PICTURE BOOK - The World is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid by Jeanette Winter

Illustrated by the author

2017 Beach Lane Books
(Bosler Memorial Library)

HC $17.99

56 pgs.

Goodreads rating: 4.2 - 447 ratings

My rating:  5

Endpapers:  Pale, plae, pale green

1^st line/s:  "In Iraq, rivers flow throught green marshes.
Wind swoops across sand dunes and through ancient cities.
Zaha Hadid sees the rivers and marshes and dunes and ruins with her father
and imagines what cities looked like thousand of years ago."

My comments:  It's no secret that I adore anything and everything that Jeanette Winter writes and/or illustrates,  but what I really appreciate is the diversity of people that she chooses to research and share with kids!  This book highlights another amazing woman in our world and will inspire kids (and architecture buffs!) in many, many ways.  Bravo!

Goodreads:  A Washington Post Best Children’s Book of 2017
Parents’ Choice Recommended
          Get to know Zaha Hadid in this nonfiction picture book about the famed architect’s life and her triumph over adversity from celebrated author-illustrator Jeanette Winter.
          Zaha Hadid grew up in Baghdad, Iraq, and dreamed of designing her own cities. After studying architecture in London, she opened her own studio and started designing buildings. But as a Muslim woman, Hadid faced many obstacles. Determined to succeed, she worked hard for many years, and achieved her goals—and now you can see the buildings Hadid has designed all over the world.

46. The Kurdish Bike: A Novel by Alesa Lightbourne

read on my iPhone
2016, Alesa Lightbourne
324 pgs.
Adult CRF
Finished 5/25/18
Goodread/s rating:   4.4 - 126 ratings
My rating:  3
Contemporary Kurdistan

First line/s:  "Two women laugh exuberantly in a snapshot, their arms around each other, heads close together and aimed toward the camera."

My comments:  This feels like a self-published book, and reads like nonfiction.  There weren't enough details for me.  It was a total "telling," with no "showing."  I couldn't imagine the school, her apartment, the village, the kids.  No showing, only telling.  But was was told was really interesting, though I think it gave me an incomplete picture.  I wanted more, lots more.  Based on a true story and very readable, just lacking the details that I need to form a picture in my head.

Goodreads synopsis: “Courageous teachers wanted to rebuild war-torn nation.” 
          With her marriage over and life gone flat, Theresa Turner responds to an online ad, and lands at a school in Kurdish Iraq. Befriended by a widow in a nearby village, Theresa is embroiled in the joys and agonies of traditional Kurds, especially the women who survived Saddam’s genocide only to be crippled by age-old restrictions, brutality and honor killings. Theresa’s greatest challenge will be balancing respect for cultural values while trying to introduce more enlightened attitudes toward women — at the same time seeking new spiritual dimensions within herself.
 
          The Kurdish Bike is gripping, tender, wry and compassionate — an eye-opener into little-known customs in one of the world’s most explosive regions — a novel of love, betrayal and redemption.

PICTURE BOOK - The House of Wisdom by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland

Illustrated by Mary Grandpre

1999, DK Publishing, NY

currently OP

40 pgs.

Goodreads rating:  4.07 - 68 ratings

My rating: 4:  

Endpapers:  peachy/orange

Illustrations:  orangy pastels, no white on the very large pages

1^st line/s: "Over many lands came caravans of camels, six thousand strong, swaying and rocking as the padded single file across the sands and plains on their way to Baghdad."

My comments:  I always get excited when I find a well-written picture book for older kids.  This is certainly one of them.  Based on history, this is the story of 9th century Baghdad and its books, libraries, scholars, and inquisitive minds. I love that it points out that at this time areas to the west (Europe) were basically uneducated and, perhaps, crude.  And when talking about scholars, like Aristotle, coming a thousand years before, the father tells his son, "We are like the leaves of the same tree, separated by many autumns."  What a great quote!

Goodreads:  This is the true story of Ishaq, a young boy in ninth-century Baghdad. And it is the story of the House of Wisdom. More than a house, more than a library, more even than a palace, the House of Wisdom was at the very center of the new ideas that flourished in Baghdad. It was here that thousands of scholars gathered to read, to exchange ideas, and to translate the dusty manuscripts that were brought by camel and ship from all over the world. Ishaq cannot understand why ancient words, words from faraway places, can cause such excitement. Then he embarks on a difficult journey seeking lost manuscripts. But it is what he discovers when he returns that ignites his imagination and changes him forever.Lyrical prose and glorious illustrations capture the splendor of Baghdad when it was the center of one of the world's great civilizations. They tell the story of Ishaq's transformation from a bewildered young boy searching for understanding to a brilliant scholar, the greatest translator of Aristotle, whose work preserved Greek thought for civilizations to come.

47. The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller

listened to on Audible
Read by Will Damron
2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pgs.
Adult CRF
Finished 8/15/17
Goodreads Rating:  4.12 - 771 ratings
My rating:  5
Setting: Contemporary Middle East and a short time period 22 years before that....probably Iraq....

First line/s:  "Arwood Hobbs was bored.  Not your regular bored.  Not your casual rainy-day Cat in the Hat-style bored that arrives with the wet, leaving you with nothing to do.  It wasn't post-fun or pre-excitement bored, either.  It was somehow different."

My comments:   This book puts you smack dab in the middle of Iraq, first in 1991 and then in 2013, following the same group of characters as they begin...and then finalize....a huge episode in their lives.  This is a modern war story, the story that we see hinted at on the news and in hearing stories of returning soldiers who have been mentally (and physically) wounded.  The story wasn't exactly eye-opening, but more illuminating.  Every nerve-wracking, frazzled step.  What made it especially real for me is all the humor that seeps in.  You'd not expect humor, but that's how it maintains its believability, and its humanity.
     You can read the plot summary that Goodreads gives.  It's the characters, and of course the setting, that set this story apart.  It wasn't easy to read.  It isn't easy to rate a 5.  But it earned it.  Mr. Miller is a great writer and storyteller, and the guy who read it (I listened on Audible) did a terrific job.

Goodreads synopsis: From the author of Norwegian by Night, and Short Listed for the 2017 CWA Gold Dagger Award, a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before.
          1991. Near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a mid-western American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus, or might be a genuine lunatic with a death wish--it's hard to tell.
          Desert Storm is over, peace has been declared, but as they argue about whether it makes sense to cross the nearest border in search of an ice cream, they become embroiled in a horrific attack in which a young local girl in a green dress is killed as they are trying to protect her. The two men walk away into their respective lives. But something has cracked for them both.
          Twenty-two years later, in another place, in another war, they meet again and are offered an unlikely opportunity to redeem themselves when that same girl in green is found alive and in need of salvation. Or is she?

MOVIE - War Dogs

R (1:54)

Wide Release 8/19/16

Viewed at Roadhouse Cinema on Tuesday 9/13/16

RT Critic:  61  Audience:  73
Critic's Consensus:   War Dogs rises on the strength of Jonah Hill's compelling performance to take a lightly entertaining look at troubling real-world events.

Cag:  4.5 Liked it - and learned a lot - from it (and I don't consider it a comedy!)

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Brothers Studio

Miles Teller, Jonah Hill, Bradley Cooper, Kevin Pollack

My comments:  I enjoyed this movie, and since it was based on a true story, truly eye-opening.  I've turned a blind eye to all the crazy government spending, especially when it comes to the military, but this movie is a should-watch for everyone in the US!  Both leads portray their characters really well, I've been an especially strong fan of Miles Teller, so I particularly enjoyed watching his performance in this movie.

RT Summary:  Two friends in their early 20s living in Miami Beach during the Iraq War, exploit a little-known government initiative that allows small businesses to bid on U.S. Military contracts. Starting small, they begin raking in big money and are living the high life. But the pair gets in over their heads when they land a 300 million dollar deal to arm the Afghan Military—a deal that puts them in business with some very shady people, not the least of which turns out to be the U.S. Government.

The Librarian of Basra - Jeanette Winter

A True Story from Iraq
Published: 2005
Rating: 5
Endpapers: Aqua

"In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammed was 'Read' " (NYT 7/27/03, from the book's preface.

Just to open a Jeanette Winter book brings a simple joy to me. You see orderliness and color and terrific illustrations - framed boxes and no white. Really tugs at my anal heart.

Simply told, beautifully illustrated, here is another version of the bombing of the central library in Basra, Iraq. Ensconced in rich purples and yellows and blues, Winters' recognizable artwork accentuates the story beautifully. A great companion book to Alia's Mission.

Alia's Mission - Mark Alan Stamaty

Saving the Books of Iraq
Published: 2004
Rating: 5
Endpapers: red
Illustrations: Brown on cream

I'm still getting used to reading graphic novels - I realize I like the large, easy-to-read font in this one. And the illustrations show the magnitude of the job this brave woman took on. I really like Jeanette Winter's version, but I like the way Stamaty's version really makes the plight and the task overwhelmingly real.

Although Alia knows that war in Basra, Iraq is imminent, it's not until she arrives at her job as chief librarian at the Basra Centrl Library and sees armed soldiers (with an anti-aircraft weapon!) on the roof that she knows the library is in terrible danger. So, in a few fast-paced days, she and many helpers move over 30,000 books - by hand - before the library is destroyed. They're stored stacked everywhere in her own home and home of friends. Whatt a story!

The last page tells the history of other famous libraries in the middle east.

Silent Music - James Rumford

A Story of Baghdad
For: Kids
Published: 2008
Rating: 4.5
Read: Oct. 21, 2008
Endpapers: Dark Blue

Interestingly enough, James Rumford created the illustrations for this book in pencil and charcoal, then did all the enhancements on the computer. The book is filled with Arabic calligraphy, whether as a background embellishement or written boldly in black across the page..."the letters loop together and make beautiful shapes all by themselves." Arabic mosaics, Arabic designs, money, stamps, postmarks, motifs, are spread throughout the book so that the reader gets a wonderful mideastern feel from beginning to end. I love calligraphy, so the notion of creating this beautiful, flowing writing from right to left completely fascinates me.

The story is about Ali, a boy who loves to write and doodle, proudly practicing the calligraphy of his language as he continues to learn it. Although he loves to play soccer, dance, and listen to loud music like other kids, he is drawn to calligraphy, "I love to make the ink flow - from my pen stopping and starting, gliding and sweeping, leaping, dancing to the silent music in my head.". He tells about Yakut, the most famous calligrapher in the wold, who lived in the 13th century. The last picture is of Ali and his family, mom, dad, sister, grandad (cat and rabbit!), all in Iraqi garb and sitting on a bench with beautiful mosaics behind them. The entire books depicts Iraq and the middle east beautifully making this an expressive multi-cultural picture book on every level.

Addendum: January 24, 2009: I attended a five-hour workshop at the University of Arizona today, taught by Kathy Short and Seemi Raina. It was entitled MidEastern Culture Children's Literature. At the very beginning, Seemi, a doctoral candidate who came to the US eleven years ago from Pakistan, read this book aloud. Her lovely, lilting Urdu accent and added information made this a real treat. As the young boy is surrounded by fallling bombs, he calms himself by prcticing calligraphy..."I filled my mind with peace." At the conclusion of the day, Seemi wrote out each of our first and last names in Arabic calligraphy for us to keep. It was a fantastic five hours, including a wonderful lunch from Ali Baba restaurant.