Oct 30 2011

Stories from the Bible illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger

As longtime readers know, I am fascinated by fairy tales, folktales, myths and classic stories.  Combine these with great illustrations and quality packaging and I can’t resist.

Award winning illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger’s career seemingly lies at this very intersection.  So I am always on lookout for her books when I browse used bookstores or library sales. And I have been able to find some amazing books for just a few dollars.

My first children’s book illustrated by Zwerger was The Selfish Giant which I loved.  Since stumbling on that volume I have become more fascinated and enamored with this artist and her work adding more of her books to my collection. Over the next few days I will be sharing my thoughts on these great books

The first book I came across after Selfish Giant was Stories from the Bible a beautiful combination of excerpts from the King James Bible and Zwerger’s illustrations.  But as the School Library Journal notes, this is not really a book likely to appeal to children:

These excerpts, taken verbatim from the King James Version of the Bible, are divided into six groups. The Old Testament sections include stories of the Beginning, the Fathers and Mothers of Israel, the Deliverance out of Egypt, King David, Psalms, and the words of the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. The New Testament sections are the birth of Jesus and the beginning of His works, Jesus’s words about His mission, experiences with Jesus, the message of Jesus, the Passion and Resurrection, and “Unto the Ends of the World” (Acts and Revelations). Coverage of Genesis, Exodus, and Jesus’s life and teachings is passable, although there are substantial gaps. The other selections are very limited. The work is imaginatively illustrated with occasional full-page paintings, usually but not always associated with the accompanying text, and a number of decorative vignettes. Often they have an almost surreal quality. In the scene of Moses in the bulrushes, Pharaoh’s daughter watches from a distant riverbank and is accompanied by jackal- and falcon-headed Egyptian gods. The principals may be dressed in modern clothing or carrying suitcases. Colors are muted and the artistic styles vary from meticulously detailed to abstract. The perspectives are sometimes dramatically skewed. With its use of the elevated King James language, its very selective choice of material, and its sophisticated paintings (some illustrations are not readily comprehensible), this title is more a coffee-table art book than a collection of Bible stories for youngsters. There are many anthologies available with friendlier language and more accessible pictures for children.

I agree that the book is more coffee table art book than children’s Bible, but that within that framework it is a beautiful book.  And this doesn’t mean you can’t read it with you children.

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By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

Oct 29 2011

Barnes and Noble unclear on meaning of “In-Stock”

Wanting a hard copy of  Three And Out by Jason Bacon, I surfed over to BarnesAndNoble.com and saw that it was available at the Easton store. So off I went. When I arrived at the store I was informed that they had the book in-stock but all the copies were on hold. When I asked why the website would tell me copies were available when in fact they were not, I was met with blank stares.

I assume the book is not taken off the in-stock list until it is purchased. This is what the kids today call a “fail.” It leads to the false assumption that a copy is available when it is in fact not.

Guess I will just buy it at Amazon.

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Oct 29 2011

From wannabe rockstar to successful writer

Interesting piece on how author Andy Ferguson (Crazy U, Land of Lincoln)  ended up writing political journalism:

Andy Ferguson never wanted to be a writer.

Not when he was growing up outside Chicago. His dream was to be a rock star.

“I wanted to be one of the Beatles,” Ferguson said. “Then it turned out they weren’t hiring, and I wanted to be a first baseman for the White Sox.”

Since he couldn’t do either of those he tried fiction but that failed as well eventually leading him to Washington, DC by way of Bloomington, Indiana:

Ferguson planned to write the Great American Novel. He was living in an adobe shack in Albuquerque, N.M., and continually sent pieces of novels and short stories to magazine editors.

“I think they had some kind of automatic system where the minute my envelope came in the office it just flung out a rejection letter,” he said. “So I was papering this little shack I was living in with rejection letters from The Atlantic and New Yorker and The Hudson Review.”

Ferguson came to the conclusion that if he were going to write, he would have to get involved with print journalism. So he moved to Bloomington, Ind. to attend the journalism school at the University of Indiana. At the time, Bloomington was the home of the editor of The American Spectator. Ferguson met him, struck up a friendship, and soon went to work for the magazine. When the publication picked up and moved to Washington, D.C., Ferguson followed.

“So suddenly from my little adobe hut in Albuquerque I found myself right in the middle of Washington journalism,” he said. “It was quite a thrill.”

Seems few writers take an easy path …

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Oct 28 2011

WFB Bio, James Madison & Post-Harry Potter

Terry Teachout finds the most recent William F. Buckley bio (Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism) disappointing:

Sure enough, Buckley is as fair-minded a study of its subject’s career as you could possibly expect from a contributor to The Nation and Tikkun. It deals bluntly but honestly with such difficult topics as his equivocal views on civil rights, and it gives him full credit for having purged the conservative movement of such “loonies” (Buckley’s word) as the members of the John Birch Society. Above all, Bogus recognizes that “Buckley and his colleagues changed America’s political realities,” both by making conservatism intellectually and socially respectable and by turning the GOP into something not far removed from a genuine conservative party.

But Buckley is too soberly written to be of interest to the average reader, and the only full-scale biography, John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (1988), is both outdated and overly partisan. The best thing published so far about Buckley is Richard Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr., and the Conservative Movement (2009), a sympathetic, at times startlingly candid memoir that describes him more vividly than anything other than Buckley’s own autobiographical volumes, of which Cruising Speed: A Documentary(1971) is the first and best. What is now needed is an up-to-date biography written by someone with the twin gifts of literary portraiture and historical perspective. This, alas, isn’t it.

Frustrating because I was looking forward to reading it (and probably still will).

Speaking of Richard Brookhiser, Richard Beeman finds his bio of James Madison worth reading:

The amount of scholarship chronicling these events is immense, and although Brook­hiser is somewhat sparing in acknowledging his debts to historians who have preceded him, his sprightly narrative will serve as an entertaining introduction for those who are making their first acquaintance with Madison. Moreover, Brookhiser’s book is a useful corrective to some of the recent works in the fields of political science and law that place excessive emphasis on Madison the theorist.

For more on Brookhiser from my perspective, see the related articles links below.

And from a completely different perspective, Eloisa James brings a book to my attention (Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact By A. J. HARTLEY) that I think will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile:

Post Harry Potter, we can all sketch the outlines of a paranormal private school novel. Darwen Arkwright is a far odder and more creative addition to the genre than I have read in years. Darwen has powers of a sort…but he also has the ability to behave like a bumbler, like a dunce, like a grieving boy. The book never relies on paranormal flourishes alone to carry the reader’s interest. A. J. Hartley shows an uncanny, brilliant ability to shape the inner life of an unmoored child, who realizes that the worst thing of all is that there’s no one to be disappointed in him.

This sounds like a great fit for me and a potential read aloud book for my daughter.

Related articles

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Oct 26 2011

Ian Morris on The Patterns of History

This week Pejman and I spoke with Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules – For Now, about how geography helps significantly shape destiny, how it explains the rise of the China, and the possibility that it may overtake the West. Listen below.

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By Kevin Holtsberry • Interviews • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

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