INFODAD.COM: Family-Focused Reviews

(++++) SOME GOREY, SOME GORGEOUS

2009-11-25T08:44:00.000-05:00

Edward Gorey: The New Poster Book. Pomegranate. $19.95.

Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey. Text by Karen Wilkin. Pomegranate. $29.95.

The Blue Aspic. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

Sierra Club Holiday Cards: Backyard Birds in Winter. Pomegranate. $15.

Dard Hunter Design Holiday Cards. Pomegranate. $15.

Dard Hunter Folio Notecards. Pomegranate. $9.95.

Gustav Klimt Thank You Notes. Pomegranate. $8.95.

The winter holidays are a wonderful time to immerse yourself in art, from the stolid to the offbeat to the commercial. In the “offbeat” arena is the art of Edward Gorey (1925-2000), which remains difficult to categorize nearly a decade after Gorey’s death. Gorey was a master of what may be called the amusingly macabre, although even that description does not quite fit everything he created. Gorey fans who hope to make other Gorey fans – not always easy to do, since his highly detailed art is at the service of some very strange storytelling indeed – might want to consider giving Edward Gorey: The New Poster Book as a seasonal gift. This wonderful oversize collection of 30 Gorey illustrations, 18 of them in color, includes such delights as “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” a group of adorable (if sober-faced) youngsters standing beneath a huge umbrella held by Death (or a reasonable facsimile thereof); a Gorey version of a “Little Nemo in Slumberland” scene, captioned “Donald imagined things,” showing a small boy sitting up in bed, gazing quizzically at a gigantic green prehistoric-looking dragon-and-eel-like thing that is staring at him; a crow (or raven?) warning “Beware of this and that” as two children perch, facing in opposite directions, on a very angular bicycle that looks like a Salvador Dali creation; and much more. Gently weird and gently amusing, these posters make a wonderful introduction to Gorey’s visual delights.

For something more in-depth, read Karen Wilkin’s text in the very handsome Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, a book packed both with Gorey’s crosshatched-ink art and with understanding of it. Wilkin, a friend of Gorey and an expert in his work, offers insights into the artist’s life and times as well as a sampling of illustrations that Gorey made for other writers, for theatrical productions and even as costume designs. Some material here has not been published before (the book originated as an accompaniment to the first retrospective of Gorey’s work, held this year at the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania). The sketches, doodles, typewritten manuscripts and other offbeat features neatly complement the many finished drawings (more than 175 of them), and the book as a whole makes a marvelous tribute to an artist whose work always smelled faintly of Edwardian drawing rooms, with a whiff of the macabre throughout – but without ever reveling in horror or gore. How Gorey managed to make tragedy somehow amusing remains an unanswered question even after a cover-to-cover perusal of Elegant Enigmas (whose title, by the way, is a wonderfully apt description of Gorey’s works).

For a full if not-quite-fatal plunge into Gorey’s world, nothing beats immersion directly into one of his books, and The Blue Aspic, originally released in 1968, is a gem of its kind (incidentally showing, on the cover, what certainly seems to be a severed head immersed in blue aspic). As so often in Gorey’s work, the title has nothing to do with the story (well, except for that cover picture): this is a tale straight out of the overdramatized world of opera, and it is about opera, starting with a mysterious murder that elevates a singer to world-class status and ending with a murder-suicide and having a variety of deaths and other unpleasantnesses in between. Yet none of this is frightening and none of it wallows in grotesquerie – Gorey’s illustrations here, perhaps inevitably, are reminiscent of the work he did in creating the animated opening for the PBS series, Mystery. The tremendous attention to detail in the drawings, and the apparent inattention to writing and plot (there are many implications but no solutions here), combine in Gorey’s inimitable manner and will delight those willing to submit themselves to his oddly skewed and oddly endearing work.

But even though Christmas and other winter holidays occur at the darkest time of the year, Gorey may be too dark for many people – and there are plenty of more-cheerful ways to mark the season. Cards are one of the delightful traditions that do just that, and there are some truly merry and bright ones available this year. One standout among the many beautifully made ones from Pomegranate is Backyard Birds in Winter, a Sierra Club offering of 20 cards printed with soy-based ink on recycled paper, with each of the four designs showing a bird whose plumage is set off beautifully against a winter scene: Eastern bluebird, Northern cardinal (two different views) and black-capped chickadee. The cardinal is a tradition of its own on winter-holiday cards, but the star of this show is the Eastern bluebird, whose white, gold and blue feathers look simply gorgeous against the red of highbush cranberries touched by a coating of ice. Each card has the entirely appropriate “Season’s Greetings” message inside.

For holiday art with the same printed message but of a different visual type, the Dard Hunter Design Holiday Cards offer four lovely studies in seasonal reds and greens, coupled with intricate black-and-white designs. William Joseph “Dard” Hunter (1883-1966) created stained-glass and other windows, title pages for books, and more, and the simplicity and elegance of these 20 cards (five each of four designs) clearly reflect the Arts and Crafts movement of which Hunter was a part. Although far from the best-known name among the many artists whose work graces Pomegranate’s holiday cards, Hunter offers great charm and highly attractive designs that are overtly secular but also hint at the sacred messages that permeate the season. In fact, Hunter’s designs transcend any specific season (although their floral components speak always of spring) – witness the lovely Dard Hunter Folio Notecards, which are blank inside and make a beautiful gift anytime. Pomegranate’s folio of 10 cards includes five each of two 1906 Hunter designs for stained-glass windows. In one, purple is the predominant color, along with a closely related blue and some green; in the other, red, green and yellow splashes of color appear in an attractive open-work black-and-white design. These cards are for any occasion, and make any occasion a little more special.

And for an occasion where the main message is “thanks,” gift-givers should consider the set of 10 thank-you cards featuring a design from a frieze created by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). These cards are just the right size for a quick thank-you message (3½ x 5 inches), and their multicolored swirls and other geometric shapes nicely complement any special occasion – and compliment any recipient. Pomegranate actually offers thank-you cards for just about any artistic taste – there are even some featuring Edward Gorey’s work, specifically an illustration of a cat on a unicycle – and all Pomegranate cards are well-made and attractive. So if Klimt is not to your taste, you can surely find something that is. But do take a look at Klimt’s elegance of style and lovely color blends. You may consider these cards just the right way to say thanks, or may find the box of them just the right gift to present to someone who could well turn around and send back one of the cards to thank you for being so thoughtful!

(++++) PARTICIPATORY PLEASURES

2009-11-25T08:41:00.000-05:00

The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow. By Andy Griffiths. Illustrated by Terry Denton. Feiwel and Friends. $14.99.

Baking Kids Love. By Sur La Table with Cindy Mushet. Photography by Maren Caruso. Andrews McMeel. $20.

Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars. By the editors of Klutz and Bonnie Burton. Klutz. $16.95.

There is so much for parents to do at this time of year that kids can sometimes get left behind, except of course when it is time for eating food and opening presents. Here, though, are three delightful ways for kids to take part in adventures of their own – or ones they can share. For young readers, ages 4-8, The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow will be exactly the sort of book they want to read by themselves. Andy Griffiths, an Australian children’s-book author who has clearly figured out how to channel Seussian cadences, here produces 10 very simple rhymed stories that are an absolute hoot to read. “Big Fat Cows,” which is more or less the title story, starts things off just perfectly: “It’s raining big fat cows today. How many cows? It’s hard to say. A big cow here. A fat cow there. Big fat cows are EVERYWHERE!” Abetted by wonderfully funny drawings by Terry Denton, who often collaborates with him, Griffiths lurches delightfully all over the place – from cows in space to one that really does explode (twice, in fact). And then there are the tales of “Noel the Mole,” “Klaus the Mouse,” “Willy the Worm” (who has trouble at squirm school), “Keith, Ed, and Daisy” (who make unusual choices in clothing), “Lumpy-head Fred,” “Brave Dave,” “Ruth’s Super Scooter,” “Mike’s Bike” (which has a VERY BIG SPIKE), and “Somewhere Less Spiky” (that is, away from Mikey). The jaunty rhythms will keep even reluctant readers interested in taking part in the book: “And that’s the whole story of the mole called Noel – he’s a hole-dwelling, coal-eating, rock-and-roll mole!” And the pictures go wonderfully well with the words – in fact taking over altogether for several pages in the “Mike’s Bike” tale. The Big Fat Cow That Goes Kapow is a great way to get kids to read, instead of insisting that you read to them (although it’s really fun for adults to read the book out loud, too).

Baking Kids Love invites participation of a different kind. Here, the cookware-store chain Sur La Table and Cindy Mushet, a professional pastry chef and baking teacher, have gotten together dozens of really delicious baked-goods recipes that kids can handle with adult supervision – or, for older children, on their own. Cookies, pies, cakes, quick breads and more permeate the pages of this spiral-bound, lie-flat book, which is easy enough for first-time bakers (it even explains how to measure ingredients and grease pans) but offers plenty of creativity for more-advanced young bakers. Sprinkled throughout are wonderful photos of kids enjoying the results of the recipes, plus quotations that are almost, if not quite, as much fun as eating all these delicious things: “When I bite into one [of the chocolate-chip cookies], I’m in cookie heaven, surrounded by more cookies that have little halos and wings, sitting on clouds.” Meringue crispies, chocolate toffee bars, jumbleberry pie, vanilla scones, pumpkin gingerbread, chocolate-caramel cheesecake, cinnamon rolls, chocolate chunk bread pudding – just the names of the foods are mouth-watering (and these are only some of the recipes). Interspersed with the step-by-step directions are sections called “playing around,” showing how much fun you can have by varying elements of recipes. Baking Kids Love is a book adults will love, too – not only for the delicious results but also for the chance to take part in some truly yummy projects with some sure-to-be-delighted children.

For kids who express their artistry outside the kitchen, the new Klutz invitation to Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars offers plenty of guidance and, like a good recipe book, plenty of opportunities for experimentation, too. Klutz – now part of the Scholastic family – has long specialized in well-made “books-plus” offerings, in which the book itself is only part of the package. This time, the guidance on character drawing comes packaged with blank paper, tracing paper and just the right tools to follow instructions and eventually go beyond them: mechanical pencil, marker, colored pencils (actually six colors in three pencils), and eraser. As with a cookbook, Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars starts with the basics about how to draw (including how to sit) and what not to do when creating art. Tracing, overlines, stick figures, building-block shapes and more elements of drawing are applied to characters from this part of the Star Wars saga. Young artists find out how to create Anakin, R2-D2, Chancellor Palpatine, Jabba the Hutt, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and other characters (20 in all), as well as the opposing armies (“good guys” clone troopers and “bad guys” battle droids), a variety of weapons, and more. Star Wars: The Clone Wars may not be among the best stories in the Star Wars series, which now dates back more than 30 years; but young, artistically inclined fans of this installment will find the new Klutz how-to-draw guide a wonderful invitation to take part in the adventure and make it their own.

(+++) SOMEWHAT SCARY STUFF

2009-11-25T08:38:00.000-05:00

The Good Neighbors, Book Two: Kith. By Holly Black & Ted Naifeh. Graphix/Scholastic. $16.99.

The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You. By Vlad Mezrich. Scholastic. $7.99.

The Solomon Effect. By C.S. Graham. Harper. $7.99.

The second book in The Good Neighbors graphic-novel trilogy, Kith, continues the themes of reality, illusion and identity confusion that filled the first, Kin. The focus continues to be on Rue Silver, who is half human (through her father) and half faerie (through her mother) – and there is nothing ethereal about the faeries in these books: they are human-sized, powerful and inimical (or at best indifferent) to the human race. The idea that Rue does not quite know where she fits, and must find out, is a tried-and-true one, but it has a twist here because Rue does not much like either of her choices. Her mother was allowed to marry her father only on condition that he was never unfaithful to her – but he was, after falling in love, and in this book finds himself torn between human and faerie-centered emotions, which he tells Rue are not the same. Rue finds her mother in this installment and tries to save her from her grandfather, Aubrey – but is it really “saving,” and does her mother really belong with her father or with the faeries? While these uncertainties abound – handled in spare, direct text by Spiderwick Chronicles coauthor Holly Black and in dark, gloomy and sometimes frightening art by Ted Naifeh – Rue is also dealing with unexpected changes in her peer group, with her boyfriend’s apparent drifting away, with her own attraction to someone else, and with unanswerable questions, the central one being, “Are you sure you know whose side you’re on?” Rue is not sure: “I used to try really hard not to worry. Now I’m worried all the time.” And what she learns about herself does not help her decide what to do: “What makes us betray the people we love? Now I know. Nothing makes us. We just do.” By the end of this episode, Aubrey has engineered a faerie-focused success that Rue feels should horrify her – but doesn’t. And that ends the book with a question mark that will remain unresolved until the trilogy’s finale.

There is little that is light in The Good Neighbors, and little that is dark in The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You, a “dating guide” written by a team of nine like-minded satirists under the pen name “Vlad Mezrich” (yuck). At a time when vampires are hot – as publishing phenomena, not just within the books themselves – this amusingly overdone little book makes a nice corrective to the oh-so-serious emotional intensity of the Twilight series and other works that would be bodice rippers (or bodice piercers, maybe?) if today’s teens and young adults still wore bodices. The book contains a flow chart to help a would-be vampire dater decide if he is “goth, emo, gamer, or vampire.” It offers appropriate things to say at awkward moments: “Of course I understand that killing my brother was an accident. Don’t worry about it – things like this are bound to happen.” There are comments by smitten teens such as “Abigail, 16” and “Willa, 18,” and by vampires such as “Gregor, 498” and “Theo, 112.” There are multiple-choice quizzes, advice on “coaxing him out of the crypt,” suggestions on how to celebrate the holidays together, and what to do if it turns out after all that the vampire really just isn’t that into you (“what to do when your relationship has one foot in the grave”). There are even suggestions for places to contact if you can’t get over the heartbreak of losing him, such as the Vampire Depression Hotline. The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You is silly, juvenile and overdone – but then, so are plenty of the “vampires are wonderful” stories out there these days. And those books, unlike this one, are meant to be taken seriously.

It is hard to tell how seriously to take The Solomon Effect, C.S. Graham’s fast-paced followup to The Archangel Project. Like The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You, this is a team-written book, although here it is a team of two: husband and wife Steven Harris and Candice Proctor. Their earlier thriller turned on the concept of “remote viewing,” the ability to see things from a distance – specific things, if guided by a handler who knows how to get the remote viewer to focus in the right place. Psychology graduate student and Iraq War veteran October “Tobie” Guinness has remote-viewing ability; she works with a CIA rogue agent, Jax Alexander (the CIA abounds with rogues -- in books, anyway). Yes, the protagonists are types; and yes, the plot of The Archangel Project was formulaic (vast conspiracy to stop Tobie and Jax after Tobie remotely views secret documents that that could lead to war, assassination or both). The Solomon Effect is formulaic, too, involving a nefarious Nazi plot that comes to light through discovery of a sunken U-boat off the Russian coast that carried a cargo that could bring on the Apocalypse. Calling this an apocalyptic novel is therefore redundant. And of course Tobie and Jax are threatened by enemies in high places as well as by those who would benefit from allowing an unimaginable (well, not so unimaginable) catastrophe to occur. What is interesting about The Solomon Effect is the sneaking suspicion that the authors are not taking it entirely at face value. They lapse frequently into genre clichés, for example, but seem to know when they are doing so. Sample dialogue: “What part of ‘life is never easy’ did you miss?” “You never know; we might get lucky.” On the same page: “Things are not going as well as we’d expected. …We haven’t been able to contact our man in Berlin to ascertain just what went wrong.” Elsewhere: “You of all people should know I don’t give anything away.” And “I’m not an easy man to kill.” Add chapter headings that sometimes function as datelines (“Jaffa, Israel: Thursday 29 October 11:54 p.m. local time”) and you have all the trappings of thoroughly mediocre adventure fiction – but somehow The Solomon Effect is better than that, perhaps because it seems to watch itself from outside, making readers aware that the authors know exactly what they are doing. Consider it, perhaps, a display of authorial remote viewing. In any case, the book can certainly be read simply as an apocalyptic thriller, enjoyed and immediately forgotten. But it is more fun if you assume its use of multiple clichés is intentional – thus making it possible to get extra enjoyment out of some of the story’s twists and turns, such as the crucial importance of Googling a 93-year-old doctor who has contributed a certain article to Scientific American.

(+++) TRAVELS AND TRAVAILS

2009-11-25T08:35:00.000-05:00

The Blue Shoe. By Roderick Townley. Pictures by Mary GrandPré. Knopf. $16.99.

The Indigo Notebook. By Laura Resau. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

Looking for Marco Polo. By Alan Armstrong. Random House. $16.99.

DWEEB: Burgers, Beasts, and Brainwashed Bullies. By Aaron Starmer. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

Preteens and young teenagers can travel long distances for adventure in these books -- or find excitement close to home. The Blue Shoe, whose text is nicely printed in blue on attractive cream paper, is subtitled “A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes,” and that pretty well sums it up, except that the last word of the subtitle should be singular. For there is only one blue shoe in the town of Aplanap, and it was never meant to be worn: it was ordered by a mysterious man and created as a jewel-covered piece of finery – jewels of every shade of blue bedecked the shoe. The shoe is damaged because of an attempted good deed; the would-be do-gooder is the shoemaker’s apprentice and hero of the tale. In Aplanap, no good deed (at least of this type) goes unpunished, so 13-year-old Hap Barlo is sentenced to banishment to the far side of Mount Xexnax, a place from which no one ever returns. This may not be all bad, though, since it gives Hap the chance to find out what happened to his father, who was banished there a year earlier. In short, there are all the ingredients of a moderately compelling mystery-fantasy here. What raises The Blue Shoe above the ordinary is Roderick Townley’s narrative style, which is full of asides and questions to the reader: “Even the town’s mayor (whose name is far too important to write out here) was tempted by” the shoe. “Everyone called [the shoemaker] Grel, which was his name, or as much of it as anyone bothered to remember. …He was poor, but not poor enough to be arrested. Did I mention that the poor were arrested in Aplanap?” Now, this style can wear thin pretty quickly – all the foregoing examples come in the first two pages – but Townley sprinkles it pretty evenly throughout the book, and dials it back when some of the complications (all that thievery, villainy and sorcery) come forward. Furthermore, the book features illustrations by Mary GrandPré, who did the pictures for the U.S. versions of the Harry Potter books, and her gentle curves of black and white (okay, blue and white) and clever portrayals of not-quite-human characters add a great deal to the story. In addition, there are enough twists and turns in the tale to raise it several notches above the traditional boy-solves-mysteries-and-grows-up mode, even though, at bottom, that is the mode in which it operates.

Another blue-ish object is the focus of The Indigo Notebook, but this is a work of our world, not one out of fantasy. Laura Resau here focuses – for the first time in what may become an ongoing series – on 15-year-old Zeeta and her wanderlust-driven mother, Layla, who teaches English and moves to a different country every year. Layla is a real character: “a cute, disheveled hippie chick in a slightly see-through cotton wraparound skirt tucked over her knees, with her bare toes peeking out,” as Zeeta describes her. “I used to wish for a Handsome Magazine Dad,” adds Zeeta, “but I’ve pretty much given up at this point. Every year in a different country. Fifteen years, fifteen countries, well over fifteen boyfriends for Layla. Fifteen dozen maybe, one for each month.” Layla is, in fact, a more interesting character than her note-taking daughter, and tends to steal the scene whenever she appears. But The Indigo Notebook focuses on Zeeta most of the time, and specifically on her adventures in Ecuador, where she meets a boy named Wendell, adopted by Americans, who has come to Ecuador to search for his birth parents. Zeeta agrees to help him, but Wendell is concealing a secret – and, it soon turns out, so is just about everyone with whom the two teens interact. The main lesson here, as Wendell articulates it in response to a story Zeeta tells him, is “that sometimes what you thought was bad is good after all.” Not a profound lesson, perhaps, but one that both Wendell and Zeeta learn, to their mutual benefit.

Exotic settings are integral to Looking for Marco Polo as well. Alan Armstrong’s protagonist, 11-year-old Mark Hearn, has an anthropologist father who goes to the Gobi Desert to trace Marco Polo’s route from Venice to China – and disappears. Mark’s mother takes Mark overseas to try to get together a search party to look for him; this is crucial to the plot but not entirely believable in our age of instant communication. In any case, Mark and his mother arrive in Venice, Mark suffers a serious asthma attack, and an old friend of Mark’s father – a doctor known as Doc Hornaday – shows up to help Mark recover. Doc, seeking to distract the boy from his wheezing, starts telling him the story of Marco Polo’s adventures, and once-timid Mark (the similarity of whose name to Marco is of course no coincidence) becomes so involved in the tale that his own taste for adventure rapidly develops. The best part of this book is the tale-within-the-tale of Marco Polo, as Doc tells it, because Armstrong focuses not on the grandeur of Marco Polo’s ambitions or the glories of ancient China but on small, everyday things that thoroughly humanize a major figure in European history. For example, the story of how Marco Polo almost dies on his journey, only to be saved by a shaman who brings with him a big black dog that eventually ends up staying with the traveler, is wonderfully told and crucial to the book’s climax. In letters to his absent father, Mark makes comments on the tales he hears: “Doc told me some Marco Polo stories that aren’t in the book. I think he’s guessing and making up a lot, but I don’t care.” By the time it turns out that Mark’s dad is alive and the family will be reunited, the novel turns heartwarming to the point of being overdone – but the happy ending is inevitable and is not, really, the point of the book.

If all this gadding about seems a bit much, there are also adventures to be found close to home, for instance at Ho-Ho-Kus Junior High, where five eighth-graders and non-friends named Denton, Wendell, Eddie, Elijah and Bijay end up as a group called DWEEB (from the first letters of their names) when they are all falsely accused of theft and find themselves face-to-face (or faces-to-faces) with a mystery. Aaron Starmer’s first novel is narrated by each of the five protagonists in alternating chapters – although, in truth, their voices are not especially distinctive. Each boy is encapsulated in a couple of words and then operates according to his type: Denton the negotiator, Wendell the computer whiz, Eddie the athlete, Elijah the writer and Bijay the performer. Of course, each has to use his special abilities to solve the mystery that involves them all, and each of them learns that teamwork beats going it alone, and all that expected stuff. What is amusing here is not what the boys find out but what they go through on the way. They are imprisoned in a secret room beneath their school; they are ordered to ace the standardized Idaho Tests to prevent the school (in the person of nasty Vice Principal Snodgrass) from calling their parents; and they have to use their individual skills, and even body types, to figure out what is really going on. Yes, body types, as in: “Eddie had to do this alone. No one else could fit through the hole. And even if they could, they probably weren’t athletic enough to climb the pipes.” And yes, individual skills: “For Bijay, it was the performance of a lifetime, because he was doing something he had never been able to do: he was fitting in.” The plot that the five uncover is ridiculous, but DWEEB makes no pretense to be anything more than a silly romp with a bit of a message. And Starmer carefully leaves open the possibility of a sequel if the book does well. Nothing dweeby, or DWEEBy, about that.

(++++) TWO FIFTHS AND A NINTH

2009-11-25T08:32:00.000-05:00

Mahler: Symphony No. 5. Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Markus Stenz. Oehms. $19.99 (SACD).

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 5 and 9. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Naxos. $8.99.

It was the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln – then known as the Cologne City Orchestra – that gave the first performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on October 18, 1904, with the composer conducting. While it is a mistake to believe that this history gives the current orchestra’s players some sort of mystical connection to the work – after all, every single orchestra member today is different from the ones who first played it – there is no doubt that Cologne is proud of its Mahler associations, and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln works hard to maintain a special claim to his music. Or perhaps the phrase is “plays hard,” because the orchestra, under Chief Conductor Markus Stenz, certainly takes on the Fifth with intensity and enthusiasm. And the results are excellent throughout, from the opening trumpet call to the strongly accented second movement; from the well-paced and bucolic third movement, through the always beautiful Adagietto (here with a bit more bite than usual), and into a propulsive finale that flows naturally from what has gone before and comes across as the symphony’s capstone, not (as in some other performances) an afterthought. One thing that Stenz and the orchestra do particularly well is contrast the quieter, chamber-music-like portions of the symphony with its grand tutti sections; for example, the very soft ending of the first movement here sounds just right, so the explosive attacca of the second creates the strongest possible contrast. The sound quality boosts the performance’s effectiveness: this is a particularly clearly recorded SACD, in which the absolute silences are as impressive as the loudest sections of the symphony. This is the first release in what is planned as a Mahler cycle; and while there are now a number of good complete-Mahler-symphony recordings, Stenz and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln seem likely – if they continue as they have begun – to produce one of the best.

Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra are already well on their way to producing what could be the best Shostakovich cycle of all. Their new recording of Symphonies Nos. 5 and 9 fulfills the promise of their first CD, of Symphony No. 11 – an unusual choice to start a complete set of Shostakovich symphonies, but one that they pulled off brilliantly. Now they have turned to better-known, more-often-heard symphonies and produced equally fine results. The surprising thing here is the attention Petrenko gives to the quiet passages – an approach that would seem to make more sense in, say, Mahler, than in Shostakovich, who often comes across with all the subtlety of a battering ram. Petrenko finds subtleties in these works that most other conductors miss or gloss over: the solo violin passages in No. 5, for example, and the quicksilver flashiness of the third movement of No. 9 – here taken at a true Presto, which is how it is marked but which is a tempo that conductors rarely attempt for it. Because Petrenko is at such pains to get the details and quiet passages of these symphonies right, the more bombastic – and simply louder – music comes off far better as well. The problematic finale of No. 5, for example, starts with speed and triumphalism, but by the last section – which Petrenko, like some other conductors, takes quite slowly – there is an ambiguity about the movement that fits well with current thinking that this work was less a celebration of Socialist Realism than a necessary accommodation to it. As for No. 9, its classical balance and sardonic modernism exist in an uneasy melding here – witness, among many examples, the piccolo tune in the first movement – and the result is a symphony that keeps listeners slightly off-balance in a very engaging and thought-provoking way. Indeed, “thought-provoking” is a good description of all three Shostakovich symphonies recorded so far by Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, of which he has been Principal Conductor since 2006. Petrenko has some genuine insights into Shostakovich’s music, and will hopefully continue sharing them with listeners as this series progresses.

(++++) GIFTS GRAND AND GLORIOUS

2009-11-19T08:49:00.000-05:00

The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 1—Call Me Joe; Volume 2—The Queen of Air and Darkness. Edited by Rick Katze. NESFA Press. $29 each.

M.C. Escher “Reptiles” 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle. Pomegranate. $17.95.

Lost Worlds. By John Howe. Kingfisher. $22.99.

Versus: Warriors. Illustrated by Steve Stone. Kingfisher. $19.99.

The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

’Tis the season of gifts, ’tis the season of wonders, ’tis the season of wonderful gifts – if you choose carefully, looking for items that will entertain, enthrall or educate long past the season in which they are given. Thus, ’tis a fine season for the first two volumes of a planned multi-volume Poul Anderson series from NESFA Press. Anderson is one of the grandest of grand masters of science fiction, having won seven Hugos and three Nebulas – the top awards in the field – and actually being named a Grand Master in 1998. Anderson (1926-2001) was a strong advocate of space exploration, a believer in the improvability (if not perfectibility) of humanity, and a dedicated chronicler of larger-than-life characters cast in heroic settings that would try them deeply – leading sometimes to success, sometimes to failure. The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson is a rather capriciously edited series – the stories appear in no apparent order – but it is also a marvelous one, giving readers a chance to explore Anderson’s world (and worlds) in depth while also showing how his storytelling evolved over time (his later stories are often quieter and less stormingly heroic). The 26 stories and poems in Call Me Joe include Anderson’s first published tale, “Tomorrow’s Children” (1947), and range to as recently as 2001 (“Kinnison’s Band,” a poem with echoes of Aristophanes that is here printed immediately after “Tomorrow’s Children,” on the same page as that story’s ending). The Queen of Air and Darkness includes 19 pieces, one of which is the wonderful title story (published in 1958) and the rest of which appeared between 1956 (“Operation Afreet”) and 1993 (no fewer than 10 different pieces). Anderson was a prolific writer, an old-style SF stylist (which means his works tend to be straightforward and narrative-driven), a man of ideas and action rather than psychology (there is little analysis of characters in his works), and an author unafraid to bring sociopolitical matters into his tales (his philosophy was essentially libertarian). Individually, his tales are a treat. In these two sumptuous volumes – more than 500 pages each – they are a feast that will last long past the winter holiday season.

Equally outré and equally certain to carry well into 2010 is Pomegranate’s excellent and very difficult jigsaw puzzle based on M.C. Escher’s famous study in two and three dimensions, “Reptiles.” This is one of a series of Escher-based puzzles from this very innovative publisher, and any of them will delight jigsaw fans. “Reptiles” may even make fans for these puzzles, because there is so much in it: a planter containing two cacti, an open book, a stoppered bottle near a glass, and several objects over which a crocodilian creature climbs after emerging into three dimensions from a notebook page on which its basic, flattened form has been drawn two-dimensionally. The creature completes a circuit of its environment before climbing back into the two-dimensional world that gave it birth – but of course the creature only looks three-dimensional, since the medium itself is a two-dimensional one. Since the whole wonderful “Reptiles” concoction is done in black-and-white, it is very difficult indeed to figure out just what piece of the jigsaw puzzle goes just where. Escher’s works are treats for the mind as well as the emotions. So is this puzzle, which takes his work into…well, into yet another dimension.

The pages of Lost Worlds seem to have three dimensions as well, so realistically and with such care are they drawn by John Howe, who was one of the concept artists for director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Visual splendor is what this book is all about, as Howe portrays lands real and fictional with equal skill and attention to detail. The names are the stuff of legend: Ultima Thule, Shambhala, Mohenjo-Daro, Rapa Nui, Cahokia, Cibola – but which existed and which did not? And what of Babylon, Atlantis, Troy, Asgard, Camelot and Avalon? What of them was real? How much is legend? Howe’s marvelous illustrations make every place seem as real as every other, and the brief narratives about each of the Lost Worlds explain what we know and do not know about them. The Garden of Eden, for example, may have been somewhere in the plains of Mesopotamia; Mount Olympus is real, “though no one, of course, has ever seen the gods there”; and so on. The information here is solid, but it is not what makes this book so attractive as a gift for ages 9-12. It is Howe’s great skill at bringing to life long-gone lands, or ones that never were, that makes this a book to treasure.

History comes to life in a different way in Versus: Warriors, where everything shown is real except the underlying premise of the book: battles between warriors who existed at very different times and in very different places and therefore never met in the real world. Like a gladiatorial video game seen in slow motion (and with far less gore, although plenty of implied violence), Steve Stone’s book posits fights between, for example, an Aztec and a Viking, or a Spartan and a Mongol. Hyper-realistic illustrations show each warrior’s weapons, fighting style and other data – pages are laid out like video-game still shots. Then – and this is where the book gets really interesting – one member of each pair is selected as the winner, for reasons that are cogently argued from a historical perspective. At the end, the five winners are compared and an overall champion is picked – again, based on known skills of the real-world fighters. And then there are “rematch” pages, suggesting alternative matchups whose outcomes it is left for the reader to decide. Offbeat design, strong graphics and a cleverly analytical approach make Versus: Warriors an unusual gift for readers ages 10 and up for whom mindless slash-and-crush video-game action is not quite enough.

And how about a present for students’ more serious side – one that relies not on strong graphic design but on intelligence, not on punchy action but on words? The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition makes a wonderful gift – yes, in the Internet age; perhaps especially so in the Internet age. It is true that you can look up word definitions online easily, but not necessarily more quickly than you can look them up in this dictionary – because a Web search for a word turns up so many sources, and you may need to jump from one to the next to the next to find a definition that fits the particular circumstances in which you have seen the word. And niceties of this dictionary – a style manual, commentary on alternative pronunciations (“ax” for “ask,” for example), usage notes and more – are available online only if you go actively looking for them. In this dictionary, they are an integral part of the presentation, which they enrich significantly. It is unlikely today that a printed dictionary will be the sole source of word definitions for the high-school-and-up audience for which this one is intended; and that is fine, since the ability to use hyperlinks and other online tools to figure out vocabulary while doing online reading is valuable – and a necessary skill for college and the world after graduation. But as long as school work and pleasure reading continue to involve books (including electronic books), having a handy dictionary like this one nearby is a great boon – and brings the bonus of serendipity. One example: look up “jaguar” and you will find, in the margin of the page giving the definition, a picture of a jaguar – plus pictures of Andrew Jackson, Jesse Jackson and Cheddi Jagan. And maybe, just maybe, a quick, almost subliminal look at those pictures will spark a young reader’s curiosity about something or someone he or she never intended to look up. And maybe, just maybe, that will start his or her thoughts in entirely new and fruitful directions. The Internet is the perfect place to go for a directed search. For an expansive one – one with the potential to take the mind somewhere new – try The American Heritage High School Dictionary, Fourth Edition.

(++++) A CORNUCOPIA OF COMICS

2009-11-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box: A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Children at Play: A “Cul de Sac” Collection. By Richard Thompson. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

The Natural Disorder of Things: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 25. By Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Lust and Other Uses for Spare Hormones: A “Zits” Look at Relationships. By Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Math, Science, and Unix Underpants: A Themed “FoxTrot” Collection. By Bill Amend. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Thirteen dollars gets you an uncounted number of laughs from a wide variety of sources in a size you can actually read (unlike the size now accorded to most newspaper comic strips) in these excellent new collections from Andrews McMeel. The preeminent workplace-oriented strip of our time, Scott Adams’ Dilbert, is now in its 33^rd collection – with all strips in color – and as usual is filled with ideas that are just slightly too plausible to be real. There is Dilbert’s invention, the “carbicle,” which let you drive your workplace around – but, as Dogbert points out, unfortunately lacks a bed. There is the character who becomes Employee of the Month for the superb command of jargon with which he says “we need to plan the plan’s planny plan” – but unfortunately the guys with nets show up looking for him. There is “forcible relocation to an agrarian society” as the penalty for asking for too much technical support. There is Dilbert exposing the double standards permeating Congress when he is called to testify there, causing one lawmaker to say, “I yield my time to the hypocrite from another state.” There is the inspirational poster, “If all else fails, your coworkers are edible.” Throw in the three-headed rebate-preventing monster Rebaterus, a woman who laughs too much, and a performance review describing an employee as “like a blister on a skunk’s colon,” and you have a modern version of what Mad magazine used to call “humor in a jugular vein.”

The amusements are gentler but no less surreal in Children at Play, the second collection of Cul de Sac, one of the most visually as well as verbally interesting comic strips of recent years. Expect to pause every now and then to try to understand just what is going on with Alice Otterloop; her big brother, Petey; their parents; and the various hangers-on who populate Richard Thompson’s world. Watch Alice do her dances on the manhole cover! See Petey have an out-of-body experience that ends when all of his selves are knocked down by a soccer ball! Listen to the “skweeks” as Beni tries out his new hammer! See Alice try to make her eyes extend on stalks! Observe Dill peeking through the Otterloops’ mail slot “as a community service”! Read along with “A Child’s Garden of Haiku” in a Sunday strip written entirely in haiku form! Hear the legend of Pulpy Joe and his watermelon head! Watch Petey dance to the tune he makes up by saying the names “Alice-Beni-Dill” real fast! Then discuss the merits of Halloween candy – “I like candy corn because it tastes like wax” vs. “I like eating wax, but only in crayon form.” And when you stop laughing, read the book again.

Or move on to a different sort of family and laugh there. “There” would be the MacPherson house, where The Natural Disorder of Things includes oldest child Zoe helping baby Wren break the annoying habit of always saying “da da da da da” by teaching her to say “no no no no no” unstoppably. Middle child Hammie decides to be called “H” from now on, because capital “H” is a manly letter that looks like a goal post or steel beam – except that small “h,” as Zoe points out, “looks more like a potty chair.” After her hair, nose and face get pulled and twisted innumerable times while Wren is feeding, mom Wanda learns why she should “never breast-feed with your hands full.” Also here, you can learn the game of “X-treme sistering,” at which Zoe is an extreme expert. Meet the cicada that takes up residence on Hammie’s nose. And catch the wisdom of dad Darryl: after everyone else says Hammie’s drawing looks like an eel, the wise father takes a peek and immediately says, “It’s an elephant” – gaining Hammie’s instant appreciation (and then, when Wanda asks how he knew what it was, Darryl explains that “all of his elephants look like eels”). Jerry Scott’s writing and Rick Kirkman’s art meld so perfectly in Baby Blues that it is hard to imagine a better-matched team. To see how well Kirkman and Scott work together, just check out the “Ask a Mom/Ask a Dad” strips – for example, to the question “Can you fix it?” the mom answers, “I’ll get the manual,” while the dad says, “I’ll get the duct tape.” This is almost too true to be funny. Almost.

If there is another strip with the collaborative punch of Baby Blues, it is the other one that Scott writes: Zits, for which Jim Borgman provides some truly amazing art. The latest Zits collection is a “theme” book whose focus is one of those things you can’t really get into in newspapers, even in 2009 (at least, not in newspaper comic strips). The word Lust is in huge red letters on this book’s great cover, which shows Jeremy Duncan and girlfriend Sara in a lip lock so intense that everything around them is burning up (including the back cover), each has sprouted multiple hands to hold the other that much closer, and their faces have merged into a single face. The cover alone makes this book worth buying. But there’s much more inside, including not only Jeremy and Sara but also multiply pierced Pierce and his girlfriend, D’Ijon, plus RichandAmy, always seen as tightly wrapped together as their names (name?) – until they briefly and very traumatically break up before getting very together again (two people wearing a single pair of shoes – enough said). The “lust” element here is implied rather than seen – the newspapers of 2009 are not even close to where the underground comics were in, say, 1969 – but Scott and Borgman extract hilarity even from that situation, as when Jeremy fantasizes about the school guidance counselor in jungle costume and “Mrs. Robinson” pose; and Jeremy’s parents embarrass their son into more incoherence than usual when they start giggling after having a weekend alone together. Toss in some of those patented (well, they should be patented) Borgman surreal-art strips, such as one in which Jeremy and Sara call each other names and turn into whatever they are called (chicken, pig, Neanderthal, Miss Goody Two-Shoes), and you have a collection whose main theme is hilarity.

Ditto the first “themed” collection of Bill Amend’s almost-late, almost-lamented FoxTrot, which now runs only on Sundays. It’s really a shame that it is no longer possible to get a daily dose of Math, Science, and Unix Underpants. Amend has a degree in physics, of all things, and he often used math and science – sometimes rather complex math and science – in his strips, usually through the character of 10-year-old Jason. The new FoxTrot collection includes examples of the many ways Amend brought these subjects into the strip: Paige exults at getting a 91 on her math test until Jason reveals that he got 108 on his. Jason and his pal, Marcus, program a printer to spit out 1,000 labels saying “kick me” that they can paste on fellow students’ backs. Jason struggles through a poetry assignment and then reads a computer book to relax, because “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a binary tree.” Sixteen-year-old Peter starts drooling on his math test when a question about π makes him think of pizza. Jason (who really does wear Unix underpants) sets up the family’s answering machine to require callers to “press the square root of 1,296 minus the cube root of 13,824 times 17.5 minus the 4^th root of 1,908,029,761.” There is much more of this, all of it thoroughly in character – that is, in the character of each member of the Fox family and the people with whom the Foxes interact – and it all adds up to a delightfully funny collection from which, if you are not careful, you just might learn some math or science. Now, how comical would that be?

(++++) ANIMAL PLANS – HUMAN ONES, TOO

2009-11-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

Crow Call. By Lois Lowry. Illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Scholastic. $16.99.

Cornelia and the Great Snake Escape. By Pam Muňoz Ryan. Illustrated by Julia Denos. Scholastic. $4.99.

The Secret Plan. By Julia Sarcone-Roach. Knopf. $16.99.

The Busiest Street in Town. By Mara Rockliff. Illustrated by Sarah McMenemy. Knopf. $16.99.

Imogene’s Last Stand. By Candace Fleming. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

There are plots aplenty in these books, some hatched for or by animals, others created entirely by and for humans. Crow Call is a sensitive memoir of a time in 1945 when Lois Lowry and her father, who had just returned from service in World War II, went hunting for the crows that were eating the crops. Liz, as the girl in the book is called, has never hunted and is not sure she wants to. But she does want a hunting shirt – a boy’s shirt – and her father agrees she should have it. And she is willing to try using the crow call to bring the crows close enough to be shot. But the actual shooting – she is not so sure. What she is sure of is that “the stranger who is my father” is home, and she wants to be with him and do what he does and become part of a complete family again. And so father and daughter interact, joke, have both playful and serious talks, and eventually Liz uses the crow call with tremendous success – and her father does no shooting that day, although he knows he will have to at other times. This is a wonderfully touching story, made all the more realistic by the near-photographic quality of Bagram Ibatoulline’s illustrations – which, however, are done in subtly muted tones that reinforce the nostalgia of Lowry’s recollection.

A much lighter animal plot is the subject of Cornelia and the Great Snake Escape, an easy-to-read paperback for kindergartners and first-graders, in which Cornelia gets a corn snake named Corny that she just can’t seem to keep in its cage. Pam Muňoz Ryan gets the basics of snakes as pets exactly right, having Cornelia learn what sort of cage to use and how to keep the snake in it – even though snakes are excellent escape artists. Corny, it turns out, is unusually good at getting away, even when three books, and then four, are put on top of the cage. Cornelia’s mom, who was not too fond of the idea of a snake in the house in the first place, has had more than enough by the time Corny slips into the family car’s air vent and disappears. But Cornelia’s dad has a good idea – luring Corny out by setting up a soft spot warmed by a lamp – and this actually works, as it often does in real life. The family eventually figures out what to do, and everyone ends up happy – including Corny, who is mostly drawn realistically by Julia Denos but is also shown with an occasional unrealistic (but cute) smile, as when he is basking happily in the warmth of a lamp.

There is nothing realistic in The Secret Plan created by an elephant named Milo and his three cat friends, Henry, Harriet and Hildy. The plan is to stop bedtime forever – because it always interferes with the friends’ play. Julia Sarcone-Roach shows the friends trying to hide, camouflaging themselves, wearing a hilarious disguise, and trying to sneak outside – all to no avail. Bedtime keeps catching up to them, until Hildy hatches a new plan that involves some “big, furry monster feet from Halloween.” And this plan actually works! Well, almost… This is a simple and delightful bedtime story, pleasantly and amusingly illustrated in a way that almost makes the friendship of the suburb-dwelling kittens and baby elephant seem plausible – even when it involves all of them sneaking around together, each just as silent as the other.

A little silence and contentment is all the humans want from The Busiest Street in Town, but Rushmore Boulevard is built for speed, not contemplation. Agatha May Walker and Eulalie Scruggs, who live on opposite sides of the street, cannot even cross it to visit each other – until Agatha decides to do something about all the hustle and bustle. So she puts her “wingback chair…smack-dab in the middle of the street” and simply sits in it, as traffic screeches and honks all around her. When people yell at her, she offers them gingersnap cookies she has made herself. And Eulalie, looking out from her house, sees all this and brings out “a piano stool, a card table, and a Parcheesi set,” and the two friends sit together in the middle of the street as traffic belches and blusters past them. But the traffic has to slow down now, and that means that soon, other people can walk into the street, and children can start to play there, and each new arrival of a person forces traffic to slow even more, and then the whole neighborhood gets involved, and people plant flowers and stage parties and play music and generally have a grand time. “It took a while these days to drive down Rushmore Boulevard,” writes Mara Rockliff. “But no one minded.” And there is a very happy ending to the whole fantasy – but it is a fantasy, accentuated by Sarah McMenemy’s pretty illustrations. Children will enjoy the book, but adults will need to warn them not to try to duplicate it on a real-life busy boulevard.

However, kids might manage to emulate Imogene Tripp if they, like Imogene, live in a small and isolated town. Candace Fleming’s Imogene’s Last Stand features a young heroine with a passion for history and a penchant for quoting famous people of the past (who are shown and briefly discussed on the inside front and back covers). Imogene lives in tiny Liddleville, New Hampshire, where a shoelace factory will soon be built to revive the town’s economy. That means tearing down the Liddleville Historical Society, which is in a house so dilapidated – as Nancy Carpenter’s apt illustrations show – that it is no wonder no one ever visits. Imogene and her dad decide to fix the place up, but even after they do, no one comes there – and teardown time is fast approaching. So plucky Imogene launches a “Save Our History” campaign – which meets with no success whatsoever. But then, just as she is about to give up, she makes an amazing discovery – and then she contacts a historian – and then she makes a dramatic gesture that prevents the bulldozers from knocking down the house. TV crews show up, everything takes on a carnival atmosphere, and eventually the historian arrives – and Imogene and her love of history prevail! Realistic? Not very – but the message that a little girl can take on City Hall (literally: the mayor is the biggest proponent of the shoelace factory) is an empowering one. And the amusing way Fleming and Carpenter handle the story keeps it from becoming preachy, while reinforcing the importance of history and of young people’s involvement in keeping the past alive. That’s quite a lot to accomplish in 40 pages, and Imogene’s Last Stand manages to pack it all in very successfully.

(++++) SAFER AND EVEN MORE SECURE

2009-11-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

Norton Internet Security 2010. Windows 7/Vista/XP SP2. Symantec. $69.99.

Year after year, Symantec makes small incremental improvements to its Norton line of utility products. But, to misquote George Orwell, some years are more equal than others – and the changes in Norton Internet Security 2010 add up to more than the ones in the last several years of updates. This needs to be pointed out up front, because what is interesting about the new version of this security program is that most users will not notice how much better it has become.

Here’s why: having successfully reduced the previous Norton Internet Security drag on system performance with the 2009 version of this protection suite, Symantec this year made the product even easier to use and better at its primary job of protecting users’ computers (up to three for the $69.99 price). One-click installation is simple and quicker than in past years (five minutes or less), and – this is a neat trick – when the 2010 version runs into problems during installation, it tackles them instead of crashing. That is, it offers solutions, suggests approaches, and can even make decisions on its own (about whether to run a preinstall scan, for example).

Once installed, Norton Internet Security 2010 does something that no previous version has done: it uses an approach called reputation-based security technology to supplement the signature-based and behavior-based protection of previous years. This add-on approach, which Symantec has labeled Quorum, has the potential to undercut one of the most troubling weapons of malware creators: their ability to turn out new instances of malicious code very quickly. The reason Symantec’s counterattack works is that Quorum evaluates download source, age and other factors for every file. So a file that is a) new and b) downloaded from a Web site that is not well known and that few people have used will be automatically regarded as suspect even if it does not seem harmful. This should let Norton Internet Security 2010 intercept threats very quickly – and that is increasingly important, since a great deal of modern malware is written to exist in any single form for less than 24 hours (the time needed to release signatures to detect a threat). Malware writers are, in effect, doing drive-by computer hijacking these days. Quorum fights back.

What matters to users, though, is that they will not know Quorum is there. In fact, they will have only rudimentary evidence that Norton Internet Security 2010 is working at all, most of the time. Both unobtrusive and non-intrusive, the software percolates along in the background so effectively that users will notice it only when it warns them about a threat. Like earlier versions, Norton Internet Security 2010 protects against viruses, Trojans, rootkits, spyware and more, and includes a firewall, intrusion protection, Web protection and E-mail protection for POP-3 and SMTP-compatible E-mail clients (and if you don’t know the terminology, don’t worry – all it means is that most E-mail is protected). Furthermore, Norton Internet Security 2010 integrates with browsers and search engines to warn users away from sites that may be malicious or compromised. And it is designed for Windows 7 as well as for Vista and XP, so it works effectively in any operating system a PC user is likely to have.

You might think the improvements to Norton Internet Security 2010 come at the cost of bloat – after all, more features, more need for memory and hard-disk space, right? But not so: the suite does not require substantial RAM or system resources and does not noticeably slow down other processes.

The fact that users already familiar with Norton Internet Security will not notice much new this year is remarkable, considering the changes in the product. The interface is similar to those of previous years, although not identical – for instance, the main screen is now in three sections called Computer, Network and Web instead of the previous Computer, Web and Identity. But the screen still gives you a snapshot of your security at a glance, says whether any actions need to be taken, and lets you turn features on and off; and, as before, has monitors on the left-hand side of the screen that show current CPU usage and how much of that Norton is taking up. The main screen is all you need for a security overview, and will be plenty for many users. But those who enjoy poking around in the innards of their computer (figuratively speaking) can go much more deeply into the system by clicking on links such as Performance, System Insight and Network Security Map. System Insight can be particularly useful if problems develop unexpectedly: you can use this feature to find out (for example) whether an odd behavior began after you installed certain software – and if it did, you can uninstall that program and see whether the problems disappear. The result is a kind of collaborative model of system protection, with Norton Internet Security 2010 doing most of the work but letting you investigate matters on your own if you wish to do so.

Among other improvements in Norton Internet Security 2010 are an anti-spam component that Symantec says is 20% more effective than previous ones; a free subscription to OnlineFamily.Norton, which lets parents adjust children’s Web access; and Norton Safe Web (previously introduced in Norton 360, version 3.0), which shows whether any Web sites that turn up in search results are potentially dangerous (it works with Google, Bing and Yahoo!). There are also a few changes that are not really improvements, such as a main-screen link called Vulnerability Protection, which lists programs that Symantec has found to have vulnerabilities. That sounds good, but the list is generic, not related to what you actually have on your computer – so there is really no value to looking at it. Furthermore, Symantec’s continued insistence on offering protection for only a single year remains an irritant, especially if you use Norton Internet Security 2010 on only one computer, which makes it pricey. Nevertheless, the new version of Norton Internet Security is improved in so many ways that it certainly makes sense to upgrade from earlier incarnations (in other years, this has often been a close call). This is simply the best Norton Internet Security yet.

(++++) OPERAS NEW AND (SORT OF) OLD

2009-11-19T08:37:00.001-05:00

John Adams: Nixon in China. Robert Orth, Maria Kanyova, Thomas Hammons, Marc Heller, Tracy Dahl, Chen-Ye Yuan, Melissa Malde, Julie Simson, Jennifer DeDominici; Opera Colorado Chorus and Colorado Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos. $26.99 (3 CDs).

Britten: The Beggar’s Opera. Susan Bickley, Jeremy White, Leah-Marian Jones, Tom Randle, Robert Anthony Gardiner, Donald Maxwell, Sarah Fox, Frances McCafferty; City of London Sinfonia conducted by Christian Curnyn. Chandos. $34.99 (2 CDs).

Tchaikovsky Romances. Dmitry Hvorostovsky, baritone; Ivari Ilja, piano. Delos. $16.99 (2 CDs).

One of the greatest accomplishments of President Richard Nixon – some would call it the matter for which he will be positively remembered – was opening normalized relations between the United States and Communist China. It may be that only so staunch an anti-Communist as Nixon could have pulled off such a rapprochement in the midst of the Cold War. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, and his meeting with Mao Tse-tung and Madame Mao, could be the stuff of opera – even though it was, in reality, the stuff of politics. But John Adams has made it the stuff of opera with Nixon in China, which is now available in a mostly excellent recording led by Marin Alsop, assembled from several live performances in June 2008. Alsop, who directed the Colorado Symphony from 1993 to 2004, clearly knows how to bring out the best from the musicians, and the fine vocal performances by the principals help move along a story that is short on action (most of what happens is ceremonial) but is focused, in Alice Goodman’s libretto, more on the characters’ inner lives and their sense that they are making history. That is particularly the case with Nixon (Robert Orth, who does an excellent job inhabiting the character of this complex and deeply flawed president) and his wife, Pat (Maria Kanyova, a fine foil for her husband and an equally strong singer). Arrayed against them, yet with ultimately the same sense of being present at a historic moment, are Mao Tse-tung (since revised in spelling to Zedong), who is mostly bluster in Marc Heller’s portrayal, and Madame Mao (Tracy Dahl, whose voice is slightly shrill but whose characterization is effectively chilling). Chen-Ye Yuan makes Cho En-lai thoughtful and introspective, but there are some overdone political notes in the opera’s rather buffoonish characterization of Henry Kissinger (well sung by Thomas Hammons). This is an interesting and impressive opera that is certainly one of Adams’ most important works, but it should be noted that it is by Adams, which means there are long sections of repetitive music – some of which seem to wear on the orchestra, which is otherwise well-balanced and responsive to Alsop’s direction. Diplomacy in opera certainly came a long way in the 82 years between Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow and Adams’ 1987 work, which features – in addition to Adams’ trademark repetitiveness – frequent rhythmic changes and passages of neo-Stravinskian sound. This is a highly impressive performance of one of the few recent operas that seem likely to gain at least semi-regular stagings. And kudos to Naxos for providing the libretto.

This is not to say that operatic success is assured even to the very best of composers. Witness the case of Benjamin Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera, which is infrequently performed and rarely recorded (the last recording dates to 1993). This is, in fact, the least known of Britten’s stage works, although it does hold the boards from time to time in England. What Britten did in this 1948 opera was rework John Gay and Johann Pepusch’s wonderful (and bawdy) 18^th-century “ballad opera” of the same title – not in the way Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill did when they created The Threepenny Opera from the same source, but in his own musical language. The 1728 original was inspired by a letter from none other than Jonathan Swift to no less a figure than Alexander Pope, and consisted of no fewer than 69 songs – the idea being to create a play for actors who could also sing. In Britten’s hands, this is transformed into an actual opera, or meta-opera, since the concept involves re-setting the scene in a laundry filled with beggars – who reenact the Gay/Pepusch story of the often-appealing scoundrel Macheath and his two lovers (wife and mistress). Britten keeps the original’s audience-participatory ending, in which patrons can help save Macheath from the gallows with their applause (Brecht and Weill jettisoned it in order to strengthen their sociopolitical points about Weimar Germany). And even though Britten uses the original 18^th-century tunes in this opera, he gives them his very personal compositional stamp – and considerable satirical bite, although of a type quite different from that of Brecht and Weill. The changes, additions and updates to Gay’s libretto are by Tyrone Guthrie, and they are by and large quite effective; it helps enormously to be able to follow along in Chandos’ included libretto. The performance is a very fine one, with the intimate feeling appropriate to a chamber opera and with soloists who all manage to combine genuine operatic vocalization with verbal bite. Tom Randle is particularly good as Macheath, but Leah-Marian Jones (Polly), Sarah Fox (Lucy), Susan Bickley (Mrs. Peachum) and Jeremy White (Mr. Peachum) more than hold their own, and the interplay of the other soloists with the principals is very effectively managed by conductor Christian Curnyn. The performance is so good that it argues for more-frequent stagings of this underappreciated Britten gem.

Prefer something more of the Romantic era – and more romantic as well – than either Adams or Britten? The Dmitri Hvorostovsky release called Tchaikovsky Romances can be looked at as an encore to the full-length operas – or simply as two full CDs of encores. Hvorostovsky’s rich, expressive baritone voice has just the right timbre for “None but the Lonely Heart,” “It Was in the Early Spring,” “Don Juan’s Serenade” and the other short but sweet – often very sweet – songs here. There are two dozen in all, each delivered with gorgeous tone and a great deal of feeling, and all of them accompanied in just the right vein by pianist Ivari Ilja, who provides firm support without ever getting in the way of what is clearly a vocally focused recording. In truth, listening to all 24 songs at one time may be a bit much: Hvorostovsky has considerable vocal power and impressive range, but the songs themselves become a bit monochromatic after a while. This release therefore gets a (+++) rating: as well sung and well played as it is, it does tend to be a bit “much of a muchness.” But it certainly offers plenty of Romantic/romantic singing – it’s just that it’s more effective when taken a bit at a time than in a single large dose.

(++++) AMAZING WORLDS FOR AN AMAZING YEAR

2009-11-12T08:51:00.000-05:00

2010 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Anguished English; Shakespeare’s Insults. Desk—M.C. Escher. Postcard—Frank Lloyd Wright Designs. Mini Wall—Frank Lloyd Wright Designs. Wall—Edward Gorey: The Doubtful Guest; Buddhist Paintings. Pomegranate. $12.99 each (English; Insults; Postcard); $14.99 (Escher); $7.99 (Mini Wall); $13.99 each (Gorey; Buddhist).

Many companies make calendars, but only one, Pomegranate, makes calendars that seem to open the doors to an ever-unfolding series of worlds – worlds of art, of beauty, of language, of humor and joy and even transcendence. The biggest problem with Pomegranate’s calendars is deciding which world, or worlds, you want to enter in the coming year. It’s easy to go overboard and choose a different world for every room (good for sales, of course, but perhaps just a little extreme). So here are a few options among the very many this company offers for 2010:

Anguished English and Shakespeare’s Insults are day-to-day calendars for people who want to be immersed in a world of words. But not just any world of words. Language commentator Richard Lederer has a high old time finding instances of ambiguous reference, unintended double meanings, erroneous punctuation that changes what people intend to say, and more. There are 13 categories of mishaps in Anguished English, covering everything from signage to sports to courtroom misdemeanors (of the linguistic sort). Here you will find people spreading the Gospel in foreign lands and being congratulated on assuming the missionary position; an oral surgeon being given a small token of achievement – that is, a dentist receiving plaque; plus plenty of malapropisms and confusing translations (notably from Japanese into “Engrish”). Some of the chuckles are obvious – and some may have you wondering what’s so funny, until you realize that you yourself are unintentionally mangling the language.

Of course, no one used the language as Shakespeare did, and the Bard was the grand master of, among other things, scurrilous comments. Shakespeare’s Insults goes well beyond the “bite my thumb at thee” that so incenses the youths at the start of Romeo and Juliet. Whoreson knaves abound here, in works both well-known and less so, as Shakespeare has characters curse each other in language most foul – if you can understand it. The calendar helps you do so: every page puts its quotation in context, explaining not only where the excerpt comes from but also just who is saying what to whom, under what circumstances, and why. Shakespeare was a master of insinuation as well as out-and-out nastiness, and you’ll find plenty of both here – a trip to the darker side of the Elizabethan world.

But Shakespeare’s world is less strange than that of M.C. Escher, and if you really want to visit somewhere odd in 2010, take in the scenes in the M.C. Escher 2010 Engagement Calendar. This is one of several Escher-based calendars from Pomegranate, and it is a particularly happy melding of form and function. Here are not only Escher’s famous black-and-white works that challenge the senses to figure out just what is going on (such as “Up and Down” and “Concave and Convex,” in both of which directions become interchangeable), but also fascinating color engravings (such as “Stars,” featuring chameleons within a most unusual space object, and “Depth,” in which fishlike winged creatures fly or swim from or to infinity). The spiral-bound, lie-flat calendar provides room for notes for every day of the year; and its samplings of Escher’s earlier, more realistic drawings of people and objects are a well-selected contrast to his more familiar and outré designs.

The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright are particularly adaptable to calendar use, with their colors and unusual use of geometric forms. If you would like a smaller spiral-bound calendar than the Escher one – but still with enough space to jot down a note or two for each day of the year – the Wright “postcard calendar” offers beauty with a bonus. The bonus is that 26 of the pages can be easily removed (they are perforated) and sent as postcards – an exceptionally clever design that gives this calendar value even after you finish using each week. The postcards are quite attractive: a 1927 design for the cover of Liberty magazine, a 1903 art-glass window design, plus textile and carpet designs and much more. Offbeat and unusual, this calendar makes a particularly fine gift for anyone who enjoys Wright’s art and architecture.

In fact, Pomegranate uses Wright’s work in quite a number of different ways. Some of the same designs that appear in the “postcard calendar” also adorn the attractive Wright mini wall calendar for 2010. The abstracts and geometrics here, their colors brilliantly reproduced, very attractively brighten up a small space, such as a work cubicle or a bathroom or small bedroom. Wright’s wallpaper details in multiple shades of blue, in bright orange or in multicolored geometrics really stand out, with textile, rug and magazine designs of all sorts bringing splashes of color to every month.

Or perhaps you would prefer a world both larger and weirder. Then, by all means, consider the full-size wall calendar, Edward Gorey: The Doubtful Guest. Gorey’s ink drawings, extremely meticulous and often very dark, adorn the months in his tale of a strange, vaguely birdlike creature that wears white canvas shoes, shows up at the door unannounced one cold winter’s evening, and remains for 17 years (and still counting) – tearing up books, sleepwalking and disappearing into the soup tureen. Amusing and disturbing at the same time, this story – an allegory of the immigrant experience – retains its oddity and rather soulful depiction of turmoil in a more-or-less Victorian setting more than 50 years after its original publication in 1957. Gorey is something of an acquired taste, and this calendar will not be for everyone, but those who find his observations quietly unsettling – and admire them for that quality – will very much enjoy immersing themselves in the world of The Doubtful Guest all year long.

By now, though, if all you want is a touch of peace, quiet and beauty, consider Buddhist Paintings, featuring works from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. This calendar assembles a dozen devotional works on cloth and from hanging scrolls, some made as long ago as the 13^th century and others from modern times. There is remarkable consistency of imagery despite the vast time span here: the deities and other figures are still shown much as they have been for many hundreds of years. Deities such as White Tara of China and Penden Lhamo of Tibet, the six-armed guardian Mahakala and the guardian Skanda – these and more are depicted in rich colors and textures, with intricate background detail highlighting the figures and projecting a sense of beauty, protection and peace. This calendar takes you to a world away from everyday humdrum and hectic life – a journey that can be revivifying at any time of any month of the coming year.

(+++) COMICS OF MANY KINDS

2009-11-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

Tundra: Nature’s Favorite Comic Strip. By Chad Carpenter. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Stone Rabbit #3: Deep-Space Disco. By Erik Craddock. Random House. $5.99.

Kit Feeny: #1, On the Move; #2, The Ugly Necklace. By Michael Townsend. Knopf. $5.99 each.

I Spy Fly Guy! By Tedd Arnold. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.

Comic-strip-style characters get used in all sorts of ways these days, in books for people of all ages. Tundra is one of the longer-lasting strips of which most people have never heard. It has been around since 1991, with Chad Carpenter using his single-panel format in an attempt to emulate The Far Side in a much colder setting. Carpenter was raised in Alaska and now lives in Wasilla, the town better known for its association with Sarah Palin – who makes no appearances in these strips, which are determinedly apolitical. Carpenter has no recurring characters per se, but he peoples (if that’s the right word) his strip with the same themes again and again: overly fussy scavengers feasting on roadkill, offbeat talking snowpeople, and characters from fairy tales and old legends. Paul Bunyan (once seen to be wearing very large women’s shoes) and his blue ox, Babe (sometimes turned into a blue steak) show up repeatedly; moose of all kinds (but mostly dumb) appear again and again; one snowman appears in a car’s passenger seat in the car-pool lane, while another drinks a hot beverage and complains of “brain-thaw,” and a gossipy third one is “always poking her carrot into everyone’s business.” Then there are animal-vs.-animal jokes, such as chickens eating takeout and saying “tastes like Bob” and two deer putting a “tick me” sign on a third. And the dish that ran away with the spoon takes up with a ladle, and an unfaithful gingerbread man has frosting on his collar, and Tinkerbell flies into a bug light, and so forth. Some of these jokes are old; some are funny the first time, but not in their second, third or fourth variations. Carpenter’s far-north settings sometimes provide offbeat humor – involving hunters, spawning salmon, etc. – but in book form, his panels start to drag a bit after a while.

Nothing drags in the fast-paced Stone Rabbit series. Both it and Kit Feeny are preteen-oriented sequences featuring cartoon characters handling life with varying levels of absurdity. Stone Rabbit’s usual nemesis, Henri the turtle, takes a back seat in Deep-Space Disco, because here the real menace is Melvin the Plutarkian, who looks just enough like Stone Rabbit to switch places with him and try to conquer Earth while Stone Rabbit gets tried by an intergalactic court for Melvin’s crimes. This is all silly (and fairly standard) stuff, but Erik Craddock’s drawings whirl and swirl enjoyably across the pages as Stone Rabbit is repeatedly put into impossible situations that force him to exclaim, “Crudmonkeys.” He does escape, of course, and Melvin is brought to justice, of course; and Henri, of course, comes out on top in the end. The best pages here are the ones with no story at all – just lots of weapons and spaceships zipping back and forth in great swirls of color.

Craddock’s art resembles that of Michael Townsend in some significant ways – perhaps not a surprise, since both attended New York’s School of Visual Arts. But Townsend’s Kit Feeny is decidedly more down-to-earth than Craddock’s Stone Rabbit. Kit is a bear (more or less) living in a standard family in a standard suburban setting, having adventures along the lines of those in the Babymouse books – but oriented more toward boys. Kit and the other characters – including his friends, his parents and his younger twin sisters, April and Bonnie – are pleasantly enough drawn, and some of the ideas are good. For instance, in On the Move, Kit and his family move to a new neighborhood, and Kit is so distraught at leaving his best friend behind that he decides to become a “lonesome hobo.” And in The Ugly Necklace, Kit and his new best friend, Hoff, try to figure out how to pose as rich adults so Kit can get his mother a super-fancy birthday gift. The writing, unfortunately, tends to be uninspired, so the stories end up being a bit too commonplace. And there is nothing like the snippy narrator in the Babymouse books to make the Kit Feeny tales a tad more pointed. On the other hand, they do rely on characters – rather than the action/adventure of the Stone Rabbit series.

Tedd Arnold’s Fly Guy series is more simply plotted and aimed at even younger readers. The latest installment in the story of a boy named Buzz and his pet fly (who can say Buzz’s name) is perhaps not the cleverest, but it is amusing, and the characters are drawn as exaggeratedly as usual. The plot is simply that Fly Guy gets carried to the dump after hiding in a trash can during a game of hide-and-seek that occurs just as the garbage truck comes along. Buzz gets his father to drive to the dump so Buzz can recover Fly Guy – but there are flies everywhere at the dump, so Buzz has to come up with a clever way to figure out which one is his fly. Fans of the characters and the series will enjoy this latest entry, which may be slight but manages to be endearing as well – no small feat for a story that shows Fly Guy eating garbage and features trash everywhere.

(+++) MAKING BIG TOPICS ACCESSIBLE

2009-11-12T08:45:00.000-05:00

Really, Really Big Questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. By Stephen Law. Illustrated by Nishant Choksi. Kingfisher. $16.99.

Life Story: The Story of Life on Our Earth from Its Beginning Up to Now. By Virginia Lee Burton. Houghton Mifflin. $22.

The We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids. By Michael Ungar, Ph.D. Da Capo. $15.95.

Making big topics understandable to young readers and their families is a noble endeavor even when it is not a wholly successful one. So Stephen Law, a British philosophy professor and journal editor, deserves praise for Really, Really Big Questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything, even though the book tends to tread too lightly to make the impression Law obviously seeks. There are four chapters here: “The Great Big Universe Puzzle,” “Mysterious Minds and Robots That Think,” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and “Seeing and Believing.” Each contains a series of questions: “What is nothing?” “What is it like to be a bat?” “How important is happiness?” “Does astrology really work?” Law tends to dance around many of the questions, apparently hoping readers ages 9-12 will get to the answers themselves, but often conveying the notion that there are no right or wrong answers – a noble thought in philosophical terms but less so in scientific ones. For example, “Did someone design the universe?” meanders from the blithe comment, “If a designer designed the universe, who designed the designer?” to a quotation about a puddle from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who here seems to be something of an ultimate authority. Indeed, although the work for which Adams is most famous is not mentioned, it is clearly a big influence on Law, since the third volume of Adams’ five-volume SF trek is called Life, the Universe and Everything. But to return to Law’s book: “What makes stealing wrong?” explains that a successful bike theft may make the thief happy, but it makes the victim less happy and also worries or frightens other people, so “there is less happiness overall.” Well, yes, but why, exactly, should the successful and happy thief care? It is unfair to fault Law for offering better questions than answers – that is what philosophers and many other people do all the time – but there is a “well, maybe” tone to this book that becomes wearing after a while. And Nishant Choksi’s cute illustrations do little to clarify the underlying seriousness of purpose – although they are often fun to look at in their own right.

Life Story takes on an even bigger subject – the entire history of life on our planet – but Virginia Lee Burton’s 1962 book does not hold up very well, even in its new, updated edition. Burton, best known for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House, casts Life Story as a play in a prologue, five acts and epilogue, using left-hand pages for simple narrative and right-hand ones to show the events on a stage. The narration tends to be a bit coy for modern tastes: “Way back in time when our Earth was young no Life could have lived on it.” And the need for compression leads to writing that seems dismissive of vast ages of Earth’s development, such as the single sentence, “Fish, which first appeared in Cambrian oceans, grew more abundant,” to cover one of the major developments of the entire Ordovician period. There is an underlying perkiness to the narrative that is rather ill at ease with the subject matter: “Some [dinosaurs] had developed armor for protection from their meat-eating cousins.” And the “play” conceit wears thin quickly. On the other hand, the basic science here is sound. Left-hand pages, in addition to narrative, show fossils of specific animals and give their names and the names’ pronunciations. And there have certainly been updates, such as the reference to “our Sun’s family of eight planets” now that Pluto has been demoted from planetary status. But some narrative that could have been changed has been left intact: “Historians tell the story of the rise and fall of the great civilizations of the Old World and the discovery of the New World” could easily have been altered to “and their discovery of what they called the New World,” which would be more in line with contemporary sensibilities. Life Story is probably too simplistic for many modern families, but it does offer some accurate skim-the-surface science and a certain period charm in its illustrations.

It is to the young members of The We Generation that books such as Burton’s are least likely to appeal. Dalhousie University School of Social Work research professor Michael Ungar believes that today’s children – he has two of his own – gravitate increasingly toward “we” thinking and away from the “me” orientation of their parents (presumably including Ungar himself). Ungar believes it is incumbent on today’s parents not only to learn from their children (about electronic social interconnection, for example) but also to guide them into realms of compassion and community interest. Ungar’s book is a template for a certain form of social and political liberalism – the kind that encourages attending religious and cultural events of people of other beliefs so as to celebrate and foster diversity. A good deal of what Ungar urges is plain and simple unselfishness and cooperation, which are certainly worthy goals: family cooperation to make holiday dinners a success, for instance, or making carefully thought-out gifts for others instead of rushing to the store to buy something mass-produced. But much of The We Generation assumes a certain idyllic lifestyle that has definite political undertones: constantly asking children how their actions make others feel, for example, or arranging play dates with kids of many ages so your children can help younger ones while being assisted by older ones (all of whom presumably share the same social values). The basic idea here – and it is a good one – is to avoid providing children so much that asks nothing of them that they become focused entirely on themselves. Ask more of kids, and expect more of them, and they will deliver more, writes Ungar – from toddlers learning to say thanks for birthday gifts to preteens looking after pets and teenagers planning school events and helping pay for their own clothing. This is essentially a continuation of the argument that Ungar made previously in Too Safe for Their Own Good, and it is an entirely reasonable one: “Helping our children learn to feel compassion for others and to act responsibly is an old-fashioned idea that needs revisiting.” Parents who share Ungar’s worldview will surely find The We Generation uplifting, with its positive viewpoint, “tips lists” of behavior, and such chapter titles as “Monster Homes Make Monstrous Children.” But there is a certain smug certainty underlying Ungar’s prescriptions that will likely be off-putting to readers who are not predisposed to accept his recommendations even before he presents them.

(++++) WINDOWS 7: BEYOND THE HYPE, SOLIDITY

2009-11-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

Windows 7. Microsoft. Home Premium upgrade, $119.99; Professional upgrade, $199.99; Ultimate upgrade, $219.99.

Don’t buy Microsoft’s hype about Windows 7. Don’t buy any of the hype. But do buy the operating system: it’s a very worthwhile upgrade from either XP or Vista. In fact, Windows 7 is in many ways what Vista ought to have been: it retains the advances of that little-loved OS while subduing many of its most egregious faults, such as extremely long boot times.

There is little that is game-changing in Windows 7, and that is part of what makes it so good. Whether you replace XP or Vista with this new OS, you will be able to adapt fairly quickly and will get a boost in productivity and (especially if you have been running XP) security and networking capability.

The problems that led many XP users to refuse Vista upgrades – constant and overdone security warnings, compatibility issues affecting both hardware and software, plus the aforementioned glacial boot and reboot pace – are solved in Windows 7. True, there are some new irritations, such as the absence of integrated E-mail, video editing and calendar programs; but in fairness, this is not Microsoft’s fault – its bundling of functional programs with its operating systems has cost it many years of lawsuits and many billions of dollars. And all the programs that are no longer included can be downloaded for free.

What Windows 7 does is make a user’s interface with the computer more pleasant, easier and speedier. The new, taller taskbar now lets you pin icons of often-used programs anywhere you like, and move them around as you wish. Then, hovering over a taskbar icon brings up a small preview showing the program in miniature view – a refinement of a similar Vista feature, since now every open window in the program shows up separately in the preview screen and can be brought to full size simply by moving the mouse over it. If you do that, all other desktop windows become transparent in a neat appearance trick called “Aero Peek.” Being able to close windows within the preview screens is another refinement.

Actually, taskbar icons do even more – maybe too much for some people’s tastes – by providing popup menus listing recent files used or frequent actions taken. This feature takes some getting used to, but can really speed work along – or be ignored if you don’t care for it.

Microsoft went for some cuteness as well as practicality in Windows 7, for the first time. The “Snap” feature lets you turn windows into full-screen size by dragging them to the top of the screen, or half-screen size by dragging them to the left or right edge; and “Shake,” a feature that sounds silly but is actually great fun to use, lets you make your current window the only operating one by simply grabbing its title bar with the mouse and shaking – at which point all other windows disappear. Very neat.

Among other improvements in Windows 7 is a “Libraries” feature that pulls together all files of a specific type, such as Documents or Pictures, no matter which folder or hard disk you keep them on – although this does take some getting used to and can be confusing until users adapt to it. There is also, thank goodness, a security-warning feature (“User Account Control”) that is easily adjustable, so you can decide how sensitive to changes you want your computer to be – a significant improvement over the intrusive Vista version, which was much harder to alter. Furthermore, hardware and third-party software generally run far more easily and better in Windows 7 than in Vista, although it’s a good idea to check out your programs’ compatibility by downloading and running Microsoft’s free Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor before trying to install the new OS.

As for which version of Windows 7 to install: well, Microsoft really hasn’t made that decision much easier than in earlier operating systems. It continues to offer multiple flavors for this latest OS. They range from Starter, which comes preloaded on netbooks, to Ultimate, which packs in everything Microsoft could think up, such as the ability to switch among 35 different languages. The business-oriented Professional version is helpful if you need to access a company network remotely, but otherwise, it is overkill. Most users can and should opt for Home Premium, which is sufficiently full-featured under the vast majority of conditions.

Upgrading, though, can be a chore – not if you are going from a version of Vista to the identical version of Windows 7, but very much so if you are changing versions or upgrading from XP. A same-version Vista upgrade is as close to a pleasure as any change in OS could ever be: you simply install Windows 7 over Vista and keep all your settings, programs and files, all in an hour or so. And the hardware requirements for Windows 7 are, thankfully, just about the same as they were for Vista (a welcome change from Microsoft’s previous habit of requiring ever-more-powerful hardware for each new OS). Unfortunately, an upgrade from XP is far from easy. It requires you to back up all your files, wipe your hard disk, install Windows 7, then reinstall all programs (including re-downloading and reinstalling any patches and upgrades) and files. This is extremely time-consuming and is not helped much by Microsoft’s Easy Transfer utility, which moves files but not programs. It is still worth doing – XP is, after all, eight years old, and was actually designed back in 1999, which makes it a real relic. But be prepared to invest considerable time and effort in the upgrade (or, of course, you can always stay with XP until you buy a new computer with Windows 7 preinstalled).

Incidentally, upgraders should remember to stick to the same type of operating system they are used to when moving to Windows 7. The new OS comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and the 64-bit one can improve performance by letting computers use more random access memory (RAM). If you do buy a new computer with Windows 7 already installed, it will likely have the 64-bit version. And there are 64-bit Vista computers out there, and even a few 64-bit XP ones. However, the admirable compatibility of Windows 7 with existing applications – and, more significantly, with older hardware – has a greater chance of breaking down in the 64-bit world, since not all third-party hardware and software makers have created 64-bit drivers for all their products. What this means, in simple terms, is that if you are satisfied with the way your programs and peripherals run on your current computer, and you have the more-common 32-bit OS (either Vista or XP), then you should go to 32-bit Windows 7 and wait to buy a new machine for the 64-bit version.

The increasing use of the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on new computers points to the fact that this OS seems poised to take advantage of some computer features that exist in only rudimentary form today – in other words, it is more forward-looking than earlier Microsoft operating systems. For example, Windows 7 has a touch-screen feature that lets users move windows, flip through photos and more – the sort of thing iPhone owners, for example, have come to expect. But the special screen required to use this feature is not yet widely available. Still, when it is, Windows 7 will show another of its strengths.

This is not to say that this OS is all strengths. Its networking feature is improved – for one thing, you can now see all available networks by clicking a single taskbar icon – but it remains on the cumbersome side. Its “HomeGroups” feature, intended for easier sharing of files among home-network PCs running Windows 7, does not work particularly well and requires the use of long, complex and irritating passwords. And because Microsoft continues to dominate the OS world and is therefore highly attractive to spammers and scammers, users still need third-party antivirus and other self-protection programs to keep malware away and defend their computers (Microsoft’s own efforts at protective software are not robust enough to keep up with the bad apples out there). This need for protection is not a flaw in Windows 7, but it is a fact of life for users of any Microsoft OS – and, it should be said, would become a factor for Apple users if that company’s computers ever took over enough market share to make attacks on them sufficiently profitable for botnet creators and other thieves.

In effect, what Windows 7 does, in addition to adding a few nice-to-have features, is to take all the good things that Microsoft built into Vista – and there were many of them, despite that operating system’s bad reputation – and make them easier to use and less intrusive. One good example of this (among many) is the Start menu, whose improved layout and instant search capability build on what Vista had (although – fair warning – it can still get cluttered as you install third-party software) and make the menu significantly more enjoyable to use. Yes, the word is “enjoyable.” Windows 7 does not make any huge strides in the OS world, but the small ones it makes almost all work well, giving users a relatively clean, uncluttered interface with improved usability, better speed, easier access to whatever they want, and a generally more pleasant working and playing environment. It’s a very, very fine operating system – to which users of Vista and XP should seriously consider upgrading.

(++++) KEYBOARD SUBTLETIES

2009-11-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

Idil Biret Beethoven Edition, Volume 12: Piano Sonatas Nos.4, 8 (“Pathétique”) and 27. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Schumann: Kinderszenen; Brahms: Paganini Variations. Claudio Arrau, piano. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Liszt: Organ Works, Volume 3. Martin Haselböck, organ. NCA. $24.99 (SACD).

There are interesting contrasts between the interpretations of a distinguished pianist taught by some of the grand masters of the earlier 20^th century – and those of one of those masters himself. The latest Idil Biret Archives issue – 12^th in her Beethoven Edition and sixth in her cycle of the piano sonatas – includes recordings of Sonata No. 4 from 2002, No. 8 from 2006 and No. 27 from 2004. As in all her more-recent recordings appearing on the IBA label, Biret shows considerable sensitivity and lyricism in these readings, allowing herself rubato (but not to excess) while letting the structural underpinnings of the music come through clearly. The first two movements of No. 4, which are dark and brooding, come off particularly well here; the lighter third and fourth movements are a touch less impressive, as if Biret cannot quite let go of the solemnity of the earlier part of this sonata – but they are certainly well played. In the “Pathétique” (whose name, unlike those of several other famous Beethoven sonatas, was chosen by the composer himself), Biret plays for depth and drama throughout, but at the same time highlights the work’s careful structure (for instance, the compressed dynamics of the finale prior to the return of the first subject). Thus, she melds emotion to intellect – a common approach for her, and one that works particularly well here. It does not come across quite so well in Sonata No. 27, a proto-Romantic work in which Biret’s focus on control is insufficiently leavened by emotional expressiveness. This two-movement work is a difficult sonata to interpret and not an especially popular one with listeners. Biret handles it with skill and with sensitivity to, among other things, the first movement’s key changes and the second’s decorative flourishes; but it feels almost as if she dissects the music rather than allowing it a natural flow.

Biret is a disciple of Alfred Corot and Wilhelm Kempff, not Claudio Arrau, but it is nevertheless interesting to contrast her Beethoven with Arrau’s 1974 recordings of Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Brahms’ Paganini Variations. Arrau is all suppleness and flow on Pentagon’s SACD re-release. The Schumann is comparatively easy to play, and some pianists tend to overwhelm it as a result. Not Arrau. He takes these small childhood scenes – remembrances, really, by a composer who wrote them when he was not yet 30 – and plays each with straightforward simplicity that nevertheless hints at subtleties just beneath the surface. Arrau makes it possible to enjoy the 13-movement suite entirely at face value, as a divertissement, and then return for another hearing in which it seems there is more going on than appeared at first. The delicacy and balance here are quite special. And for out-and-out virtuosity, there is the contrast with Brahms’ very theatrical handling of a Paganini theme – in a work whose première the composer himself performed. These variations are all about technique, and are very tough to play indeed, but Arrau makes their difficulties subservient to their excitement as he builds each of the work’s two “books” (which contain 14 variations apiece) toward breathless climaxes. There is something unassuming rather than flashy in Arrau’s pianism, which in these two works he puts so clearly at the service of the composers’ very different intentions. The result is a disc that is simply a delight to hear.

Virtuosity is subservient to content as well in Martin Haselböck’s remarkable cycle of Liszt’s organ music. The provenance of these works is frequently complex – Liszt would often tweak others’ organ arrangements of his music, or sometimes alter them substantially, instead of creating them himself from the start – but the historical details are of less interest than the works themselves. The longest of the 11 pieces included in the third volume of this series is Prelude, Fugue and Magnificat from the Symphony to Dante’s “Divina Commedia” (1856-60), begun by Liszt’s assistant, Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg, then substantially altered by Liszt himself. This is, in fact, Liszt’s largest individual arrangement for the organ, and it is a work of towering strength – with an especially impressive fugue (the portion on which Liszt did the most work). Also here are the 1859 version of “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” whose 1862 version Haselböck played in Volume 2 of this series, and Ora Pro Nobis (1865), a work of comparative simplicity and delicacy that makes an effective contrast. Two Wagner-focused pieces appear as well: Pilgrim’s Chorus from “Tannhäuser” (second version, 1862), whose surface simplicity conceals a very artful arrangement, and Am Grabe Richard Wagners (At the Grave of Richard Wagner) (1883), a heartfelt and intimate work whose expressiveness is heightened by inclusion of some Wagnerian motifs. The other works on this disc – whose somewhat disconnected arrangement is its only significant failing – are “A Magyarok Istene” (Hungary’s God) (1881), one of several arrangements Liszt made of a revolutionary poem; Excelsior! – Preludio (1874), one of whose themes Wagner used in Parsifal in 1882; Resignazione (1877), one of several late works in which Liszt seems to express failure or asceticism; Angelus! – Prière aux Anges Gardiens (also 1877), a somewhat less downbeat piece from the same time period; Agnus Dei from Verdi’s Requiem (another 1877 work), a lovely and simple adaptation; and Der Choral “Nun Danket Alle Gott” (1883), a piece considered inferior to Liszt’s earlier organ works when it was first heard, but one whose incorporation of old church music gives it a certain elegance. Haselböck’s playing is sensitive and involved throughout: this is clearly music that he not only understands well but also cares about very deeply.

(++++) THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF STRINGS

2009-11-12T08:36:00.000-05:00

Dvořák: Violin Concerto; Romance in F minor; Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No. 1. Arabella Steinbacher, violin; Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Marek Janowski. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Chants d’Est/Songs from Slavic Lands: Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ernö Dohnányi, Alexander Tcherepnin, Franck Krawczyk, Sergei Prokofiev, Bohuslav Martinů and Gustav Mahler, plus two Jewish traditional songs. Sonia Wieder-Atherton, cello; Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by Christophe Mangou. Naïve. $16.99.

Programs of variety, sensitivity and subtlety distinguish these two well-played disks, although Arabella Steinbacher’s SACD has more depth and is more nuanced than Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s CD. Steinbacher offers a contrast between the high Romantic art of Dvořák and one of the first violin concertos to move past it: Karol Szymanowski’s one-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 (1916), which manages to be highly expressive while going beyond traditional Romantic esthetics and traditional tonality. The Szymanowski, which is played first on this SACD, sounds straightforward and even tame from the vantage point of almost a century later, but Steinbacher makes no attempt to hide its modernity (1916-style) as she attacks the work with both care and gusto, especially notably in the cadenza (written by Paweł Kochański, who helped Szymanowski understand the intricacies of the violin and to whom the composer dedicated the concerto – although Kochański was not the first to play it). Just how far Szymanowski had moved beyond the Romantic ideal is clear in the contrast between his concerto and Dvořák’s Romance in F minor, which the composer reworked for violin and orchestra from a movement of one of his string quartets. Steinbacher nicely controls what can be a level of swooning sentimentalism here, although she plays the work with care and emotion – and is well supported by Marek Janowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, whose sound here is lusher than in the Szymanowski. And then comes Dvořák’s only Violin Concerto, written for Joseph Joachim – who, however, did not care for it and never played it in public. Today it is easy to dismiss Joachim’s objections to the structural liberties that Dvořák took in the work, but in the Romantic era, the composer’s ideas – notably the abrupt shortening of several parts of the first movement and its attacca progression into the second – would have seemed to deny the work (and the soloist) a full measure of expansiveness. Steinbacher plays here with a full, even elegant sound that maximizes the concerto’s effectiveness while showing how firmly it sits in the great Romantic expressive tradition.

Expressiveness is a major focus of Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s CD of folk, religious and traditional music drawn mostly from the parts and peoples of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wieder-Atherton’s program looks wonderful on paper, and her cello playing is sumptuous and lovely, but somehow the juxtaposition of these various short pieces does not quite work – with the result that this CD gets a (+++) rating. There is a sense that Wieder-Atherton is trying too hard to make a point that never quite gets made. An excerpt from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers is followed by parts of Dohnányi’s Ruralia Hungarica, after which there is a Jewish traditional “Song in Remembrance of Schubert” and then the Tatar Dance from Tcherepnin’s Songs and Dances. The underlying musical traditions of these works bear some resemblance to each other, but the pieces coexist rather uneasily here, in a disconnected fashion. And after the Tcherepnin, Wieder-Atherton plays Jeux d’enfants by Franck Krawczyk (born 1969), which is avowedly based on Janácek’s Moravian Folksongs but draws on a much-changed musical language. Then we return to Russia for a short piece from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, followed by Martinů’s Variations on a Slovak Folk Song and an instrumental version of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen from his Rückert songs – and then, at the end, there is another Jewish traditional piece, this time a dance. The emotions skitter helter-skelter throughout this CD, which ultimately is united mostly by Wieder-Atherton’s style and her sensibility. The individual pieces on the disc are a pleasure to hear, and Wieder-Atherton plays them well (and gets good backup from Sinfonia Varsovia under Christophe Mangou, which in this case means the orchestra stays mostly in the background so the limelight remains on the cellist). But as a totality, the CD does not quite hang together, for all the beauty of the playing.

(++++) ANIMALS IMAGINED AND REAL

2009-11-05T08:53:00.000-05:00

The Bog Baby. By Jeanne Willis. Illustrated by Gwen Millward. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

A Book of Sleep. By Il Sung Na. Knopf. $15.99.

Black Beauty. Retold by Sharon Lerner. Illustrated by Susan Jeffers. Random House. $16.99.

Winter’s Tail: How One Little Dolphin Learned to Swim Again. By Juliana Hatkoff, Isabella Hatkoff, and Craig Hatkoff. Scholastic. $16.99.

For joy and for life lessons, animals – real ones and made-up ones – are unsurpassed in books for young readers. The Bog Baby, for ages 3-7, has an old and simple message: “If you love it, let it go.” But it is here framed in ecological awareness and shown in an exceptionally charmingly drawn woodland setting. Jeanne Willis tells of two sisters who, instead of going to a friend’s house, go fishing in a magic pond in Bluebell Wood. What they catch is a wonderfully adorable, frog-sized blue creature called a Bog Baby, with “boggly eyes and a spiky tail and…ears like a mouse.” Soft as jelly, the Bog Baby has wings “no bigger than daisy petals” but cannot fly. The girls take the Bog Baby home, make him a beautiful place to stay in a bucket, play with him and feed him and don’t tell their mother about him, since they caught him when they went somewhere they weren’t supposed to go. But then the Bog Baby gets sick, and the girls have to tell their mom, because they love him so much. And Mom isn’t angry – but she knows that “the Bog Baby is a wild thing. He doesn’t belong here.” And the girls learn the hard lesson that “if we really loved the Bog Baby, we had to do what was best for him.” So they let him go – and then, a generation later, in a surprise ending that isn’t really surprising at all, not one but hundreds of Bog Babies reappear in a truly delightful final illustration by Gwen Millward. Every one of the creatures in this picture has its own pose and its own expression, and the illustration is simply priceless – but no better than Millward’s other marvelous ones, which make this book as much a delight to the eye as it is to the heart.

A Book of Sleep features calming pictures of real animals and a story arc that starts with a watchful owl at night and ends with a tired one as day dawns. Il Sung Na’s simple story shows quiet sleepers (koalas), noisy ones (an elephant), standing ones and moving ones, all observed by the owl, whether they sleep alone (giraffe) or all together (penguins). That’s all there is to the narrative – but it is plenty for a nighttime book for ages 1-5, offering warmly envisioned animals resting comfortably in a wide variety of environments. A Book of Sleep may be just the thing to read to a young child who can’t quite settle down at bedtime.

Sharon Lerner’s retelling of Anna Sewell’s classic, Black Beauty, is not a book for bedtime at all. Intended for slightly older readers, ages 6-8, this 40-page illustrated version of Sewell’s novel retains much of the drama and cruelty of the original, with Susan Jeffers’ illustrations giving a realistic picture of Black Beauty’s many misfortunes and his eventual rescue and happiness. Parents familiar with Sewell’s book will find Lerner’s adaptation an accurate (if highly compressed) retelling and, perhaps, an entry point to the longer work for children who may be reluctant to tackle it in its original form. Jeffers beautifully portrays Black Beauty’s days as a happy colt – warned by his mother that “there are many kinds of people in this world: some are kind, some are cruel, and some are just careless.” And readers watch Black Beauty encounter people of all those kinds, from the caring Gordon family to people who whip and abuse him to drivers of London horse cabs to, eventually, a young boy whose grandfather, Mr. Thoroughgood, helps restore the horse’s faith in human kindness. Black Beauty is a meaningful story for children of all ages, its lessons communicated firmly but gently; this illustrated version should open up its joys and sorrows to a whole new group of young readers.

Black Beauty, although realistic, is a fictional story. Winter’s Tail could well be the stuff of fiction, but it is the true story of a real animal: an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin that became so badly caught in the ropes holding a crab trap that its tail was seriously damaged and eventually fell off. The Hatkoff family members – who have previously chronicled the real-life struggles and triumphs of orphaned hippo Owen, giant tortoise Mzee, polar-bear cub Knut and a family of mountain gorillas – have again fastened on a marvelous, uplifting chronicle that, remarkably, includes the actual photos of Winter’s rescue as well as the ones of her rehabilitation. Winter proves amazingly adaptable: after her tail falls off, she figures out how to swim by moving her body side to side – although dolphins normally swim with an up-and-down motion. But Winter’s solution begins to cause spinal problems for her, and her caretakers at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida realize she needs further human help. The solution turns out to be a custom-designed prosthesis that eventually allows Winter to swim in normal dolphin fashion – a happy ending toward which the book builds fascinatingly, step by step. Four back-of-book pages of more-detailed information on dolphins, Clearwater Marine Aquarium and the prosthetics manufacturer provide additional depth to the story – and a fascinating look at some ways in which the work of helping Winter is now helping humans as well. The result is a wonderful tale of a wonderful tail.

(++++) WELCOME 2010, AGAIN AND AGAIN

2009-11-05T08:50:00.000-05:00

2010 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Get Fuzzy; Cul de Sac: This Exit; Liō: Monster under the Bed; Joy of Cooking; The Office; Australia. Desk—Dilbert; Peanuts. Andrews McMeel. $13.99 each (Get Fuzzy; Cul de Sac; Liō; Joy of Cooking; The Office; Dilbert desk; Peanuts desk); $8.99 (Australia).

2010 Calendar: Wall—Little Nemo in Slumberland. Sunday Press Books. $14.95.

That sound you hear faintly, tripping along the corridors and hiding just out of sight in the distance, is the approaching new year, the final one of the first decade of this century. But fear not, for 2010 is sure to bring amusement, enjoyment, escapism and even (if you like) a bit of education, thanks to the many wonderful calendars that will help you get through the year one day (or one month) at a time.

Andrews McMeel always offers a plethora of wonderful comic-strip amusements in calendar form, and the coming year is no exception. Just as there are cartoons for all tastes – indeed, many strips nowadays are targeted for specific tastes – there are day-to-day calendars that will keep you amused all year with the antics and/or wry comments of your favorite characters. Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley’s increasingly pointed chronicle of the life of feckless human Rob with put-upon mixed-breed dog Satchel and über-self-centered Siamese cat Bucky, features the one-fanged cat’s daily conceited utterances and ever-failing moneymaking schemes, as well as Bucky’s plots against monkeys and ferrets, Satchel’s constant (usually unsuccessful) attempts to stay out of the way of feline abusiveness, and Rob’s ineffective attempts to find a way in which all species can just get along. Cul de Sac, one of the most inventive comics of recent vintage, follows four-year-old Alice Otterloop (“outer loop,” as in the outer lanes of a highway ringing a major city) and her older brother, Petey, in suburban adventures that manage to be both almost-real and entirely surreal. From the thoroughly appropriate education at Blisshaven Preschool Academy to the antics of Alice’s father, Peter, whose tiny car seems to be smaller than he is, life in the suburbs is not so much skewered by Richard Thompson as it is dissected – not only with telling dialogue but also with art that is actually worth looking at every day.

One comic whose art is the point is Liō, a pantomime strip in which words sometimes occur but are never spoken by the boy with the odd name after whom the strip is named. This is a dark strip, but in an amusing way, and if that seems hard to imagine – well, it is hard to imagine, although apparently not for Mark Tatulli, the strip’s creator. Liō’s friends include swamp beasts, cephalopods, Death (who in one strip delivers sweet treats marked “Death by Chocolate”), under-bed monsters, space aliens of all shapes and sizes, and the occasional zombie. How much of this is in the boy’s imagination, and how much is in his “real” world, is one of those questions you can enjoy asking yourself all year with this calendar.

At the opposite extreme of wholesomeness and verbiage is Joy of Cooking, where all you get is words, and they’re suitably delicious. Every page of this calendar includes recipes and kitchen tips, tricks and hints, with material taken specifically from the 75^th-anniversray edition of this highly popular cookbook. The step-by-step instructions make the recipes easy to follow, and since all of them are short enough to fit on a tear-off calendar page, they should be simple enough for even a busy cook to try once in a while.

But what’s keeping you busy? If it’s the office, you might enjoy the silly-to-sparkling dialogue from the fifth season of The Office, offered daily in calendar form. No scenes from the NBC show here, true, but this is a program driven by verbal punches and plots rather than by intense action sequences. In fact, strictly speaking, the action at Dunder Mifflin isn’t much different from the action at real-world offices – and that, of course, is what gives The Office its charm. Well, that plus the fact that the characters speak more pithily and amusingly than most people do most of the time in most real offices. From promotional schemes to office romances, The Office takes everyday work life and dresses it up in snappy dialogue that fans will enjoy day after day – assuming, of course, that they want to be reminded of the contrast between the office in the show and the one in which they work.

But suppose you want to get away from it all each day of the year, not be immersed in an alternative office reality – and are not a “foodie.” What if you just want a calendar to give you a daily peek at somewhere beautiful and exotic? One good choice could be the Australia mini day-to-day calendar for 2010: this island continent is far enough away so most North Americans have not seen it in person, and it has extraordinary beauty – ranging from the world-famous wave-shaped Sydney Opera House to the bleak, red, otherworldly landscape of the Nullarbor Plain. From Australia’s magnificent beaches to its bustling cities and amazing natural wonders, this little calendar is filled with wonderful sights. And it really is a little calendar, so take that into account: it is small enough to hang on a metal cubicle wall or a refrigerator door (a task made easy by the magnets on its back), and that is a plus; but at times the calendar seems too small to contain a place as expansive as Australia. Of course, you could always pay a visit and see everything life-sized….

Day-to-day calendars have retained buyers’ interest despite the increasing use of electronic organizers; but the once-ubiquitous desk calendars (or “daily planners,” if you prefer) have become less popular. That’s too bad, because there is still something useful about seeing an entire week of work and appointments at a glance when you look away from your computer screen (which, for your eyes’ sake, you need to do occasionally!). And there are some wonderful comic-strip-based desk calendars available, too, such as the Dilbert and Peanuts versions for 2010. In fact, although these two calendars are the same size – 8½ inches in one dimension, 7¼ in the other – and are both spiral-bound so they lie flat, their execution is as different as the comics that appear on every left-hand page. The Dilbert calendar is vertical in layout, and each day of the week gets a long, narrow, unlined space in which you can take notes (Saturday and Sunday are half-size). Peanuts is laid out horizontally, and each day gets a vertical, lined block of space (again, half-size for weekend days). The result is that Dilbert is more useful for making notes or writing sentences across a page, while Peanuts is better for listing appointments or things to do. And anyone who likes the work of Scott Adams and Charles Schulz equally won’t go wrong by buying both.

But if you really want a dose of magnificent comic-strip art – art that has never been equaled and, given the shrinkage of newspapers, likely never will be – you may want to treat yourself to a truly wonderful wall calendar showing scenes from Winsor McKay’s astonishing Little Nemo in Slumberland. One of the greatest comic strips of all time, this surrealistic strip from the early 20^th century pushed the boundaries of comic-strip art in ways that are still beyond almost anything ever done in the medium. The full-color Sunday strips gorgeously reproduced in the 2010 calendar include some in which Nemo’s dreams are really surpassingly strange. One has him sliding down an apparently endless banister until he eventually slides right out of bed and wakes up (each strip ends with Nemo awakening). Another has him dreaming that his bed comes to life – and as its legs grow and it starts walking, the panels themselves become more and more elongated. Another features mermaids and takes place half on land and half in the water. And McKay’s truly bizarre version of the old year giving way to the new has to be seen (and marveled at) to be believed. The 2010 Little Nemo calendar may whet your appetite for more of McKay’s superb art and storytelling – and in fact its dozen strips are taken from two collections of McKay’s Sunday strips published, like the calendar itself, by Sunday Press Books. There has never been cartooning quite like McKay’s, so don’t be surprised if even a full year of his images is not enough. Luckily, the publisher has a way for you to get more – a bit of good news for any time of year.

(++++) AND THE DISC KEEPS SPINNING

2009-11-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

Unseen Academicals. By Terry Pratchett. Harper. $25.99.

Let us now praise Terry Pratchett. Or rather Sir Terry Pratchett, the author having been knighted early this year under circumstances that would call into question his inheritance of the mantle of arch-satirist Jonathan Swift if there were any way to call that into question. Pratchett is quite thoroughly British, and Swift was Irish, but Pratchett still seems a most unlikely knight of the realm. After all, he spends much of his time undermining everything on which the realm and its former colonies, such as the United States, are built.

Unseen Academicals is Pratchett’s most thoroughly British book in some time, and that may give pause to some readers on the western side of the pond, who will wonder what in heaven’s name Pratchett means by passing references to scouse (a kind of meat and vegetable stew) and characters called bledlows (perhaps having to do with a village in Buckinghamshire, although the author never quite makes that clear). More importantly, Americans will be bewildered by the alleged subject of Unseen Academicals, which is football – none of your bleedin’ American-style “game” with padded uniforms on refrigerator-sized slabs of human meat and with endless time-outs, but real football, with hooligans and no stopping the game unless somewhat gets killed and maybe not even then, and almost no scoring at all (the greatest player of all time scored four points in his entire career, we learn early on). This is real football, not to be demeaned by being called “soccer,” especially since it has some of the daintiness of rugby thrown in.

But because this novel is set on Discworld, which of course is not Earth, not at all (“There are more things in Heaven and Disc than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” one sage character sagely observes), it is inevitable that this book about football is not about football, or at least not wholly, and maybe not very much after all, although to be the judge of that, you will have to read it, which is a remarkably exhilarating and laugh-and-thought-producing experience. The book’s title refers to Unseen University, good old UU, the centerpiece of Discworld wizardry, except that much of the magic therein appears to have gone rogue and an obscure provision in a long-ago bequest turns out to require the occasional playing of a football game lest the wizards be deprived of their preferred choice of many dozens of different types of cheese.

Obviously this is a Romeo and Juliet story (that’s obvious, isn’t it?), and it just so happens that there are two violently, virulently opposed football clubs, one of them supported by the son of the aforementioned highest scorer of all time (who, however, works at UU and does not intend to play football and come to the same bad end as his father), and the other supported by perhaps the most beautiful and empty-headed model ever to grace the front page of a Discworld newspaper while wearing a beard. And her name is actually Juliet – of course it’s a Romeo-and-Juliet story.

Never assume. It’s not. Or rather it is, but that’s no more the main point than is football. Or cheese. What is so astonishing about Pratchett’s peculiar genius – and it is genius, but only with the qualifying adjective – is the way he casually throws in oblique references to earlier Discworld books and recurring characters while taking a new novel such as Unseen Academicals in entirely different directions that eventually tie into all that has gone before. So Lord Vetinari, tyrannical and perfectly Machiavellian ruler of the city of Ankh-Morpork, plays the other characters here like the game pieces they turn out to be. Rincewind and his walkabout luggage show up, and Death has a bit part, too, being as pithy and self-aware as usual. And there are passing references, which indeed pass very quickly, to dwarfs digging ever deeper beneath the city, to the game of Thud, to the Assassin’s Guild, and so on. Interwoven with these are offhand comments that Pratchett appears to make for no better (or worse) reason than that he can get away with them. Thus, “as an eyewitness the average person is as reliable as a meringue lifejacket.” And, she “met the gaze, which was quite difficult, of Mr. Wobble, the three-eyed transcendental teddy bear.” And, “It was like listening to two ancient dragons talking to each other with the help of an even older book of etiquette written by nuns.” And by the way, please note that in Ankh-Morpork, a trolley bus is really a troll-ey bus, which means a troll with seats upon his back, suitable transport for the reasonably well-to-do.

Now, all the aforesaid relates only tangentially (or perhaps subliminally) to the tale of Juliet and her Romeo (whose name is actually Trev); and no mentioned has yet been made of Juliet’s steadfast and much smarter (if homelier) friend, Glenda, who learns to listen to sherry and for whom a character named Nutt may be a beau. Nutt may in fact be the most important character here, his origin mysterious, his appearance peculiar, his knowledge and strength both prodigious despite his meek and mild and near-starved appearance. His ability to un-die may turn out to be important. Or maybe not, in the grand scheme of things, where the overriding question is whether UU can not only field a football team but actually win a game without using magic. Or maybe there is some other overriding question. It’s all quite wonderfully confused and confusing, and thoroughly satisfying. Or, as UU’s Archchancellor Ridcully says at one point to Glenda, “I see there are a great many things we don’t yet understand.” To which Glenda replies, “Yes, sir. Everything.”

Praise be to Pratchett.

(++++) PUNS AND OTHER AMUSEMENTS

2009-11-05T08:44:00.000-05:00

From Russia with Lunch: A Chet Gecko Mystery. By Bruce Hale. Harcourt. $15.

Dial M for Mongoose: A Chet Gecko Mystery. By Bruce Hale. Harcourt. $15.

Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel about Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out. Edited by Ted Thompson, with Eli Horowitz. Delacorte Press. $12.99.

Silliness knows no bounds – certainly none of age. Preteens who graduate from the pun-filled world of Bruce Hale’s tales of Emerson Hicky Elementary School will find plenty of somewhat more grown-up nuttiness in Noisy Outlaws (and so forth), originally brought out by the publisher McSweeney’s in 2005 and now available in paperback.

But first, back to Emerson Hicky. The 14^th and 15^th adventures “from the tattered casebook of Chet Gecko, Private Eye,” move right along in the well-worn path of the first 13 – a path that Gecko fans will enjoy continuing to travel. From Russia with Lunch (its title itself a pun, or at least a variant, on a famous adventure/mystery movie – as are all the titles of Chet Gecko books) features the usual amusements in chapter titles: “Stu Pigeon,” “Witch and Famous,” “Nobody Does It Badger,” and so on. And it has a typical topsy-turvy plot: machines are taking over school functions usually done by humans (courtesy of a mysterious Russian inventor, Dr. Tanya Lightov), and students are going through personality reversals (teachers’ pets talking back – that sort of thing). Intrepid and sticky-footed Chet needs to get to the bottom of the intertwined happenings without running afoul of what may turn out to be witchery. And speaking of “afoul,” Chet’s partner, the mockingbird Natalie Attired, turn from a fowl friend to a foul fiend here, abandoning him just when he most needs her help. “I went down hard, like a steel-belted birthday cake,” remarks Chet at one point. But of course he eventually picks himself up (which, as it happens, requires him to crawl) and solves the case.

And that brings Chet, and readers, to Dial M for Mongoose, in which the nefarious doings stink. Really stink, as in “stink bomb.” And that is only the first of many indignities visited upon Emerson Hicky and its students and teachers, as the school gets messier and messier while the principal decides janitor Maureen DeBree (as in “more debris,” of course) has lost her cleanliness touch and needs to go. Chet knows that can’t be so – there’s dirty work afoot. Or under foot, as it turns out. And as the chapters roll by – “Jerry Dooty,” “Clues Blues,” “Cold Hard Crash” and the rest – Chet (with Natalie’s help and the occasional lice-cream sandwich) manages to misconstrue all the clues until the mystery more or less solves itself. Which is just fine.

But when young readers outgrow Hale and his Chet-ventures – and they will – where can they turn for offbeat stories for slightly older (and perhaps slightly more mature) readers? Noisy Outlaws… is one place – the title alone is so long that it tells you a great deal about the anthology’s approach. What you have here is a profusely illustrated volume of short stories (and a comic strip and a crossword puzzle), plus one-and-a-half offerings by Lemony Snicket (pen name of Daniel Handler). The complete offering by unfortunate-events expert Snicket is the book’s introduction, which he promises readers will find tedious; the partial one is the last entry, which runs just over one page, breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and is followed by seven blank pages that readers can use to complete the story, or at which they can simply marvel, having paid for their blankness. Anyway, Noisy Outlaws… includes works by Nick Hornby, George Saunders, Kelly Link (a genuinely scary story about whether a monster is genuinely scary), Jon Scieszka, Sam Swope (a variation on the three-wishes fairy tale, including a mother who is a real ogre, not just a human with the personality of one), Clement Freud, James Kochalka (a tale in postmodern comic-strip form), Neil Gaiman (a story of epicureans whose ultimate exotic meal proves too hot to handle, much less swallow), Jeanne DuPrau, and Jonathan Safran Foer (a fantasy about a part of New York City that has mysteriously disappeared, if it ever existed). There is also a self-described ““excessively difficult crossword” by David Levinson Wilk (answer key provided). As in any anthology, some items are more successful than others, but this story grouping is considerably better than most, showcasing a wide variety of styles, sensibilities and subjects. The illustrations are in a large number of different styles, too, and give Noisy Outlaws… a freewheeling appearance as well as a decidedly odd one. It’s the sort of thing Chet Gecko might come up with if he actually ate the lunchroom’s broccoli-and-lima-bean pie – and found it had spoiled.

(++++) WHEN VIRTUOSI COMPOSE

2009-11-05T08:41:00.000-05:00

Joachim: Violin Concerto in One Movement, Op. 3; Violin Concerto in the Hungarian Style, Op. 11. Suyoen Kim, violin; Staatskapelle Weimar conducted by Michael Halász. Naxos. $8.99.

Sarasate: Music for Violin and Orchestra, Volume 1—Zigeunerweisen; Airs espagnols; Miramar—Zortzico; Peteneras—Capriccio espagnol; Nocturne-sérénade; Viva Sevilla!; Fantasie sur “La Dame Blanche.” Tianwa Yang, violin; Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra conducted by Ernest Martínez Izquierdo. Naxos. $8.99.

It makes sense for brilliant instrumentalists to compose music for themselves, and there is a longstanding tradition of their doing just that – dating back, in the case of violinists, to Vivaldi, who wrote at least some of his hundreds of concertos for himself to play (and, incidentally, may well have written the words to the poems that accompany his four most famous ones, The Four Seasons). Not everyone cared for Vivaldi’s playing – apparently some contemporaries found it a touch on the showy side and therefore unseemly, especially for a priest – but it certainly attracted attention. And attracting attention is one thing that violin superstars do exceptionally well. In the 19^th century, the ultimate violin virtuoso was Niccolò Paganini – who, not surprisingly, created a series of concertos that would let him display his technical prowess, and also wrote (among other things) a set of 24 caprices that remain a pinnacle for every modern would-be virtuoso to scale.

But Paganini may not have been the most influential performer among 19^th-century violinists, for his main interest was in displaying his own talents. Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) was expert not only at showcasing his own abilities but also at bringing out the best in some of the Romantic era’s greatest composers. Joachim established Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, previously deemed nearly unplayable, as a mainstay in the concert hall. He was instrumental in reviving interest in Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Schumann and Dvořák wrote their violin concertos for him, although he never played either of them. He advised Bruch, who also wrote works for him, and Joachim’s close friend Brahms composed his Violin Concerto for him – although Joachim played it only six times. The F-A-E Sonata by Brahms, Schumann and Albert Dietrich was written for Joachim as well. In addition, Joachim wrote a small number of works himself – about two dozen – including three violin concertos. The first two, played by Suyoen Kim on a new Naxos CD, are a study in contrasts. Violin Concerto in One Movement is strongly influenced by (and dedicated to) Liszt, who was an important influence on the young Joachim but from whom Joachim later broke, allying himself with the more-conservative musical approach epitomized by Brahms. This is a youthful and exuberant work, with two cadenzas in its single extended movement, and with plenty of opportunities for virtuoso display. Joachim’s second concerto, Violin Concerto in the Hungarian Style, was published after Joachim’s break with Liszt, but it handles its Hungarian inflections with Lisztian panache, especially in the finale. Joachim was himself Hungarian, and the multiple thematic elements reflecting Hungary in this concerto are impressively managed as well as atmospheric. These are good concertos for top-notch young violinists such as 22-year-old Kim to play, demanding excellent technique without requiring great emotional depth. These Joachim concertos, especially the second, have considerable flair, and Kim tosses them off very effectively, receiving fine backup from Staatskapelle Weimar under Michael Halász.

Another 22-year-old virtuoso, Tianwa Yang, brings plenty of fire and spirit to the compositions of another great 19^th-century violinist, Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908). Sarasate was more in the tradition of Paganini – a superb player whose technique was highly influential – than in that of Joachim, whose tremendous abilities were placed at the service of some of the great composers of his and earlier times. Sarasate’s use of vibrato and emphasis on his instrument’s tone are just two of his areas of influence on other violinists. His music, written in various folklike styles, has a fairly narrow emotional range (languorous to flighty) and tends to sounds a bit repetitious when heard in large quantities. But many of his works, when listened to individually, are gems – notably including Zigeunerweisen, perhaps his best-known display piece. The distinct Hungarianisms of this work (which uses the same concluding melody that Liszt chose for one of his Hungarian Rhapsodies) make an interesting contrast to the more typical Spanish and Basque music heard in most of the other works on this CD. Among the disc’s highlights are the lovely Nocturne-sérénade, which is graceful and more subtle than most of Sarasate’s music; and Fantasie sur “La Dame Blanche,” based on François-Adrien Boieldieu’s 1825 opera, which combines considerable lyricism with plenty of fireworks. Ernest Martínez Izquierdo and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (which was founded by Sarasate in 1879) give Yang excellent accompaniment throughout these works – and since Naxos has designated this CD as Volume 1 of a series, there should be considerably more of Sarasate’s music, and his approach to the violin, still to come.

(+++) TRIBUTES

2009-11-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

El Sistema: Music to Change Life. A film by Paul Smaczny and Maria Stodtmeier. EuroArts DVD. $24.99.

Within a Dream: A Celebration of the Artistry of Richard Hickox. Chandos. $18.99 (2 CDs).

Overtly celebratory productions are, in a sense, quite beyond criticism. They are generally of interest only to people who already know what is being celebrated, and those people need not be told if the person or event is wonderful (they believe that already) and will not listen if things seem to fall short (they will not believe that to be possible). So releases like these two inevitably have the flavor of “preaching to the converted,” a fact that their sheer exuberance underlines. This in no way means they are uninteresting or poorly produced: both the film El Sistema and the two-CD Richard Hickox set contain a great deal of worthy material. But too much adulation comes to seem as if those delivering it are trying a little too hard – not that fans of El Sistema or Hickox would ever feel that way.

The Paul Smaczny/Maria Stodtmeier film is essentially an affirmation of a well-conceived program that has produced one international musical superstar – conductor Gustavo Dudamel – and has pulled hundreds of thousands of poor children into choirs and orchestras. This is El Sistema, brainchild of Venezuelan musician/politician José Antonio Abreu; and the documentary follows a number of wonderful stories (including Dudamel’s) in showing how the music-education program has brought many, many children out of the violence and hopelessness of the barrios and into a world filled with hope and opportunity. It is almost too uplifting for words – although there are plenty of words here, including some from Abreu himself. But there is a problem: El Sistema is essentially a political creation, and as such is now firmly under the control of Venezuelan caudillo and self-proclaimed “Bolivarian revolutionary” Hugo Chávez. Filmmakers get no access to El Sistema or to anything else in Venezuela without the approval of Chávez, and Chávez is not known for approving in-depth studies that show him, his policies or his nation in an unfavorable light. This situation throws something of a pall over El Sistema, which does not address its dependency on Chávez at all and remains focused on heartwarming stories. And the stories are heartwarming, with children as young as age two taken off the “mean streets” of the nation, taught the basics of music, provided with instruments and lessons in the hundreds of núcleos throughout the community, and given the chance to become part of an ensemble. The youngsters make music six days a week for four hours a day, and the film emphasizes that this time gives them respite from otherwise difficult lives, providing safety and a supportive environment. But consider: if this were occurring in, say, Fascist Italy or Communist Romania, questions would surely be raised about regimentation, about using the approach to generate support for the government and specifically for its leader, about the whole arrangement being a method of control and a tool for solidifying power. These are not questions that are present in El Sistema, and perhaps they could not have been asked while still allowing the filmmakers such extensive access to the program and its participants. Yet one wonders, in listening to Dudamel and others speak of the marvels of El Sistema, how much freedom they have to say anything less than adulatory, and how free the filmmakers would have been to include criticism if it had been given. This is not to take anything away from El Sistema as a film (it is a well-made documentary), from the music education it chronicles (which has clearly had remarkable successes), or from Abreu himself (who comes across as a dedicated and farsighted man). But hagiography, whether of a person or of a system, is always (almost by definition) overdone. In today’s Venezuela, it seems particularly out of place.

The issues with the two-CD tribute to Richard Hickox are somewhat different. When a respected musical figure dies unexpectedly, as Hickox did in November 2008 at the age of 60, outpourings of affection are to be expected; and it only makes sense for Chandos, for which Hickox made some 280 recordings, to create a memorial tribute such as this one. The fact that royalties from Within a Dream are being donated to The Richard Hickox Foundation is a plus: the foundation promotes British music and composers and helps boost the careers of young British singers and conductors – worthy causes all. Furthermore, the two CDs contain more than 153 minutes of music – close to the medium’s 160-minute capacity – and so deserve to be called generous. But they are, for all that, a very limited look at Hickox, one of whose distinguishing characteristics was the ability to carry an overall concept of a lengthy work through the entire piece, even while effectively bringing out details of individual sections. There is, of course, no room for anything very long in a “tribute” production, and what Chandos offers here is 22 tracks of very well-played music not only by British composers (Bridge, Britten, Elgar, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and others) but also by Dvořák, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Verdi and more. The result is a set that proves that Hickox was versatile and had a fine ear for musical detail in shorter formats; but this is certainly not an in-depth exploration of the conductor. And fans of Hickox will likely have much of this material in their libraries already. This set is a lovely gesture and a money-raiser for a good cause, and certainly lets part of the Hickox style come through to listeners – but only part of it, and not necessarily the most distinguished or important elements.

(++++) NEW YORKERISMS

2009-10-29T08:48:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker: On the Money—The Economy in Cartoons, 1925-2009. Edited by Robert Mankoff. Andrews McMeel. $24.99.

Old Farts Are Forever. By Lee Lorenz. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

There are some very special things about The New Yorker, not the least of which is how determined it is to have people regard it as special. To that end, the magazine has developed a unique sense of humor in its cartoons – some of which are haughty but not particularly funny, others of which are in-jokes of one sort or another, and still others of which are hilarious in a sophisticatedly offbeat way. One topic that the magazine does not cover particularly well is finance, so it may come as a surprise that so many of its cartoons have dealt with matters monetary over the years. Still, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his introduction to The New Yorker: On the Money, these are not really the cartoons of people who understand financial matters or Wall Street (even though that famous center of capitalism is, after all, in New York). These cartoons are mostly those of bemused characters who just can’t quite figure out what all that financial fuss is about and how the “money business” works. And yet many of these offerings are extremely funny. There is the well-dressed man walking into the IRS holdings his hands up in surrender. There is the husband ruefully telling his wife that they are now living beyond their second income. There are the Wall Street traders looking up at the display board to see the start of the Biblical phrase of doom, “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.” There is the IRS bureaucrat telling the irritated (and presumably under-audit) businessman, “Maybe we do bungle the spending of your tax dollar, but you’ll have to admit we do a bang-up job of collecting it.” There is the down-at-the-heels miner who pans a large gold nugget from a stream and says, “Damn it! Now I’ve got to revise my estimated income.” There’s a megastore in which men and women with shopping carts roam aisles adorned with signs such as “Mutual Funds,” “REITs,” “Tax Exempt Municipals” and “U.S. Treasury Notes.” And there is one down-at-the-heels man saying to another, “There, there it is again – the invisible hand of the marketplace giving us the finger.” The cartoons are arranged by decade – a very few from the 1920s and a good selection thereafter – but the best ideas transcend their times, poking fun at (and a few holes in) the whole notion of prosperity for its own sake and the people who pursue it. The New Yorker is often a touch too snooty for its own good (although many of its readers think that is their own good), and the frequent disdain for the monied class in these cartoons melds uneasily with the fact that the magazines’ subscribers are scarcely downscale. But even if this creates some dissonance and ambivalence within the cartoons, it also helps give them a kind of wry effectiveness – and an impact quite different from that of the cartoons in, say, The Wall Street Journal.

But it must be said that The New Yorker seems more at ease with cartoons about relationships than with ones about dollars and cents. Lee Lorenz, longtime cartoon editor of the magazine (before Robert Mankoff, editor of On the Money, took over) and a contributor of more than 1,700 drawings to it, offers some samples of his work in the small but delightful Old Farts Are Forever. The title comes from a panel that could have gone into On the Money. It shows three older businessmen sitting together, apparently at a club, with one saying, “Wunderkinden come and go, but old farts are forever.” Most of the Lorenz drawings here, though, are about interpersonal relationships. Young woman to older man, at a party: “It's certainly refreshing to meet someone sixty years old who looks sixty years old.” Long-suffering wife to her husband: “Of course I still love you – it’s called the Stockholm syndrome.” Woman lying in a bed with two men, one on each side of her, both of them reading books, as she turns to the one on her left: “Howard, I’m seeing someone else.” Wife to husband when Death shows up at the door: “It’s the closure fairy.” Thoroughly bored dog’s thought as his owner pets his head: “Mr. Dennison is survived by his long-time companion, Rusty.” Futuristic scene with sweet and busty young woman talking to grizzled man: “Gee whiz, Mr. Collins – two hundred and six isn’t old!” Old Farts Are Forever offers more chuckles than guffaws, but there are plenty of them to be had, and Lorenz – who says he has become an “old fart” himself – is a fine companion in and chronicler of this age group’s amusingly skewed world.

(++++) CHRISTMAS IS A-COMING

2009-10-29T08:45:00.000-04:00

’Twas the Night Before Christmas. By Clement Clarke Moore. Illustrated by Jon Goodell. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $17.99.

A Christmas Manger. By H.A. Rey. Houghton Mifflin. $9.99.

The Christmas Book: How to Have the Best Christmas Ever. By Juliana Foster. Scholastic. $9.99.

The Little Prince Deluxe Pop-Up Book. By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $35.

Dinosaur Park. By Hannah Wilson. Illustrated by Steve Weston. Kingfisher. $17.99.

Christmas is not that far away – and here are some wonderful new books to help put you in the mood. The familiar verses of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas are enlivened in the handsome new Accord edition of the poem by illustrations that make use of lenticular animation – or “AniMotion,” as the publisher calls it. This is a technique in which pictures (or, in this book, parts of pictures) seem to move as you change the angle of the page, lending an animated element to the story. The Star of Bethlehem grows larger at the start of the poem as a comet whizzes past; a candle flame visibly flickers; those sugar-plums really do dance in a child’s dream; and, later, a toy train moves under the Christmas tree and Santa’s belly does indeed shake when he laughs. The naïve charm of the otherwise old-fashioned illustrations mixes pleasantly with the modern technology that makes parts of the book seem to move, even though Jon Goodell takes some liberties with the words of the poem: Santa is human-size, not a “jolly old elf”; there is no indication that “his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot”; and there is no sign of his pipe smoke encircling his head – the pipe seems to be a toy. Ah well – these pictures are not so much about accuracy as they are about enjoyment, and kids will certainly get plenty of that as they watch elements of this much-loved poetic tale appear to come to life.

It is the religious elements of Christmas that come to life in A Christmas Manger, a wonderful crafts project for the whole family. Curious George creator H.A. Rey (Hans Augusto Reyersbach) was Jewish, but this 1942 work is entirely Christian, using words from the gospels of Matthew and Luke to tell the familiar tale of the birth of Christ, and then showing the animals, Three Kings and angels adoring the Holy Family. The book’s design is tremendously clever: every figure can be neatly punched out of the pages – no scissors or other tools required – and then folded so it stands up. Cutouts in the inside front and back covers are storage pockets for the figures, so they can be set up year after year. And when they are set up, they produce a traditional manger scene that kids can arrange as they wish and that parents can use to teach the story of Jesus’ birth visually – to go along with the Biblical words that the book includes. This is a lovely family activity and an effective way to recount the Christmas story, especially to young children.

For a guide to the more secular aspects of Christmas, families can turn to The Christmas Book, which explains the origins of many Christmas traditions (cards, Santa Claus, caroling, Christmas trees, etc.) and offers suggestions on activities such as holding a Christmas party, preparing Christmas dinner (including for vegetarian guests), wrapping presents, and making edible gifts (several recipes are included). Stories of how Christmas is celebrated around the world are especially interesting: in Greenland, people feast on raw, decomposed auk meat; in Iceland, instead of one Santa, there are 13 imps; in Ukraine, revelers welcome spiders into their homes to commemorate a folktale about magic arachnids that turned webs into silver and gold. Add in the suggestions for games that kids can play – plus some for adults – and you have a winner of a book that will help keep your Christmas spirited.

And speaking of Christmas gifts: anyone who loves Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novella, The Little Prince, will be absolutely charmed by the new pop-up version, which would make a very generous gift for a child or a marvelous addition to a family’s own bookshelf of treasures. This is the complete story, not the sort of abridgment that would more usually appear in a pop-up book. And the illustrations are the original ones created by Saint-Exupéry himself for the first edition in 1943 – not modernized at all, just rendered into three-dimensional form through very clever pop-up designs. Adults encountering the book for the first time, or re-encountering it after some years, may be surprised at how…well, adult the book is, for all its reputation as a children’s work. The core statement in the book – “What is essential is invisible to the eye” – is scarcely what one would expect in a story for children. And the Little Prince’s adventures, on six planets inhabited by foolish adults and then on Earth, are far from the kind of mundane and innocent fun that so many children’s books offer. The fact is that The Little Prince is not a children’s book, or certainly is not wholly one, and the wonderful pop-ups in the new edition make that clear (and increase the work’s many ambiguities) by giving the author’s unusual illustrations greater prominence. This is a treasurable edition of a wonderful work, highly recommended as a gift for Christmas or any holiday.

Even in pop-up form, The Little Prince will be a bit too much for younger children, but they too can have a wonderful time with pop-ups – in Dinosaur Park, which is nearly an entire play set in book form. Open this very cleverly designed book and you get four separate pop-up scenes set in a make-believe zoological park featuring dinosaurs – think Jurassic Park without the scares. Each scene bears unidentified footprints and is imprinted with questions, such as “Who hunts hadrosaurs?” and “Who is trying to eat the eggs?” Kids find the answers in the bound-in “Dinosaur Park Field Guide,” which tells about several dinosaurs and shows their tracks – which can be matched to the ones in the pop-up scenes. And the dinosaurs themselves are contained in a packet bound into the back inside cover of the book and marked “Warning!! Dinosaurs – Open if You Dare.” When kids do open the flap, out come perforated, press-out dinosaur pieces that easily stand up and can be placed within the pop-up scenes – or used for play elsewhere. For children ages 3-6, Dinosaur Park makes a wonderful gift: colorful, educational, filled with things to do and lots of fun to use. It’s a treat for any occasion in any season of the year.

(+++) EVERYDAY WONDERS

2009-10-29T08:42:00.000-04:00

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life. By Cami Walker. Da Capo. $19.95.

Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently—Why It Helps Your Kids and Can Strengthen Your Marriage. By Kyle Pruett, M.D., and Marsha Kline Pruett, Ph.D. Da Capo. $15.95.

Most of life is made up, not of grand triumphs and failures, but of small, everyday successes and less-than-ideal outcomes. And in the long run, the daily accumulation of positives and negatives turns out to be what matters most – not only to adults but also to children. In the case of 29 Gifts, the small successes were a way to pull out of a very deep and dark hole indeed. Author Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her early 30s, and soon found herself depressed, sleepless, in constant pain, and addicted to prescription drugs designed to keep the effects of the incurable disease at bay. Then Walker, a believer in alternative medicine, got some surprising advice from an old friend, a South African medicine woman: start giving gifts to others – 29 of them in 29 days. Initially skeptical, Walker soon embraced the concept as a way to change her perception of herself and her MS. By Day 29, she wanted to give a gift to the world, and did so by launching the Web site, www.29gifts.org. Thousands of people have signed on and are now doing their own forms of gift-giving. Interestingly, a reader need not believe in shamanism, “natural healing” or any of the other alternative-medicine buzzwords to understand how the 29 Gifts approach could work. It forces the participant to think outside herself and beyond her disease, focusing – even if only briefly – on other people and what they want or can use. The reason is that the gifts need to be mindful, not arbitrary. For example, you can give more money than you usually would to a street performer, and you can listen empathetically to a friend who is having a tough time; Walker did both these things. But you cannot do the reverse. Walker interweaves her own story with that of the movement that she now so strongly supports. For instance, she talks about her husband, Mark, not being a believer: “Though I’ve tried several times, I still haven’t managed to convince Mark to try the Giving Challenge and sign up to share stories. He thinks it’s uncool to ‘brag’ about the things you do for others.” Mark is apparently not an Oprah fan: this book practically exudes Oprah-ishness, with all sorts of heartfelt comments and teary moments and affirmations galore. In fact, it is so relentlessly upbeat (despite the sections devoted to Walker’s struggles) that it wears rather thin after a while. “While I was busy comparing our outsides, I lost sight of what we have in common on the inside.” “Over time, my relationship…evolved and we are now close friends.” “I want to send out a sincere thank you to every person who has chosen to take part in the 29 Gifts Movement.” And so on. It’s all very uplifting, potentially of genuine value in teaching people to look outside themselves and the daily grind of their lives, and often quite syrupy.

Partnership Parenting is more matter-of-fact and more child-focused. Actually, its focus is the traditional family unit of mother, father and child; and the husband-and-wife team of Kyle Pruett and Marsha Kline Pruett focuses on the need for a “parenting team” to turn the “inherent contradictions” between male and female parenting styles into learning opportunities. The basic argument here is that men and women naturally gravitate to different styles where children are concerned: mothers tend to protect and nurture, while fathers tend to push kids toward independence and exploration. It is absolutely necessary to accept this underlying premise for this book to have any value – arguing with it undermines the foundation of the whole approach. Indeed, the authors are fond of absolute statements throughout. For example, when writing about discipline, they say, “By age two…shame arrives on the scene to help children control their impulses. It works now – as opposed to when they were younger – because the child’s growing moral sense and self-awareness combine, rendering her capable of figuring out embarrassment and, more importantly, its causes and effects.” Or, regarding “retaliatory behavior” such as pushing buttons on household media, it “isn’t expected until a child is closer to three.” And: “Even when mothers and fathers are equally involved in raising children, mothers may feel a sense of ownership of the children compared to fathers.” Readers who accept the Pruetts’ comments at face value – and, to be fair, many of them are backed up by solid research – will find suggestions in this book for embracing different styles of parenting instead of arguing about them and then seeking a “middle ground.” Think of parenting as a team sport, the Pruetts suggest: each parent plays a different position, and each needs to understand and appreciate – and support – what the other does. Partnership Parenting is mostly about ways in which to develop that support system, which the authors say will be good not only for children but also for parents themselves. One particularly useful idea is to be sure you and your partner agree on really major issues, such as schooling and values, and then allow yourselves to disagree on various everyday matters, even if that seems inconsistent. The Pruetts argue that this teaches children to handle diversity better. Much in Partnership Parenting is not intuitively obvious, and some elements will be questionable, especially if parents have significantly different styles. But the book’s suggestions for managing conflict, handling discipline effectively, and finding ways to strengthen the parental bond even when two people approach child-rearing differently, are certainly worth considering – and may make it easier to develop a family structure that works better for children and adults alike.