CM Volume 1 Number 14

Volume 1 Number 14

September 15, 1995

Table of Contents

From the Editor

More Stuff Free!

Book Reviews

The Magic Ear.
Laura Langston. Illustrated by Victor Bosson.
Review by Ian McClaren.
Grades K - 4 / Ages 4 - 8.

The Mystery of the Gold Ring.
James Heneghan.
Review by Ian McLaren.
Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 8 - 11.

Dragon in the Clouds.
Rosemary Nelson.
Review by Irene Gordon.
Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 9 - 12.

Telling Tales on the Rim: Folk Tales from around the Pacific Rim.
Naomi Wakan.
Review by Elinor M. Kelly
Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.

Telling Tales on the Rim:Teacher's Guide
Naomi Wakan.
Review by Elinor M. Kelly
Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.

Video Reviews

Apeman
Episode Four :``Science and Fiction."
Review by Duncan Thornton
Grades 7 - 13 / Ages 11 - Adult.

The Face of Tutankhamun
Episode One: ``The Great Adventure."
Review by Duncan Thornton
Grades 10 - 13 / Ages 14 - Adult.

News

News: Manitoba
Celebrate Manitoba's 125th!
Meet Manitoba's Authors and Illustrators for Young People

The Canadian Children's Book Centre
ART CONTEST

CM
Editor
Duncan Thornton
email: editor@mbnet.mb.ca

CM
Executive Assistant
Peter Tittenberger
email: camera@mbnet.mb.ca

From the Editor

More Stuff Free!

As you probably know, our original plans for the new, electronic CM were that it would stop being freely accessible after the middle of September, and that afterwards only paid subscribers would have access. Since we began publishing in June, this has given us a lot of time to get most of the kinks out. (Not all! We're publishing in a new medium, and some of the things we'd like to do we have to hold back on because of the technical capacity of our subscriber base.

But on thinking again, we realized that many of our readers have access through the school where they work, and consequently haven't watched us grow over the summer. In fact, what with the beginning of term rush, many of you are probably only now starting to read the new CM.

So the CM board has decided to extend the period of free access another month, through the October 13th issue. Those of you who have sent in subscriptions, don't worry; they're good for fifty-two weekly issues after the free period ends. Those of you who haven't get a few more weeks to check us out.

Right now, we're planning to have the formal launch for the new CM here in Winnipeg on, Friday, October 13th. We'll publish more details next week, but I hope to see as many of you as possible there, holding your appetizers and gazing raptly into the computer terminals. (Just don't spill any drinks on the keyboards.)

As always, send any comments or suggestions to the address beneath my name.

-- Duncan Thornton, Editor
editor@mbnet.mb.ca

Book Review

The Magic Ear.

Laura Langston. Illustrated by Victor Bosson.
Victoria, B.C.: Orca Book Publishers, 1995. 32pp, cloth, $14.95.
ISBN 1-55143-035-5.

Grades K - 4 / Ages 4 - 8.
Review by Ian McClaren.

excerpt:

``That," said the great dragon king, ``is the magic ear. There is not another one like it in all of Neriya."
``Then you must keep it," Hoderi said quickly. ``I have no need of a reward."
The dragon king was silent for a long time. Finally he spoke. ``You have saved my daughter's life," he said. ``Nothing is too good for you. You must take the magic ear."

Laura Langston's previous works include No Such Thing as Far Away and Pay Dirt! The Search for Gold in British Columbia. Langston currently lives in Victoria, B.C., and has taken up writing full-time.

The Magic Ear is a short, illustrated story based on a Japanese folk tale. Langston's narrative may prove a bit cumbersome for very young readers or listeners -- for a picture book aimed at Division One children, the sentences are often long and complex. But the rich descriptiveness of Langston's writing is undeniable. Her ability to paint pictures with words will appeal to older children.

The cover of The Magic Ear is bright and eye-catching. The picture on the back, of a man riding an enormous fish, will effectively draw potential readers, curious about this strange event. The text is large enough to read easily, and a beautifully illuminated initial begins each new page.

One of the strengths of this book is the illustrations; Victor Bosson's rich, colourful pictures vividly convey the quiet honesty and gentle nature of Hoderi, the protagonist. Each illustration is framed by a complementary border.

The Magic Ear would be useful as an addition to the study of Japan or folk-tales in the classroom. It also stands very well on its own merits as an excellent read-aloud book for young listeners.

Recommended.

Ian McLaren is an elementary teacher living in Pincher Creek, Alberta.

Book Review

The Mystery of the Gold Ring.

James Heneghan.
Richmond Hill, ON: Scholastic, 1995. 128pp, paper, $4.99.
ISBN 0-590-24623-2

Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 8 - 11.
Review by Ian McLaren.

excerpt:

Max stared at her. So did Sadie. Clarice didn't usually share her investigations with outsiders. Sadie hoped Clarice hadn't succumbed to Max's oily charm.
``We saw a kid jump the fence and run into the Ariadne," whispered Clarice. ``The only kids in the hotel are your bunch."
Max chuckled. ``No way. A kid couldn't pull off a serious crime like that. And even if he could, I'm sure it isn't a member of the band." He raised his eyebrows at the three sleuths. ``But what's it to you, anyway."
``We're detectives," said Clarice. ``We solve crimes."

The Mystery of the Gold Ring is the fourth in the ``O'Brien Detective Agency" series. Like its predecessors, it stars Clarice O'Brien as the hard-driving leader of the group (her code name is ``Number One"), Sadie Stewart as the brains of the outfit, and Brick as the sleepy-eyed, quiet, but useful brawn. In this episode, the three sleuths (all around twelve or thirteen years of age) are on holiday in Greece with Sadie's parents. During their stay, a priceless ring is stolen from a local museum. The evidence seems to point to one of the kids from a Canadian school band who are also staying at the hotel. Of course, the three heroes are the only ones with the ability to solve this mystery.

If this sounds like a pre-teen Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mystery, well . . . it is. To a one-time Hardy Boys fan, the elements are eerily familiar. Unlikely scenarios (how often did your friend's parents take you with them to Greece?), inept police departments, and apparently supernatural forces at work make these stories go. Lest I sound too harsh, let me say that James Heneghan's intended audience will quite happily overlook some of the implausibilities, since they make the story more exciting.

Heneghan makes no bones about this being a Canadian story. Many references are made to sites in the Vancouver area (where Heneghan lives) and the main reason the children want to solve this case is to preserve the honour of Canadians everywhere. If you want your kids to read Canadian content, look no further. Heneghan also manages to weave a fair amount of Greek history, geography, and mythology into this novel. . . . Without realizing it, the reader could end up learning something.

The Mystery of the Gold Ring is a very readable, well-narrated pre-teen mystery. Though it has a certain stock quality, it's non-violent, interesting, and even educational.

Recommended, with reservations.

Ian McLaren is an elementary teacher living in Pincher Creek, Alberta.

Book Review

Dragon in the Clouds.

Rosemary Nelson.
Toronto: Napoleon Publishing, 1994. 159pp, paper, $6.95.
ISBN 0-929141-22-9.

Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 9 - 12.
Review by Irene Gordon.

excerpt:

Then I spied a pitcher of ice water sitting on the picnic table. That would cool Trevor's laughter. I leapt onto the lawn, only to have my high heels sink into the grass and remain there while I tried to take another step. I pitched forward onto the grass, leaving both shoes neatly stuck behind me.

Dragon in the Clouds, a novel for nine- to twelve-year-olds set in the Okanagan Valley, has something for everyone. It has appealing slapstick humour, a dog and horses for animal lovers, adventure for adventure lovers, and problems for those who enjoy ``problem" novels about growing up.

Nikki, the twelve-year-old narrator, is initially resentful when her thirteen-year-old, wheelchair-bound cousin comes to spend the summer with her family. But gradually the cousins become friends, and they make some major strides in growing up over the summer while sharing both normal summer fun and some exciting adventures.

Nikki also has a talent for getting into hilariously silly situations, like her first attempt to wear high-heels, described in the excerpt above. And Trevor becomes a hero and gets involved in wheelchair sports.

This is a fast-paced and well-written book. Some might feel that it tries to combine too many elements, or that it is unrealistic that Nikki, Trevor, and their friends should have so much excitement in one summer. But fiction is almost always at least slightly exaggerated, and the combination of themes makes the story and the characters more realistic and well rounded rather than less so.

Highly recommended.

Irene Gordon is a teacher-librarian at Westdale Junior High in Winnipeg.

Book Review

Telling Tales on the Rim: Folk Tales from around the Pacific Rim.

Naomi Wakan.
Victoria, B.C.: Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1995. 143pp, cloth, $21.95.
ISBN 0-921358-21-0.

Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 8 - 12.
Review by Elinor M. Kelly.

What better way to learn about the people of the Pacific Rim than by hearing their folk-tales! The author has collected and illustrated thirty-four such tales and retold them in an easy, colloquial style.

There are stories of how things began, animal stories, tall tales, and repetitive ones; all brief and amusing. The Canadian items are three tall tales and a story from the Gitksan people.

The note accompanying each story encourages discussion of the moral lesson and the culture concerned. A book-list and a glossary are included.

There are other, more literary and scholarly versions of this sort of story for the serious teller, but these are all easy, lively, and simple to read or to learn and tell, and are great for classroom use.

Highly recommended.

Telling Tales on the Rim: Teacher's Guide.

Naomi Wakan.
Victoria, B.C.: Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1995. 37pp, paper, $9.95.
ISBN 0-921358-22-9.

Review by Elinor M. Kelly.

A teacher's guide to the above collection of stories. The writer feels that there is no better way for students to understanding community living, moral dilemmas, and behaviour, or to expand a child's imaginative powers, than through folk-tales.

For each story in the Telling Tales anthology, there is a brief synopsis, suggested readings, a discussion of the issues raised, ideas for original writing and drawing, and all kinds of activities of the best ``think globally, act locally," sort. And throughout there is a strong concern for right and wrong -- something children think about a lot.

How useful teachers' guides are depends on the individual (and the budget!). Some teachers are more inventive than others. Some need ideas to help get them started; some are pressed for time to do research beforehand. This guide will serve anyone who needs the help well. (Permission to photocopy activity pages for individual classrooms is included.)

Recommended.

Elinor M. Kelly is a retired librarian who lives in Port Hope, Ontario.

Video Review

Apeman
Episode Four: ``Science and Fiction."

Arts & Entertainment Network. 52 minutes.

Distributed as part of the Cable in the Classroom project: 7 - 8 a.m. Eastern time, Friday, September 22.

Grades 7 - 13 / Ages 11 - Adult.
Review by Duncan Thornton.

exerpt:

For many years the thought that's been most difficult for everyone to come to terms with, and agree about, is that evolution hasn't been working toward creating us: we just happened.

This is the final part of Cable in the Classroom's presentation of the A&E series on the development of the human species, APEMAN. (Part Three, ``It's All in the Mind," was reviewed here last week.)

Host Walter Cronkite wraps up the series with a program that considers the history of archaeological thought itself, and how cultural attitudes have moulded our understanding of the fossil record. (I should mention here that though the series treats creation accounts with great respect, it is straightforward about presenting evolution as a scientific fact in roughly the same category of certainty as the orbit of the Earth around the sun.)

This is really an intellectual history then, and so lacks a little of the appeal of previous episodes, but it remains smooth and fascinating. It lays out with excellent examples (early silent films about Neanderthals, for example) how our interpretation of the fossil record has changed with the times.

Thus Neanderthal remains were misinterpreted as being more ape-like and stooped than they actually were because the notion that these relatively recent and brutish creatures could be our ancestors was unappealing. Surely our real ancestors must have been smarter and more human far earlier? Thus the world was ready to be taken in by the famous Piltdown Man hoax, where a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw were fit together to ``prove" we were smart -- if not lovely -- millions of years earlier.

Similarly, the ``Killer Ape" view of early hominids seemed quite plausible, somehow even an explanation, after the savagery of the Second World War. But it now seems clear that early hominids were really the hunted -- prey of sabre-tooth tigers and other large carnivores -- more than the hunters.

Finally, after probing the ways our prejudices have skewed understanding of the fossil record, the last few minutes of ``Science and Fiction" moves to an area even more speculative than pre-history, as anthropologists discuss the plight of this hunter-gatherer species living in a technological world we have not fully adapted to, and speculate on the future of humanity, or its descendants.

It's interesting, but sketchy, and a little disappointing after the promise to examine the subject at the end of Part Three. A better treatment of the problems our technological evolution has led us into could be found in Gwynne Dyer's NFB series The Human Race, (part one of which, ``The Bomb under the World" was reviewed in volume I, number 3 of CM). Actually, showing the Dyer series after APEMAN would almost constitute a good eduction by itself.

But in all, a good finish, showing the intellectual problems behind the story the series has told. Worth setting the VCR for.

Recommended.

Duncan Thornton is the Editor of Canadian Materials.

Video Review

The Face of Tutankhamun
Episode One: ``The Great Adventure."

Arts & Entertainment Network. 49 minutes.

Distributed as part of the Cable in the Classroom project: 7 - 8 a.m. Eastern time, Friday, September 29th. (Episodes 2 through 5 will be broadcast at the same time in succeeding weeks.)

Grades 10 - 13 / Ages 14 - Adult.
Review by Duncan Thornton.

exerpt:

From the discovery of the fantastic burial place of Tutankhamen to a sparsely attended funeral in South London, the career of archaeologist Howard Carter was one of stark contrasts -- between high adventure and deep disappointment; between fame and neglect; a blessing and a curse.

This is the first part of Cable in the Classroom's presentation of the A&E series on King Tut, The Face of Tutankhamun, hosted by the genial and amusing professor Christopher Frayling.

Like APEMAN (reviewed here this week and last), and most A&E materials, it is smoothly made and attractively filmed, and the story of the young king, and how his tomb was found is as fascinating as any in archaeology. But this first episode will really hold the attention only of those already caught by the Tut mystique: it's largely an account of everything in the career of Howard Carter, the archaeologist who made the great discovery, right up to the point when the door is opened.

So it might be smarter to wait to use this one for a resource after showing later episodes that get into the meat of the find, or after using other projects or curriculum items to whet the appetite for Egyptology. But for an interested audience, this has plenty of good material. (It's interesting, for example, to find that as a boy Carter was friends with Lord and Lady Amherst, whose home, Didlington, held the largest collection of Egyptian relics in England; thus Carter was practiced at observing and drawing Egyptian artifacts before he ever left England.)

And there are good asides, like the difference between ancient tomb robbers -- who ruined so many potential finds -- who were interested precious metals, and modern tomb robbers, who are primarily interested in stealing ancient Egyptian art, for which there's a ready market. Of course the Tut find was to hold both art and gold in abundance, though the question of whether breaking into a someone's grave and despoiling it is really all right just as long as, like Indiana Jones, you cry ``It belongs in a museum!" is left unasked.

But there's an awful lot of detail about the early archaeological career of Carter, a man with a good eye and a chip on his shoulder. More about the politics between the early twentieth-century French and English administrations in Egypt than we really want to know, and more details about Carter's early patrons, or more about how exactly he managed to climb into one of the tombs he discovered before the great find of Tut.

So it's a long wait before we reach the climax of this episode, and the start of what should be the really fascinating stuff, the thrilling moment Carter recorded:
At first I could see nothing; the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the candle flame to flicker. But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist -- strange animals, statuettes, and gold! Everywhere, the glint of gold!
 Recommended, with reservations.

Duncan Thornton is the Editor of Canadian Materials.

News

News: Manitoba

Celebrate Manitoba's 125th!

Meet Manitoba's Authors and Illustrators for Young People

Join the celebrations on Sunday, September 24th and meet many of Manitoba's finest authors and illustrators for children and teens.

In attendance will be:
  • Martha Brooks (Travelling On into the Light)
  • Margaret Buffie (My Mother's Ghost)
  • Kady Macdonald Denton (Story of Little Quack)
  • Bob King (Sitting on the Farm)
  • Carol Matas (Primrose Past)
  • Sheldon Oberman (The Always Prayer Shawl)
  • Jamie Oliviero (Som See and the Magic Elephant)
  • Connie Steiner (Paul's New Ears)
  • Diana Wieler (Ran Van the Defender)
Presentations by the authors and illustrators will be conducted from 2:00 to 4:00 pm on Sunday, September 24 at Balmoral Hall School (630 Westminster... Only minutes from downtown Winnipeg!).

Adults $5.00 at the door. Children and teens no charge.

This event has been coordinated and sponsored by the Winnipeg Children's Literature Roundtable, the Winnipeg Public Library, the Canadian Children's Book Centre (Manitoba Branch), and the Manitoba Arts Council. For further information, please contact Cheryl Archer, Regional Liaison Officer for the Canadian Children's Book centre, at (204) 667-7032, or fax (204) 668-1611.

News

What's your favourite Canadian children's book?
Wish you'd drawn the pictures?

NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!

ENTER

The Canadian Children's Book Centre's

ART CONTEST

Celebrate Children's Book Week, November 18-25, and the great art created by Canadian Illustrators, by sharing with us the Canadian children's book you would most like to have illustrated!

Draw a picture from your favourite Canadian children's book
and tell us in your own words why that book is special to you.

You can use coloured pencils, paint, crayons, markers
-whatever you like to draw with!

You can win great prizes:

A visit to your school from one of your favourite Canadian Illustrators, or an original illustration.

Posters ----- Art Supplies ----- Books

Everyone who enters will receive a fabulous full-colour
Book Week poster by artist Barbara Reid

How to Enter

On a separate piece of paper print your name, address, postal code and phone number, and the age category you are in:
  • Age 8 and under
  • Age 8 to 12
  • Age 12 to 18

Remember to tell us which Canadian children's book you've chosen and why.

Send your entry information with your artwork to the Regional Office of the Canadian Children's Book Centre nearest you:

BRITISH COLUMBIA OFFICE
884 Woodgrove Avenue
Delta, B.C.
V4E 3G9

ALBERTA OFFICE
c/o Young Alberta Book Society
Percy Page Centre, 2nd Floor
759 Groat Road
Edmonton, Alberta
T5M 3K6

MANITOBA OFFICE
130 Oakview Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R2K 0R8

NATIONAL OFFICE
The Canadian Children's Book Centre
35 Spadina Road
Toronto, Ontario
M5R 2S9

NOVA SCOTIA OFFICE
628 Yukon Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia
B3L 1E9

Entries must be postmarked by October 15, 1995.

Each office of The Canadian Children's Book Centre
will choose a regional winner in each age category.

From those fifteen prize winning entries, a grand prize will be awarded.

The winner will be flown to Toronto with a member of his or her family to attend the National Launch of Children's Book Week on Saturday, November 18, 1995.

Winners will be notified by telephone no later than November 10, 1995.

Entries can be returned ONLY if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope of the right size.

Copyright © 1995 the Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

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