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Today I’m taking part again in Nonfiction Monday, a weekly carnival in the kidlitosphere celebrating the best of nonfiction books for children. My contribution is a review of Nights of the Pufflings by Bruce McMillan.

This book is also part of our Icelandic sojourn Reading Round Europe. Althought the author/photographer isn’t Icelandic himself, the book is all about an event which takes place Iceland.

Before going any further I should point out that this book ought to come with a warning: Your child will beg you to holiday in Iceland after reading this book! (And you yourself may well be tempted to say yes).

Photo: The.Rohit

Nights of the Pufflings recounts an annual event on the island of Heimaey, just off the SW coast of Iceland, when for a couple of weeks in late summer the air is thick with pufflings, young puffins, taking their first flight, from the nests of their birth out to sea.

Puffin anatomy is such that they are astonishingly skillful underwater, but not so graceful when airborn and often the pufflings don’t quite make it to the water on their first flight. And unable to take off from flat land things could look bleak for these grounded Pufflings.

Photo: Stig Nygaard

But help is at hand. The children on Heimaey come out at night at this time of year (nighttime is when the pufflings attempt their seabound flight) and gather up all the struggling pufflings in cardboard boxes and take them to the beach the following morning to send their guests on their way.

For two weeks all the children of Heimaey sleep late in the day so they can stay out at night. They rescue thousands of pufflings. There are pufflings, pufflings everywhere, and helping hands too – even though the pufflings instinctively nip at helping fingers.

This real life story is accompanied by a slew of beautiful photos of the events being described: it would seem there are few things more photogenic than puffins and Icelandic scenery. To add further local flavour, the text is peppered with Icelandic phrases, accompanied by pronunciation guides and translations, and further context is provided in the endpages with background information on both Puffins and the island of Heimaey.

This book has proved incredibly popular with my girls. For a start the pufflings are adorable, and then there is this amazing true story where kids are the heroes of the day, not only getting to actually pick up the pufflings, but to rescue them and help them. It’s a story tha

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By Jan Zalasiewicz

To a geologist, the presence of a volcano on Iceland isn’t at all surprising. After all, Iceland is literally, and continuously, splitting apart, as this island sits exactly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That mighty planet-sized fracture is continuously oozing magma, as the Americas pull ever farther apart – by a couple of centimeters a year, maintained for over a hundred million years – from Africa and Europe.

What raised a few eyebrows, though (mine, for sure) was the sheer filthiness of the eruption, and the amount of ash that it hurled high into the atmosphere, to the alarm of airline companies just about everywhere. For volcanoes that sit astride mid-ocean ridges are by nature generally placid by nature. For sure, they produce what seem like spectacular firework displays for the TV cameras, and flowing lava can, here and there, play merry hell with real estate values.

This is nothing, though, compared to the paroxysmal eruptions – Krakatoa, Pinatubo and the like – that occur in those parts of the world where tectonic plates are colliding. The violence of such cataclysms can destroy a whole country (and even Krakatoa was small compared to the great eruptions of the deep geological past). So why was Eyjafjallajokull trying to behave like one of the bad boys?

One answer is ice. Lying far north, Iceland is a land not just of volcanoes but of glaciers too – one of which lies on top of Eyjafjallajokull. As the uprushing magma came into contact with this, the ice flashed into steam, the expansion of which added quite a bit of oomph to the eruption. The lava, in turn, rapidly chilled by the ice, solidified quickly as it emerged, the thermal stresses shattering it into countless tiny fragments. This produced lots of ash, to be carried high into the atmosphere in the steam-driven (turbo-charged, if you like) eruption plume. It’s a bit (only a bit, mind) like putting a lot of wet wood and leaves on to a bonfire. This was one smoky volcano, and it seriously annoyed the neighbours.

Volcanic ash, of course, is feared by airline pilots, and justifiably so. One of the scariest experiences in all of flight history took place in 1982 when a British Airways Boeing 747, carrying 263 people, flew into an ash cloud from an erupting Indonesian volcano, Mount Galunggung. Ash particles entered the jet engines, melted against the hot metal, and, in effect, clogged them with reconstituted magma. All four engines failed, and the airplane, now completely without power, began to plunge towards the Indian Ocean.

The pilots kept their nerve, and prepared to ditch into the sea, while at the same time trying to restart the engines. The attempts failed until, when just a few thousand meters above the sea, the engines – amazingly – coughed back into life. They were able to fly to Jakarta, and landed safely (though not without difficulty, as the windscreen was almost opaque through being sandblasted by the sharp ash particles).

They had been saved by the same phenomenon that made Eyjafjallajokull such a disruptive volcano: thermal shock. As the stricken airplane descended, the cold air rushing through the lifeless engines chilled the molten ash, freezing it into solid volcanic glass. The chilling was fast enough for thermal stresses to shatter this glass, causing enough of it to break off to allow the engines to re-start. It was a lucky squeak.

That

I recently embarked on a two-year adventure that will take me, in Dan Brown style, from end to end of Europe (with a brief foray into Asia) in search of the answer to the age-old question: “What are the differences in the ways that children’s literature is taught to 8-11-year-olds in Spain, the UK, Iceland and Turkey?”

Okay, it’s not quite the Da Vinci code, but it’s still important! It’s easy to become myopically focused on one’s own situation and history, after all. In England and Wales we debate the National Curriculum and Literacy Hour, and complain about literature being taught in snippets rather than whole books. What has happened to reading aloud in class for the sheer pleasure of it, we ask? Where do books fit into the wider curriculum? Are they simply springboards to discussion of “issues”? Are they viewed as ways of inculcating social values – and, if so, whose? Which subjects are out of bounds, and why? Who chooses the books? Why do we read so little in translation? What do the children themselves think about it all?

I and my colleagues will be surveying both teachers and pupils in the four countries to find the answers to some of these questions – and one result, we hope, will be a sharing of ideas that will in a small way help invigorate teaching across the board. So far I’ve only been to Murcia in Spain, but in a couple of weeks I’ll be off to northern Iceland and the University of Akureyri to plan our next move (why didn’t we schedule that trip for midsummer? Why?). Ankara is slated for later in the year.

One difference I noticed right away in Spanish bookshops, by the way, was in the way they display books. Think of the colourful, not to say garish, stands of books in the children’s section of your local Waterstones, with dump bins, covers facing outwards, and each publication striving to be as different from the rest as possible. Then look at the Spanish equivalent, above. The colours of the jackets denote neither publisher nor genre, I’m told, but age-banding - which in this country remains a highly-controversial topic. It all looks very dull to me, but several people have told me that as children they'd have preferred their shelves to have that kind of neat uniformity. So, who's missing a trick, the Spanish or the Brits? Chacun à son goût, I guess.

, last added: 1/28/2010

Talk about a new spin on the old family portrait!

Icelandic illustrator/designer, Siggi Eggertsson, successfully combines unusual geometric shapes and muted colors to create refined abstractions. He has an impressive collection of work, ranging from posters and type to mosaics made from his collection of 20,000 basketball cards from the 90s. See more on his website, www.vanillusaft.com.

Images via Product of God.

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©2008 Grain Edit

Ah, the award season is upon us. And I don't mean the Golden Globes, Academy Awards, or any other silly low profile affairs like those. I am of course referring to the children's book award season that begins with the announcement of the Newbery and Caldecott and other ALA awards and culminates with the prestigious Bluebonnet award presented at the TLA conference in late March. For those of you who have possibly not lived in Texas (or The Center of the World as we think of it here), you may not be familiar with the Bluebonnet Award. You can familiarize yourself here.

This morning the feeding frenzy began when ALA announced the winner of all of their major awards. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a book I've never heard of, won the Newberry. White Darkness won the Printz, and in what I'm sure will be a controversial move, ALA awarded the Caldecott for "most distinguished American picture book for children" to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a mid-grade novel. Personally, I feel a picture book award should go to a picture book, but no one asked me.

And, that, I have decided, is the problem. Yet again I am unable to participate in all the non-stop discussions on these books because I haven't read a single one of them. I tried to read Hugo Cabret, but didn't make it past the first set of pictures. The other 2 don't really sound all that interesting to me, so I doubt I'll be reading them. I have read some of the Honor books, but that's not as fun as discussing the actual winners. So if one of the books has disturbing imagery, or controversial plots, or even uses taboo words like booby, I know nothing about it. I'm spending another year in the dark concerning the winners.

But, I'm determined not to miss out on award mania entirely. Since I can't join the talks about the "official" award winners, I just decided to present some awards of my own. So, presenting the first 1st annual 2008 Slushie Awards. (Play suitable theme music here.) From now until I lose interest, I will periodically be presenting a Slushie to a book I think worthy of notice and attention. I will be taking nominations for both book and category ideas. And since no award is complete without a seal, I made one of those too:


So as to not take away from the other award winners' special day, I will not announce the first of the Slushies until tomorrow. You'll just have to wait in hair pulling anticipation until then.