CM Volume 2 Number 1

Volume II Number 1

October 20, 1995

Table of Contents

From the Editor

Welcome to Volume II

Book Reviews

Big Boy.
Tololwa M. Mollel. Illustrated by E.B. Lewis.
Review by Harriet Zaidman.
Grade Preschool - 3 / Ages 4 - 8.

8 O'Cluck.
Jill Creighton. Illustrated by Pierre-Paul Pariseau.
Review by A. Edwardsson.
Grades K - 5 / Ages 5 - 9.

The Ship That Voted No and Other Stories of Ships and the Sea.
Tony Keene.
Review by Neil V. Payne.
Grades 7 - 13 / Ages 12 - Adult.

Almost a Lifetime.
John McMahon.
Review by Neil V. Payne.
Grades 9 - 13 / Ages 13 - Adult.

For the Poet Novitiate
The Crafted Poem
Writing Reader-Friendly Poetry
Susan Ioannou.
Review by Liam C. Rodrigues.
Grades 10 - 13 / Ages 14 - Adult.

Features

The Little Math Puzzle

Advertising Feature

Copperfield's Books

CM
Editor
Duncan Thornton
e-mail: editor@mbnet.mb.ca

CM
Executive Assistant
Peter Tittenberger
e-mail: camera@mbnet.mb.ca

From the Editor

Welcome to Volume II!

Well, the CM staff and board are slowly coming down after our official launch last Friday night. (It turns out we still have a magazine to get out...)

The launch marked the end of Volume I, our "trial" volume, which means that access to new issues will be restricted to subscribers from now on. The whole run of Volume I, as well as our Review and Advertiser indexes, will remain freely available, however. If you don't have a subscription (free to Manitobans) yet, please contact our Executive Assistant, Peter Tittenberger at camera@mbnet.mb.ca.

Within a week or two then, reading new issues of CM over the Web may require a password (which we'll be e-mailing out to subscribers soon). One of the consequences is that you may need a graphic Web browser that supports form completion, such as Netscape (which is free for educational users), to read the new issues over the Web. The e-mail version of CM will be unaffected, of course, but text-based Web browsers like Lynx won't be able to display the password-dialogue; if you use Lynx, we'd encourage you to upgrade so as to be able to experience CM in all its colour (and sound) and glory. If that's not practical, don't worry, as I said, you'll still get all the text by e-mail every week anyway.

As the pictures on this page might show, our launch was a big success, with a large-turnout by the media. We were lucky enough to have the Honourable Jon Gerrard, Secretary of State for Science, Research and Technology and M.P. David Walker, representing the Honourable Michel Dupuy, Minister of Canadian Heritage, as speakers, and a good time was had by all.

I want to say again that our launch would have been impossible to arrange and afford without the co-operation of Zine's Infocafé, and the generousity of our sponsors: Advance Electronics, who have supplied the Apple computers we use to produce CM and who set up the display for the large-screen demo; Magic On-Line Services, an Internet service provider whose assistance has been vital in getting the magazine up and running; and Copperfield's, Manitoba's largest dealer of computer and business books. Look for advertising features from these fine people in this and upcoming issues.

We plan to go on improving in Volume II, and we want to hear your opinions about both individual reviews or articles and the magazine in general. As always, send any comments, suggestions, or complaints to the address beneath my name.

-- Duncan Thornton, Editor
cm@umanitoba.ca

Book Review

Big Boy.

Tololwa M. Mollel. Illustrated by E.B. Lewis.
Toronto: Stoddart, 1995. 32pp, cloth, $18.95
ISBN 0-7737-28511.

Grades Preschool - 3 / Ages 4 - 8.
Review by Harriet Zaidman.

excerpt:

Oli didn't want to eat his ugali. He didn't want to take his nap. He wanted to go bird hunting in the woods with his big brother Mbachu. His mama said no.
"You are too little," she told him.

So begins the tale of Oli, a little boy in Tanzania who yearns to be big and go on adventures. The story is based on a motif found in African folklore, but the setting is contemporary. It is yet another beautifully told tale by Tololwa M. Mollel, author of the haunting book The Orphan Boy, as well as Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper, and The Hare and the Tortoise.

When Oli steals out of the house and encounters the magical bird Tunukia-zawadi, he is frightened but mesmerized. Tunukia-zawadi grants Oli's wish to be big as a mountain and strong as the wind, and he immediately goes out into the world to flaunt his new-found prowess. But his giant size is out of tune with his environment, and he causes disruption for people, animals, and nature. Then all he wants is to return to being what he was, and when this wish is granted he returns safely home to the arms of his loving family.

Oli gets to experience every child's dream -- of being bigger and somehow superior to everyone else, if only for a while. The shattering of his illusions makes him realize that he has to grow up emotionally and physically to be able to handle the responsibilities that come with size, and that the stages of life cannot be rushed. He comes to appreciate and miss the safety, warmth, and guidance that a family can provide.

The book is sprinkled with words in Kiswahili , Tanzania's national language, and a glossary of terms at the back explains their meaning. The use of Kiswahili adds authenticity to the story, as do the illustrations by painter E.B. Lewis. Lewis's work captures the earth-tone beauty of the country, the life of the villages and the animals, and the detail of the main characters.

This book will be a welcome addition to every story collection.

Highly Recommended.

Harriet Zaidman is a Winnipeg teacher/librarian..

Book Review

8 O'Cluck.

Jill Creighton. Illustrated by Pierre-Paul Pariseau.
Richmond Hill, ON: Scholastic Canada Ltd., 1995. 30pp, paper, $5.99.
(Issued in French as L'heure des poules!)
ISBN 0-591-24-439-6.

Grades K - 5 / Ages 5 - 9.
Review by A. Edwardsson.

excerpt:

Mr. Wolf moved into the empty house beside the chicken coop. "Right next door to dinner," he chuckled, rubbing his paws together. He put on his speckled tie, his feather-patterned waistcoat, his egg brooch and his chicken watch. Then he went next door to introduce himself to the hens.

Author Jill Creighton (The Weaver's Horse) has turned a popular children's game of chase into an unusual picture-book. At "one o'cluck," Mr. Wolf invites his chicken neighbours to join him for dinner at eight. He spends the rest of the day preparing for his fowl supper, and watching the mysterious activities next door. For example: "The chickens were all inside the henhouse, gathered round the telephone. One chicken poked her head out. `What time is it, Mr. Wolf?' she called. `Six o'cluck,' he answered, staring at her fat belly. She slammed the door. `Rude' he murmured, 'but pleasingly plump!'"

Seven times the chickens ask the question and are told the correct hour. However, at eight, Mr. Wolf creeps over to the henhouse and his response is "DINNER TIME!" The clever fowl are prepared and soon they have Mr. Wolf trussed up in a van and on his way to Howling Pines Wolf Sanctuary. The chickens sit down to a celebration feast at his dinner table.

The premise is amusing but the text and accompanying pictures are more than a little dark and disjointed. For this book, Pierre-Paul Pariseau has used a cut-and-paste technique called photomontage. According to the promotional info, his surreal artwork combines photographs from magazines, brochures, and catalogues that he had lying around the house.

The illustrations are fascinating, but many of the absurd touches come across as disturbing. Most of the animals have "altered" body parts. There are chickens with human eyeballs and a pig with lips, and the fully clothed hens and Mr. Wolf have gloved human hands. And when eight o'cluck arrives, Mr. Wolf strips off his finery and is truly menacing: "His claws were itching as he sneaked towards the chicken coop and slithered through the gate. His teeth were glistening as he pushed open the door of the henhouse with his chilly black nose."

The anthropomorphic chickens truss up Mr. Wolf, and then "Everyone jostled him into the crate, slammed it shut, and snapped on the two big padlocks." We see the chickens holding an oversized lock and key. Above their head, "HA HA HA" is spelled out with letter blocks in ransom-note style -- "The chickens fell to the ground, giggling hilariously. At last with tears running down their beaks, they got up and went next door." Although the text tells us about the chickens' hilarity, or that they are "smiling sweetly," or that "they all giggled, the way chickens do," the chickens illustrated are always dour and dry-eyed, with no smiles to be seen.

But the illustrations also have less macabre, comic touches that would appeal to a child's sense of the absurd, like the chicken watch, the over-sized cutlery, and the sunflowers growing in the trees. "Real" water sloshes in Mr. Wolf's pail, and in the kitchen he juggles vegetables and salt- and pepper-shakers.

The text is clear, and the illustrations spread across two pages. Unfortunately, some of the pictures are warped by the fold.

Fans of Jon Scieszka would appreciate 8 O'Cluck, and older children might enjoy the detailed artwork, but otherwise it's an optional purchase.

A. Edwardsson is in charge of the Children's Department at a branch of the Winnipeg Public Library. She has a Bachelor of Education degree and a Child Care Worker III certification, and is a member of the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Authors' Association.

Book Review

The Ship That Voted No and Other Stories of Ships and the Sea.

Tony Keene.
Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1995. 86pp, paper, $7.95.
ISBN 0-88999-588-5.

Grade 7 - 13 / Ages 12 - Adult.
Review by Neil V. Payne.

excerpt:

Mutiny. The word conjures up images from boyhood tales, of cutthroat pirates and high seas treachery. Ragged seadogs cheer as captain and mate are made to walk the plank. Retribution, when it comes, is a dangling noose from the yardarm.
But by the mid-twentieth century, mutiny was not that colorful or violent. The minor nature of these incidents in the Canadian fleet was out of all proportion to their effect on the future of a navy first formed in 1910, rooted in the Nelson tradition of the British senior service.
The mutinies, such as they were, mainly consisted of a refusal to work by crewmen aboard five different vessels in incidents spanning six years. The first two were quietly dealt with and then more or less forgotten. The latter three resulted in a report which shook the foundations of the service.

Most Canadians would be amazed to learn that the Canadian navy had five mutinies during the 1940s, or that a Canadian naval ship, H.M.C.S. Uganda, while serving in an active theatre of war during World War II, voted to not fight any more.

The Ship That Voted No is a light-reading collection of twelve unrelated Canadian tales of the sea. Eight of the stories deal with naval events, while the other four concern civilian ships. They range from the rescue efforts to find survivors of the Titanic to tales of war at sea, a history of the Segwun (a tour boat on the Muskoka lakes), and the infamous refit of Canada's last aircraft carrier, Bonaventure.

These are all interesting, fast-paced stories presented with a minimum of detail, making this collection ideal for young readers, or as an introduction to Canada's maritime history. Since each story is told only briefly, the book is likely to raise many questions that the reader may want to pursue elsewhere in more detail

A useful addition to any Canadiana collection, The Ship That Voted No would be suitable as a source for short readings to promote interest in books or in Canadian maritime history.

Recommended.

Book Review

Almost a Lifetime.

John McMahon.
Lantzville, British Columbia: Oolichan books, 1995. 297pp, paper, $19.95.
ISBN 0-88982-143-7. CIP.

Grade 9 - 13 / Ages 13 - Adult.
Review by Neil V. Payne.

excerpt:

Barrack Commander Alec MacKinlay interrupted our Stalag exit preparation with a request for everyone to come forward and listen. Alec looked like an old man. These last few distressing months had played havoc with him. He struggled to his table top podium and spoke quietly. "Well, fellows," he began, "the Russian armies are not too far away. We expect they will be in this area within a couple of days. We don't know what is happening; communications are poor. All we have is rumours, some not so good. But unless a battalion of German soldiers retreat this way and through the camp, I don't think we will have trouble from our guards.
"There is the possibility we will have to walk out of here to some place further west, so don't bank on being liberated by the Ruskies. I have information that tomorrow morning we are to take with us on check parade any smal1 kit we wish to have and use on a march. So you are being forewarned. When parade is over tomorrow you will not be permitted to return to your barrack. It's hellish cold weather and I can't understand why they want to take us out on a hiking tour right now. We are 40,000 plus men, and once we move away from here, we'll be camping in sub zero temperatures. Make sure you wear the warmest clothing you have and the best footwear. I'm not giving orders or much advice; you are all free to make choices."

So began a forced march of forty thousand Prisoners of War westward more than four hundred miles across the frozen, ice-covered Germany of February 1945. A march that ended in exhausted freedom for some; a cold, lonely death in a ditch in the middle of nowhere for many others.

John McMahon was a nineteen-year-old delivery boy for a Belfast grocery store when he joined the Royal Air Force in the spring of 1940. He started out in the relatively safe job of maintaining and repairing aircraft, but soon wanted to be part of the "real" war as air crew.

After training as air crew, he was shot down over Holland on his first mission in February 1943. The only survivor of the seven-man crew, McMahon was briefly hidden by Dutch people, but soon became a POW.

McMahon's captors took him to Stalag VIIIB in eastern Germany where he spent the next two years as a POW. Much of Almost a Lifetime deals with this time in a German prison camp.

Life as a POW was harsh and boring, food was always lacking in both quality and quantity, and life centred around trying to maintain strength, health, and sanity until rescue came. The weekly Red Cross package and infrequent mail deliveries were all that made continued life either possible or bearable.

McMahon describes the friends, the mutual support systems, the efforts to maintain the humanity among the POWs in great detail, but, strangely, doesn't provide much detail on the interaction with their captors except as it affected their daily routines. Life was harsh, health was failing due to poor nutrition and significant weight loss, but the clearest images of these two years are of the determination of the POWs to survive through collective action.

Then early in 1945, with Germany clearly losing the war on all fronts and the sounds of Russian artillery coming ever closer to their camp, when liberation seemed imminent, they were forced to trudge westward, through unusually harsh February weather, with only the clothes on their backs.

McMahon started out strongly, surrounded by the help of friends, but after many days contracted dysentery. Rapidly losing strength, he was unable to keep up and finally collapsed on the road. A German civilian who found him unconscious and delivered him to medical aid saved his life.

A long recovery finally lead to a return home to his family. He soon married his childhood sweetheart and, in 1952, moved to Canada. Thirty years later, he retired and started to write this book.

In 1983, he returned to Holland with his son and found the Dutch family that had sheltered him, the graves of his air crew, and the German pilot who had shot them down.

This is an intensely personal and very readable account of both the experiences of the young airman and POW, and of his recent return to the memories, the people, and the places of a lifetime ago. It is a deeply moving and very human story that allows us to appreciate experiences of war we could otherwise only dimly imagine.

Public libraries and high school libraries would find this a very valuable source of insight into World War II and the life of a Prisoner of War.

Highly recommended.

Book Review

For the Poet Novitiate

The Crafted Poem.

Susan Ioannou.
Toronto: Wordwrights Canada, 1994. 58pp, paper, $8.95.
ISBN 0-92083S-02-3.

Writing Reader-Friendly Poetry

Susan loannou.
Toronto: Wordwrights Canada, 1995. 24pp, paper, $5 95.
ISBN 0-920835-15-5.

Grades 10 - 13 / Ages 14 - Adult.
Review by Liam C. Rodrigues.

excerpt:

Reader-friendly poetry is writing that communicates. It reaches beyond confession, shrugs off literary fashion, and bypasses the esoteric and avant-garde, to put the reader first. No matter where a poem springs from, spilling thoughts onto paper in private shorthand is not enough. Reader friendly poetry is a public art. Its authors must select, expand, arrange, and edit their raw inspiration to create a new whole -- one that is open and accessible, one that engages the reader through five senses as well as the mind and emotions. Reader-friendly poetry aims not to puzzle, not to preach, but to share.

from Writing Reader-Friendly Poems

Collected from a series of columns that appeared in the Arts Scarborough Newsletter between September 1980 and June 1985, The Crafted Poem is Susan loannou's third book on writing. A poet herself, Ioannou's sensitivity to the material originates from a practical relationship with it. It is appropriate then that The Crafted Poem reflects on the construction of poetry.

Directed towards aspiring poets, and presumably teachers (not only of creative writing, but also of literature), The Crafted Poem is a "writer's" handbook -- the transportable wisdoms, as it were, passed down from master to initiate. As such, its strengths lie in its compact and accessible prose, treating each trope and scheme, structural and formal element that it broaches with a concision and clarity foreign to many discussions of poetry.

Unfortunately, though it aspires to pedagogy, The Crafted Poem is limited in its complexity, illustrating its points admirably, but sketching out only what is the most familiar landscape. It concerns itself almost exclusively with the workings, and then only the most fundamental, of a poetic practice that is conspicuously absent as a rule from the craft of the John Ashberrys, the Czeslaw Miloszs, the Marilyn Hackers, the Marie Kinzies. For whom is this book then? For the high-school junior or would-be love sonneteer? In effect, yes!

That audience will find this more than helpful, but for the more ambitious, Ioannou's guide -- however well organized and well illustrated -- is little more than a glance at the back of one's own hand.

Published subsequently, Writing Reader-Friendly Poetry is something of a follow-up to The Crafted Poem. Less romantic and freer of the "vogue parlance" that infiltrates the 1994 publication (although one would never guess from the title), these fifty odd "Rules of Thumb for Clearer Communication" are to revision and editing what The Crafted Poem is to composition.

Except for the occasionally irksome heading like, "Create Team Players," and its -- I hope intentionally -- ironic predecessor, "Avoid Trendy Poetic Diction" (but not business jargon, apparently), Ioannou's 1995 poet's handbook is a valuable companion -- an indifferent editor attempting to keep runaway language at bay.

Recommended with reservations.

Liam C. Rodrigues is a Toronto-area writer interested in art, archicture, poetry, and all that liberal arts stuff.

Feature

"The Little Math Puzzle Contest"

Tom Murray, the coordinator of the The Math Puzzle, has been kind enough to give CM permission to run the weekly Little Math Puzzle Contest (inspired by The Great Canadian Trivia Challenge.)

Royal West Academy (a high school) in Montreal, Quebec is sponsoring a little math puzzle contest.

This contest is open to all participants but is designed for students in grades five through ten. English will be the language used for all problems and if their solutions relate to a language, the language will be English.

Contest Format:

Each week a new puzzle will be presented and the answers and winners from two weeks earlier will be posted. Answers are to be received by 8:00 a.m. eastern time the following Friday.

The answers will then be judged, and a correct answer along with the winners' names, will be posted with the puzzle two weeks later.

Both individual students and entire classes are welcome to participate.

Do not to send your answers to CM. Instead, please send all answers to Andrea Pollock and Alex Nazarov at the following address:

math_puzzle@rwa.psbgm.qc.ca

With your solution please include your names, school, grade, and e-mail address, and your city.

Answer #5

The question from two weeks ago was the following:

Question #5:

What are the next two numbers?.... 6 9 18 21 42 45 ___ ___

The answer was 90 93

The pattern was add 3 then double the number, add 3 then double etc...

45 X 2 = 90
90 + 3 = 93

Puzzle #7

This week's question #7 is the following:

What is the next letter in the set?.... R, E, B, M, U, ___

Please remember to send your response by 8:00 am Friday, October 27th to:

math_puzzle@rwa.psbgm.qc.ca

Andrea Pollock and Alex Nazarov
math_puzzle@rwa.psbgm.qc.ca
Royal West Academy, Montreal West, Quebec.

Advertising Feature

Copperfield's Books

Step into Copperfield's Computer Books for Manitoba's largest selection of books for computers. Feel free to browse in Copperfield's elegant, relaxed setting at 1389 Pembina Hwy. (Just south of McGillivray Blvd. )

Phone (204) 477-1961
Fax (204) 477-1957
e-mail: info@copperfields.com

Copyright © 1995 the Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

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