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One of the reasons Madison’s public library wants me dead is my reluctance to read Walter Dean Myers’s SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH. I returned this to the library, overdue, twice without having read it, before finally getting myself to crack it open (at a point when the creditors’ letters bemoaning my idea that this time, I’m really going to read this! were piling up).

Why the reluctance? I love Myers — I have since some kind soul got me to read MONSTER — and I was excited to know SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH was coming out. I think the source of my Hotel Rwanda-ing of it is mostly that I read about, and think about, and talk about Iraq all the time*, and the idea of doing it at bedtime, when I read kids’ books to relax, was a bit overwhelming.

Of course, I’ve also been working on IRAQIGIRL this past year, putting “children’s/YA books about the Iraq war” a little more firmly into the camp of “work” rather than “chilling out with a sauvignon blanc and a book and pretending there’s not some journal article that some more virtuous grad student somewhere is taking notes on (or writing) while I enjoy this shit.”

Anyway, I was really glad when I finally did force myself to start SUNRISE, because it is excellent. All of Myers’s usual strengths come into play: he manages to genuinely individuate characters by the precise brand of sardonic wit they employ. This feat is one thing that elevates the book over generic war stories, with their military banter so tired we feel we’re on our own third deployment of it; I’ve, sadly, read my fair share of that, too, and Myers is better than it.

Another notable characteristic of SUNRISE is the serious research effort that Myers clearly put into it. Having read a lot of soldiers’ memoirs (nearly all more brutal and negative about the war than what Myers portrays, by the way, although his has certainly been received as a bleak view), SUNRISE broadly accords with what I’ve read and also heard soldiers describe; Myers also makes good use of facts that have more recently come to light — like Blackwater’s role in Iraq — to imagine what the war looked like back in its earliest days.

I particularly appreciated that some of this research was clearly off the beaten path of mainstream U.S. reporting, as when Myers’s protagonist, Robin “Birdy” Perry, witnesses an argument between his superior and a local sheikh:

“Do you really think that we have the problems your papers are reporting?” Hamid asked. “Do you think that people who have lived together more years than your country has been in existence suddenly find it impossible? That the hatred has grown so quickly between Sunnis and Shiites that we must shoot each other and bomb each other?”

The mythology of timeless and unchanging ethnic hatred in Iraq is so taken for granted in the U.S. that I was surprised and happy to see it explicitly challenged in one of the book’s key scenes. And it’s historically accurate: SUNRISE is set in the war’s first year, before the ethnic divisions among Iraqis had become so entrenched by the experience of occupation and by the electoral and military systems designed by the U.S.

That decision to set the story in the war’s early days is what gives Myers’s book its most effective emotional punch: the characters can truly believe that they’re about the find the fabled WMD, and we get to vicariously experience their ultimate betrayal without Myers having to take his story there directly. Here’s another such scene:

“Tell him we didn’t come to kill him,” I said. “That we’re trying to build a democracy over here.”

“You bombed my village,” the old man, his head down, replied slowly in English. “First you shoot into my house, then you come to the door.”

“Where you learn to speak English?” Jonesy asked.

“I drove a cab in London for twelve years,” answered the old man. “When I had enough money to buy a house for my family, I came back to my country.”

“You’re going to be all right,” Jonesy said. “We don’t hurt our prisoners.”

And, of course, everything we know about Abu Ghraib and everything else makes this scene intensely painful.

Which also raises my biggest question about the book. People who are about to be freshmen in college this fall were in sixth grade when the Iraq war began; they were in elementary school during 9/11. Myers’s target audience of high school students, of course, was even younger. Do they even remember the lies about the WMD? Do they remember Abu Ghraib? They never experienced, as news-aware citizens, the days when the most optimistic hopes of Myers’s characters were taken for granted by most Americans. What do they make of this book? And when Jonesy assures his prisoner, do they believe him?

* Emily and I both have a long history of involvement in the antiwar movement; we both, for example, were at different times members of the national coordinating committee of the Campus Antiwar Network, back when were were in college.

I just read an Advanced Reader Copy of Fran Cannon Slayton’s debut middle-grade novel, WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, after winning it as part of a prize pack of debut novels.

The book — set in 1940s Virginia — is half about the protagonist Jimmy’s relationship with his dad (the mom is such a minor character that I kept forgetting she was living; more distortions of my fairy tale-centric childhood?). And it’s half about Jimmy’s relationship with the book’s other central character: the railroad where the family’s men work, and where Jimmy is desperate to go to work himself.

The centrality of the railroad had a special resonance for me because I read a ton about Eugene Debs last summer, including Ray Ginger’s beautiful biography THE BENDING CROSS. Debs grew up as the railroad era was beginning, and it was the major influence on his early life; he was enthralled with their power, and he dropped out of school to work for them as soon as he could, as a 16-year-old in 1871 — exactly what Slayton’s Jimmy wishes his father would let him do. In fact, though, Debs was later bitterly regretful at having truncated his formal education; I think he’d have been the first to tell Jimmy to listen to his father.

But he’d also have understood Jimmy’s desperate drive to grow up, to take a ‘man’s job,’ and most of all, to do it on the railroads. Debs quit railroading only a few years in, with extreme reluctance, prevailed upon by his mother’s concern for his safety. As emerges in Slayton’s story, railroad work was immensely dangerous; in Debs’s time, the railroad workers’ associations (called Brotherhoods) were basically insurance clubs whose main function was issuing death benefits to the widows of men killed on the job.

But Debs, still fascinated by the railroad he was no longer working for and desperate to avoid the boring life of a retail clerk, leaped into organizing the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, transforming it into a true union and leading the first national strike in U.S. history. It was 1877, and he was 22 years old. Debs’s increasing recognition of the depth of exploitation in the railroad industry, the tight collaboration among its monopolistic owners and the government, the violence with which they would maintain the profitability of their industry, and the inability of conservative union professionals to challenge any part of this, helped him to become possibly the most important labor leader in American history. His own obsession with the railroad was emblematic of his era; the class struggle this led him to spark would define the next era.

Slayton’s story bookends this history. Like Debs, Jimmy sees before him two possible lives — the life of a grocery clerk or life on the railroads — and knows which he wants, despite all the objections of his family. And like Debs, Jimmy finds that the railroad can’t live up to the promise it seemed to hold for his own life, and has to find a third path for himself.

But Debs’s transformation was at the beginning of the railroad era, and the era of unionization; Jimmy’s comes as its end. Whereas Debs’s disillusionment was that the railroads never lived up to the sense of social progress they seemed to promise, Jimmy’s problem is that time is progressing on, whether he likes it or not. The railroad jobs he knows are dying — the steam engines around which his entire town is organized replaced by diesel. His solution, too, will be of a more solely personal nature than Debs’s; indeed, no union is ever mentioned in the book, and his dad, who’s some sort of foreman, pays out of pocket to maintain the income of some of the displaced workers.

In that sense, I think, WHERE THE WHISTLE BLOWS isn’t only a portrayal of Jimmy’s time (which actually was itself a time of substantial and militant class struggle), but of ours: it’s a beautifully-told story of having hopes destroyed by economic forces out of one’s control, but finding recourse in one’s personal relationships and character. At this point in American history, the Debsian solution isn’t one that most people can imagine. I wonder, as the economic crisis continues, what other kinds of stories we might begin to see.

Tomorrow’s follow-up post: The unusual storytelling method of WHERE THE WHISTLE BLOWS.

In contrast to the general experience of high school — which as we all know tends to produce antagonistic feelings between teachers, students and parents (especially if the student is like me… sorry, Hunter College High School teaching staff! You put up with a lot!) — check out these cool recent examples of students fighting for their teachers’ jobs:

• “San Jose’s Overfelt High students march for teachers’ jobs”
• “The battle for our schools heats up in LA” (including 75 middle school students holding a “Save Our Teachers Day”)

Maybe sad that it takes a full-frontal assault on public education to produce this kind of unity, but very cool to see it happening.

Anyone know of other examples?