Banned Book Week 2012

Today is the first day of Banned Books Weeks, as well as its 30th Anniversary.  Its purpose is to celebrate the freedom to read, to read anything we want even if it is unpopular or unorthodox.   Remember May 10, 1933?  The day the Nazis held their now famous book burnings?  Some of my very favorite books went up in flames that day.  And sadly,

Well, part of the reason for the book burning was to make sure the German people would not have access to other ideas beside what the Nazis wanted them to know.  Ironically, they burned the works of Heinrich Heine, a German Jewish poet who had always been much loved by the Germans.  It was Heine who prophetically wrote

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen"

(Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people)

You read that and can immediately see the importance of fighting censorship.  

Thinking about all this, I thought I would include some of my personal WWII favorites that have been banned for one reason or another are

1- Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself by Judy Blume - not her most famous banned book, but Blume says she identifies with Sally more than any other of her characters and this is the most autobiographical  book she has written.

2- Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - written while in hiding from the Nazis, there are people who felt this book was too sexual and pornographic, a viewpoint that never ceases to make my jaw drop when I read it.

3- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - this was banned for using dangerous language.  I read it when I was about 14 and just starting to appreciate adult farce and though I loved this book, I forget to pay attention to the dangerous language.  And yes, I know, I should have posted about it by now and I will at some point (and I will be sure to pay attention to the dangerous language this time around.)

4- Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut - this was recently challenged by a writer in Republic, MO, a fact I find mildly amusing because I actually know someone who lived there.  The reporter felt the language was profane and there was too much explicit sex.

5- A Separate Peace by John Knowles - another high school favorite, this was challenged for have graphic and offensive language and for being a "filthy, trashy sex novel."  Again I forgot to pay attention to that then, and, oh yes, when I reread it.

6- Summer of My German Soldier by Betty Greene - this was challenged because the ending was too pessimistic, too sexually explicit, and for unsuitable language.  Why didn't these challengers say anything about the severe beatings Patty was given by her father or is abusive behavior more acceptable that a few dirty words?

Do yourself a favor and read a banned book this week and

Be sure to visit YouTube to view some of your favorite people "exercising their First Amendment right to read a banned book" at the Virtual Read-Out

Becoming Clementine by Jennifer Niven

It has been almost a year since I reviewed Velva Jean Learns to Fly by Jennifer Niven.  As you may recall, Velva Jean married at 16, learned to drive and at 18, drove from North Carolina to Nashville by herself, leaving her husband and hoping to a sing at the Grand Ol' Opry.  Talk about coming of age.

But then World War II began and VelvaJean found herself in the WASP Program (Women's Airforce Service Pilots.)  Now, in Becoming Clementine, it is June 16, 1944, Velva Jean is 21 and a seasoned pilot.  So seasoned that she has just become the first woman to fly a B-17 Flying Fortress across the Atlantic Ocean to Preswick Airfield, Scotland.  Proud of her accomplishment, she also has an ulterior motive for accepting this challenge - her beloved brother Johnny Clay, a paratrooper, hasn't been heard from since October 18, 1943 and Velva Jean is on a personal mission to find him.

As luck would have it, Preswick has been short of pilots since D-Day, less than two weeks earlier and Velva Jean decides getting to Europe would be the best way to find Johnny Clay, so she convinces all relevant authorities to let her copilot a mission to France.  On July 13, she gets orders to fly to Roun, dropping supplies and a team of OSS agents and returning immediately to base.

Naturally, over France, the plane is hit by enemy ground fire and badly damaged though still flying.  Then, when they finally find the place to make their drop, they realize it has been compromised by Germans.  In an attempt to avoid them and singing "My Darling Clementine" to keep herself calm, the plane nevertheless crashes. Velva Jean's flight crew is killed.  The team of five she was to drop does survive, but, angry and disgusted, they want to leave Velva Jean behind and try to find their own way.

Well, they may have wanted to leave Velva Jean, but she was a woman with a mission and a strong will.  Eventually, the survivors meet up with a member of the resistance and that begins their journey through occupied France with the aid of the Underground, eventually ending in Paris.  Through all this, Velva Jean finds herself more and more attracted to the leader of the OSS team, Émile Gravais and eventually this becomes a mutual attraction.

In Paris, Velva Jean is given a new identity, Clementine Roux, an American who married a Frenchman, unable to return to the US after the war began and her husband was killed.  Now, she is pulled into the mission Gravais and his team are to accomplish - rescuing an important agent code-named Swan being held in a woman's prison in Paris.

Velva Jean alias Clementine's new mission: get herself picked up and sent to the same prison.  Is that what happens?  No, it isn't.  And don't think for a moment she has forgotten about Johnny Clay.

One of the things I found very interesting in Becoming Clementine was how difficult it was for Velva Jean to embrace her new identity as Clementine Roux.  It is a testament to her strong sense of who she is that made Velva Jean want to keep surfacing, even in the face of danger.

I did feel that some of the technical bits about planes and things like that could have used some editing, mostly because I have no idea what I was reading about.  Confession: I thought skipping those bits but actually read on, all the while realizing that my fear of flying was getting the best of me and that some readers would find this fascinating.

Becoming Clementine has something for everyone: excitement, espionage, romance (but not much sex, none explicit), action, but it also has violence, lots of it and cursing, lots of that, so be warned.  It is a gritty, fact-paced novel but I felt it may still have the same level of YA appeal that Velva Jean Learns to Fly had even since it is still a coming of age story of sorts.  After all she had been through, it was hard to realize the Velva Jean is only 22 by the end of this novel.

And yes, there will be a fourth Velva Jean novel in autumn 2013.

This book is recommended for readers age 18+ and sophisticated teens with an interest in WWII
This book was received as an E-ARC from Plume Paperback through Edelweiss

For another review of Becoming Clementine at So Much So Many So Few, followed by a wonderful interview with the author Jennifer Niven

This is book 13 of my Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Historical Tapestry.

Back to Bataan by Jerome Charyn

This is the story of Jack, a lonely 11 year old boy.  To begin with, he is the only scholarship student at the Dutch Masters Day School, for which he must deal with some mean-spirited boys despite being top in his class.   His mother is away most of the time, working for the war effort and trying to cope with being left alone to care for things on the home front.   Poor Jack has also been having a hard time trying to cope with the loss of his father at the Battle of Bataan.  And so, Jack decides the thing for him to do is to drop out of school, enlist in the army and find General MacArthur and go back to Bataan to defeat the Japanese in the south pacific.  

Naturally, Jack doesn't get much support for this idea, but after his girlfriend breaks up with him and finds "love" with the rich, overweight Alfredo, a boy their class, life begins to feel like one abandonment after another.   Then Jack decides to take out his anger by hurting Alfredo"s family.  Afterwards, knowing it was wrong and believing he has committed a major crime, Jack takes the cowardly way out and runs away to Riverside Park rather than facing the consequences.  There, he finds acceptance, and companionship with some homeless led by the a tyrannical leader simply named The Leader.  

But are things really as wonderful as Jack thinks they are living with The Leader and his faithful companions.  Or does Jack find himself in his own personal war, where he must decide if he really is a coward or a brave enough soldier to do the right thing.  

At first, I was attracted to this short novel because it is a YA World War II story.  Next, I have a hard time resisting a novel set in my favorite place, New York City.   In the end, I found Back to Bataan to be a novel that stuck with me for a long time and I ended up with a mixed reaction to the story of Jack.   

First of all, the cover that came with the E-book led me to think it was a story about an old teen, not an 11 year old boy.  So disregard this cover.  Once I wrapped my mind around Jack's age, the story seems more for a younger reader, maybe someone on the cusp of MG/YA.  

Back to Bataan turns out to be a nice coming of age story of a boy seeking an appropriate male role model after he losses his own dad.  And this is a kid who needs guidance.   But everyone seems to fail him, except the one totally unexpected person in the story.  Which was a nice message - sometimes you find that the one who will help and guide you in life is the most unexpected person of all.  
And Charyn, who grew up in the Bronx during the war, gives a very realistic slice of life picture of NYC in the 1940s in Back to Bataan.  Now, I lived here all my live and have been in enough old soda fountain places to know the real deal and Charyn describes them to a tea or should I say an egg cream.  For the uninitiated, try going to Lexington Ave and 83rd Street and enjoy an egg cream at The Lexington Candy Shop, opened in 1925.

And the title Back to Bataan: now I watch that old 1945 John Wayne movie Back to Bataan on enough rainy afternoons with my brother to know that in 1942, after General McArthur was ordered out of Philippines, where Bataan is, he uttered the words "I shall return" and apparently young Jack took these words to heart.   But, it turns out,  he finds his own Bataan right in the heart of New York City.

If you are looking for something different to read about World War II, Jerome Charyn's novel Back to Bataan just may be the book for you.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was obtained from the publisher.

About the author:  Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him “one of the most important writers in American literature.”

New York Newsday hailed Charyn as “a contemporary American Balzac,” and the Los Angeles Times described him as “absolutely unique among American writers.”

Since 1964, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.

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T4 by Anne Clare LaZotte

Paula Becker is 13, deaf and living in a small village in German when the Nazis pass Aktion 4 allowing them to do the unthinkable - "euthanize"disabled persons like Paula in their quest to become a master race and to eliminate the cost of caring for them.

T4 is a short novel in free verse told throughout in Paula's voice:

Hear the voice of the poet!

I see the past, future, and present.

I am deaf, but I have heard 

The beauty of song

And I wish to share it with 

Young readers...

 ...In T4, the facts

About history are true, and

My characters tell the story. 

At first, Paula writes, the Nazis target only people living in institutions and she is left alone.  But in March 1940, the family's  priest comes to the house in the middle of a snow storm to tell them that it is now necessary to get Paula out of the house and into hiding.

The priest takes her to a woman named Stephanie Holderlin, where it is believed that Paula can remain safely hidden.  There, she is able to learn  the official sign language of the deaf.  But early one morning, the Gestapo knock on the door.   They had been informed that a disabled person was living there.  They search the house, but do not find Paula.  Stephanie finally manages to get rid of them, but Paula must be moved to another safe place immediately.

This time, she is taken to a homeless shelter run by a Lutheran priest.  There, she meets Homeless Kurt.  Gradually, he and Paula become friends and after a while, they decide to travel to Berlin together.  On the way, they discover seven people living in the woods, Jews who are hiding from the Nazis.  Realizing they cannot really make it to Berlin without being caught, they return to the shelter.

In 1941, the killings under T4 'offically' ended but it still wasn't safe for people like Paula and Kurt until the end of the war.  Unofficially, Paula writes, the killings continued.

When the war was finally over, the people responsible for T4 were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, with the exception of Dr. Philipp Bouhler, who was the head of the program and who committed suicide.

In its simplicity, LaZotte's story poem manages to convey some of the horror that Nazi Germany held for some people, but also some of the kindness that could still be found there among the people, reminding us again that not everyone was a Nazi and many didn't support their policies, like T4.

The author, Ann Clare LaZotte can well understand what it would be like to be in Paula's shoes, since she herself is also deaf.  She clearly feels very strongly about T4 and it shows throughout in her poetry. And she also knows more than a little something about German poetry: Stephanie Holderlin was named for Frederich Holderlin, a German lyric poet and two of the Jewish children that Paula and Homeless Kurt meet int he woods  are named for Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, two of the greatest poets of the Holocaust and whose works I would definitely recommend reading some of when you have finished reading T4.

This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was purchased for my personal library.

More information on Hitler's T4 Program can be found here.

Happy Chinese

This past summer, my Kiddo came home from China to visit for about 2 months before moving to San Francisco.  During that two months, we all went on vacation to the Jersey shore (no, not THAT Jersey shore, we were much further south, but 10 miles north of Cape May.)

So, while we were there enjoying the sun, the surf and the beautiful weather we were lucky enough to have, Kiddo started getting homesick for China.  She remedied this by watching a program on her Ipad called Happy Chinese.  

What is Happy Chinese, you might ask?  Well, it is a kid-friendly program designed to teach the viewer Chinese and something about Chinese life and culture.  It is made in China, but there are English subtitles.  And from what I have been told, there are lots of episodes.  And, WOW, it is readily available on YouTube.  

Why do I bring up Happy Chinese?  Take a look at this photo I took:

On a beautiful summer's day, there are five people, 2 ten year old girls, a 12 year old boy, a 6 year old boy, and a 24 year old Kiddo, crowded on a bed, all watching Happy Chinese on one little Ipad and laughing like crazy.  

They were hooked in Happy Chinese!  They loved it.  They couldn't get enough.  

Meanwhile, adults (among them a reading teacher) looked on in dismay as all those novels and storybooks lovingly chosen for vacation fell by the wayside.  But I am happy to say, the Happy Chinese obsession last only a few days and the kids were back to their usual activities and books.  They still watched, but not so compulsively.  And so all the adults relearned a good lesson: when you have children who love to read, they will always return to the books if you just give them time.

Oh, by the way, at the end of two weeks, the kids were all starting to say things to each other in Chinese so all was not lost.  FYI: Two of these kids are now planning to pick Mandarin as their foreign language choice in school.

Curious about what may have hooked these kids? You can check out Happy Chinese here and lots more episodes on YouTube: