Code Girls by Liza Mundy

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming from a long line of renowned Mundys, such as the late lamented Sic Transit Gloria, and the animalistic Coty, this author...I'm kidding. The real review starts next.

This book is about the literal thousands of young women such as the work-like Dorothy Braden Bruce and the stellar Ann Caracristi (and some, such as Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Elizebeth Smith Friedman, not so young) who worked in, oversaw, and contributed invaluably to cracking Axis codes during World War Two. Most of these women are unsung and many just as heroic in their way as the men who went into battle. It was that very drafting of men en masse which deprived the allies of critical help in the war effort on the home front, which is where women came in.

Realizing help was going to be needed in the grunt work of cracking enemy coded transmissions, women were initially sought from the upper crust colleges of the northeast, but before long, the trickle of such women became a flow and as soon as the white men running things realized that it wasn't so much a woman's academic qualifications as other characteristics that made her useful (r useless) in not just working the pipeline, but also cracking codes, the floodgates opened and women from all walks of life came in by the hundreds, and not just civilians.

In the course of this recruitment, there was created a Navy branch which came to be known as the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Despite these women being summarily rejected at the end of the war, not all of them left the espionage service, and the world would never be the same again after women had finally been given the chance to show what that could do.

I had some problems with the organization and the writing of this book. It had too much extraneous detail, and the time-line jumped around like a grasshopper on a hot tin roof. It made things much more confusing than they ought to have been. It once again only goes to show that a journalist is not necessarily qualified to be a writer of books.

The brainwashing that journalists are given to put some humanity and personal interest items into the story got in the way of this story at times. I know there were a lot of women worthy of mention, but here there were so many that it often got to be a problem keeping track of who was who, and the jumping did not help this. And did we really need to know that so-and so resided at address X in city Y? No! Who cares? Seriously? I sure a shell wouldn't want to see my address appear in a book because so and so lived here in 1943. Hell no!

There was a lot of this kind of thing, and while some details were interesting (such as Bets Colby's "epic" parties about which I actually would have liked to have learned more!), this technique (if you can call it that) failed to make a lot of the women who were mentioned actually stand out. They tended to get lost in the mundane. It seems like those who did stand out, achieved that despite the writing, not because of it, and many did, purely from the sterling contributions they made and the insights they had in the actual breaking of codes, but others, who nevertheless made serious contributions in terms of attention to detail and work ethic, often got lost which was a crying shame.

That said, the author did make a remarkable and very welcome contribution to offset the woeful lack of information out there about what these girls and women did. There were scores of them, far too many to mention here, and they worked their butts off to crack codes and save lives. They lived and breathed their work and it was a sad loss when most of them went back to their unheralded lives after the war, never to be heard from again. Although no doubt at least a few of them were happy to do that, I am sure many more were not. I found this book gripping and fascinating, and could not put it down for the last third because I was so engrossed in it and really wanted to finish it. I commend it fully as a worthy read despite some writing issues.

There were code-breakers and female 'yeomanettes' in World war One, believe it or not, and I found it quite curious how these two wars panned-out in terms of what happened afterwards. Post WW1, we had the era of the 'roaring' twenties and the flappers, but after WW2, all we got was the fifties - not an era known for excitement and rebellion in the lives of women! What happened? What was the difference? Why were these two periods so varied? To me that would be worth a book. But I doubt it will be mine! I do have to say though, that normally when I finish a book or a novel, I donate it to the small local amateur library that serves my area of town; this one I kept because it gave me some ideas for a novel that I might write about this particular era and these women.

Seal Team Six by Howard E Wasdin, Stephen Templin

Rating: WARTY!

My problem with this was the complete lack of modesty and boundaries on the part of the author. I get that these guys need to unwind, that they do a job most of us would fail dismally at (even the part about getting through basic training), but this went beyond strutting and into abuse and psychosis. I draw the line there.

The author seemed like he always had to be first and on top, and successful, and he had no respect for those who dropped out of the BUD\S training or who finished behind him, which was disrespectful in my opinion. This arrogance pervaded the entire book and turned me right off it and the author in short order. Much as I would have liked to have read more and learned more, I rang the bell three times about a third of the way through and felt no sense of failure about it at all. The failure is all on the part of the author. There are much better books about Navy SEALs than this one. This is the worst I've read.

The author tells a story about a third of the way through, of visiting a stripper bar one day. Inside the bar, he asked the staff if they'd make an announcement to welcome back soldiers who were recently on foreign operations, which was a bit overbearing, but fair enough. Apparently there were four Tunisian men in the bar, one of whom made a comment about America minding its own business.

How he knew these guys were Tunisian I do not know, but this guy took exception to that comment, and rather than let it go, which in my opinion he ought to have been man enough to do, he literally leaped over the table at the Tunisian guy, and a fight ensued. The cops were called, but rather than be contrite and settle down, the SEALs then got into a fight with the cops, including a female cop who was manhandled, and they were all arrested.

Then this guy has the nerve to say the female cop wrote her phone number on a piece of paper and put it in his shirt pocket. I'm like, "Seriously?" I didn't believe it, and I am sure as hell not going to read any more of that arrogant and puffed-up crap. I'll find other sources to learn about these men - and I mean the men, not the adolescent boys who this author is evidently obsessed with talking about.

I like to learn about these special ops guys, and I don't mind some swagger and bravado. I think they've earned that, but the over-the-top gung-ho bullshit and sense of entitlement this book was larded with left me cold.

A Girl Walks Into a Book by Miranda K Pennington

Rating: WORTHY!

This was really more of a memoir about the author's life and her bad relationships than it was about the Brontë books, but there was nonetheless enough in it pertaining to the books, and it was interesting and amusing enough in parts that I decided I would rate it favorably. I picked it up to read the blurb initially because I found the title amusing.

This author is clearly in love with the Brontës, something I confess I am not. I tried Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and did not like it at all. I tried Shirley by Charlotte Brontë and found it boring in the extreme, so I DNF'd it in short order. Agnes Grey destroyed my little grey cells. The only place I erred from that poor history was Jane Eyre, which I liked.

Given this dismal track record I was curious as to what new light this author might shed, and there wasn't a lot except in where it applied to her own love life - or lack of one, or failure in one. It became a bit annoying in parts, because it seemed like every Brontë she read pertained to whatever was happening in her life at that moment and I wonder if her attachment to the book might have been less were she to have had a more accommodating social life.

The most infuriating part - and the part where I wondered if I might have to ditch this book - was where she became involved with a colleague at work in a wretched co-dependent relationship and this went on, and dragged on and on forever. It bothered me that she stayed in this relationship with this guy who was half-assed about it for the longest time and just when I thought she was going to ditch him permanently she reported getting back with him and then peremptorily marrying him! Now I'm wondering how long that marriage will last. But it's her life; I'm not going to judge this book on the poor choices she might have made living it! Especially not since the book made a point of comparing her poor choices in other relationships with the relationships the various Brontë books detailed.

It was because of reading this that I decided to try Shirley and Agnes Grey. I do not thank her for that! She ends the book with a report about traveling to London and then to Haworth in Yorkshire which is where the Brontës lived. It's a bit of a honeymoon for her and her husband. Of course the first morning they're in Haworth, he gets sick and she has to hike a mile in the Yorkshire fog down to the nearest pharmacy. Which is called a chemist in Britain.

It turns out he had this thing called quinsy which I'd never heard of before, despite having grown up in Britain. I realized what it was when I discovered the scientific name for it is peritonsillar abscess. From what I've read of it, that's hardly so debilitating that he couldn't have got out of bed and gone to the pharmacy himself, so to me this spoke poorly of this ongoing relationship between these two, but then I've never had it, so maybe it's worse in person than a text can convey. I dunno.

After reading so much about this relationship this felt to me like just one more burden it had put on her. But surgeons took my tonsils when I was little so I don't have any issues with those. They still haven't paid me for them. Maybe if they had, I'd feel differently!

Like I said, this book can be annoying in parts, but it is educational and entertaining, and even insightful in others, so overall, I commend this as a worthy read.

Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage

Rating: WARTY!

I like Adam Savage on TV. He's interesting, and funny and entertaining, but in this memoir, I wasn't impressed with him at all. I was hoping he'd talk about the projects he'd worked on and the engineering and technical challenges, and he did mention those things in passing, but he was more about rambling and waffling over the philosophy of what he did, working intelligently, and planning, and making list, and he seems to contradict himself from time to time.

The problem is that he's talking about this stuff as though it's some divine revelation. Really, it's stuff most people who have even half a functional brain already know, so I didn't get the point of it. I guess if you're an idiot who wants to follow the same trail he blazed, which really began when he was working for one of George Lucas's companies making models for movies, then this is the book for you. It wasn't the book for me. I can't commend it and skipped most of it. There were some interesting bits, but nowhere near enough for me.

Agatha Christie by Laura Thompson

Rating: WARTY!

Having read a few of her books - or more recently listened to them, and seen virtually her entire Poirot oeuvre on TV, I decided to take a look at Christie herself out of sheer curiosity, and I picked up two books: this one and Christie's own autobiography. My interest in these was not to read about her entire life, but to skim the books for references to Christie's own writing, to see if I could gain any insights into how she put the books together or where she got her inspiration. My goal was only partially met, I'm sorry to have to report. I don't envy anyone who actually plows through over a thousand pages for so little reward, so I wouldn't commend either book unless you are really, really, and I mean seriously really into Christie! Even then you may find yourself disappointed.

Subtitled "An English Mystery" for no apparent reason other than to sound dramatic, this book is well over five hundred pages and the author seems determined to link every single thing in Christie's life to every single thing in her murder mysteries, mostly with limited success. Obviously a writer puts herself into her books, but that doesn't mean everything has link and/or meaning. For me though, the worst part about this was Thompson's pure fiction in describing the week or two Christie 'disappeared' in a huff over her first husband's infidelity, and apparently with a petulant desire to make him pay for it by making it look like maybe he murdered the murder mystery writer. It was awful. Christie herself mentions not a thing about this in her own autobiography and never talked of it, so all of this here is pure speculation and guesswork even with the best of intentions. I'm not convinced this author has the best of intentions, or the most honest in her portrait.

The book really offers nothing new and reveals the answer to no mysteries including why Christie has been such a perennial and prolific seller of her books. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Agatha by Anne Martinetti, Guillaume Lebeau, Alexandre Franc

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Martinetti and Lebeau, illustrated by Franc, and translated from the original French into English by Edward Gauvin, this was a really good graphic introduction to Agatha Christie, which I encountered during a search of my local library's resources regarding Christie biographies.

It begins in what is often seen as the biggest mystery about this author, which is what happened to her during her short disappearance in December of 1926. Personally I think it can be quite adequately accounted for in precisely the way this book explains it - she was pissed-off with her husband, who had told her he wanted a divorce so he could continue seeing this woman he had met, named Nancy Neele, and apparently decided that he liked better than he did Christie. I also think her depression over this may have been exacerbated from her mother's death earlier that year.

But this graphic novel goes further, bringing in her literary creations, most especially Hercule Poirot, as characters in the story, seen and heard only by Christie, but who comment on her life and discuss things with her, annoying her as often as not. The story as told her is interesting, engaging, and moving, and tells a complete story, abbreviated as it necessarily is in this format. I commend it as a worthy read.

Agatha Christie by Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Elisa Munsó

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been following the 'Little People, Big Dreams' series in the form of advance review copies from Net Galley. This is the first I've encountered in the 'real world'! It's also the first print book and it was a much larger format than I had imagined from the ebooks I've been reading. This came as part of a library search for Agatha Christie biographies so I decided to give it a look and while it was not anything spectacular, it was a worthy read considering the age range it's aimed at. It's a nice introduction to the second best-selling author in the world after Shakespeare (I don't count religious fiction).

The book keeps it simple in both illustration and text, and lays out the bare bones of her life from her childhood to her death. For a simple and basic introduction of the so-called Queen of Crime thrillers (I've had a mixed bag of results from my reading of her work). This works well. Any child who has literary aspirations could benefit from reading this, so I commend it as a worthy read.

Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a depressing read, but never was there a better time since this travesty took place than now to read this account of one woman's experiences in the concentration camps set up by the racist hypocrite Franklin "Detain them" Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Most of the well over 100,000 people imprisoned behind barbed wire were American citizens.

The constitution meant nothing to a clueless and panicked government back then. These people were incarcerated in shoddy, ill-finished - if even finished - barracks and everything they owned which they could not carry with them and which they could not entrust to reliable friends, was gone when they were finally set free two or three years later. They were released into destitution and had to start over from scratch; then this same government had the nerve to ask the young men they'd detained to show their loyalty by signing-up for the same military which had pointed machine guns at them for the previous few years.

Yoshiko Uchida was merely one of these, but that doesn't make her personal story less important. She, her sister, and her mom and dad were given ten days notice that they had to leave for a camp taking only what they could carry. The camp was a racetrack and they were 'housed' in the horse stables - a family of four in a large horse stall stinking of manure with no privacy and barely any facilities. Later they were moved to a specially-constructed - well half-constructed - camp in the middle of the Utah desert.

It was a couple of months before they got sheetrock installed inside their 'apartment' to keep the desert wind and the chalky desert sand out of their 'home'. It took equally long to get their stove installed - which until then had been a hole in the roof where the desert sand and chill got in. The list of abuses continues not only back then, but also today. Like I said it's a depressing but necessary read at a time when this government is doing the same thing to illegal immigrants - using euphemisms to describe the concentration camps. You don't make America great again by treating humans beings like cattle, and apparently that's a lesson we have a really hard time intern-alizing.

I commend this book as an important and worthy read.

Frida & Diego by Catherine Reef

Rating: WORTHY!

I've long been interested in Frida Kahlo and the life she was forced to live, so when I happened upon this larger format print book I saw in the library, I grabbed it up without thinking twice. It tells the individual stories of the childhood and youth of the two artists separately, and then of their life together, problematic as it was at times. It discusses their work and how events in their lives influenced it, and of Frida's struggle with health issues, beginning with polio, and then with a tramcar accident which resulted in a metal hand rail piercing her hip - a major and life-threatening injury from which she never fully-recovered and for which she was still having surgeries long after the accident.

As if that wasn't bad enough, she ended up falling for a serial philanderer which led to a codependent relationship that neither party could move on from, not even after they divorced. The book covers a lot of ground and contains a wealth of fascinating detail. The author has done her work without question.

The only thing about this book which bothered me was that so little of their art was depicted. There is a lot of imagery and quite a few of their paintings are included, but most of the pictures are photographs of them and their friends, so for me, too little of the art was on show. That aside though, I enjoyed reading this, and I commend it as a worthy read for anyone who is a fan of either artist, or even of art in general. Both the over-used phrases 'struggling artist' and 'tortured artist' apply quite literally to Frida Kahlo and she's always worth reading about.

Kick Kennedy by Barbara Leaming

Rating: WORTHY!

Kathleen Kennedy was nicknamed "Kick" which sounds stupid to us today, but which was right in line with kids for the era in which she grew up. She was a part of a very large Catholic family, sister to John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. This audiobook tells of her time from her first trip to Britain in the late 1930's and her eventual marriage to the Marquess of Hartington, heir apparent to the 10th Duke of Devonshire. She lost her husband to the war in Belgium in 1944, not long after the marriage, and died in Europe herself just a few years later, at the age of 28 in a plane crash.

This book which sports, I have to say, some rather fanciful story-telling here and there it seems to me, recounts her life and death, surround by Lords and Dukes and Grand Dukes and Viscounts, and Marquises. It's really quite shameful how spoiled-rotten these people were, and how easy their life was, drifting from one event to another, from one function to another, from one party to another, never doing a lick of work because they were so rich, they didn't have to. Now that doesn't make it right that she died so young, but it does make it hard to sympathize with her when she lived a life most people who live into their eighties can't even imagine.

That said it makes for an interesting read, even if parts of it are so far from one's personal experience that it seems like reading fiction even when it's true. Having started to fall for the guy, she found herself torn away from him by her father's insistence that his entire family return to the USA as hostilities between Britain and Germany, via France and Czechoslovakia's travails. The Kennedys had been welcomed and even somewhat revered in Britain, and Kick was very popular with her own set, but when Joe Kennedy started talking, back in the USA, about leaving Britain to it when it came to fighting this war, his popularity plummeted in the UK and he saw this starkly on his return.

Meanwhile all Kick wanted to do was return to see Billy. She eventually got her wish and they married to opposition from her Catholic, but far from catholic parents, and this was despite her not giving up on Catholicism herself. All she had to do was agree to the children being raised Protestant, and she didn't protest about that at all. The thing was that her husband stuck his head up, either unaware that he was being fired on by a German machinegun, or not realizing it was dangerous, and was shot in that same head. It was a whole week before Kick learned her husband of only four months had died - only one month after Kick's own brother, Joe Kennedy Junior, also died in a plane crash.

The book moves a lot more quickly after this and it would seem that Kick had changed her view of life by then, so instead of seeking out someone she truly loved, now she was little more than a gold digger. Having lost her status since her husband's death and seeing the dukedom go then to his younger brother (who was married to one of the feisty Mitford sisters), it wasn't so very long before she began chasing after the married 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, who was even richer and had higher status than her late husband had.

Prior to reading this I had little idea of Kick Kennedy other than being intrigued that she was JFK's sister and had died young and was tied to the area of Britain where I had grown up (she's buried in my home county). Now I've read this (listened to it, more accurately) and learned plenty about her, and while I commend this book as a worthy read, I can't imagine I would ever have actually liked Kick Kennedy had I been alive in the era which she lived. In fact, our social circles would have been so divorced from one another that I would never have even met her at all, and that would have been fine with me because she disgusts me.

In Pieces by Sally Field

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook started out great, but went downhill quickly once Burt Reynolds came on the scene, and everything from that point on was annoying. I'd skipped almost nothing for the entire eighty percent or whatever prior to that point, but I skipped almost everything after it. That said, however, I consider this a worthy listen because it was heartfelt, informative, and beautifully read by the author, who has one of the best reading voices I've ever listened to.

The story is delicately told, but pulls no punches and hides no secrets. Of course it's one voice and no one the author talks about gets a chance to respond, but they can always write their own biography and address it that way. Talking of which, I'm really not a great fan of biographies, but I do read or listen to one now and then, and I like Sally Field as an actor.

I enjoyed her playing Spider-Man's aunt in The Amazing Spider-Man and the sequel, but prior to that I had seen her in Stay Hungry many years ago, and in Soapdish which I thought was hilarious and in which I really fell in love with her (along with Kevin Kline and several of the other cast members) as a comedy actor. I also loved her voice acting in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. She was great in Mrs Doubtfire and in Legally Blonde 2 too!

I have never seen her supposed masterpieces, Norma Rae or Places in the Heart for which she won academy awards so I cannot comment on those. They're not my kind of movie. I did take a look at Gidget and at The Flying Nun and was not at all impressed with those - not so much with her personally, but with the whole dumb-ass, tame, uninventive, unadventurous, moronic sit-com shtick, which frankly makes me barf, and which I suspect she might well feel the same way about, but at least it got her face and acting known. It did lead me to read Frederick Kohner's 1957 original novel, Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas which he wrote based on his own daughter's anecdotes, and I found that really entertaining and which I also review positively, today.

This biography begins with Field's early and difficult childhood, her molestation by her stepfather, and her various unsatisfactory relationships. She doesn't blame everyone but herself when things went wrong, either, shouldering her fair share. I found the insights she gave into actors, and directors and into her own lifelong learning of her craft quite fascinating and this was the major reason I wanted to listen to this, but there are also disturbing and moving moments, and amazing descriptions of her giving birth to her first two children, which makes me think she would have made a great comedy writer had she chosen to do that instead of act. What impressed me most though was how whole and sane she has managed to stay despite what she went through.

So overall, I commend this as a worthy read and I'm glad I listened to it (except for that last 20%!).

Dolly Parton by Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Daria Solak

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've been following this series of biographies for a while and rarely does it take a misstep, so this was pretty much a guaranteed winner. Written by Vegara, and illustrated flamboyantly by Solak, this book takes a look at entertainer Dolly Parton's life. Parton has had 25 number ones on the Billboard Country Music chart, and just as many gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards, as well as a record number of top ten country albums.

She started out young and dirt poor, and her voice and talent carried her to stardom, which she did not let slip from her grasp, converting her fame into long-term business ideas that kept her comfortable (and more!) even when her popularity wasn't always what it had been. This book aimed at young children tells of her life in simple and straight-forward terms, always moving the story forwards. It's short and sweet and I commend it as a worthy read.

I am Amelia Earhart by Brad Metzler

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a very short book for young children which skipped a huge part of Earhart's life and harped a bit overmuch on her purportedly dedicated lifelong devotion to flight, which actually didn't happen in real life. She took something of a scattershot approach to her career, aiming vaguely toward medical service until she saw this guy fly an airplane at a show. He must have spotted her and her friend standing on the ground watching, and aimed the plane straight down at them before swooping by quite closely. It was at that point, when she was in her early twenties that she really decided she wanted to fly, not when she was a child, but it doesn't hurt to stir up kids' ambitions here and there, or encourage them to aim higher than they might otherwise do, so I wasn't too focused on that.

Other than that, the book was largely factual, amusingly and colorfully illustrated, and an enjoyable read, so I commend it as a worthy read for young children.

Isadora Duncan a Graphic Biography by Sabrina Jones

Rating: WORTHY!

Before I read this I didn't know squat about Isadora Duncan - not even what she was famous for other than her death which is probably better known than her life by too many people - myself a prime case in point. I also remember her name from a Beatles movie, although I forger the specific movie tile. It's where Ringo chants at one point, "Isadora Duncan worked for Telefunken." He either got it from a song title by John Lennon, or Lennon titled his song after Ringo's chant. I don't know which came first, but I never could get that line out of my head! Telefunken was at the time a German electrical appliance manufacturer the name of which had perhaps amused the Beatles during their tenure in the country at the outset of their career.

I'd rather idly assumed that Duncan had been a writer, maybe a poet, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover from this biography that she'd been known pretty much solely for dance in her own time. I enjoyed the biography and it was packed and informative, but for me, Isadora Duncan came off as a bit of a flake, and probably not someone I would have taken to had I ever met her. Not that that's chronologically possible since she died in 1927.

Her dancing seems to me to have been the visual equivalent of jazz music - free-form and undisciplined. I can't say for sure since sadly, there's no film of her dancing, although there are photographs, but such static snapshots cannot possibly give a good picture of how she moved or what her dancing was truly like. I'm guessing I would not have liked it.

Regardless of my personal preference though, she impressed very many people with her dance in her lifetime, and attempted at one time or another, to start schools to teach others to be free and self-motivated in their dance rather than rigidly adhere to preset forms. In this regard she was the Bruce Lee of dance, for he advocated precisely this same thing except that it was in regard to martial arts in his case. Whether he knew anything of Isadora Duncan I can't say, but the two of them would have probably gotten along quite well had chronology been such that they could ever have met.

Her death, for anyone who has never heard of it, was the equivalent of a hanging, when her flowing scarf became caught in the open-spoked wheels and axle of the open-top car in which she was riding, resulting in her being pulled out of the car by the neck, which broke. Death was instantaneous, we're assured, although I doubt many deaths truly are. She was only fifty and still had so much to offer the world, which redoubles the tragedy.

The thing is that her life was equally ill-favored in many regards, including that of raising children. She was not an advocate of marriage, She was very progressive and feminist, and a pursuer of free love as it was called. Today she'd likely be cruelly dismissed as a slut, but she had two children with her lovers who both died when the car they were in ran off by itself into a river. She later had a third child which died shortly after it was born. So tragic a life.

She was so renowned in dance that she was able to support her several siblings and mother (father abandoned the family when Isadora was quite young), but then she would go off on a tangent and embark upon some project - such as starting a dancing school or proposing an idyllic retreat in the hills of Athens, none of which ever really took off.

After those, she would find herself in debt and would began dancing again to raise money before launching a new venture - another school or whatever. At one point she had a dancing troop of six girls who toured, and were known as the "Isadorables" which is an amusing and charming name. Her professional reputation and influence lasted a lot longer than her schools did. The last of her Isadorables died quite recently, in 1987.

The book in general, I think, does a good job of conveying her life, but from subsequent reading I've done, it appears to omit some details, such as her private life becoming less private and more scandalous in later life, her drunkenness and her waning ability to pay her bills, so it seems that this book set out only to paint a glossy and positive picture, but that said, I feel better for knowing more about her than I did before, and I commend this graphic novel for getting me there.

Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joseph Lambert

Rating: WARTY!
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I believe in giving credit where credit is due, but aside from the focus on Sullivan rather than Keller - and lets face it, without Sullivan there would be no Keller as we know her today - there really is very little due here.

This graphic novel is aimed at grades six through eight, but while I am far from those grades, I was not happy with it. The artwork is indifferent and appears in tiny panels (a rigid and plodding sixteen per page) such that the image is not only tiny, but the text is also small. I had a hard time reading it and an almost impossible time reading the narration, which is in script. There were parts I skipped rather than strain my eyes trying to read it. If the format of the book had been larger this would not have been such a problem, but as it was, it was really irritating to me and overwhelmed the story.

While the book does convey the magnitude of the task which faced a visually-impaired 20-year-old Sullivan trying to teach a willful and spoiled seven-year-old who was impaired in ways much greater than Anne herself was, it fails to make the impact it should because it is so choppy. An early flashback itself dissolves into an earlier flashback and this back-flashing keeps happening as we move back and forth between the 'present' where Anne is teaching Helen, and the past, where Anne had her own trials to go through, which were tough enough. Anne Sullivan was a strong woman.

This story is about Anne as opposed to Helen, which most stories are written about, and such a story is important and needs to be told, but I don't think this book gets it done. The 'Annie' of the title was better known as Anne, although her birth name was Johanna Mansfield Sullivan to which she added a 'Macy' when she married later in life. Her initial interactions with Helen were nightmarish because Helen was so spoiled and had no discipline. Anne was not only fighting her charge, but also Helen's parents who did not understand the huge amount of work which needed to be done to liberate Helen from the prison of her impaired senses.

Much as I'd like to recommend a book like this, I cannot. I've read other books about Helen Keller and the one I commend so far is Helen Keller by Jane Sutcliffe. This might not be quite as appealing as a graphic novel to children in this age range, but it isn't something they could not handle, and I'd prefer it to this graphic novel. However, if this novel gets kids interested enough to read something on this topic that's more grown up and less picture-y, then all well and good, but I have doubts it will do that.

Pelé the King of Soccer by Eddy Simon, Vincent Brascaglia, Joe Johnson

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Eddy Simon and translated by Joe Johnson, with illustrations by Vincent Brascaglia, this was an enjoyable graphic novel about the remarkable career of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known to the world as Pelé, who was an outstanding Brazilian professional soccer player.

He played for a club team at the tender age of fifteen and for his national team at the age of sixteen; at seventeen, he put in a sterling performance at the 1958 World Cup, the first of three in which Brazil won with him on the team. He's the only player to have been on three world cup winning teams, and he scored 77 goals in 92 games during those competitions. He averaged almost a goal a game throughout his career, scoring some 650 in 694 professional club appearances.

There was a less stellar side to his life in his multiple marriages and multiple affairs outside of those marriages, some of which brought offspring. The story doesn't delve very much into those or his son's conviction for money laundering. It keeps the focus mostly on soccer, recounting his career almost game by game.

This graphic novel tells the story well, with lively, colorful, and well-crafted illustrations, from his barefoot, ball-made-of-rags street soccer days of his early age, to this triumphs as a professional (in soccer boots and with a real ball!). His hero was his father who was also a professional player until he got a bad leg injury and could play no more, but he encouraged his son to excel and Pelé did not let him down. I commend this novel as a worthy read and a piece of sports history that's well-worth learning.

Ghetto Klown by John Leguizamo, Christa Cassano, Shamus Beyale

Rating: WARTY!

Written by Leguizamo based on his earlier one-man stage plays about his life, and illustrated really well by Cassano and Beyale, this graphic novel failed to impress me favorably.

The biggest impression was just the opposite: that the author was arrogant at best and a bit of a jerk at worst, and that he's really learning nothing from his life experiences. I could well be wrong on both those scores, but I can only gauge him by the impression his story leaves me with. It started out quite well, but the more I read, the less I liked the author.

No one is perfect, of course. We've all done dumb, regrettable, ill-advised things to one extent or another, and behaved improperly in one way or another. It's part for growing up, testing boundaries, learning rules and figuring out how to fit into a civilized society, but that's where the problem lay for me: in that he seems to learn nothing from his experiences, which are diverse and considerable.

Like Brett Kavanaugh (don't get me started!), he seems to be in a state of complete denial that he's ever done anything wrong. Yes, he had a lousy childhood and this haunted him throughout his life, so I can cut him (Leguizamo, not Kavanaugh!) slack for that. He deserves it, but for him to suggest this book might offer guidelines for others who might be going through what he did is stretching it, because it implies that he has some life lessons to offer, and none were in evidence as far as I could see.

Balanced against that are the amazingly lucky breaks he got that he squandered shamelessly. He's been spoiled, and I'm really tired of this implication that we should somehow idolize if not worship the bad boy made good, like they're some sort of gold standard of achievement. I want to see stories about the good boy making good because he was good, and hard-working, and grateful, and not abusive and intolerant. Why do those guys not get the credit they deserve? Because they're not as arrogant as some others? I think so. I can't recommend this novel.

Cuba My Revolution by Inverna Lockpez, Dean Hapiel, José Villarrubia

Rating: WORTHY!

Told in stark red and black, this is a story based on the writer's own life. In the story, 17-year-old Sonya has ambitions to be an artist in Habana, Cuba, but ends up joining the Castro revolution and becoming a doctor where she encounters the horrors of war during the Bay of Pigs debacle, and ends up being imprisoned as a CIA spy by her own fellow soldiers. She's tortured brutally, but eventually is released. Despite all of this and the now constant feeling of stress and insecurity, and despite what she sees happening to her country on a daily basis, she continues to believe in the revolution, but as six years slip by and nothing improves - in fact things only progressively become worse - she finally reconciles herself to leaving, and finds the opportunity to move to the USA.

This is what the real life artist and medical trainee did, and she says that the events depicted here were real, but some changes were made to the story. The story serves to show that any radical ideology on a national level like this necessarily becomes a brutal dictatorship and a series of pogroms no matter how idealistic it maybe have been in embryonic form, and no matter how well-intentioned its supporters were. The story is a depressing read, but essentially a true story and I commend it because there are lessons to be learned here.

Jane Goodall by Isabel Sanchez Vegara

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is another in a series of books aimed at doing its part to redress the imbalance between genders when it comes to high achievers. This one shows young children that a determined young woman can do whatever she wants if she puts a mind to it.

The story simplifies Goodall's interesting and complex life considerably, but hopefully it will inspire children to read more about her as they mature. Her story is one of an abiding interest in animals ever since she was young, inspired in part by a plush toy she had as a child: a chimpanzee. From this simple beginning, she found her way to Africa and came into contact with famous human ancestry researcher Louis Leakey, who eventually dispatched her to work at Gombe, where Goodall's unorthodox research practices were at times criticized, but which nonetheless produced original and unexpected research results.

Goodall was one of three Leaky Ladies, so to speak, whom Leakey named 'The Trimates', the other two being Dian Fossey who died horribly at the hands of gorilla poachers, and Birutė Galdikas, who studied orangutans. Each of these has written one or more books on their studies. It would be nice to see a book in this series for each of the other two women. I commend this one as a great start.

Lucy Maud Montgomery by Isabel Sanchez Vegara

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This one covers the author of Anne of Green Gables who also authored many, many other books including sequels. Montgomery had a rather troubled childhood in that her mother died before Montgomery turned two, and her father felt incapable of raising a child. He immediately put her into the care of her maternal grandparents, who were rather cool towards Lucy. When she was seven, her father left to work elsewhere, making Lucy a very lonely child, so she made up imaginary friends and had a rich fantasy life to go with them.

It's this imagination which led her into writing, something she was very interested in from a young age despite some setbacks. When she had Anne of Green Gables published it was such a roaring success that she never looked back, focusing on fulltime writing, at which she was very prolific. This book does an admirable, if slightly fanciful job of depicting this writer's childhood and her determination to succeed, and I commend it as a worthy read for young children. We need serious writers and if this inspires more of them it can only be a good thing.