerburg existed, and that the poor and minority
communities lived on the outskirts and peripheries. I wouldn't doom
this book to the type of drubbing that Twain's boyhood tales receive
but it would be nice to get an inner city version of Homer Price to
balance things out, perhaps a Harlem-based version of the 30's and 40's
that celebrated the same spirit of boyhood adventure minus any sort of
social message or literary revisionism.