Picture Book - Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey

Caldecott Award Winner
Illustrated by the author

1941, Viking Press

HC & price

68 pgs.

Goodreads rating:  4.22 - 77,467 ratings

My rating:  5
Illustrations:  brown illustrations and text on cream colored pages

1^st line/s:  "Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live."

My comments: This 1941 Caldecott Award winner is still one of the very best picture books in children's literature.  It's truly distinguished, as well as clever, lovely, comical and heartwarming.  I grew up on this story; AND my grandmother used to take my sister and me into Boston to ride on the Swan boats every spring.  Now there's a beautiful bronze sculpture of Mrs. Mallard with Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack following her across the Public Gardens.  Oh my goodness, do I love it!

Goodreads:  This classic tale of the famous Mallard ducks of Boston is available for the first time in a full-sized paperback edition. Awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1942, Make Way for Ducklings has been described as "one of the merriest picture books ever" (The New York Times). Ideal for reading aloud, this book deserves a place of honor on every child's bookshelf.

MOVIE - North by Northwest

Unrated (2:26)

Wide release 9/17/1959

on DVD 8/2000

Viewed at the Arizona Inn with Fran and Terry

RT Critic: 100 Audience: 94

Cag: 3/Liked it

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Turner Studios

Actors:  Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau

My comments:  I must be missing something.  People rave about this film - a young acquaintance has seen it a dozen times. Cary Grant was certainly charming. To me it was predictable though fun - production techniques and acting has certainly changed (improved?) over the years.  My question - has it been colorized?  Or was it originally in black and white?  I saw the color version, but the black and white might have given me an "older" feel and thus I might have been able to watch it more as a classic and not thought it was actually funny.....

Rotten Tomatoes Summary:  While having lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) has the bad luck to call for a messenger just as a page goes out for a "George Kaplan." From that moment, Thornhill finds that he has stepped into a nightmare -- he is quietly abducted by a pair of armed men out of the hotel's famous Oak Room and transported to a Long Island estate; there, he is interrogated by a mysterious man (James Mason) who, believing that Roger is George Kaplan, demands to know what he knows about his business and how he has come to acquire this knowledge. Roger, who knows nothing about who any of these people are, can do nothing but deny that he is Kaplan or that he knows what they're talking about. Finally, his captors force a bottle of bourbon into Roger and put him behind the wheel of a car on a dangerous downhill stretch. Through sheer luck and the intervention of a police patrol car and its driver (John Beradino), Roger survives the ride and evades his captors, and is booked for drunk driving. He's unable to persuade the court, the county detectives, or even his own mother (Jesse Royce Landis) of the truth of his story, however -- Thornhill returns with them to the mansion where he was held, only to find any incriminating evidence cleaned up and to learn that the owner of the house is a diplomat, Lester Townsend (Philip Ober), assigned to the United Nations. He backtracks to the hotel to find the room of the real George Kaplan, only to discover that no one at the hotel has ever actually seen the man. With his kidnappers once again pursuing him, Thornhill decides to confront Townsend at the United Nations, only to discover that he knows nothing of the events on Long Island, or his house being occupied -- but before he can learn more, Townsend gets a knife in his back in full view of 50 witnesses who believe that Roger did it. Now on the run from a murder charge, complete with a photograph of him holding the weapon plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country, Thornhill tries to escape via train -- there he meets the cooly beautiful Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who twice hides him from the police, once spontaneously and a second time in a more calculated rendezvous in her compartment that gets the two of them together romantically, at least for the night. By the next day, he's off following a clue to a remote rural highway, where he is attacked by an armed crop-dusting plane, one of the most famous scenes in Hitchcock's entire film output. Thornhill barely survives, but he does manage to learn that his mysterious tormentor/interrogator is named Phillip Vandamm, and that he goes under the cover of being an art dealer and importer/exporter, and that Eve is in bed with him in every sense of the phrase -- or is she? 

MOVIE - Jane Eyre

a lovely film for a classic story
Limited release 3/11/11
on DVD 8/16/11
viewed 4/28/11 alone
PG-13 (2:01)
RT 84% cag 90%
Director:  Cary Fukonaga

Katy and the Big Snow - Virginia Lee Burton

Houghton Mifflin, 1943/1971
Brand new paperback edition has sparkly cover and STICKERS!
$6.99 paper
40 pages
My rating: 5

Virginia Lee Burton's picture books - over sixty years old - are stiill being published! The Little House, Mike Mulligan, Katy - this is incredibly cool, huh? And after reading Katy and the Big Snow again (it's been an incredibly long time) I know why.

There's a wavy border on every page. There's a compass rose on any page that shows the city of Geopolis. There are maps. There's excitement. There's a hero (heroine!)....

When a blizzard covers the city of Geopolis, big, strong Katy the bulldozer-with-a-plough is called out to help (to the rescue!)

The illustrations are primarily in aqua with black, red, yellow, green. and white as the only other touches of color. They're "old fashioned" and incredibly wonderful.

14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Published: 1884
Rating: Well....I'm glad I finally read it, but it's not on the top of my favorites list...
Read: With 8th grade class, Jan/Feb, 2009
Audio by Recorded Books
Reader: Norman Dietz
10 discs, 11.75 hours

This is not the cover of the book I read. Can't find it anywhere, but I did discover there are literally hundreds of different editions of this book.

Bildungstroman (coming of age), slavery, racism, prejudice, superstition, morality, honesty, voice, humor - all have a huge part in the story.

Set on the Mississippi River in 1840, twenty years before the Civil War, Huck Finn gets tired of being "civilized" by the kindly woman who has taken him in. He escapes from his drunken no-good father and sets off, with a runaway slave named Jim, down the river about 1200 miles. Together they have one adventure after another. That's the basic plot. But....

There are two things that a reader has to get past. First, the dialogue, especially Jim's, is really difficult to understand. I had the kids read it aloud to themselves. They finally got the hang of Huck's speech, but never fully got 'hold of Jim's. It was easier when I found an unabridged CD and we listened, although the speaker seemed to be an older man and that made it a bit disconcerting.

And secondly, the word nigger. Hundreds and hundreds of times. I really tried to put it out of my mind, but there it was, constantly. Eighth graders are still pretty impressionable. I hope they didn't get desensitized to the word. It makes me shudder. So I got past the first, but not the second. And I hope I never do.

We had some pretty decent conversations. I know a lot of the kids skimmed, some didn't read at all, some read the Cliff Notes from cover to cover...more than once. A couple actually read the entire book. But I feel I spent two months on a book that they - at least this particular group of kids - should have waited a couple more years before reading. Not my call. Not my call at all.

I purchased this Disney movie, sight unseen, hoping that it would help some of the kids that were having difficulty understand the story a little better. It's not a very good movie. There WAS a lot of conversation flying around the classroom about the many, many departures the movie made from the book - they picked up a lot that surprised me. They loved that Elijah Wood (aka the Lord of the Rings guy) played Huck and that Hagrid played either the Duke or the King. But we only watched bits and pieces and I won't use it if I have to teach this book again.

All in all, a very unrewarding personal and professional read.