The world of children's literature lost another light with the passing of author/illustrator Simms Taback, who passed away on December 25th at the age of 79. Taback won the Caldecott Medal for Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (2000) and a Caldecott Honor for one of my favorite read alouds, There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, with its amazing die-cut illustrations. He also created the illustrations for the first McDonald's Happy Meal Box in 1977!
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On this day in 1857, Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski--later known as Joseph Conrad--is born in Poland.
Conrad spent his early childhood in northern Russia, where his father, a Polish poet and patriot, had been exiled. His parents both died of tuberculosis when he was 12. An uncle raised Joseph for the next five years. At age 17, Joseph set out for Marseilles, France, where he joined the merchant marine and sailed to the West Indies. Conrad's many harrowing adventures at sea set the scene for much of his writing. In 1878, when Conrad was 21, he traveled to England as a deck hand on a British freighter. He learned English and spent 16 years with the British merchant navy. He became a British subject in 1886 and later commanded a Congo River steamboat for four months, which set the stage for his well-known story Heart of Darkness (1902). Without Joseph Conrad, we wouldn't have the film Apocalypse Now and any number of pop culture quotes, such as: Kurtz: The horror... the horror... (final lines) and of course: Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that? Lance: What? Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Bill O'Reilly, TV commentator, attempts to be a scholar in his new book, Killing Lincoln, but the text is so riddled with errors and inaccuracies that one of the bookstores at Ford's Theatre is refusing to carry it. Some of the most egregious errors include numerous references to Lincoln working in the Oval Office, which didn't even exist at the time he was president. (It was built decades later.) O'Reilly also gets his dates wrong several times, including the burning of the original Ford's Theatre, and repeats a theory dismissed long ago by true Lincoln historians that Secretary of War Edward Stanton was involved in the assassination plot. We won't mention the poor overall writing quality (O'Reilly has Lincoln "furl" his brow -- we presume he means "furrow." Unless he had a sail on a mast perched up there. Also, O'Reilly must have figured he is above the standard that all writers of research papers from 5th grade on up are expected to meet: he offers no direct citations for any of his assertions.
Read more here and here. Wouldn't it be nice if authors who wrote series and sequels had the forethought to title their books in alphabetical order? Then there would be no patron confusion as to which book came next, or about why we librarians arrange them in alphabetical, instead of chronological, order. Inevitably we get questions as to why Catching Fire (the third novel of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy) is shelved before The Hunger Games and Mockingjay or why The Amber Spyglass (the third book of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy) is shelved ahead of The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, or why the Harry Potter books aren't in the right order. So we salute a couple of authors who make our jobs easier: Ron Roy, author of the A to Z Mystery series for children ("The Absent Author," "The Bald Bandit," etc.) Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mystery series ("A" is for Alibi, "B" is for Burglar, etc.) Hmmm, why are they always mysteries? Or are there others? It's a mystery I will have to investigate. |
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