The Songbook Highway

Horses
Lerner, Sharon, Susan Jeffers, and Anna Sewell. Black Beauty. New York: Random House, 2009.

Thanks to my wonderful husband, I have a new hobby–horseback riding! Marc wisely figured that since I care so much about the horse rescue organizations Animal Recovery Mission (ARM) and the South Florida SPCA, I would probably enjoy actually [...]

Boxing
Boxing is one of the few sports that I like enough to watch on TV. I think it’s because I grew up without cable. After Saturday morning cartoons were over, the only show left to watch was ABC’s Wide World of Sports which featured the great comedy team of Howard Cosell [...]

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Telling tales

Brown, Marcia, and Robert L. Egolf. Stone Soup: An Old Tale. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.

A couple of weeks ago I read and told folktales to a group of visiting kindergartners. The children really surprised me with their reactions. I started with one of my childhood [...]

Friday, April 15, 2011

The Beauty Killer

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Cain, Chelsea. The Night Season. New York: Minotaur Books, 2011.

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Cain, Chelsea. Evil at Heart. New York: Minotaur Books, 2009.

The Beauty Killer series takes place in Portland, Oregon where the elusive serial killer Gretchen Lowell has become a celebrity, mostly because of her good looks. Archie Sheridan [...]

Friday, March 18, 2011

Three great books about courageous girls

Fitzhugh, Louise. Harriet, the Spy. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Kathleen T. Hornig wrote a fascinating (and brave!) essay about the impact Louise Fitzhugh’s classic novel had on her life, On Spies and Purple Socks. Kathleen also wrote From Cover to Cover which is the definitive [...]

March is Women’s History Month

Let’s not forget how hard our sisters fought for rights we now take for granted.

Kendall, Martha E. Failure Is Impossible!: The History of American Women’s Rights. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2001.

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Harness, Cheryl. Remember the Ladies: 100 Great American Women. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.

Rossi, Ann. Created Equal: Women [...]

Happy Birthday, George Thorogood!
Thorogood, George. Bad to the Bone. Hollywood, Calif: EMI Manhattan, 1982.

Happy Birthday, Galileo!

Peter Sís won a Caldecott Honor Award for this beautifully illustrated book about the famous Italian Renaissance man.

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Sís, Peter. Starry
Messenger: A Book Depicting the Life of a Famous Scientist,
Mathematician, Astronomer, Philosopher, Physicist, Galileo Galilei. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.

Peter Sís
is a bit of a Renaissance man himself. [...]

M is for Motown
Aronson, Virginia. The History of Motown. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.

It’s fun to read about what rock stars were like back in their younger years. Stevie Wonder was a prankster and master mimic. Marvin Gaye was painfully shy, and Martha Reeves got her foot in the door by working as a
secretary at the [...]

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Happy Birthday to A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.

–A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh.

A.A. Milne and the real Christopher Robin

Who doesn’t love [...]