By: Abbey Lovell,
on 7/22/2016
The past can be very important for those living in the present. My research experiences as an archaeologist have made this very apparent to me. Echoes from the distant past can reverberate and affect the lives of contemporary communities, and interpretations of the past can have important ramifications.
The post Matters of the past mattering today appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Betsy Bird,
on 6/14/2015
In a Village by the Sea
By Muon Van
Illustrated by April Chu
Creston Books
$16.95
ISBN: 978-1-939547-156
Ages 4-6
On shelves now
We talk a lot about wanting a diverse selection of picture books on our library, bookstore, and home shelves, but it seems to me that the key to giving kids a broad view of the wider world (which is the ultimate effect of reading literature about people outside your immediate social, economic, and racial circle) is finding books that go into formerly familiar territory and then give the final product an original spin. For example, I was just telling a colleague the other day that true diverse literature for kids will never come to pass until we’ve a wide variety of gross out books about kids of different races, abilities, genders, etc. That’s one way of reaching parity. Another way would be to tackle that age old form so familiar to kids of centuries past; nursery rhymes. Now we’ve already seen the greatest nursery rhyme collection of the 21st century hit our shelves earlier this year (Over the Hills and Far Away, edited by Elizabeth Hammill) and that’s great. That’s swell. That’s super. But one single book does not a nursery rhyme collection make. Now I admit freely that Muon Van and April Chu’s In a Village by the Sea is not technically a nursery rhyme in the classic sense of the term. However, Merriam-Webster defines the form as “a short rhyme for children that often tells a story.” If that broad definition is allowed then I submit “In a Village by the Sea” as a true, remarkable, wonderful, evocative, modern, diverse, ultimately beautiful nursery rhyme for the new Millennium. Lord knows we could always use more. Lord knows this book deserves all the attention it can get.
On the title page a single brown cricket grabs a rolled piece of parchment, an array of watercolor paints and paintbrushes spread below her (to say nothing of two soon-to-be-necessary screws). Turn the page and there a fisherman loads his boat in the predawn hour of the day, his dog attentive but not following. As he pushes off, surrounded by other fishermen, and looks behind him to view his receding seaside home we read, “In a fishing village by the sea there is a small house.” We zoom in. “In that house high above the waves is a kitchen.” The dog is now walking into the house, bold as brass, and as the story continues we meet the woman and child inside. We also meet that same industrious cricket from the title page, painting a scene in which a fisherman combats the elements, comforted by the picture of his family he keeps beside him. And in another picture is his village, and his house, and in that house is his family, waiting to greet him safely home. Set in Vietnam, the book has all the rhythms and cadence of the most classic rhyme.
When it comes to rhymes, I feel that folks tend to be fairly familiar with the cumulative form. Best highlighted in nursery rhymes likes “The House That Jack Built” it’s the kind of storytelling that builds and builds, always repeating the elements that came before. Less celebrated, perhaps, is the nesting rhyme. Described in Using Poetry Across the Curriculum: A Whole Language Approach by Barbara Chatton, the author explains that children love patterns. “The simplest pattern is a series in which objects are placed in some kind of order. This order might be from smallest to largest, like the Russian nesting dolls, or a range of height, length, or width . . . A nursery rhyme using the ‘nesting’ pattern is ‘This Is the Key to My Kingdom’.” Indeed, it was that very poem I thought of first when I read In a Village by the Sea. In the story you keep going deeper and deeper into the narrative, an act that inevitably raises questions.
Part of what I like so much about the storytelling in this book is not just its nesting nature, but also the questions it inspires in the child reader. At first we’re working entirely in the realm of reality with a village, a fisherman, his wife, and their child. But then when we dive down into the cricket’s realm we see that it is painting a magnificent storm with vast waves that appear to be a kind of ode to that famous Japanese print, “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. When we get into that painting and find that our fisherman is there and in dire straits we begin to wonder what is and isn’t real. Artist April Chu runs with that uncertainty well. Notice that as the fisherman sits in his boat with the storm overhead, possibly worrying for his own safety, in his hands he holds a box. In that box is a photo of his wife and child, his village, and what appears to be a small wooden carving of a little cricket. The image of the village contains a house and (this isn’t mentioned in the text) we appear to zoom into that picture and that house where the sky is blue and the sea is calm. So what is going on precisely? Is it all a clever cricket’s imaginings or are each of these images true in some way? I love the conversation starter nature of this book. Younger kids might take the events at face value. Older kids might begin to enmesh themselves into the layered M.C. Escher-ness of the enterprise. Whatever draws them in, Van and Chu have created a melodic visual stunner. No mean feat.
For the record, the final image in this book is seemingly not of the cricket’s original painting but of the fisherman heading home on a calm sea to a distant home. What’s so interesting about the painting is that if you compare it to the cricket’s previous one (of the storm) you can see that the curls and folds of the paper are identical. This is the same canvass the cricket was working on before. Only the image has changed. How is this possible? The answer lies in what the cricket is signing on the painting’s lower right-hand corner. “AC”. April Chu. Artist as small brown cricket. I love it.
So who precisely is April Chu? Read her biography at the back and you see that she began her career as an architect, a fact that in part explains the sheer level of detail at work in tandem with this simple text. Let us be clear that while the writing in this book is engaging on a couple different levels, with the wrong artist it wouldn’t have worked half as well as it now does. Chu knows how to take a single story from a blue skied mellow to a wrath of the gods storm center and then back again to a sweet peach colored sunset. She also does a good dog. I’ll say it. The yellow lab in this book is practically the book’s hero as we follow it in and out of the house. He’s even in his master’s family photograph.
One question that occurred to me as I read the book was why I immediately thought of it as contemporary. No date accompanies the text. No elements that plant it firmly in one time or another. The text is lilting and lovely but doesn’t have anything so jarring as a 21st century iPhone or ear bud lurking in the corners. In Van’s Author’s Note at the end she mentions that much of the inspiration for the tale was based on both her family’s ancestral village in Central Vietnam and her father’s work, and mother’s experiences, after they immigrated to American shores. By logic, then, the book should have a bit of a historical bent to it. Yet people still fish in villages. Families still wait for the fisherman to return to shore. And when I looked at April Chu’s meticulous art I took in the clothing more than anything else. The mom’s rubber band in her hair. The cut of the neck of her shirt. The other fishermen and their shirts and the colors of the father’s. Then there was the way the dishes stack up next to the stove. I dunno. It sure looks like it’s set in a village today. But these things can be hard to judge.
There’s this real feeling that meta picture books that play with their format and turn the fourth wall into rubble are relatively new. But if we look at rhymes like “This Is the Key to the Kingdom”, we can see how they were toying with our notion of how to tell a story in a new way long long before old Stinky Cheese Man. I guess what I like most about “In a Village by the Sea” is how to deals with this duality. It manages to feel old and new all at the same time. It reads like something classic but it looks and feels like something entirely original. A great read aloud, beautifully illustrated, destined to become beloved of parents, librarians, and kids themselves for years to come. This is a book worth discovering.
On shelves now.
Source: Final copy sent by publisher for review.
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By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 5/15/2015
[Note “Future Comic” is the category we assign to comics that use interactive elements to tell stories. Here is one such comic.]
It’s been a while since we had a good “future comic” to talk about, as they’ve become way too expensive for the casual creator to produce, but here’s one that is beautiful, inventive AND moving. The Boat adapts the internationally acclaimed Dylan Thomas Award-winning story by Nam Le about Vietnamese resettlement in Australia following the fall of Saigon in 1975. It was commissioned by Australian network SBS and their interactive unit has created a scrolling graphic novel that uses limited animation, archival footage, text, gorgeous hand drawn art by Matt Huynh and sound design by Sam Petty (Animal Kingdom, The Rover) to tell this story.
Both Le and Huynh are connected to the story of 16-year-old Mai, who is sent alone in a boat to what her parents hope will be a welcoming new home. Le’s family was part of the diaspora and Huynh’s family left Saigon a few years after the fall.
said: “The Boat is the most urgent and immediate comic I’ve ever made – a work of a kind I’ve never quite seen before and a unique chance to engage an issue so entangled with my own life. It’s a work that deals not in metaphor or analogy, not exclusively fiction or history and impossible to segment artist from subject. This resulting work is proof of my life, luck, of a country’s compassion for people in the most vulnerable of circumstances over 40 years ago and our urgent, unavoidable connection to today’s asylum seekers and refugees.”
Le said: “An astounding and original piece of work: Matt Huynh and the team at SBS have taken a short story and shifted it into another register. The result is strange and powerful; more importantly, it opens up new ground. I’m thrilled to be part of it.”
As I’ve mentioned, making a project like this is not cheap, so props to SBS for having the resources to make something that tells an important story in a new and moving way.
And here’s a video on the making of the comic:
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By: Lizzy Burns,
on 7/8/2014
Great news!
The Echo Company books by Ellen Emerson White are available to buy!
White wrote these books back in the early 1990s, under the name Zach Emerson.
Last week was the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the start of the Allied landing in Normandy, France, that contributed to the end of World War II.
While some marked it with (deserved) pomp and circumstance, we observed it by reading the latest from some of our favorite veterans’ blogs on WordPress.com:
Then-infantryman Don Gomez served two tours in Iraq with the US Army in the early 2000s. After a stint in graduate school and a dissertation on the experiences of Iraqi soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, he re-upped and heads to Afghanistan later this summer as a Second Lieutenant.
His blog, Carrying the Gun, is a mix of thoughtful essays on everything from modern soldiering to women in combat to the transition from soldier to civilian. Sprinkled throughout are photos and letters from his Iraq deployments — a fascinating portrait of the life on the front lines.
O-Dark-Thirty is a literary journal for veterans, current military personnel, and their families. Created by the Veterans Writing Project, it helps those who have served tell their stories — and makes sure those stories are accessible to the rest of us.
The magazine is home to The Report, which publishes unedited fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and The Review, an edited quarterly journal presenting the best literary writing on the veterans’ experience. Browse the latest entries for a poetic take on the forgotten veteran, a fictionalized encounter between German and Russian troops, and a writer’s memoir of a day spent driving his wounded brother to yet another hospital.
O-Dark-Thirty accepts submissions year round — find their guidelines here — and the Veterans Writing Project holds workshops around the US.
For many soldiers, especially those who have served in combat roles, returning to “regular” life brings a new set of challenges. In Paving the Road Back, psychiatrist and Warrior Wellness Unit director Rod “Doc” Deaton gives those who serve our veterans a deeper understanding of the stresses of this transition.
Readers seeking information on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder will find analyses of the ethics of PTSD diagnoses and the relationship between PTSD and other psychiatric disorders, along with the stories of real veterans (fictionalized, to protect their privacy). “Doc” also provides the transcripts of his podcast, “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” and a variety of additional links and resources.
For more reading, check out:
By: AlanaP,
on 12/6/2012
A New York Post photographer snaps a picture of a man as he is pushed to his death in front of a New York City subway. An anonymous blogger photographs a dying American ambassador as he is carried to hospital after an attack in Libya. Multiple images following a shooting at the Empire State Building show its victims across both social media and news outlets. A little over three months, three events, three pictures, three circles of outrage.
The most recent event involved a freelancer working for the New York Post who captured an image of a frantic Queens native as he tried futilely to escape an approaching train. Depicting the man clinging to the subway platform as the train sped toward him, the picture appeared on the Post’s front cover. Within hours, observers began deriding both the photographer and the newspaper: the photographer, they said, should have helped the man and avoided taking a picture, while earlier photos by him were critiqued for being soft and of insufficient news value; the newspaper, they continued, should not have displayed the picture, certainly not on its front cover, and its low status as a tabloid was trotted out as an object of collective sneering.
We have heard debates like this before — when pictures surfaced surrounding the deaths of leaders in the Middle East, the slaying of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, the shattering of those imperiled by numerous natural disasters, wars and acts of terror. Such pictures capture the agony of people facing their deaths, depicting the final moment of life in a way that draws viewers through a combination of empathy, voyeurism, and a recognition of sheer human anguish. But the debates that ensue over pictures of people about to die have less to do with the pictures, photographers or news publications that display them and more to do with the unresolved sentiments we have about what news pictures are for. Decisions about how best to accommodate pictures of impending death in the difficult events of the news inhabit a sliding rule of squeamishness, by which cries of appropriateness, decency and privacy are easily tossed about, but not always by the same people, for the same reasons or in any enduring or stable manner.
Pictures are powerful because they condense the complexity of difficult events into one small, memorable moment, a moment driven by high drama, public engagement, the imagination, the emotions and a sense of the contingent. No surprise, then, that what we feel about them is not ours alone. Responses to images in the news are complicated by a slew of moral, political and technological imperatives. And in order to show, see and engage with explicit pictures of death, impending or otherwise, all three parameters have to work in tandem: we need some degree of moral insistence to justify showing the pictures; we need political imperatives that mandate the importance of their being seen; and we need available technological opportunities that can easily facilitate their display. Though we presently have technology aplenty, our political and moral mandates change with circumstance. Consider, for instance, why it was okay to show and see Saddam Hussein about to die but not Daniel Pearl, to depict victims dying in the Asian tsunami but not those who jumped from the towers of 9/11. Suffice it to say that had the same picture of the New York City subway been taken in the 1940s, it would have generated professional acclaim, won awards, and become iconic.
At a time in which we readily see explicit images of death and violence all the time on television series, in fictional films and on the internet, we are troubled by the same graphic images in the news. We wouldn’t expect our news stories to keep from us the grisly details of difficult events out there in the world. We should expect no less from our news pictures.
Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.
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The post Why we are outraged: the New York Post photo controvery appeared first on OUPblog.
By: AlanaP,
on 12/6/2012
A New York Post photographer snaps a picture of a man as he is pushed to his death in front of a New York City subway. An anonymous blogger photographs a dying American ambassador as he is carried to hospital after an attack in Libya. Multiple images following a shooting at the Empire State Building show its victims across both social media and news outlets. A little over three months, three events, three pictures, three circles of outrage.
The most recent event involved a freelancer working for the New York Post who captured an image of a frantic Queens native as he tried futilely to escape an approaching train. Depicting the man clinging to the subway platform as the train sped toward him, the picture appeared on the Post’s front cover. Within hours, observers began deriding both the photographer and the newspaper: the photographer, they said, should have helped the man and avoided taking a picture, while earlier photos by him were critiqued for being soft and of insufficient news value; the newspaper, they continued, should not have displayed the picture, certainly not on its front cover, and its low status as a tabloid was trotted out as an object of collective sneering.
We have heard debates like this before — when pictures surfaced surrounding the deaths of leaders in the Middle East, the slaying of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, the shattering of those imperiled by numerous natural disasters, wars and acts of terror. Such pictures capture the agony of people facing their deaths, depicting the final moment of life in a way that draws viewers through a combination of empathy, voyeurism, and a recognition of sheer human anguish. But the debates that ensue over pictures of people about to die have less to do with the pictures, photographers or news publications that display them and more to do with the unresolved sentiments we have about what news pictures are for. Decisions about how best to accommodate pictures of impending death in the difficult events of the news inhabit a sliding rule of squeamishness, by which cries of appropriateness, decency and privacy are easily tossed about, but not always by the same people, for the same reasons or in any enduring or stable manner.
Pictures are powerful because they condense the complexity of difficult events into one small, memorable moment, a moment driven by high drama, public engagement, the imagination, the emotions and a sense of the contingent. No surprise, then, that what we feel about them is not ours alone. Responses to images in the news are complicated by a slew of moral, political and technological imperatives. And in order to show, see and engage with explicit pictures of death, impending or otherwise, all three parameters have to work in tandem: we need some degree of moral insistence to justify showing the pictures; we need political imperatives that mandate the importance of their being seen; and we need available technological opportunities that can easily facilitate their display. Though we presently have technology aplenty, our political and moral mandates change with circumstance. Consider, for instance, why it was okay to show and see Saddam Hussein about to die but not Daniel Pearl, to depict victims dying in the Asian tsunami but not those who jumped from the towers of 9/11. Suffice it to say that had the same picture of the New York City subway been taken in the 1940s, it would have generated professional acclaim, won awards, and become iconic.
At a time in which we readily see explicit images of death and violence all the time on television series, in fictional films and on the internet, we are troubled by the same graphic images in the news. We wouldn’t expect our news stories to keep from us the grisly details of difficult events out there in the world. We should expect no less from our news pictures.
Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.
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The post Why we are outraged: the New York Post photo controversy appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 9/4/2012
No Easy Day, the new book by a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden on 30 April 2011, has attracted widespread comment, most of it focused on whether bin Laden posed a threat at the time he was gunned down. Another theme in the account by Mark Owen (a pseudonym) is how the team members openly weighed the political ramifications of their actions. As the Huffington Post reports:
Though he praises the president for green-lighting the risky assault, Owen says the SEALS joked that Obama would take credit for their success…. one SEAL joked, “And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden.”
Owen goes on to comment that he and his peers understood that they were “tools in the toolbox, and when things go well [political leaders] promote it.” It is an observation that invites only one response: Duh.
Of course, a president will bask in the glow of a national security success. The more interesting question, though, is whether it translates into gains for him and/or his party in the next election. The direct political impact of a military victory, a peace agreement, or (as in this case) the elimination of a high-profile adversary tends to be short-lived. That said, events may not be isolated; they also figure in the narratives politicians and parties tell. For Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, this secondary effect is the more important one.
Wartime presidents have always been sensitive to the ticking of the political clock. In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln famously fretted that he would lose his reelection bid. Grant’s army stalled at Petersburg after staggering casualties in his Overland campaign; Sherman’s army seemed just as frustrated in the siege of Atlanta; and a small Confederate army led by Jubal Early advanced through the Shenandoah Valley to the very outskirts of Washington. So bleak were the president’s political fortunes that Republicans spoke openly of holding a second convention to choose a different nominee. Only the string of Union victories — at Atlanta, in the Shenandoah Valley, and at Mobile Bay — before the election turned the political tide.
Election timing may tempt a president to shape national security decisions for political advantage. In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt was eager to see US troops invade North Africa before November 1942. Partly he was motivated by a desire to see American forces engage the German army to forestall popular demands to redirect resources to the war against Japan, the more hated enemy. But Roosevelt also wanted a major American offensive before the mid-term elections to deflect attention from wartime shortages and labor disputes that fed Republican attacks on his party’s management of the war effort. To his credit, he didn’t insist on a specific pre-election date for Operation Torch, and the invasion finally came a week after the voters had gone to the polls (and inflicted significant losses on his party).
The Vietnam War illustrates the intimate tie between what happens on the battlefield and elections back home. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Lyndon Johnson came within a whisker of losing the New Hampshire Democratic primary, an outcome widely interpreted as a defeat. He soon announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Four years later, on the eve of the 1972 election, Richard Nixon delivered the ultimate “October surprise”: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand,” following conclusion of a preliminary agreement with Hanoi’s lead negotiator Le Duc Tho. In fact, however, Kissinger left out a key detail. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu balked at the terms and refused to sign. Only after weeks of pressure, threats, and secret promises from Nixon, plus renewed heavy bombing of Hanoi, did Thieu grudgingly accept a new agreement that didn’t differ in its significant provisions from the October version.
But national security success yields ephemeral political gains. After the smashing coalition triumph in the 1991 Gulf War, George H. W. Bush enjoyed strikingly high public approval ratings. Indeed, he was so popular that a number of leading Democrats concluded he was unbeatable and decided not to seek their party’s presidential nomination the following year. But by fall 1992 the victory glow had worn off, and the public focused instead on domestic matters, especially a sluggish economy. Bill Clinton’s notable ability to project empathy played much better than Bush’s detachment.
And so it has been with Osama and Obama. Following the former’s death, the president received the expected bump in the polls. Predictably, though, the gain didn’t persist amid disappointing economic results and showdowns with Congress over the debt ceiling. From the poll results, we might conclude that Owen and his Seal buddies were mistaken about the political impact of their operation.
But there is more to it. Republicans have long enjoyed a political edge on national security, but not this year. The death of Osama bin Laden, coupled with a limited military intervention in Libya that brought down an unpopular dictator and ongoing drone attacks against suspected terrorist groups, has inoculated Barack Obama from charges of being soft on America’s enemies. Add the end of the Iraq War and the gradual withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and the narrative takes shape: here is a president who understands how to use force efficiently and with minimal risk to American lives. Thus far Mitt Romney’s efforts to sound “tougher” on foreign policy have fallen flat with the voters. That he so rarely brings up national security issues demonstrates how little traction his message has.
None of this guarantees that the president will win a second term. The election, like the one in 1992, will be much more about the economy. But the Seal team operation reminds us that war and politics are never separated.
Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.
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View more about this book on the 
By: Sandra de Helen,
on 6/26/2011
During the Vietnam War the people of the US put enough pressure on Congress to lower the voting age to 18 because young men were being drafted at 18, fighting, dying for our country at 18. I know the drinking age was 18 in some states as well. I don't know if that was nationwide.
The voting age remained. The draft was abolished in favor of an all volunteer military. But during the Vietnam War, it was rare for people to do more than one tour. Now they do three or four. Our volunteer military goes way above and beyond the call of duty IMHO. But that is not my subject today.
Age is. We are an aging population in the US. I had many friends who went to the war I protested. I worked for the US Army Recruiting Main Station before I became a protester, so I witnessed literally hundreds of young men going off to war.
One thing that never occurred to me to protest was the age limits for holding office. This morning I read an article on this topic. John Seery is proposing an amendment to the US Constitution to lower the age requirements. I agree with him. Read his article and see what you think.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/06/26/john_seery_age/index.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
By: Aline Pereira,
on 6/23/2011
Last month I was fortunate to attend the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) in Singapore. Each day of the Festival was jam-packed with activities and it was truly an incredible experience to be surrounded by people from all over the globe who shared such a passion for children’s literature. You can read my previous posts about the Festival by clicking here and if you click here on the Gathering Books blog Dr. Myra Garces-Bacsal has compiled a list of links to blog posts about the AFCC.
One presentation that I haven’t blogged about yet but want to share with you was entitled “The Asian Children’s Publishing Symposium Parallel: Asian Markets and Experiences”. I almost missed this session as I lost track of time while perusing and purchasing books in the Media Mart but thank goodness I arrived in time to get a seat as this presentation was a highligh
t for me. The three panelists: Le Phuong Lien, Head of Children’s Literature at the Vietnamese Writer’s Association; Sayoni Basu, Publishing Director at Scholastic India; and Linda Tan Lingard, Managing Partner of Yusof Gagah Lingard Literary Agency Malaysia, each gave an overview of the history and current state of children’s publishing in their respective countries. Each of these ladies is definitely an expert in their field and I certainly learned a lot. Children’s literature published in Vietnam is a subject I have been eager to learn more about but have had difficulty finding information on so it was a great pleasure in particular to listen to Mrs. Le Phuong accompanied by her lovely daughter who acted as a translator.
Mrs. Le Phuong discussed three pieces of literature for Vietnamese children, from three different time eras, that highlighted the efforts of “the Vietnamese writer in the expression of Vietnamese culture for children”. She noted that “the trend of searching, realizing and praising the original beauty with strong local characteristics is now being emphasized more and more in the writing for children in Vietnam”. She also shared her thoughts on the impact of global development and harmonization with respect to Vietnamese children’s literature and also why conferences such as the AFCC are important. You can downloaded Mrs. Le Phuong’s presentation here and view her power point slides
0 Comments on The Asian Children’s Publishing Symposium Parallel: Asian Markets and Experiences ~ Day 2 at the AFCC as of 1/1/1900
By: Lauren,
on 6/17/2011
David Ignatius of The Washington Post recently highlighted several “positive signs in Afghanistan,” citing progress on the diplomatic front, in relations between India and Pakistan, and on the battlefield itself. Of note, Ignatius stressed how U.S.-led coalition forces had cleared several Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The enemy, according to the opinion piece, was “feeling the pressure.” That same day Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan condemned General David Petraeus’s tactics as counterproductive and “profoundly wrong.” Denouncing an overemphasis on military action, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles noted that the use of body counts and similar statistics was reminiscent of the Vietnam War and “not conducive to a stable political settlement.”
The allusion to Vietnam, made frequently in the last five years, suggests uncertainty over the true amount of progress being made in Afghanistan today. For nearly a decade Americans in South Vietnam similarly tried in vain to assess progression towards the daunting political-military objective of a stable and independent noncommunist government in Saigon. Military officers and their civilian leaders employed a range of metrics to track success in the myriad political, military, economic, security, and social programs. As early as 1964, analysts were wading through approximately five hundred U.S. and Vietnamese monthly reports in an attempt to appraise the status of the conflict. In the process, the American mission in Vietnam became overwhelmed with data, much of it contradictory and, thus, of dubious value. By war’s end, questions remained over whether the U.S. Army in particular had achieved its goals in Southeast Asia. That debate continues to this day.
The American experience in Vietnam has served—rightfully so—as only an imperfect roadmap for our more current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, all wars are unique. Our recent conflicts, however, do illustrate the continuing challenges of defining progress and success in unconventional wars and of developing a coherent strategy for such wars. It is here that an objective study of Vietnam can offer insights and perspectives into the unresolved problems of measuring what matters most in an environment like Afghanistan. Quantitative statistics often do not tell the whole story as governmental allegiances, population security, and political stability all are highly subjective assessments. As in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have varied from province to province and any broad, centralized appraisals of the war likely miss the finer points of local conditions driving the political and military struggle.
Even in a war without front lines, Americans expect wartime progress to be linear. Effort should equal progress. Progress should lead to victory. The widely contrasting views of David Ignatius and Sherard Cowper-Coles, however, imply a battle is being waged over the very idea of “progress” in Afghanistan today. (Asking if the United States “won” in Iraq would provoke equally opposing responses.) If historical examples can be instructive in any way, the problem of metrics in Vietnam arguably helps illuminate the reasons why gauging wartime progress in Afghanistan has produced such a wide range of opinions. Assessing wars oftentimes is just as difficult as winning them.
Colonel Gregory A. Daddis is the author of No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War. Daddis teaches history at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He has served in a variety of
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By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: April 26, 2011
Inside Out & Back Again
by Thanhha Lai
Reading level: Ages 8-12
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (February 22, 2011)
Source: Publisher
What to expect: Vietnamese Americans, Emigration and immigration, Immigrants, Vietnam, Alabama
How much do we know about those around us? This is the question that debut novelist Thanhha Lai challenges her readers with.
Based on Lai’s own personal experience as a Vietnamese refugee, Inside Out & Back Again is a poignant story divided into four parts using a series of poems that chronicle the life of 10-year-old Hà, a child–refugee from Vietnam, during the year 1975—the Fall of Saigon. Along with her mother and three brothers (her father has been missing in action for nine years), Hà travels by boat to a tent city in Guam, is moved to Florida and then finds herself living in Alabama sponsored by an “American cowboy” and his wife. In Alabama, the family are treated as outcasts and forced to integrate quickly through language, food, and religion, to be accepted as a part of the community.
Adjustments to Hà’s new life are delivered through smells and tastes and touch. In “Part One: Saigon,” a verse titled “Two More Papayas” gives Hà’s delectable description of her most cherished fruit. In “Part Three: Alabama,” a verse titled “Not the Same,” which is followed by “But Not Bad,” showcases the bitter differences between the comfort of her precious birth city and the emotional challenges of her new home in Alabama, combined with the acceptance of change.
Two More Papayas
“…Middle sweet
between a mango and a pear.Soft as a yam
gliding down
after three easy,
thrilling chews.”
Not the Same
“Three pouches of papaya
dried papaya
Chewy
Sugary
Waxy
Sticky
Not the same
at all.
So mad,
I throw all in the trash.”
But Not Bad
“… I wake up at faint light,
guilt heavy on my chest.
I head toward the trash can.
Yet
on the dining table
on a plate
sit strips of papaya
gooey and damp,
having been soaked in hot water.
The sugar has melted off
leaving
plump
moist
chewy
bites.
Hummm …
Not the same,
but not bad
at all.”
Told with pure honesty, emotions run freely from verse to verse and page to page. Hà’s voice is clear, allowing readers to make a leap from sympathy to deep seeded empathy by experiencing her joy, pain, anger, frustration, loyalties, challenges, loss, and determination. The clarity of Hà’s self-awareness and development toward self-actualization is reminiscent of Susan Patron’s character Lucky, also a 10-year-old girl, from the Newbery winner (2007) The Higher Power of Lucky (2006). Both characters suffer
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By: Jennie,
on 4/16/2011
Black and White and Yellow and Red
The bell rings.
Everyone stands.
I stand.
They line up;
so do I.
Down a hall.
Turn left.
Take a tray.
Receive food.
Sit.
On one side
of the bright, noisy room,
light skin.
Other side,
dark skin.
Both laughing, chewing,
as if it never occured
to them
someone medium
would show up.
I don't know where to sit
any more than
I know how to eat
the pink sausage
snuggled inside bread
shaped like a corncob,
smeared with sauces
yellow and red.
I think
they are making fun
of the Vietnamese flag
until I remember
no one here likely knows
that flag's colors.
I put down the try
and wait
in the hallway.
September 2
11:30 am
I got to review this wonderful novel for School Library Journal. My full review is here.
If you don't want to click over and read, here's the takeaway:
1. It got a star
2. Sensory language describing the rich smells and tastes of Vietnam draws readers in and contrasts with Hà's perceptions of bland American food, and the immediacy of the narrative will appeal to those who do not usually enjoy historical fiction
Book Provided by... School Library Journal, for review
Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.
By: nella32000,
on 3/20/2011
Here’s some initial photos I received of the 2011 Vietnam International Illustration Exhibition sponsored by The Korea Society of Illustration Research in Hanoi. Once again I’d like thank my friend and major coordinator of this and previous exhibits Jae Chang. It was suggested this year’s exhibition location was more exotic, less modern atmosphere compared with the previous exhibitions in Kagoshima, Japan 2010 and the 2009 exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand. I imagined it would look something like what you see above. I’m told more photos will be forthcoming. I’ll share them on this post when I receive them.
By: Laura,
on 2/24/2011
The school and library world is a-buzzing with accolades for Thanhha Lai’s debut novel INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN! Check out these reviews…and the shiny stars that accompany them:
“In her not-too-be-missed debut, Lai evokes a distinct time and place and presents a complex, realistic heroine whom readers will recognize, even if they haven’t found themselves in a strange new country.” ~ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An incisive portrait of human resilience.” ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Based on Lai’s personal experience, this first novel captures a child-refugee’s struggle with rare honesty.” ~ Booklist (starred review)
“[...] the immediacy of the narrative will appeal to those who do not usually enjoy historical fiction.” ~ School Library Journal (starred review)
“Lai’s spare language captures the sensory disorientation of changing cultures as well as a refugee’s complex emotions and kaleidoscopic loyalties.” ~ The Horn Book
And here is what our teacher and librarian friends are saying:
INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN (ISBN 9780061962783) is on-sale now.
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By: Jennie,
on 10/22/2010
My fingers stumble
through the scales
and through
"The Gypsy Camp."
They crowd the keys,
landing in two spots
at the same time.
They slip, clank, and clash
into sounds
that aren't music.
Watch, Jeff says calmly
when my fingers freeze
in frustration.
Jeff's fingers are
bigger than mine,
but they know how
to touch each key,
one at a time.
They unlock each sound
separately.
Jeff doesn't make mistakes.
His fingers brush
across the piano keys
like branches
of the tamarind
swaying in the wind.
How can such big hands
make such quiet music?
Matt is the son of a Vietnamese mother and the American soldier who left and didn't come back. He was airlifted out of Saigon without his mother or brother and adopted by an American family.
In his experiences on his baseball team, where a teammate blames Matt for a brother's death, and in working with a Veterans group, Matt comes to face the life he lived before and now only lives in his nightmares.
I've often talked about how I feel many verse novels could be written in short paragraphs and that's true here, but the sparsity of the text because of the verse format helps show Matt's isolation and confusion.
Round up is over at A Wrung Sponge!
Book Provided by... my local library
Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.
By: Aline Pereira,
on 9/20/2010
“My grandmother saw
the emperor cry
the day he lost
his golden dragon throne.”
So begins The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland and illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi, a beautifully crafted story set in Vietnam and the U.S. The lotus seed of the title belongs right at its heart, both as a souvenir and talisman, and as a link across generations.
When she saw the emperor cry, the narrator’s Bà (grandmother) picked a lotus seed to remember him by, and from then on it became her most treasured possession, carried in her pocket for luck when she got married, and later, when war in Vietnam meant she had to flee, brought with her to America to take up its customary place under the family altar. So when “Last summer/ my little brother” took the seed and planted it in the garden, Bà was understandably devastated – but then in the spring an amazing thing happens. A beautiful lotus flower grows in the mud, providing a concrete connection for the children with their heritage. Bà once again has a lotus seed, and so do her grandchildren. And following in her grandmother’s footsteps, our young narrator wraps hers in silk and hides it away – with the intention of planting it for her own children…
The narrative is simple and poetic, which emphasises the feeling of the cyclical passing of years. It also allows the horrors of the story to come through without being overly traumatic for young listeners. Tatsuri Kiuchi’s beautiful illustrations are particularly powerful here, showing grandmother as a young woman fleeing her village pulling her son behind her; and then as one of many passengers on a boat leaving Vietnam, only distinguishable because of her hand across her chest holding tightly onto the lotus seed.
The Lotus Seed is a moving story that is perfectly pitched for young children and for reading aloud, even at bedtime. There are also good, concise historical notes at the end about Vietnam; and an added bonus is the lovely, anonymous poem about the Lotus flower – in Vietnamese on the back cover, and its English translation on the dedication page. I have included The Lotus Seed in my Personal View of refugee stories for children of all ages, as part of our current issue, which focuses on Refugee Children.
And, at a bit of a tangent really: do take a look at Japanese illustrator Tatsuro Kiuchi’s website - his most recent children’s book covers also look beautiful; and I was delighted to discover that he was the artist of the UK Christmas stamps a few years ago. That was the same Christmas that I (picture horrified mother) discovered Older Brother had made a collage (picture proud small son) incorporating a rather large number of (new) said stamps…
By: Lauren,
on 7/30/2010
Welcome to the final installment the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Read the first post here, and the second post here, and the third post here.
Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change & Development and Director, Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.
Elvin -
You mention John Kerry’s aversion to invoking democracy. It’s odd that the same John Kerry who spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in 1971 on behalf of the “Winter Soldiers” – an organization of antiwar Vietnam vets – could not bring himself to speak openly of Paine in the 2004 campaign. And even more pathetic that Kerry used Reagan’s favorite words from Paine, “We have it in our power…,” when he accepted the Democratic party’s nomination, and yet he did not refer to Paine. Which is to say that Kerry quoted Reagan quoting Paine! Is that plagiarism or flattery? Either way, it amazed me that conservative pundits never made anything of it.
But you ask if I think it’s possible to be both “populist” and “pro-government.” Here I turn to FDR , who did not hesitate to engage popular memory and imagination and mobilize popular energies in favor of recovery, reconstruction, and reform and who most certainly embraced and pursued government action. In a September 1934 Fireside Chat, Roosevelt said: “I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that ‘The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.’” And for what it’s worth…FDR was the first president since Jefferson to quote Paine, cite his name, and praise his contributions in a major speech while serving as president (see the Fireside Chat of February 23, 1942 and for audio click here.)
Before we close, I’d just note that in a recent national essay contest sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and involving 50,000 high school stude
By: Lizzy Burns,
on 5/12/2010
Noodle Pie
The Plot: Andy, eleven, travels with his father to Vietnam. His father left Vietnam over twenty years before, surviving multiple pirate attacks to arrive, penniless, in Australia. Andy is Australian; not Vietnamese. His father may be "going home," but to Andy, it's a strange country, strange relatives, strange language, strange food. Even his father seems strange in Vietnam, wearing clothes, a gold watch, no longer the frugal man Andy knows.
The Good: This book is a two-fer for American readers. It's a look at modern Vietnam, through the eyes of a child who is a visitor. It's also a look at Australia, with Andy missing such foods as meat pies. Meat pies!! Just as mysterious to most American readers as pho for breakfast is to Andy. (Pho, by the way, is noodle soup.)
I loved the depiction of the emigrant returning home. Andy's father left when he was teenager; it's twenty years later. Much has changed in Hanoi; much remains the same, and the connect / disconnect, familiar but strange experience is conveyed in the places and people Andy and his father visit.
Andy is Australian. He was born in Australia, his name in Andy. He also has a Vietnamese name (Anh) and can speak and understand some Vietnamese (he calls it Vietlish). Both his parents were born in Vietnam. Andy views and understands Vietnam as the foreigner he is; but has his father to explain what is different and strange to Andy.
Because we see things through Andy's eyes, the reader first encounters Vietnam as "the other" and "strange". Here is Andy, observing a street scene: "a skinny woman squatting over a charcoal fire or a few sticks of burning wood -- right there on the roadside, amid all the dust and refuse and traffic fumes. Andy was shocked. Where where the health inspectors?" Andy's thinking is very much that of an eleven year old, especially an eleven year old experiencing culture shock. Andy's attitude softens as he learns more about the cultural and economic differences between Vietnam and Australia. His attitude and reaction is balanced by occasionally seeing things through the eyes of his cousin, Minh. Andy may start by seeing Vietnam as "the other," but as the story progresses he matures past that, just like the reader will.
There is a great balance between what Andy figures out on his own, and what needs to be explained to him. Andy, for example, sees his Vietnamese relatives (and other Vietnamese) as greedy and rude, demanding and expecting money from his "rich Australian" father. Andy knows his father is a gardener, that both of his parents fret over bills. Yes, they have a house, a car, Andy and his sister Mai go to school -- but they aren't rich! How did his father afford this trip, all the presents? And then Andy discovers that for years, his father has been sending money back home to his family. Even though the family owns a successful restaurant!
It takes the book for Andy to r
By: Jennie,
on 4/26/2010
It's the summer before 8th grade. Jamie's two best friends have both moved away (which happens a lot when you live on an army base. Either they're moving, or you are) and her older brother has just shipped out to Vietnam.
Jamie and her brother have always loved playing war and she's disappointed when his letters home aren't about the smells and sights of battle. But, with every letter, he sends Jamie a roll of film to develop. Jamie's days are spent volunteering at the rec center, playing gin rummy with Private Hollister, and developing film. Through TJ's photos, she sees a reality of war that she never expected and discovers new talents within herself.
This is a short, slight book. It's quiet, but it stays with you. Not a lot happens. It's summer, Jamie plays cards and develops film. She flashes back to when her brother enlisted up until the day he shipped out. Despite the lack of plot, we see a lot of growth in Jamie, and how she views the her father, her brother, the army, and war. 
Book Provided by... my local library
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By: msedano,
on 4/12/2010
Gregory Desilet. 2010, ISBN: 1-4415-4683-9 (Trade Paperback 6x9).
QRF detailed soldiers were confined to quarters from 1700 until called upon for a quick reaction. 
By: Lynne Chapman,
on 12/7/2009
Lapin is a fellow illustrator who lives in Barcelona and it turns out that, like me, he has been sketching in Vietnam:
I so love the way The Net helps us make connections that would otherwise be impossible.
By: Rebecca,
on 9/15/2009
Mark Philip Bradley is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent book, Vietnam at War, looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced the conflicts,
showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain to this day. In the excerpt below, from the introduction, Bradley begins to paint the Vietnamese perspective of the conflict.
In the early 1990 a short story by a young author, Tran Huy Quang, entitled ‘The Prophecy’ (’Ling Nghiem’), appeared to great interest in Hanoi. It told the tale of a young man named Hinh, the son of a mandarin, who longed to acquire the magical powers that would one day enable him to lead his countrymen to their destiny. The destiny itself does not particularly concern Hinh, but he is intent upon leading the Vietnamese people to it. In a dream one evening, Hinh meets a messenger from the gods, who tells him to seek out a small flower garden. Once he reaches the garden, Hinh is told, he should walk slowly with his eyes fastened on the ground to ‘look for this’. It will only take a moment, the messenger tells Hinh, and as a result he will ‘possess the world’.
When he awakens, Hinh finds the flower garden and begins to pace, looking downward. Slowly a crowd gathers, first children, then the disadvantaged of Vietnamese society: unemployed workers, farmers who had left their poor rural villages to find work in the city, cyclo drivers, prostitutes, beggars, and orphans. Watching Hinh, they ask in turn, ‘What are you looking for?’ He replies, ‘I am looking for this.’ Hopeful of turning up a bit of good luck, they join him, and soon multitudes of people are crawling around in the garden. Hinh looks around at the crowd searching with him and believes the prophecy has been fulfilled: he possesses the world. With that realization Hinh goes home.
To Vietnamese readers the story was immediately recognized as a parable, with Hinh representing Ho Chi Minh, the pre-eminent leader of the twentieth-century Vietnam. The prophecy was seen as coming from a secular god, Karl Marx. ‘This’ was the promise of a socialist future, which the author of ‘The Prophecy’ and many of his readers in Hanoi increasingly believed to be a hollow one. For them, socialist ideals did enable Vietnamese revolutionaries to develop a mass following and establish an independent state, throwing off a century of French colonial rule. But in the aftermath of some thirty years of war against the French and the Americans, their hopes for a more egalitarian and just society appeared to remain unfulfilled.
…In truth, there were many Vietnam wars, among them an anti-colonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among southern Vietnamese, and a revolutionary war of ideas over the vision that should guide Vietnamese society into the post-colonial future. The contest of ideas began long before 1945 and persists to the present day in yet another war, this one of memory over the legacies of the Vietnam wars and the stakes of remembering and forgetting them.
For most Vietnamese, the coming of French colonialism in the late nineteenth century raised profound questions about their very survival as a people and pointed to the need to rethink fundamentally the neo-Confucian political and social order upon which Vietnamese society has rested. As one young Vietnamese asked in a 1907 poem:
Why is the roof over the Western universe the broad land and skies;
While we cower and confine ourselves to a cranny in our house?
Why can they run straight, leap far,
While we shrink back and cling to each other?
Why do they rule the world,
While we bow our heads as slaves?
Throughout the twentieth century, in both war and at peace, and into the twenty-first century, the Vietnamese have searched for answers to the predicaments posed by colonialism and the struggle for independence. As they have done so, a variety of Vietnamese actors have appropriate and transformed a fluid repertoire of new modes of thinking about the future - social Darwinism, Marxist-Leninism, social progressivism, Buddhist modernism, constitutional monarchy, democratic republics, illiberal democracies, and market capitalism to name just a few - to articulate and enact visions for the post-colonial transformation of urban and rural Vietnamese society. But the end of the Vietnam wars did not bring a final resolution to these competing visions. When North Vietnamese tanks entered Saigon on 30 April 1975 to take the surrender of the American-backed South Vietnamese government, Vietnam was reunified as a socialist state. The long war for independence was over. Yet even today, as the searchers in ‘The Prophecy’ suggest, the meanings according to ‘running straight and leaping far’ remain deeply contested. In one of many present-day paradoxes, the Vietnamese state seeks to develop a market economy as it maintains its commitment to socialism, while an increasingly heterodox Vietnamese civil society simultaneously embraces the global economy, years for the unfulfilled promises of socialist egalitarianism, and reinvents many of the spiritual and familial practices the socialist state spent the war years trying to stamp out. Indeed, a walk today through a typical city block at the centre of Hanoi or Saigon, a block in which a refurbished Buddhist temple might be flanked by a Seven-Eleven store on one side and the local community party headquarters on the other, quickly reveals these everyday contradictions and tensions…
By: Tasha Saecker,
on 8/18/2009
All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg
Matt Pin was airlifted from war torn Vietnam to the United States and has been adopted into a loving family. Now at age 12, Matt is struggling with the internal scars of war, combined with his questions of identity. He has haunting memories of his mother and brother whom he left behind in Vietnam. Matt has trouble giving a voice to his internal struggles, while externally he is having difficulties at school and is being bullied by boys on his baseball team. Can Matt manage to make peace with his past so he can embrace his future? Or are the two so intertwined that they are one and the same?
A searing verse novel, this book offers powerful poetry that clearly conveys the emotional scars of Matt and of the community around him. Vietnam is a multi-faceted subject and Burg does an admirable job in paying tribute to its many aspects. Poetry is a wonderful medium for this sort of exploration, allowing things to be said clearly that would have to be danced around in prose. Burg’s poems create a cohesive novel yet offer verses that will linger in the memory and mind, that speak to our humanity and our past.
Here is one verse from the early part of the novel that captures the power and talent of the writing:
He never saw my face.
But she was already swelled
with love for him when he left,
taking with him
his blue-eyed promise
that it would not end there,
with the smell of burnt flesh
and the sound of crying children.
Highly recommended for tween and teen readers, this book covers powerful subjects without turning away or flinching. Readers who are not poetry readers and those who claim not to like verse novels should be encouraged to try this one. Appropriate for ages 12-15.
Reviewed from library copy.
Also reviewed by A Year of Reading.
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I just recently added this one to my LibraryThing account. The illustrations are lovely, and yes, the dog steals the show. Other than Fly Free!, I can’t think of another picture book featuring Vietnam that does not include reference to war. You’ve read much more into it than I did. I’m going to read it over again. Thanks.