Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"They're up on Mars looking around
Searching for signs of life
Down here the atmosphere is full of trouble war and strife
Earth keeps turnin'
Sun keeps burnin'
They say there's a grand design
I don't know - got no plan
I'm just looking for vital signs
Is there life on Earth?"
--Artie Traum & George James. "Life on Earth." (Roaring Stream Music, 1977.)

"Sometimes the house feels so quiet, like we're all holding our breath, saying everything except what we're really thinking.
"Saying what you're thinking can be dangerous.
"I don't talk as much as Janet and Mom. Mostly I read a lot. Right now I'm reading in my moon atlas about Galileo. He was the first person to point his telescope at the sky and publish what he saw. He discovered that Jupiter has moons. He also published the first drawings of our moon, the mountains and craters.
"There's a crater named after him, but it's tiny. You'd think they'd name a huge crater after him, or a whole mountain range. Some guys I've never even heard of have way bigger craters. Galileo got robbed.
"But there's another thing named after him: a squiggle called Galileo's Rille. Rilles are dried-up riverbeds, only the rivers were made of lava. Galileo's Rille is in the Ocean of Storms, but it looks really peaceful -- like some animal dragged its tail and left a trace in the sand.
"Galileo said that Earth wasn't the center of the universe, the sun was. He didn't even invent that idea; he just tried to prove what Copernicus had already said.
"But his church got mad, even though it was only an idea. They locked him in his house for the rest of his life, just for saying what he thought. "He'd have been a lot better off if he'd kept his mouth shut."

It must be expected, and is certainly hoped for by English teachers, that the thoughtful student interacting with a quality piece of historical fiction will be drawn to consider parallels between events during the period of time being explored in the story and events in the reader's current world.

It certainly must be expected in the midst of an incredibly costly and unpopular war that GREETINGS FROM PLANET EARTH, a quality piece of historical fiction that reveals and personalizes the long term costs of our country's previous incredibly costly and unpopular war, will inspire students to contemplate the parallels between the legacy of the Vietnam War and the future legacy of the war in Iraq.

I recently viewed a piece on CNN that examined the future, long term costs of the war in Iraq -- that is, the significant price not reflected in the half trillion dollars (and counting) that has already been spent. These future costs include the high price of providing long term care to those many thousands of Americans who have been physically or mentally debilitated in Iraq while in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction...or, err capturing Saddam Hussein...or, err creating new markets for McDonalds, Disney, Walmart, and Barbie/Britney. Of course, the enormous future dollar cost of the required health care services does not take into account all of the additional hidden and immeasurable future costs associated with the thousands of students who will now have to grow up without one of their parents due to the mistake-of-a-war created by President Bush and Vice President Halliburton.

I will undoubtedly be hearing once more from that handful of librarians who think I should talk about a story set in 1977 involving a twelve year-old boy who is hoping to learn something of the father who was lost to the Vietnam War -- the war that a certain rich kid, future warmongering President didn't experience -- without making mention of the steadily growing number of boys and girls today who are being provided similar fatherless experiences. Like Theo points out, saying what you're thinking can be dangerous.

" 'You're not eating, Theo,' Mom said. 'Are you feeling alright?' She put her hand on his forehead. 'You're so quiet tonight.'
" 'Probably puberty.' Janet shoveled peas into her mouth. 'Check his chest for hairs.' "

Theo is the boy with the missing dad, obnoxious big sister, Janet, and the moon atlas. It is 1977 and the United States is preparing to launch the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. Voyagers 1 and 2 are to contain information about Earth for any intergalactic intelligent beings with whom the probes may come in contact. Because of the entertaining question that immediately comes to mind -- What should NASA's meet-the-neighbors fact pack include? -- Theo's favorite teacher, Mr. Meyer, has devised a class assignment in which each student is required to submit one picture and one minute of audio "to share what they thought was most important about Earth."

And so Theo is seeking the meaning of life on Earth when his birthday arrives and his unspoken questions about his dad once again erupt inside of him. For each year on Theo's birthday, "JeeBee" (his paternal grandmother, Bernadette) gives him a model rocket or plane that is meant to be from his father. Theo and his dad built the first one together when Theo was five, shortly before his dad departed for Vietnam. The models all hang on Theo's ceiling. However, nobody in the family really talks about his dad, the dad who never came home:

"Talking about it would be against the rules. Mom had never told Theo what the rules were, but he'd figured them out. Number One: If you pretend everything is fine, then everything is fine. And Number Two: Don't talk about Dad. Ever. 'It's like JeeBee wants me to remember him' -- he glanced at the red birthday card lying on his desk -- but my mom doesn't.' "

But this is the year when Theo will begin outgrowing his previous coping mechanisms and will find himself taking a giant leap in order to learn about his dad and what really happened to him. As we read about Theo's quest and his family's dysfunction, we see how, years after the monthly body count ends, the effects of war continue to reverberate through the families of soldiers.

"Earth's been here a billion years
Milky Way won't disappear
On starry nights I sit and stare
As these questions come right through my tears."

Life on Earth? What might our intergalactic neighbors think?

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
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BudNotBuddy@aol.com