Sunday Funnies #34: Happy Birthday, Superman!

It's Leap Year! And February 29th is the generally accepted date of Superman's Birthday, and I'm not even going to guess at how old that makes him. Instead, I thought I would share one of my favorite Superman stories, called "I Sustain the Wings." It's about the Training Aviation Cadets program that  was done at Yale University. It's purpose was to train officers for the Army Air Corps, but a rival newspaper claims the program was too soft. So Perry White, head of the Daily Planet, sends Clark Kent undercover to check it out: 

Superman Vol. 1, No 25

Nov. Dec. 1943

Written by Mort Weisinger, pencils and inks by Fred Ray

FYI: Sustineo Alas is the motto of the USAAF and means I Sustain the Wings or Keep 'Em Flying. I Sustain the Wings was  also an big band/jazz composition written by Captain Glenn Miller, John Chalmers, Private Sol Meyer, and Master Sergeant Norman Leyden in 1943. It was the name and theme song of Miller's popular radio broadcast from September 1943 to June 1944, where he conducted the Army Air Force Band. 

Instructions Not Included: How a Team of Women Coded the Future by Tami Lewis Brown & Debbie Loren Dunn, illustrated by Chelsea Beck

Instructions Not Included: How a Team of Women Coded the Future

by Tami Lewis Brwon & Debbie Loren Dunn,

illustrated by Chelsea Beck

Disney-Hyperion, 2019, 64 pages

Back in August, I reviewed a fun book called Cape (The Secret League of Heroes), in which three new friends discover they have superpowers and come to the rescue of the women who were working on a top-secret programmable computer called ENIAC in Philadelphia, in the hope that it could help win the war.

Now, in Instructions Not Included, meet three of the real women behind the computers that are so much a part of our daily lives. They are Betty Snyder, Jean Jennings, and Kay McNulty - three very different women from very different backgrounds with one thing in common - they loved math.

Which is how they found themselves in a secret lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where a hundred women called "computers" worked 24/7 solving math problems, after answering a January 20, 1942 ad in the newspaper. They were trying to figure out such things as which was the most effective angle to aim a gun and when was the best time to launch a bomb using pencils, paper and adding machines. Their goal - to win the war.

At the same time, upstairs even more top secret work was happening. A machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC for short, had just been built, and now it needed to make it work. Six women, including Betty, Jean, and Kay, found themselves in the upstairs computer room.

Their job now was to create a code that could be understood by ENIAC using mathematics so it could do the calculations that the women downstairs were working on but more quickly and correctly. Did they succeed? Yes, they did and in fact, if you read the Author's Note in the back matter, you will discover all the innovations that they went on to make in the burgeoning world of computers.

Instructions Not Included is the kind of picture book I wish I had had when I was teaching IT to young kids. What a difference it might have made in my classroom. I know it is a simplistic look at the contributions of the women who worked on ENIAC and paved the way for today's computers, but it is also a book that could be used to inspire young kids, especially girls, to think about mathematics in a different way. What counts is that all the important points about the work of Betty, Jean, Kay, and all the women who worked on this secret project are covered. And they are shown as having more interests than math - Betty played the double bass, Jean loved baseball and Kay just was good at everything she did.

The colorful, stylized illustrations have a very 1940s feel to them, and each of the women is seen dressed in the same color in each illustration, and where they are seen working on ENIAC - Betty is red, Kay is green, Jean is yellow. This not only individualizes the women, but it also helps the reader tell they apart, and, interestingly, works to show each women's movements, giving the illustrations a sense of motion.

As a picture book for older readers, Instructions Not Included is an important addition to the ever growing STEM/STEAM body of literature and is an inspiring book that should be used liberally by parents, teachers, and librarians.

You can find a very useful Educator Guide courtesy of the publisher, Disney-Hyperion, HERE

This book is recommended for readers age 6+
This book was borrowed from the NYPL

On Snowden Mountain by Jeri Watts

It didn't take long once WWII began for 12-year-old Ellen Hollingsworth's father to join the army and go off to fight Hitler in Europe, leaving his daughter to care for their home and her catatonically depressed mother. Now, it's September 1942 and Ellen has run out of money, food, and the kindness of neighbors. Not knowing what else to do, she writes her dreaded, estranged Aunt Pearl about her circumstances and the next thing Ellen knows is that she and her mother  are on a train out of Baltimore heading to the tiny town of Snowden, Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to live with her aunt.

It's a whole new world for Ellen, from the lack of electricity and the outhouse at Aunt Pearl's to the small one room school held in an abandoned church. It's there that she meets Russell Armentrout, a boy of about 15 who seldom shows up at school, who still doesn't know his alphabet, and who always smells like skunk. Ellen and Russell take an instant dislike to each other after he calls her mother crazy.

But when Aunt Pearl sends Ellen to the Armentrout home with a basket of food, she witnesses Russell's home, his "beaten down" mother, who used to be Ellen's mother's best friend, and his abusive father. After this incident, Ellen and Russell begin a tension-filled friendship. But as they begin learn the truths about each others home life, a real friendship develops.

Because her father used the war as an excuse to run away, leaving his daughter and depressed wife behind, I decided to review On Snowden Mountain here. It is not a war story per se, but a home front tale that is definitely influenced by the fact of war.

The main theme of this coming-of-age story is the unfolding of Ellen's growth as a person. Ellen arrives at Snowden a judgmental city girl who believes herself to be above the people there and who is determined not to make any friends. But she is also a girl who is plagued with doubts about reaching out to her aunt for help, who fears that she may be prone to the same kind of depression as her mother, and who is angry at her father for leaving her with his responsibilities. But as she learns about her mother's past and witnesses acts of quiet, unpretentious kindness on Snowden Mountain, and in her exchange of letters with her father, Ellen learns to face her fears, and accept that there are things she just can't change.

Two things really impressed me while I read. First, though downplayed compared to Ellen's story, there are lots of details about Aunt Pearl and the things she does to help provide the community with needed food, much of which she cans herself, and clothing, while still caring for her sister.

Second, as a story about a family in crisis, taken the away from the hustle and bustle of a big city to the much slower moving country, it accentuates the kind of loving patience needed to help Ellen's mother with her severe depression, and undertaken not just by her sister Pearl, but by her old best friend, Hannah Armentrout.

On Snowden Mountain is a short novel that deals with some very serious themes, including family, mental illness, physical and mental abuse, and alcoholism and does it with empathy, and making it is a novel not to be missed.

Thinking about reading this with your class? You can find a useful Discussion Guide courtesy of the publisher, Candlewick Press, HERE

This book is recommended for readers age 10+
This book was an ARC gratefully received from Candlewick Press

We Had To Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport by Deborah Hopkinson

With the same attention to detail and straightforward writing style readers have come to appreciate from her, Deborah Hopkinson looks at how the rescue operation of Jewish children from Nazi occupied Europe, known as the Kindertransport, was able to saved approximately 10,000 young people.

In the first half of this fascinating history, Hopkinson details Hitler's rise to power and ties its impact into the lives of a number of Jewish families. Most people don't realize just how widespread anti-Semitic feelings were in 1930s Germany, but as Hitler became more popular, as his followers increased, many Jews who had believed themselves to be as German as their non-Jewish neighbors began to experience a definite change. For example, Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps for no reason, prohibitions were enacted so that Jews in civil service lost their jobs, Jews couldn't go to the movies or visit a park, Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend German schools. But on November 9, 1938, when Nazis attacked and ransacked Jewish homes, business and synagogues, destroying everything in their path and arresting around 30,000 men, many Jews realized things were not going to get better.

You may wonder why didn't Jews leave long before Kristallnacht? She points out that many Jews believed they could ride out the tempest of anti-Semitism sweeping Germany, that it would soon blow over. But when many realized they had waited too long, and emigration became almost impossible as borders in other countries began to close, a chance for some parents to save their children opened up. Shortly after Kristallnacht, a plan was put in place in Great Britain to get "unaccompanied children up to the age of seventeen" out of Nazi occupied countries without the usual red tape. (pg. 142) The children were chosen from applications that were filled out by parents, often without the child's knowledge. I cannot imagine the level of courage it must have taken for these parents to send their children into the unknown, but I can certainly understand why they were willing to take the chance to get them out of harm's way.

To help the reader fully understand what the Kindertransport was, why parents would be willing to send their children away to live with strangers, most of whom were not even Jewish, Hopkinson uses the personal stories of a number of participants, a cohort group of different ages and backgrounds. Through interviews, written memoirs, and oral histories, as well as an abundance of relevant secondary material, the individual stories unfold, engrossing and increasing the readers understanding of just what these children lived through, before leaving Germany, what it was like traveling to England, and their adjustment to life in a different country, most without knowing even a little English.

Once again, Hopkinson has taken a complicated historical event and made it completely accessible to her young readers. And as if the stories of these Kindertransport children aren't compelling enough, she has included an abundance of secondary resources of readers. There are copious photographs throughout the book, as well as sidebars inviting readers to "Stop, Listen, Remember." Back matter includes information about the people in the book, the;  Survivors, the Rescuers, and the Historians; a Timeline; a Glossary; Look, Listen, Remember: Resources to Explore; a Bibliography; Newspapers, Articles, and Websites for more investigation; and of course, Source Notes.

I've read a lot of books about the Kindertransport, fiction and nonfiction, but this is by far one of the best. As Hopkinson parallels the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism with the lives of Jewish families who ultimately chose to send their children to England, knowing they might never see each other again, she neither romanticizes nor loses her authorial objective eye so that a more complete picture of this little known but no less important historical event emerges.

The Kindertransport lasted only a short amount of time, from December 2, 1938 to May 14, 1940. The stories are harrowing, heartbreaking and although they took place 80 years ago, they couldn't be more timely for today's world, as people are yet again flirting with fascism.

I can't recommend We Had To Be Brave highly enough.

This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was an ARC gratefully received from the author.