Book Review: Do YOU See ME in the SEA? (OT)(Children's science book, sea animals)

Do YOU See ME in the SEA? by Bonnie Busbin (Booklogix, 38 pages, ages 4-7, 2021, $10.79 paperback)

Questions in Poetry, Answers in Prose

Fifteen common and not-so-common animals to guess their identity and learn about in Do YOU See ME in the SEA? On every right-hand page is a poem with clues as to the identity of the sea animal revealed when you turn the page. Your child will quickly learn them all, maybe more quickly than you!

With lovely watercolor art, the reader will be amazed how much the seemingly empty seas on the right-hand pages vary. A doubly helpful glossary is found at the end of this fun encyclopedia along with three thought-provoking questions to teach us to take care of our beaches.

So, is this poetry in science or science in poetry?

Book Review: Kit 'n Kat: The Nose Knows (new girl, shy shelter dog, nosework)

Kit 'n Kat: The Nose Knows, by Linda Steinbaum (Mascot Books, 2019, $14.95, 112 pages, ages 6-10 but probably for those in the upper ranges)

It's hard to be a kid and have to leave your two besties and move to an entirely different house and town and school. It's hard to be raised by your hippie mom after your dad dies when you are four and now you are almost a teenager and your mom marries Mark, a real toughie. 

This is the situation for Kat one summer. The only bright star on her horizon is a birthday present from Mark, of all people - a trip to the shelter to pick out a dog! And so, in comes a shy yellow lab-like dog with a big nose - a very shy dog, named Kit, short for Scaredy Cat since he was returned to the shelter for being scared of everything.

When toughie Mark's colleague recommends training for Kit the dog and Kat his new daughter, he is all for it. But the training classes aren't the traditional ones he expects: they turn out to be nosework, supposedly to build up confidence in dogs. After a rocky start, Kit and Kat totally shine in class and enroll in intermediate classes and later, even private lessons.

School starts and turns out to be a lonely part of both Kat's and Kit's day and seems to drag on and on. 

But then, Kit is put to the test. Can the dog win over the neighborhood and save the day? 

Author Linda Steinbaum has crafted a book that all positive-reinforcement dog trainers will love. It's about time that gentle dog training had a hero and both Kit and Kat fit that bill. DogEvals' hope is that dog trainers, dog families and dog kids all over will read this book and enroll in training classes - even if they are not nosework classes.

This book deals realistically with real problems - family, moving, school, and everything else is so believable not even adults will be able to wait for Steinbaum's next book! 

Book Review: The Odyssey & Henry's Box (children's book, robot, 1849, time t` ravel)(OT)

The Odyssey & Henry’s Box, by Sarah Aris (Semicolon Publishers, $11.99 paperback, 2021, ages 6-10, 76 pages), first in the series of The Adventures of Charlie & Baxter 

A short little chapter book with illustrations, this first book in The Adventures of Charlie & Baxter introduces us to Charlie, an 8-year-old brave (headstrong?) girl techie, her more cautious 10-year-old brother, Baxter, and their dog, Sparky. Reminiscent of Mary Pope Osborne's The Magic Tree House books, the Charlie and Baxter books involve time travel, a robot, and a new computer language, Python, that apparently only Charlie can figure out (a programming language that not even the parents of readers recognize!).

Author Sarah Aris has selected a good moment in history for her first adventure book and The Odyssey & Henry's Box is timely for a March Black History Month read: it tells the story of how Charlie and Baxter save the day when they time-travel to an American plantation of 1849 and witness a slave auction. Aris also sets the stage and introduces us to the time-travel robot, Odyssey, and how Charlie programs it to transport the kids to another date in time and then safely back home again.

The interesting and true story of Henry 'Box' Brown, on which Charlie and Baxter's adventure is based is included at the end of the book.

This series is an update of The Magic Tree House books

but we recommend you stick with The Magic Tree House series for excitement, history and geography, writing style, and character development. 

Yappy Hour! For local dogs and their peeps! (The Chrysalis, Columbia, MD)

Starting Wednesday, July 6, bring your dog to a free weekly Yappy Hour at Merriweather Park in Symphony Woods (Inner Arbor Trust) from 6-8pm. The Chrysalis.

A new tradition your dog and family will love! See you there!

Book Review: The Strong Ones (OT)(women, military, physical training)

The Strong Ones: How a Band of Civilian Women Made Their Mark on the Army, by Sara Hammel 

(Sara Hammel Books, 2021, $14.95, 397 pp)(watch the trailer)

Study Hard, Play Hard, Bond Tightly

A college sorority. . . or not?

Work Out Hard, Play Hard, Bond Tightly 

Soldiers in a small unit and the 40-odd women in the 1995 study which proved to the Army that civilian women (and therefore, female soldiers) can build strength over a period of seven months. But why?

Soldiers (and summer camp  counselors) are together 24/7. Soldiers not only work together but they work out together, and socialize together, as do their families. Their kids go to school together. And when soldiers deploy, their families come together in support. And when soldiers transfer to another duty station, they don't say goodbye, but rather, something along the lines of 'until we meet again' because in a 20-year career, chances are that they will serve together in a different location.

A Study, A Book in Three's

How I wish author and journalist Sara Hammel had found a stellar editor and publisher for The Strong Ones: it is a story that deserves to be told everywhere and is replete with drama - not only physical tribulations but emotional ones as well.

Part one: the selection of 40-some mostly civilian women in Massachusetts willing to work out vigorously for seven months to see how strong they can become, to see if they can do any job in the military, which, in 1995, is limited in opportunities for women. They dragged and carried heavy loads, ran long distances, jumped higher than they thought they could.

Part two: the training and the increasing support and cohesion of the four groups of women in their physical struggles to work out (and some, to lose weight).

Part three: 25 years later and what happened to the women and the men who trained them. Where are they now and what have they accomplished - and how do they remember their life-changing experience in the 90s?

Military Book Club

I read this book for my military book club (of which I am usually the token woman, not unusual in the military). We are all older so some of the group did not serve with very many women if they served when young. We are officers and enlisted, academy grads and ROTC and Basic grads - and boot camp grads. We are Army, Navy, and Air Force. But what we mostly are is a small band of people, some of whom served in war and some who didn't, but who all shared the culture of the military. We are immediately comfortable with each other even if we served during or in different wars or conflicts.

Unfortunately, I had not finished the book when the book club met, so I mostly listened. And my take-away lesson is that men are different from women, even in the military because the men discussed how they would have reacted if the book had been about them, and not women. The women bonded, and fell in love, and were proud to lose weight or frustrated to not lose weight. And they cried, and they supported each other. 

On the other hand, my group of men said they probably would not have acted like that but would have competed against each other more, rather than cooperated and supported each other. They would have joked around more and tried to outdo each other. 

And I mostly listened.

And, After the Book Club Meeting

Later, I finished the rest of the book, the more than 2/3 remaining. And I loved the end, how the women turned out. They actually had a 25-year reunion for as many as could be reached and could travel to the reunion. And they reminisced. And they relived a few misunderstandings and a few that not both parties remembered.

I sincerely hope the author does find an editor and publisher and perhaps a different title for maybe even a movie - The Strong Ones is a story to be read. (And I cannot believe that I was in the Army during this period of seven months and never heard about the 'experiment.')

By the time the book club met again, I had finished The Strong Ones and reported on my impressions.

Number one, that not all groups of women going through a similar experience will bond as closely (being together only one hour a day on weekdays and getting together on weekends to party) and not every woman in a closely-knit group will feel as close to the others. 

And secondly, I remembered the book  club members that the book was written and experienced by a journalist who experiences things with a different eye, looking into things more deeply.

It would have been interesting if our book club also had had another one or two women to validate or at least test my impressions. Nevertheless, this experiment became more important as time went on, as today nearly all military jobs are open to women.

And finally, the author opens with the story of a young woman today who works hard to join the military and how she succeeds in becoming an officer - and who she is today, in part due to The Strong Ones. We meet this young woman periodically and, in the end, find out who she really is.

Below: pages that I highlighted with notes to review for this book review (and which I totally forgot about until after I finished writing!) From the front, from the back of the book

Book Review: A Tale of Two Cities (YA edition)(OT)

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (FEARON, Enriched Classics Edition abridged and adapted by Andrea Clare, 1973, 92 pp, grades 8-12, ages 13-17)

Dickens, Again? Yes!

When is the last time you read Dickens? Perhaps in high-school? Then it's about time you read him again, starting with the well-known A Tale of Two Cities. You can pick up a used copy at any second hand bookstore like I did.

I picked up the easy-reader version - for young adults, teens. But I remember reading the adult version in my high-school English class.

I think we all know the story or at least some of it. Perhaps the first lines and the final lines: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." And "It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done."

We all know some of the characters: Miss Guillotine, for example. And we recall snippets - 18 years in prison, a woman knitting in code the names of some guys, etc.

The quick-read version I read could be hard to follow if you don't recall much, for there are so many characters and so many twists and turns. I believe adults want more detail in order to follow the plot but middle-school kids will have no problem.

Challenge

And for those of you adults who want to read the original, there are plenty. In one page on the internet, I counted 29 versions and that was only the first page of 50! There are even Cliff's Notes to help you.

Book Review:The Forgotten 500 (OT) (WW2, American bombers rescued from behind the German lines. . . .)

The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II, by Gregory Freeman (Penguin, 2007, 313 pages, $16.00) 

Human Compassion. Loyalty. Redemption. Heroism. Self-Sacrifice.

It is the rare nonfiction book indeed that reads like a fast-paced novel, but The Forgotten 500 is one such book. An exciting adventure with breathless twists and turns.

Too Thrilling?

It is World War II and American bombers were shot down over enemy territory, many of them over Yugoslavia on their way to or from bombing oil production sites in Romania. Parachuting from their wounded plane before it crashed, they were welcomed by the overwhelming generosity of Serbian people in small, isolated mountain villages. American crews were kissed and hugged, fed and given overnight accommodations before being escorted onward, away from German-occupied areas. And other groups of guerrillas escorting other Americans would run into each other and join up until there were hundreds of Americans hidden in the mountain villages. 

Their next mission: how to get word out that they were still alive and how to get back to their base to fight again.

Meanwhile, mothers and wives back home would receive telegrams. . . .

Cliffhangers on Every Page

Author Gregory Freeman has done an incredible amount of research and interviewed surviving members of Operation Halyard. The Forgotten 500 is non-fiction that reads like fiction: it is that spellbinding. If only Freeman had written my history textbook. . . . 

I changed my mind about some of World War 2's participants. I learned about diplomatic spats between the Brits and the American State Department (at times at war with the Pentagon). I changed my mind about Croatian Tito: it's true he and his partisans united the various factions to make Yugoslavia after the war (later, Communist) but his rival Serbian Mihailovich and the monarchists also fought the Nazis and would not undertake missions if they were too risky. It was this latter group that saved and shielded the airmen for many months yet because of a spy in British Intelligence, the Free World preferred Tito's group and stopped supporting Mihailovich, incorrectly believing erroneous information about his collaborating with the Nazis.

"You Were There" for the Birth of the OSS

Chapters alternate between the growing group of airmen and a few individuals of Wild Bill Donovan's OSS (the precursor to the CIA). One such individual, an American of Eastern European descent, was attending college for a few years in Belgrade when he fell in love with a young Yugoslav woman when war broke out in Europe. Nevertheless, they married but spent two harrowing years trying to flee from Nazi-held territory, a chapter that you will read with bated breath as the young couple split up to travel alone and later met, over and over again, barely escaping one thrilling Nazi encounter after another. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction.

You know how the book ends, hundreds of Americans are rescued, but you will read on to find out exactly how (a small part of the narrative) and what led up to such an improbable mission. 

The airmen even managed to create a secret code and transmit information to their base in Italy about their numbers and location.

What We Would Change

The title: the 500 or so airmen were not really forgotten. . . . 

(And for the locals, Pittsburgh was mentioned and even Ft. Meade)

*Interview with a survivor