Families are such funny things. Find a man in his late thirties or early forties surrounded by his kids. Around them, he is the paterfamilias. The Father. The Ultimate Authority (besides Mom). Now transfer him to his family of origin and watch him interact with them. There he’s not recognized as a dad but as a brother or child and the definition has an effect on his personality. His air of authority is gone. Maybe an old squabble is raked up with a sibling. If his children are watching, they have a rare glimpse of their Dad as a boy, momentarily spinning like an electron from their immediate family into the family of their grandparents. Around the molecules of generations, Dad becomes a covelant bond. As a writer, Anne Tyler knows this better than most and the idea stands out in her novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. This is the story of the Whitshanks, another eccentric Baltimore family (Anne is the literary patron saint of both the city and eccentric families) with an recurring, dynamic. Each generation has one member with the drive to attain a goal above their expectations even though success will not make them happy. Every…
There’s a moment in Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys when an exasperated (female) teacher declares: “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind…with a bucket.” The Cover I can’t help but wonder if Jane Hardstaff had this quote in mind when she wrote her excellent children’s novel, The Executioner’s Daughter. It may be fiction, but our heroine is forced to trudge through the disasters of history and scoop up the mess left behind with her basket. Meet Moss, an eleven-year-old girl and permanent resident of The Tower of London. On good days, her father is the blacksmith in the tower, creating and repairing any piece of metal needed for Henry VIII’s court and government and Moss stays in the forge. On bad days, execution days, her father wields the ax. If judicial murder and the blood lust of the crowd aren’t bad enough, Moss has be present at each death. Her job is to stand below the executioner’s block and catch the prisoner’s head in her basket once her father cuts it off. One execution would be enough to traumatize a child but because of the King’s battle…
Self-esteem is a tough nut to crack for most people. Very few people think they are perfect and those that do can’t see what the rest of us know. So we all have weak spots in our self-confidence. But, if you are overweight, as about two-thirds of American are, or even obese (which is a third of the American population right now), being self-confident borders on the impossible. Despite these numbers, anyone carrying extra pounds is continually subjected to the suggestion that skinny people are the only ones who really count. Size is always a factor in the entertainment industry; marketing and fashion campaigns use skinny models and the rest of us chase endless ideas on how to modify the bodies we have right now. With all of this subliminal propaganda, do you wonder why folks get depressed? Enter Jennifer Dome King, the blogger behind Stellar Fashion and Fitness and the author of Fat Girl Power: How I Built Confidence through Body Positivity, Fashion and Fitness. After chasing the Holy Grail of everyone else’s approval, Jennifer went after a more difficult but rewarding goal. She learned to love and believe in herself, just as she is, and debunk society’s myths about…
Now that Halloween and it’s cornucopia of scary stories is past, it’s time to look at the final part of the year, when the shadows lengthen early and the evenings run cold. These are the evenings when it’s good to snuggle up with a few, warm comforts as we step into the long nights of the year. So, pick up a warm drink, a good companion and a nice, old-fashioned kid’s book, like The Railway Children. It makes sense that the Industrial Age created “the Cult of the Child” and Children’s Literature. Before then time, working and middle-class kids went with their parents to the fields and shops and started helping as soon as they could stand. Children weren’t read aloud to at night because many of their Georgian-era parents lacked the energy, or ability to read at the end of the day and they had no money for books. Then came the era of machines and their descendants started working indoors. The money was better but these Victorian parents were often absent from their children’s lives and they missed the little ones they labored for. It’s no surprise Victorian children were read aloud to in the evenings and that…
It was hard telling the Founding Fathers apart when I was in Elementary School. Every fall another teacher would try to impress the achievements of the frock-coated/ American Revolutionaries into our malleable brains with similar results. In a group portrait of patriots, we could all pick out Franklin (rotund, bald and smiling) and probably Washington by his unsmiling mouth clamped around a set of dentures but the rest were identifiable only to those who had studied. To the rest of us, they were a group of middle-aged, white males with funny clothes and powdered hair. If you had asked me then who Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Benedict Arnold were, I’d probably have said: “One was a traitor, another was shot and the third one fired the pistol.” I doubt if I could have said more. And that’s why we need writer-historians like Ron Chernow. His lauded volume Alexander Hamilton not only rescued the memory of a brilliant man from obscurity and (with the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda) brought new respect to this patriot’s memory; it illuminates the character of Hamilton so well that the man and his peers become people we can recognize and relate to. Almost everyone went to…