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Articles! (Post 1)

At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off Page

( Read more... )

When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
The comments are mostly okay.

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Field Report: A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard
Comes with pictures!

( Read more... )

Articles! (Post 2)

Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive

( Read more... )

After High Line’s Success, Other Cities Look Up
Pictures!

( Read more... )

The Language Divide, Writ Small, in Belgian Town

( Read more... )

‘Immigrant’ List Sets Off Fears

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How Microbes Defend and Define Us

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A Chosen Few Are Teaching for America

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More "People using librarything for homework"

Age Appropriateness: Intermediate
Genre: Poetry
Review: This was a great example of poetry, because every word at the end of a sentence rhymed and it was in AAAB,AAAB format with the rhyming words.

Yup, if it rhymes it is poetry. Haiku? Not poetry. Burma Shave? POETRY! "I loved my friend?" Well, it doesn't rhyme. Latin is a dead language? POETRY!

The fact that this book utilizes interesting turns of phrase, the fact that the lines all scan according to a particular meter, the repetition, the use of consonance - those don't make it poetry. Only the rhyming does.

What really gets me is that whoever this teacher is that assigned this, all his/her students seem forced to call books good examples. They're a good example of poetry, or modern fantasy, or realistic fiction, or whatever else. Why can't they simply be examples and let the good or bad speak for itself?

Well, on the alphabet books front...

On the downside, today I got a new comment on my review of A Gardener's Alphabet. Now, you probably don't recall, but the first comment I got on there was from a woman who has Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece as her child's godmother, which makes her qualified to talk about why we can't ever question the need for a book to have only white people in it. (I laugh every time I think about that comment. I bet she goes to parties just ITCHING for a chance to pull that one out!)

Today's comment wasn't much better, but at least this person doesn't type like a drunken fool. Apparently, if I want to see books with non-whites in them, I should just go write them myself!

Thanks, but no thanks. How about this: If I want to see books with non-whites in them, I'll continue to purchase books with an eye of maintaining an acceptable level of diversity on my bookcase, and I'll continue to make reviews explaining my choices whenever I feel it is necessary so that other people with this desire can be more informed instead of less informed.

THAT requires far less effort than - GOD! - writing a book and getting published!

However, in GOOD news, I have on my lap right now a copy of "Tomorrow's Alphabet". And out of the six people (hands, foot) shown in the book, there are, count 'em, six different skin tones! This is what I want to see as a matter of course. It shouldn't be an amazing surprise that a book features different kinds of people. (Well, I say features. There aren't many people in the book at all.)