I am slowly progressing on my journey to finish reading my last four unread books by my childhood favorite author, Lloyd Alexander, on the year of what would have been his centennial birthday. August Bondi: Border Hawk is a cowboy-style story about a Jew from Vienna whose family immigrates to America, and he winds up fighting for Kansas to be a Free State (as opposed to a slave state).
I have to admit that August Bondi: Border Hawk is not
recommended reading from my camp—not unless you have an abiding interest in the
abolitionist revolutionary John Brown and/or have deep roots in Kansas and/or
are a Lloyd Alexander devotee, no matter what.
Sigh… Lloyd Alexander put out some literary treasures around this
time, but he didn't put as much heart into writing commission work, apparently. I suspect it’s commission work, anyhow. It’s tolerably readable, but his wit and his
heart are not much there.
The most amusing part of the whole book for me is when August Bondi has been swimming in the river and then pulls his ‘tunic’ back on. Perhaps the undershirts of Union Civil War soldiers were sometimes called tunics, but since Lloyd Alexander is famous almost exclusively for his YA fantasy novels, I felt suddenly transported into the wrong story--and would have liked to stay there.
The second funniest thing in the whole book is that every
time John Brown appears, almost to the end, he has ‘blazing eyes’. Eventually it started
to make me laugh, even though the story was never meant to be funny. I just plowed through the book, really,
reading it aloud to my husband (who at once became a Lloyd Alexander fan upon meeting me). I
suspect that Lloyd Alexander just plowed through writing it, too.
My favorite passage of all was when August Bondi is talking
about how there are good men on both sides. He’s simply being open-minded, but my husband took issue with this passage—and it made me wonder whether or not that view was actually shared by August Bondi (Lloyd Alexander drew from his memoirs for writing the biographical novel). It seemed, however, to be Lloyd Alexander suddenly speaking for himself, at least for a moment. Unless I learn
otherwise, I’ll assume this much-beloved author was attempting to inject some wisdom into a tale of adventure and strife, hoping it would stick and
plant a seed of rationality.
(I'm publishing this blog on the birthday anniversary of Lloyd's wife Janine Denni Alexander. She's lovingly depicted in Janine Is French, just about my all-time favorite book—but not one of his famous ones. She was older than Lloyd, a war bride born 108 years ago today in France.)
Happy 20th publishing birthday to a science classic! A classic I only got to just last year. I was blown away by Bryson’s summary of the history of science (up until 2003), including not just the major players (mostly scientists) and the gossip that interests us in them, but so many of the fundamental takeaways of their discoveries. By relating the history of science to us in the order that he does, we gain a better appreciation of why these discoveries matter and how they changed science. These lead to improving our holistic understanding of the universe altogether.
One of my biggest takeaways is how the dynamic crust of the earth and our volatile climate are the keys to life on our planet and probably any planet. So the same extreme climactic events that we dread are exactly how we got here in the first place! On that note, we're in a comparatively balmy and peaceful lull at the moment, and while climate change is inevitable, pumping out greenhouse gases will only precipitate extreme weather, thus upsetting this delicate balance that we've lucked into for the last few thousand years.
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| Author Sophia Alexander with Bill Bryson's brilliant A Short History of Nearly Everything |
I do question some of
his ‘facts’—like his claim that we each have over a billion atoms that were once
in Shakespeare himself. Hmm. People in
Oh, that’s just a fun little
factoid, but he gives a ton of them, most of which I didn’t react to quite so
unbelievingly. Truly, my favorite part of the book is really the first couple of
chapters, in which he talks about the universe—so get a free sample download to
your Kindle, or listen to the audiobook! I was stunned at the sheer size of our solar
system, beyond anything I had imagined. Pluto is basically a near neighbor to
us at the center of the solar system. Conventional travel beyond our solar system seems sheer folly to anyone with common sense. Bryson has also, by the way, rather convinced me that Pluto is not technically a planet (heretical, I know, to most of us who
grew up with Pluto being one).
2003 may seem out of date for a science book, but I’d argue that it isn't for this basic and holistic grasp of science. Most of the basics were down pat by then—but then again, I just saw a paperback 2016 edition online, so perhaps it's been revised. Regardless, much of his information seems solid to me (I do hold science degrees, which might make it a bit more digestable for me), and he received scientific honors as well as literary ones for this masterpiece. If all advanced middle-school students had it for required reading, I suspect we’d have a lot more science majors out there today!
For the last couple of pool seasons, this has been my poolside 'fun read', believe it or not, and that special combination of events--a perfect climate with an eye-opening book--have now established Bill Bryson as one of my favorite authors, just from this single great work. That said, I do intend to read more of his writing, for sure.
