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Looking for a great Canadian read for children or teens? Look no further. The Victoria Times Colonist recently published a Top-10 list of titles ranging from board books to teen fiction, all chosen by Tracy Kendrick, co-ordinator of children’s and teen services at the Greater Victoria Library. Three Orca titles made the list!

Alligator, Bear, Crab: A Baby’s ABC, by Lesley Wynne Pechter (Board Book)

Kendrick said, “A colorful and playful book that introduces the shapes and sounds of the alphabet amid a colorful collection of critters.”

• Purchase board book
• Purchase ebook 

 

 

Slick, by Sara Cassidy (Orca Currents)

Kendrick said, “An unforgettable young activist named Liza decides to take on her mother’s boyfriend, who happens to work for an oil company.”

 

 

• Purchase print book
• Purchase ebook

 

Death Benefits, by Sarah N. Harvey (Teen Fiction)

Kendrick said, “Royce and his mother move to Victoria to care for Royce’s irascible, elderly grandfather. The characters pop off the page in this hilarious and touching novel.”

*This fantastic title is also shortlisted for the 2011 Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize!

• Purchase print book
• Purchase ebook

Read the full Times Colonist article.

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When was the last time you saw a white rabbit, six-feet tall? (Or is it six-foot-three-and-a-half?) Well, I saw one Friday evening, and let me tell you, it was a pleasure. It’s always a pleasure when I run into Harvey, and it’s been happening since high school. I’m talking, of course, about the 1950s film, based on the Pulitzer-winning play of the same name.

The premise of Harvey is basic and yet unpredictable. Elwood P. Dowd is a forty-something gentleman who does very little in his life, beyond wander around town, meet strangers, and drink martinis with his pal Harvey. Harvey, of course, is the aforementioned rabbit. Most of the people in town think he’s downright nuts, including his sister and niece, which is why they try to have him committed. However, as Vita Louise (his sister) says, “Something protects him.” Could that something be an invisible rabbit? It seems so, as hilarity ensues over miss-communication and a bit of magic.

You’re left to wonder until the very end: is Harvey actually real? Elwood refers to him as a “pooka.” If you look up “pooka” on the internet, you’ll find the following: “The Pooka (Irish for goblin) is a creature of Celtic folklore. According to legend, the pooka is a deft shape shifter, capable of assuming a variety of terrifying or pleasing forms, and may appear as a horse, rabbit, goat, goblin, or dog. … The pooka has the power of human speech, and has been known to give advice and lead people away from harm. Though the pooka enjoys confusing and often terrifying humans, it is considered to be benevolent.”

So the legend really does exist, which is probably where playwright Mary Chase got the idea. So does Harvey exist? Or doesn’t he? You’ll have to watch the movie and see …

I love the plotline, but I love Jimmy Stewart more, especially when he says things in this movie like, “I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” I suppose I first came upon Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. (I still cry every single time when George Bailey’s little brother says, “To my brother, the richest man in town.” Oh, for Pete’s sake, I just got a little teary typing the line!) It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite Christmas movie, but it probably has a lot to do with Jimmy Stewart.

I’ve always been drawn to the guy. He’s just so sweet and unassuming. He’s handsome, too, in a nerdy sort of way. Then, there’s the psychotic passion he revealed in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, followed by It’s a Wonderful Life and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I love the look in his eye when he’s really on a roll. He is and always will be one of my favorite actors.

In Harvey, it’s even better, because he reminds me—down to the detail—of my sweet, kind, and inevitably cheerful Grandpa Schwind.

The character of Elwood P. Dowd is a man who has come to terms with what life is all about. It’s not about power or popularity. It’s not about hustle and bustle. Elwood’s life is about making new friends—connecting with people and re

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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

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Welcome back to 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.

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.

Hi Harvey,

There is little in your reply I would object to. Indeed I would add to your argument that Paine was no anarchist by pointing to his ideas in Agrarian Justice, where he proposed an estate tax, universal old-age pensions and made the very modern argument that the concepts of “rich” and “poor” were man-made distinctions to which man and government can undo.

It is indeed telling that modern conservatives want to trace their genealogy to both John Adams and Thomas Paine, who held rather opposite views especially regarding their faith in democracy. Perhaps this contradiction could be somewhat (though not entirely) reconciled if we think of conservatives as inheritors of Paine’s style and parts of Adams’ philosophy.

Modern liberals – John Kerry and Al Gore the most prominent among them – have indeed been rather slow to invoke democracy for their causes. Even Barack Obama, the Great Democratic Communicator has faltered. I wonder if there might be a structural cause associated with the degree of fit between a populist stance and an anti-government philosophy, namely, that it is easier to be populist and anti-government than populist and pro-government in America.

Best,
Elvin

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Welcome back to the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Read the first 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 – Thanks for challenging me…. You ask the right question.

While it is true that Burkeans – that is, traditionalists – have long been a minority in American conservatism, they can trace themselves back to the likes of folks like John Adams, who, while welcoming Paine’s call for independence, despised Paine himself for encouraging ordinary working people to believe not only in popular sovereignty, but also, in their capacity to “begin the world over again.”

Not for nothing did Adams write in 1805:

“I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, as you do; and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Fury, Brutality, Demons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the burning Brand from the bottomless Pit; or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pigs and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.”

And regarding the divisions in conservative politics, I can’t help but note here how impressive it remains that William F. Buckley Jr. as publisher of the National Review, followed by Ronald Reagan as presidential candidate of the Republican party, brought together traditionalists, evangelicals, libertarians, and neo-conservatives under one big right-wing roof.

Nevertheless, while Reagan himself broke with the 200-year-long conservative practice of trying to bury Paine’s memory and legacy and joyfully quoted Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” when accepting the Republican nomination in 1980 and many times after, he did not really turn conservatives into Painites. Reagan and his gang latched onto only one aspect of Paine’s argument – in fact, it often seems they latched onto merely one line of his work: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil…” No joke, they not only took out of context (that is, Paine’s attack on England’s King, Constitution, and Parliament), they also essentially ignored – and continue

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Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?

So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.

Kaye is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, and Professor of History, Sociology and Director of the 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.

Hi Harvey,

I’m almost done reading your book, and I read it, in part, as a call to return Paine as much to the American Left or Center as he has been appropriated on the Right in recent decades.

To get things started, I’d start with a contrarian volley. If Paine was the major harbinger of the democratic impulse in American society, I do wonder if he nevertheless has a natural affinity to the American Right. I say American, because Burkean conservatives / traditionalists, American Tories of the Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver variety, have always been a minority within the American conservative movement. The conservatism that has had any salience in America has been of the Barry Goldwater / Reagan kind. This mainstream conservatism has always been trenchantly populist.

A reason why, I propose, is that the conservatism that emerged in the 60s was anti-New Deal and anti-establishment. And that was a natural fit with the ideas of the revolutionary generation. Paine et al were not (yet) concerned with building “a more perfect union” – that would be left to the Founding generation. In the 1770s, the concern was one of NEGATIVE liberty, freedom from tyranny (and this was sometimes operationalized as freedom from government – hence the high correlation with natural rights talk).

It is perhaps no surprise then, that the Federalists who took over the reigns of government in the 1790s were in fact highly anti-democratic and anti-Jacobin. (The electoral college, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were institutional instantiations of their anti-democratic bias.) The Federalists had seen the dangers of too much anti-governmentalism and now saw the virtues of POSITIVE liberty, which could only be delivered by good government.

I wonder what you thought of my “affinity” arg

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Issue one of Stymie Magazine, edited by Erik Smetana and containing my story The Flat-Packed Golfer is now available to read online for free, and you can flip the pages over like a real magazine – how cool is that?

In other news – I just crossed the 20,000 word mark on Theatre of Curious Acts with these words:

The dragons skittered about their ankles leaving scorch marks on their uniforms and setting Harvey’s shoelaces alight. The man jumped down into the sludge to put himself out. The dragons rolled onto their backs and released a sound akin to laughter.

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