How many parents have been woken up in the middle of the night by a child with an incredibly sore ear? It’s the unknown for both the child and the parent that causes concern, especially at a time when their own doctor may not be available.
Enter Dr. Charlotte Cowan, a pediatrician who took a leave of absence from Boston’s MassGeneral Hospital for Children to write a series of books that address health and hasn’t gone back.
On this edition of Just One More Book Mark speaks with Dr. Charlotte Cowan about leaving her practice to write children’s books for her Hippocratic Press and the role of understanding as a component of recovery.
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Here's a link to a Publishers Weekly article I came across on Sunday. I thought I would include the following link in a Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars...and Pluto update rather than add it to the review article of Douglas Florian's newest poetry collection that I posted last Friday. I didn't want blog readers to miss Whither Pluto? by Sue Corbett (Children's Bookshelf--Publishers Weekly, 3/15/2007).
Corbett's article includes Douglas Florian's original poem about Pluto--a poem he had to rewrite when the former ninth planet in our solar system was demoted to dwarf planet last summer. It's a good thing Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930, wasn't alive when the International Astronomical Union made their momentous decision to designate just eight orbiting spheres in our solar system as "true planets." (Tombaugh passed away in 1997.)
A Word with Pluto
Well, Pluto, that's what you get for horning in on Neptune's territory. You should have known better. The big gasballs don't like it when icy little spheres intrude on their orbits. Just wait till the god you're named after and Hades, his alter ego, hear what happened to you. Thank heavens news travels slowly to the netherworld.
Some Links for Astronomy Buffs
Clyde Tombaugh (Kansas State Historical Society)
Pluto and Charon: The Discovery of a Planet
Pluto Loses Status as a Planet (From BBC News, August 24, 2006)
Pluto Poems
A Little Pluto Ditty from Gregory K. at GottaBook
PLUTO 2007
by Elaine Magliaro
Pluto, Pluto, once a planet.
Made of ice…and, maybe, granite,
A distant, tiny, frigid sphere
Demoted to a “dwarf" last year.
Pluto, Pluto, once a planet.
Astronomers said: “Let's just can it.
It’s much too small; it’s orbit’s odd.
It’s named after a nasty god."
Pluto, Pluto, once a planet.
The IAU chose to ban it
From the planetary club.
That's a solar systemic snub!!!
COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARSPoems and Paintings
by
Douglas Florian
Harcourt, Inc.
2007
Last Friday, I had just returned home from the
Banbury Cross Children’s Bookshop with a copy of Douglas Florian’s newest poetry collection,
COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARS: SPACE POEMS AND PAINTINGS, and had sat down at my computer to troll the kidlit blogs…when I came upon Roger Sutton’s post
“Keeping Up.”Roger wrote:
“It's an unfortunate fact of life-in-print that books get overtaken by events, and Horn Book editors have been busy blue-penciling reviews of all the astronomy books that haven't caught up with the events of August 26th of last year…”I assume most of you bloggers who reside on planet Earth know that poor Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet last summer. Now it’s just considered an insignificant cosmic sidekick for the big galactic gasballs—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Roger continued:
“But a new--and gorgeous--book is hep to the zeitgeist:”
Pluto was a planet.
But now it doesn't pass.
Pluto was a planet.
They say it's lacking mass.
Pluto was a planet.
Pluto was admired.
Pluto was a planet.
Til one day it got fired.
Leave it to a children's poet to keep up with the planetary times. Yes, that poem about Pluto was taken from Douglas Florian’s new book—and COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARS is a fine poetry collection. It comes in the same large square format as all of his books of animal poems. Each of the book’s illustrations spans a two-page spread—and every two-page spread contains one poem printed in large size text. The illustrations, done with gouache, collage, and rubber stamps on primed brown paper bags, are bold statements. Many include symbols, objects, and words related thematically to the subject of each poem. For example, the painting that illustrates the poem about the planet Neptune includes a cutout picture of a mosaic of the god Neptune’s face, the top of a trident, and a small ancient sailing vessel. Many pages also have small circular cutouts in them, which give the effect when one reads the book of peering through a telescope into another page of Florian’s artistic cosmos.
In his poems, Florian writes about the EIGHT planets, the asteroids, the phases of the moon, the names of constellations, the different shapes of galaxies, a comet, the gravitational pull of a black hole, “the great beyond”…and, of course, the once-upon-a-time-but-no-longer-a-planet-anymore Pluto. This book is traditional Florian. Its poems are rhythmic, rhyming, and light-hearted. He coins some inventive language: super-dupiter Jupiterterrific and Saturning. And while his verse may be playful in nature, Florian is adept at including tidbits of astronomic information in his poems. Let me provide you with some examples of this:
From URANUS
Gaseous like Neptune,
But slightly more wide.
Heaven knows how
It got knocked on its side.
The painting that accompanies this poem illustrates how Uranus’s rings "appear" to spin around the blue-green gassy sphere--or sideways planet--from pole to pole rather than its equator because of the odd way in which the planet rotates.
From THE SUN
Ninety-three million miles from Earth.
Nearly a million miles in girth.
4.6 billion years old.
Core eight times as dense as gold.
From THE MOON
A NEW moon isn’t really new,
It’s merely somewhat dark to view…
A HALF moon is half dark, half light.
At sunset look due south to sight.
Although not every poem in this collection blazes like a supernova on the page or closes with a pithy ending or clever turn of phrase, most shine with bouncy meter and enough delicious end rhymes to delight young readers. COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARS is an excellent book to use in conjunction with a unit of study about space. Not only does the collection contain poetry that will appeal to children and entice memorization—it includes “A Galactic Glossary” with additional information about the subjects of all the poems and a selected bibliography for further reading. Yes, Florian did his celestial homework—and, heaven knows, he succeeded in writing another poetry collection that is sure to be a favorite with young children.
Florian aptly ends this book with the poem The Great Beyond—and ends the final poem with a little “play” on words.
From THE GREAT BEYOND
Great galaxies spin,
While bright comets race.
And I’d tell you more,
But I’ve run out of space.
Florian's latest collection deserves a gold star!
COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARS is blasting off the publishing launch pad at an opportune time. The best children’s poetry books about astronomy--Myra Cohn Livington’s SPACE SONGS, Lee Bennett Hopkins’s BLAST OFF!: POEMS ABOUT SPACE, and Seymour Simon’s STAR WALK--have been unceremoniously sucked into the out-of-print black hole of the literary universe. (The sound of weeping, gnashing of teeth, and slamming of doors!)
__________________________________
Excerpts from COMETS, STARS, THE MOON, AND MARS by Douglas Florian. Text (c) 2007 by Douglas Florian. Published by Harcourt, Inc.
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Here is a poem of address that was written by one of my second grade classes on March 3, 1996:
Comet,
shooting around in space,
whizzing past the sun,
your long tail glowing,
where are you going?
Click on
Budding Poets and you will slip through a wormhole and emerge in an
outta this world galaxy of prize-winning children’s science poems written by my second grade students in 2000.
I will leave you with a silly little ditty that I wrote many moons ago. I just changed the last line yesterday.
Hickory dickory docket,
I sped into space in a rocket.
I traveled past Mars
And seventeen stars
With a picture of Earth in my locket. Just one more poem from an astronomy buff! I wrote the following old moldering poem nearly twenty years ago.
ASTEROIDS
Tiny planets
together in a cosmic kindergarten
holding hands in a circle
playing Ring around the Sun
yearning to grow up
and have orbits of their own
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I am a graduate student at American University currently enrolled to earn my Masters in Teaching. I would like to start off by saying I have a great admiration for someone who can take their professional knowledge and use it in another method to touch new and different lives. On a personal note I have always loved the professors I had that came straight from the field on what we were learning about and shared their unique experiences. I feel Dr Cowen has done for children what those professors have done for me. The point that stuck out to me while Dr Cowen was speaking was when she said she wanted to give kids a choice and validate fears they had about illness. People have questioned her why she has not tackled the cancer issue like it is more important than an ear infection. I have a great respect for how she answered that saying that the things she is writing about ARE important and it is important to her to educate these children because she feels the more they know about their illness and how to take care of it, the better the chance they can help themselves get better. I think Dr Cowen’s efforts to write these medical books for children is priceless and a great way to comfort a child who does not understand what is wrong with them.
Nothing about your child in pain or ill is trivial, so it is very refreshing that the more common, not life threatening but very real and scary illness’s are FINALLY addressed by Dr. Cowan. The books sound wonderful and the illustrations in each one are beautiful. So many times the quality of illustration is compromised in a small publisher’s books but these books have top of the line art from some of our most talented illustrators around. One, the little elephant with an ear ache, was illustratored by a very old and dear frient Elaine Garvine. It was with mixed emotions that I saw her art on the publishers site. Elaine died in 2004.
The books remind me of the line from Mary Poppins, “just a spoonfull of sugar makes the medicine go down” The sugar are these sweet books. They will certainly ease the fears of both the kids and their partents.
Chris