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Volume 1 Number 3
June 30, 1995
Share a Tale: Canadian Stories to Tell to Children and Young Adults.
Compiled by Irene Aubrey and Louise McDiarmid.
Ottawa: Canadian Library
Association, 1995. 222pp, paper, $29.95.
ISBN 0-88802-270-02. CIP.
Review by Dave Jenkinson
excerpt:
Large Mosquitoes
Collected by Michael Taft
Informant: Katherine Wood
Telling time: 30 seconds
Suitability: 11 years and up
Mistaking a large mosquito for an airplane will be a familiar joke to many in northern and western Canada. W.O. Mitchell tells a similar story about a grasshopper in Jake and the Kid.
There was a trapper at Fort Nelson. And he got up one morning and he found a mosquito trying on his socks. They say that when the American Army first came to Whitehorse, they had planes coming through that were refuelling. They had five hundred gallons pumped into a mosquito before they found it wasn't a plane.
-- from ``Large Mosquitoes I" originally printed in Tall Tales of British Columbia by Michael Taft, copyright © 1983 Provincial Archives of British Columbia.
A companion volume to Storytellers' Rendezvous (CLA, 1979) and
Storytellers' Encore (CLA, 1984), previously compiled by Irene Aubrey,
Louise McDiarmid, and Lorrie Andersen, Share a Tale offers 103 stories and
poems which are to be shared not just with the children's audience of the
earlier volumes, but also with young adults, a young adult being defined as
someone over 14. The present compilers, both experience children's
librarians and storytellers, have included a fine introduction which cleary
lays out how the new book differs from its predecessors; in addition to
aiming fora broader audience, the compilers have used slightly different
categories and included a new section, ``Tall Tales," which inclues
history, biography, and reminiscenses.
Specifically, users will find:
- 21 ``Anecdotes and Tall Tales"
- 8 poems in ``Poetry"
- 19 ``Eerie Tales"
- 9 ``Modern Tales"
- 21 ``True Tales"
- 18 ``Traditional Tales"
- 7 ``Tales from the First Nations"
The stories, a few of which are original texts appearing in print
for the first time, are all still ``child-tested," and the compilers
continue to offer both suggested age levels for the stories plus ``Telling
Times," which range from as little as 30 seconds to as much as 16 minutes.
The book also includes ``Name/Title" and ``Subject" indexes, plus a brief
bibliograhy and directory.
One other significant change from previous volumes is the books's
format. The large 8 1/2" x 11" size is gone; the new book is a comfortable
6" x 9", and the text is printed in an easy-on-the-eyes green.
A very small quibble: the compilers say that the book's contents
are for ``storytellers of every kind, from professionals to parents telling
bedtime stories." Certainly a professional audience will be able to use the
contents as presented, but parents, plus many classroom teachers whose
professional preparation has not included a storytelling course, would
benefit from a few hints on how to begin to make a story one's own, so that
it can be told with confidence. Though a number of titles listed in the
bibliograhy would readily help any beginning storyteller, Aubrey and
McDiarmid could still have provided a quick introduction to the art of
storytelling.
Highly Recommended.
Grades 6-13 /Ages 11 and up
Professional Collection.
Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University
of Manitoba.
Volume 1 Number 3
June 30, 1995
excerpt:
Flawless, it cast no shadow. Fascinated by the glass ball's rock-like
weight yet near invisibility, Josef experimented. He left it for three
weeks in the marble font of holy water in the Church of the Silent Virgin,
and it was still there on the fourth when he reached in. He set it with a
handful of barley in the yard to observe the reaction of the crows. But the
goat swallowed it. Josef chased the animal all day. The ball found its way
through the labyrinth of the goat's intestines and plopped out unharmed.
Josef wondered if perhaps it was some kind of egg. He placed it in the
forest, then hid and watched. But no creature emerged from the trees to
claim it. Finally Josef realized it might be a crystal ball. He set it in
the middle of a ring of candles, but he did not see the future, only his
own face reflected in the glassy flames.
Grant Buday's second novel is entitled Under Glass partly because
the protagonist is obsessed with glass objects -- an obsession that begins
as an up-lifting devotion but soon transforms into a crushing paranoia --
and partly because the narrator examines the vagaries of this obsession so
minutely that the protagonist sometimes seems a fascinating specimen caught
beneath the lens of a scientist's probing microscope. Near the beginning of
the novel, this protagonist -- Josef Bodner -- demonstrates a similar
desire to probe the secret of a mystery when he is given a ball of glass,
the object described in the excerpt above, an object that in many ways
represents Josef himself.
Throughout the novel, the author succeeds in maintaining this
fusion of Silent Virgins and greedy goats, of garlic and sapphires, of the
mundane and the unearthly. Josef's wife, Moira, for example, grows plump
and thick after marriage, and yet -- like Tennyson's Lady of Shallot -- she
learns to weave marvellous tapestries which -- like Homer's Penelope -- she
unweaves after completing them; likewise, the disappearance of Josef's
mother renders Moira incapable of speech, and yet at night in her sleep she
sings beautiful, meaningless sounds. The characters seem to move through a
world where objects and people around them seem sometimes fraught with
allegorical significance and other times devoid of any meaning whatsoever.
In fact, the strength of the novel is that it treads this line between
romance and realism so intriguingly; in this regard Under Glass
reminds me of Melville's Redburn or of Hardy's Jude the
Obscure.
If the novel has a weakness, it is that the plot -- only towards
the end -- sometimes seems to be driven by a need to fulfil some
pre-ordained design; as a result, the characters become a little less
significant and less interesting. When this happens to narratives, they end
up like Quicksand, an old movie starring Mickey Rooney that begins
wonderfully but ends up merely proving a point. Fortunately, this is not
the fate of Under Glass; Buday seems a little heavy handed at times
in directing his plot, but over all he tells a compelling, character-driven
story.
Although the novel is not targeted specifically for young adults,
it would work well as part of a high school literature curriculum. The
novel's sustained glass imagery would provide many opportunities for
interpretation, and Josef's convincingly presented obsession would provoke
much discussion.
Recommended.
Grades 10-13 / Ages 15 and up
Mark Morton teaches in the English Department and Centre for Academic
Writing at the University of Winnipeg. Last year he implemented a writing
course at Balmoral Hall High School, joined the board of the Manitoba
Writer's Guild, and began writing an etymological dictionary of cooking
words to be published by Blizzard Publishing.
p>
Volume 1 Number 3
June 30, 1995
The Bomb under the World.
Part One of The Human Race:
A Species at the Crossroads.
National Film Board, 1995. VHS, 51 minutes, $26.95.
Closed-Captioned. (Four
video series set $99.00.)
Review by Duncan Thornton
excerpt:
The experiment of civilization has been a runaway success, but we now
risk undermining our whole position as a species. Human beings are not an
all-powerful life-form that's going to destroy the planet you know; we
shouldn't give ourselves airs. We're simply another highly successful
species that's approaching the point where the usual environmental controls
kick in. And the usual environmental controls, I'm afraid, are quite harsh:
mass die-offs are commonplace and extinctions are not unknown.
What we need now is a new kind of human being who's adapted to living
in a global culture many billions strong. A global villager who can treat
all the planet's people as neighbours. That's a tall order, but we human
beings evolve by changing our culture. We can change the way we think and
behave in mere decades. Which is just as well, because if we don't move
fast, we will be very sorry that we ever invented civilization.
In The Human Race, author and historian Gwynne Dyer, best known for
his NFB-CBC series War, turns from examining the dangers of human
conflict to the broader difficulties inherent in the simple size of the
human population, in the way we organize societies, and in our relationship
with the environment.
In The Bomb under the World, the first video in the four-part
series, Dyer takes India as an example of the consequences of the conquest
of the developing world by Western-style consumerism. He opens with a
metaphor that lurks beneath the rest of the film, growing more ominous all
the time. We see the Bombay stock exchange in February, 1993, on a day when
neither the film crew nor the traders on the chaotic floor (where India
chases capitalist growth) knew that a terrorist bomb would explode within
the hour, killing several people and destroying the exchange.
It's an apt symbol of the dangers of the pursuit of progress --
cultural, economic, and environmental dangers -- that Dyer examines. While
the West has managed to achieve a relatively happy and stable industrial
society, as he points out, it was at the cost of two hundred years or so of
Dickensian misery. Now that the vastly more populous developing world has
committed itself to playing catch-up, what will the reckoning for the whole
planet be?
Throughout, the film moves deftly from personal stories -- a family of
India's potter's caste, none of whose children will become potters (cheap,
mass-produced containers are now available in every Indian village) -- to
the larger story of how business is consciously creating a consumer culture
in India through both old-fashioned advertising (an elephant-led parade),
and sophisticated television marketing. And Dyer always returns to the
larger questions: what the environmental and human cost of the change
underway will be, in whose interests the change is happening, and what
values are being lost along the way. Because the startling, unprecedented
rate and planetary scale of that change make it easy to overlook the
dangers it brings -- the ``bomb under the world."
The narration is thoughtful, and carried off in Dyer's usual personal,
casual, and lucid style, and the visuals are constantly fresh and
absorbing. India provides a wonderful setting for any film-maker, and the
contrasts and changes the camera finds are striking and quickly paced (my
favourite is the woman who carries a water vessel on her head in the
traditional way, as she walks a path atop a giant water-pipe that brings
water to the homes of India's wealthy class by very convenient but
untraditional taps).
Still, Dyer's subject is a mammoth one, and there are some frustrating
omissions and simplifications. He treats the population shift from agrarian
villages to crowded cities, for example, as a phenomenon of industrial
capitalism, whereas in fact there has been a steady migration into cities
from the countryside since at least the middle ages, simply because, for
all their risks and misery, cities provide a chance to improve one's lot
that the countryside does not.
And it's odd that Dyer omits to consider that, on the whole,
environmental trends in the West have been improving in the last decades --
if we can export our recent discovery of effective environmental regulation
with the skill we've been exporting the doctrines of growth and
consumption, we'll be well on our way to a solution.
But the video is both engrossing and thought-provoking, and raises many
questions that generally go unasked as we rush towards a Benetton
world-culture.
Recommended
Duncan Thornton is the editor of CM magazine.
Volume 1 Number 3
June 30, 1995
Mister Christie's 1995, 6th Annual Book Awards
7 Years and Under
English Short List:
- Josepha: A Prairie Boy's Story
Jim McGugan, Author, Murray Kimber, Illustrator
Red Deer College Press
- Hound without a Howl
Deborah Turney-Zagwyn, Author/Illustrator
Orca
- Gifts
Jo Ellen Bogart, Author, Barbara Reid, Illustrator
Scholastic
Winner:
Thor
W.D. Valgardson, Author, Ange Zhang, Illustrator
Groundwood Books
French Short List
- Un prof extra
Dorothée Roy, Author, Dominique Jolin, Illustrator
édition du Raton Laveuer
- Caillow-Le cauchamard-Non j'ai dit non!
Nichole Nadeau, Author, Héléne Desputeaux, Illustrator
- Proverbes et animaux 1 & 2
Michel Luppens, Cécile Gagnon, Roxane Paradis, Lyne Meloche.
édition du Raton Laveuer
Winner:
Mon chien est un éléphant
Rémy Simard, Author, Héléne Desputeaux, Illustrator
Annick Press
8 to 11 Years
English Short List:
- Summer of the Mad Monk
Cora Taylor, Author
Greystone/Douglas and McIntyre
- Winner:
A Pioneer Story
Barbara Greenwood, Author, Heather Collins, Illustrator
Kids Can Press
French Short List:
- Xavier et ses péres
Pierre Desrocher
édition Pierre Tisseyre
- La nouvelle maitresse
Dominique Demers
Québec-Amérique Jeunesse
- Fais un voeu Nazaire
Jasmine Dubé
La Court échelle
Winner:
La parc aux sortiléges
Denis Coté
La Court échelle
12 years and Up
English Short List:
- Golden Girl
Gillian Chan
Kids Can Press
- Travelling on into the Light
Martha Brooks
Groundwood
- Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me
Julie Johnston
Lester
Winner:
Out of the Blue
Sarah Ellis
Groundwood
French Short List:
- Ils dansent dans la tempéte
Dominique Demers
Québec-Amérique Jeunesse
- La lecture di diable
Reynald Cantin
Québec-Amérique Jeunesse
- Destins
Marc Laberge
Québec-Amérique Jeunesse
Winner:
L'étoile a pleuré rouge
Raymond Plante
Boréal Junior
p>
Volume 1 Number 3
June 30, 1995
Advertising Feature
Share A Tale
Canadian Stories to Tell to Children and
Young Adults
Aubrey, Irene and McDiarmid, Louise
Canadian Library Association, 1995. $29.95
ISBN 0-88802-270-0
- An exciting new collection of Canadian stories compiled especially for storytellers, librarians, parents, and teachers.
- Over 100 multicultural tales carefully selected with storytelling in mind. Each story has been tested for age suitability and popularity and indicates approximate telling time and recommended age
- Tales, legend and lore that capture the imagination and the spirit of Canada.
Just print out the handy form below to receive your copy.
Yes, please send me _______ copy(ies) @ 29.95 of
Share a Tale: Canadian Stories to Tell to Children and Young Adults
I enclose a cheque in the amount of ______________
( Add $4.00 handling. Cost of shipping per book $3.00. Please add 7% GST. )
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Order from: Canadian Library Association
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Ottawa, Ontario
K2P 1L5
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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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From the Editor