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A ‘kangaroo court’ is no more Australian than a Californian kangaroo rat. The term originated in the California of 1849, as a legacy of the summary and dubious efforts at informal justice on lawless gold fields. By contrast, the Australian gold fields of that period felt heavily the overbearing hand of the law. This contrast epitomes a larger paradox. Australians are seen as ‘disrespectful of authority’; the truth is they have, from their beginnings, been highly law-prone.

The post Australia in three words, part 2 – “Kangaroo court” appeared first on OUPblog.

Thanks for speaking to Boomerang Books, Bruce Pascoe. Where are you based? How has this influenced your new adventure story for children, Seahorse (Magabala Books)? I live at Gipsy Point near Mallacoota in Victoria. I have spent all of my life near the lighthouses at Cape Otway, King Island and Mallacoota and the sea is a […]

Are you ready to take a journey into the wild?

Bestselling authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon have teamed up to create THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON. In the first book, THE WILD, seventeen-year-old Jack London travels to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, but the path he treads is not at all what he expected. Along the way, he encounters kidnappers, traders, traitors, and a mysterious wolf. Jack must face the wild head-on in order to survive.

Two of the YABC crew, Little Willow and Kim B., participated in the blog tour for The Secret Journeys of Jack London. Check out their interviews with the authors, and drop by all of the stops on the tour to learn more about the authors, the illustrators, the Gold Rush, urban legends, and, of course, Jack London.

* Little Willow at Bildungsroman
* Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans
* Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede!, Young Adults Book Central, and YABC blog
* Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners and readergirlz diva
* Justin from Little Shop of Stories
* Rebecca's Book Blog
* Martha Brockenbrough interviews Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon
* Martha Brockenbrough interviews Jordan Brown
* The Evolution of a Monster
* Brian Keene, author and journalist

Want to help spread the word about this action-packed new series? Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

Being a fan of both Jack London's classic works and Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon's collaborations, I'm thrilled to be kicking off the blog tour for their brand-new historical adventure novel, The Secret Journeys of Jack London: THE WILD. The book officially hits stores tomorrow; the authors (as well as illustrator Greg Ruth) will be dropping by blogs every weekday for the next two weeks to share their stories with you.

Without any further ado, I welcome Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, and the legacy of Jack London to Bildungsroman.

Little Willow: What was the first Jack London book you ever read? How old were you at the time?

Tim Lebbon: The Call of the Wild when I was maybe 10 or 11.

Christopher Golden: I'm sure The Call of the Wild was my first as well--as it is for so many school children--and I reread it many times growing up. That and The Sea Wolf made a huge impact on me. If you look at the acknowledgements page of my very first young adult novel (which, perhaps for the best, is long out of print), I list Jack London as one of the writers who was a major influence on me while I was growing up.

Have you re-read any of his works as an adult? Did you find that your opinion of Jack's writing (and life) changed, or your understanding of the stories?

Lebbon: I think as a child you read The Call of the Wild as an adventure book, and maybe nothing more. But as an adult it has its themes and hidden depths, and it's a pleasure to revisit it. If I read it again in my 50s, it'll probably feel different again. Perhaps that's the mark of a great book.

Golden: I'm with Tim. It certainly had an impact on me as a child. I wrote a paper in high school on "Atavism in the Works of Jack London." I still have it, in fact. But reading his work now, you see more of his commentary about humanity in it. That's even more true of The Sea Wolf, which is tense and suspenseful when you're reading it as a kid, but a fascinating treatise on human nature when you read it as an adult. And I learned so much more about Jack the writer and Jack the man while doing research for this book than I had ever known before.

If you could travel back in time to Jack's era, would you dare travel the Yukon? Search for gold? Befriend wolves?

Lebbon: Someone once said, 'The best way to travel is by means of imagination'. I'm someone who likes their creature comforts, so while I respect London and am endlessly fascinated by people who go to these lengths to explore, I wouldn't get very far. Although .... gold, you say...?

Golden: If I had been born in that era, and lived the life that Jack lived, I would like to think I'd have had the courage to brave the world that way. But the me that I am? 21st century suburban dad? Not unless there's an apocalypse. :)

What inspired you to use his real-life adventures as the starting point for this story?

Lebbon: I can answer most of those questions with three words: vampire Polar bears. And Mr Golden can now elaborate.

Golden: Lebbon, you lazy sod. :) Okay, so...we were at World Horror Convention in Toronto, having drinks and Thai food with about a dozen other people, and Tim was talking about his novelization of the movie 30 Days of Night. He mentioned having added something about vampire polar bears, and I jumped in saying we should do an original novel about vampire polar bears and call it White Fangs, after the famous Jack London novel. One of us then said it should actually have Jack London in it, and the other promptly co

Are you ready to take a journey into the wild?

Bestselling authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon have teamed up to create THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON. Jack certainly lived a wild life, which inspired Golden & Lebbon to create this new book series based on his real-life travels. They've taken his true stories and his fiction and mixed in urban legends and myths of the time. While THE SECRET JOURNEYS series is fiction, not biography, the books are extremely well-researched, and spooky elements add another level of intrigue to the richly detailed stories.

The first book, THE WILD, will be released on Tuesday, March 1st. When seventeen-year-old Jack London travels to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, the path he treads is not at all what he expected. Along the way, he encounters kidnappers, traders, traitors, and a mysterious wolf. Jack must face the wild head-on in order to survive.

The buzz for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON just keeps getting louder. 20th Century Fox has acquired the film rights to the series. Garth Nix, author of the Abhorsen Trilogy, declared: "A masterful mix of gold, cold, supernatural creatures, and dread magic makes this a great action adventure story." Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, calls THE WILD "A great old-school adventure novel and the best use of the Wendigo legend I've ever read."

Authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will launch a blog tour the day before the book's release, beginning at Bildungsroman http://slayground.livejournal.com on Monday, February 28th and traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers through Tuesday, March 8th. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book.

Being a fan of both Jack London's classic works and Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon's collaborations, I'm quite excited to be heading up this blog tour. Here's the full schedule:

Monday, February 28th
Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st
Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd
Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd
Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th
Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th
Rebecca's Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th
Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

Publishing details:
THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON: THE WILD
Written by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon
Illustrated by Greg Ruth
On sale: March 1st, 2011
Published by HarperCollins Childrens
ISBN: 9780061863172

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Yes, today would be Jack London’s 135th birthday, and to celebrate it, we’ll be doing a giveaway to 6 lucky tweeters. International readers, keep your eyes on @OWC_Oxford and when you see,

“It’s Jack London’s 135th birthday!”

just retweet it before 3pm GMT! Live in the US? Follow @OUPblogUSA. You’ll have until 3pm ET. Winners will be announced on Thursday and have their choice of

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By Anatoly Liberman

Allegedly a nineteenth-century Americanism, highfalutin is now known everywhere in the English speaking world, but, as could be expected, its etymology has not been discovered—“as could be expected,” because the origin of such words is almost impossible to trace.  Many years ago, while investigating the history of skedaddle, I think I found a reasonable source of this verb.  I was neither the first nor the second to discover it, but I put some polish (“kibosh,” as sculptors said 150 years ago) on it.  My thoughts on highfalutin are low-key for an obvious reason.  As will be seen, I have only one feeble idea and am offering it in the hope that, despite the lack of a persuasive solution, it may redirect the search for the source of this enigmatic adjective.  But before sharing my small treasure with the world, I would like to quote the explanation given in John Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (the spelling and punctuation of the original have been retained): “Highfaluten, showy, affected, tinselled, affecting certain pompous or fashionable airs, stuck-up—‘Come, none of your highfaluten games:’ American Slang, now common in Liverpool and the East End of London, from the Dutch Verlooten.  Used recently by The Times in the sense of fustian, highsounding unmeaning eloquence, bombast.”   (Note how often the names of cloths end up meaning ‘pompous speech’: here fustian and bombast, both reflecting the idea of padding.)  Hotten’s dictionary appeared in 1859, but I was quoting from the third edition (1864).

We notice three things in Hotten’s entry: the spelling (highfaluten), the use of the word in Liverpool and London, and the proposed etymology.  The etymology is fanciful.  Dutch verlooten (now spelled verloten) is a verb (the infinitive) meaning “to dispose of a thing by lottery, raffle.”  There is also Dutch loot “shoot; offspring.”  No connection can be established between either of them and highfalutin.  The ghost of a Dutch etymon was raised once again in 1902, when a contributor to Notes and Queries traced -faluting to verluchting “an airing” (luchtig “airy, thin, light; unsubstantial, etc.”)—thus, “flighty talk,” another dead-end proposal.  Unfortunately, Hotten’s derivation has been repeated in several popular books in which verloten was upgraded to an adjective meaning “high-flown, stilted.”  But two other features of Hotten’s comment have hardly been discussed at all.  I cannot imagine that by the middle of the 19^th century an Americanism mainly used at home in reference to the inanity and shallowness of official orations (this is the impression the earliest quotations make) reached Liverpool and even the East End of London.  The parents of those whom Jack London met and described in his 1902 book The People of the Abyss (it is about the slums of the East End) would hardly have known and appropriated this piece of American political slang.  I also doubt that The Times would have used it then; in the middle and even at the end of the 19^th century it was customary in England to pity the coarseness of “our American cousins” and resent Americanisms.  So I risk suggesting that the word is British, even though the first recorded examples are from the United States.  Finally, we see that Hotten did not hyphenate the word and spelled it highfaluten, not highfalutin, let alone high-faluting or high-falutin’.  He probably did not think that the second element of the compound was a participle.

The other conjectures on the derivation of highfalutin