www.roanoke.com

PAUL ROBESON
By Eloise Greenfield
Illustrated by George Ford
Lee & Low Books
40 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Kathleen Lunsford
KATHLEEN LUNSFORD is a Roanoke artist, mother and first-grade teacher.

Eloise Greenfield has written a very nice biography of the great singer and actor Paul Robeson. Anyone who has ever heard this wonderful artist’s voice will not forget it. Robeson led a life of greatness on many levels, and his artistic accomplishments were equal to his social activism. This short biography introduces young people to a man who led an exemplary life and suffered for it.

It begins with Robeson’s father, a runaway slave who went on to get an education and craft a life of giving, which influenced his youngest son, Paul.

The illustrations are dramatic black-and-white charcoal drawings. The gestural quality of the pictures take the viewer through Robeson’s years as an exceptional athlete, performer and activist around the world. The strength of the images helps convey the power of the man.

We do not have many biographies for children about artists, especially black artists. Through this book, children can discover this great man’s voice.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM:
The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again
By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
Nationbooks 
352 pages 
$26.95

By Michael L. Ramsey
MICHAEL L. RAMSEY is president of the Roanoke Public Library Foundation.

The liberty of the press is the great bulwark of the liberty of the people: It is, therefore, the incumbent Duty of those who are constituted the Guardians of the People’s Rights to defend and maintain it.
— Massachusetts Houseof Representatives, 1768

Journalism is essential to the success of the American democratic republic. A bold assertion, perhaps.
Robert McChesney and John Nichols intend to save journalism from what they — and many others — see as an inevitable collapse. An ambitious goal, no doubt.

I live in an enclave of “extreme patriots” who brook no disagreement with their collective sociopolitical point of view. The most extreme have placed broad, black plastic tape across the fronts of their newspaper boxes — a graphic statement about their opinion of the liberal views sometimes espoused by The Roanoke Times.

But know this: A local daily newspaper is essential to personal freedom, even if you disagree with the editorial positions.

A general public discourse facilitated by a free press (journalism) is essential to the success of any democratic republic. The disappearance of daily newspapers, magazines and radio news (to cite obvious examples) is a troubling development for McChesney and Nichols.

The authors believe that all Americans should be alarmed by the prospect of losing a free and independent press. Their solution seems to fly in the face of reason: Trust the government to provide the financial underpinning to assure the freedom and independence of the news media.

Sort of like sending the fox to guard the henhouse, you say?

McChesney and Nichols cite historical precedent in arguing that it is incumbent upon elected officials to assure that journalism be spared the death many have predicted. The difficulties are many and varied.

During the Founding Era, newspapers were the only mass media available to inform citizens of the doings of the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. So there is one rather obvious difference.

During the Founding Era, the government could subsidize newspapers by allowing franking privileges so that no postage was needed to send papers throughout the colonies.

During the Founding Era, newspaper publishers could afford to churn out newspapers because of lucrative government printing contracts. Government documents (including laws and resolutions) were printed at private print shops by contract with local, colonial (state) and, later federal governments.

Now, our governments print their own documents, thus providing competition for the dollar
on which private-sector printers would pay a tax to support government enterprise. If you kill the goose, you are likely to find more golden eggs, right?

McChesney and Nichols acknowledge that difficulties exist, and they embrace that situation. After all, dialogue is the heart of a democratic republic. We don’t have to agree on a point, we just have to agree to discuss it. Compromise will follow, and then no one will be happy, and that is the soul of our government.

The book encourages us to engage in a dialogue that will bring a resolution to this problem journalism faces before we have to put the bones of a free press in an ossuary. The authors note propaganda machines would love to control the news so that “news” items would support whatever is being sold by whatever corporation is selling it. The authors make oblique reference to this issue, but the largest of these corporate giants is Federal Bureaucracy Inc.

Good for us, say McChesney and Nichols, that elected officials thrive on the lively debate encouraged by a free press — the kind of discussion that gets publicity for those we elect to solve problems such as this one.

If you are concerned about the future of journalism in America — and you should be — then this book will help you understand where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do to help the handmaiden of a democratic republic regain her strength before she collapses and dies.

A LESSON BEFORE DYING
By Ernest J. Gaines
Vintage
256 pages
$13 paperback

By Heather Brush
heather.brush@roanoke.com

Two main characters live large in “A Lesson Before Dying.” One is destined to die; the other tells the tale and is learning how to live. It is the late 1940s, in Bayonne, La. Jefferson is a young black man who is wrongfully accused of the murder of a white shopkeeper.

His court-appointed lawyer chooses to compare Jefferson to swine, stating, “Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this,” in an attempt to sway the jury. While Jefferson remains silent in the courtroom, he takes this analogy to heart and loses all sense of himself in facing his sentence.

Jefferson’s aunt beseeches the local schoolteacher to help her nephew to walk to the death chair with his identity resolved; to die as a man, not a hog. Grant runs a one-room schoolhouse on a plantation, but he too feels beaten down with no escape from being trapped in his existence. As he waits for hours in the big house kitchen to speak to the sheriff, he realizes that his college education has seemingly gotten him nowhere; he is still bending to the will of the white world.

Grant begins to visit with Jefferson in his jail cell. Is there anything to be done for someone who has given up on what life he has left? The question could be asked of both men. Slowly, Grant reaches Jefferson, hoping to impart the last lesson in life: that he is a worthwhile being.

Author Ernest Gaines’ descriptions of Aunt Emma’s fried chicken leave the reader’s mouth watering. Scenes played out in the schoolhouse vividly portray the vastly different expectations of children in regard to physical work and classroom behavior than what today’s children face.

Emotions, stolen kisses and punches are felt as the pages turn.

Gaines paints a wide picture with this 250-page novel of how things were in the ’40s in the South. It is a deep book with several lessons for readers. It is a harsh look in the mirror of America’s past.
“A Lesson Before Dying” is a book to be read and discussed, lest the lessons be forgotten.

MY TIMES IN BLACK AND WHITE:
Race and Power at The New York Times
By Gerald M. Boyd
Lawrence Hill Books
432 pages
$26.95

By Jeff DeBell
JEFF DeBELL is a retired Roanoke Times reporter and editor.

Like many journalists and former journalists, I enjoy reading occasionally about the storied culture and often colorful personalities of The New York Times. Gerald Boyd is the latest to punch peepholes through the Times’ newsroom walls, and the scene his book reveals is not a pretty one.

It is a place of brutal politics, resistance to change, institutional arrogance and thinly veiled racism. Reading the book, one wonders at times how its scrapping characters found time to put out the paper, especially a paper of such high quality.

Boyd was the Times’ first black managing editor. His rise to eminence from humble begnnings in inner-city St. Louis is an inspiring story of smarts, hard work and proven ability in a world dominated by whites. He repeatedly led Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at the Times, most notably its coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath.

It all collapsed in 2003, when a young black Timesman named Jayson Blair was caught padding his stories with the unattributed work of others. The Times’ reputation for journalistic rectitude was unforgivably tainted by his plagiarism. Blair was fired and executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Boyd were sacrificed in the name of atonement.

Raines was controversial and said by the author to be widely disliked for a bullying management style and for playing favorites among top reporters and editors. As for Boyd himself, he writes that he was fired not for managerial misfeasance but because he was black in a culture where the abilities and motives of blacks were chronically doubted despite management protestations to the contrary. Boyd maintained to the end that his portrayal as Blair’s mentor was a falsehood based solely on the color of his skin.

I say “the end” because Boyd died of cancer in 2006. He is not around to defend his assertions. The manuscript that became “My Times in Black and White” was edited and prepared for publication by his widow, Robin D. Stone, herself a former Times editor.

Boyd writes that he was picked to become managing editor at the insistence of Raines when the latter was named executive editor in 2001. Raines was a dyed-in-the-wool southerner, but a steadfast supporter of Boyd for most of their association. The publisher, Arthur Sulzburger Jr., offered no resistance to Boyd’s promotion. Still, the author cites a number of slights during his 20 years at the Times that he says grew out of subtle, if not overt, racism. In the end, he writes, he should have heeded a black colleague’s promise that the Times would eventually break his heart.

As for his firing, there may or may not have been a racial element. Beyond his own inferences, Boyd does not make an especially strong case for it. But neither does the Times conclusively defend itself against the charge, at least not in this reviewer’s reading of “My Times in Black and White.”

Boyd’s posthumous memoir will provide plentiful grist for gossip at the Times, in other newsrooms and among the bloviators and incessant chatterers of cable television. Aside from his principal points, he touches on the newspaper industry’s efforts to come to terms with declining circulation and profits, inroads of the Web and digital media, management and organizational experiments and of course the quest for greater racial and gender diversity.

There is the tale of his own impressive professional trajectory, which is woven into passages about intrigue at the Times.

It’s a compelling package if you are — or have been — in the newspaper game. If not, the book’s appeal will be fairly narrow.

Chris Van Dyk will be available to sign copies of his science fiction novel, “Awaken: The Hollowstone Chronicles.”
When: 2 to 8 p.m., Saturday, February 6
Where: Chrysalis, 1109 E. Main St., Radford
Cost: Free
Contact: 888-361-9473, terry@tatepublishing.com

Anne Frank is to remain on Culpeper, Va, bookshelves, at least for the time being. School Board member Bob Beard on Friday characterized the initial comments regarding the status of the book as a mistake.

“I do not know why the statement was made that the book had been removed when it had not gone through the removal process,” said Beard, who repeatedly stressed that he was not speaking for school system or any other school board member.

Last week, we reported from AP sources that the newer version of "Diary of a Young Girl", by Anne Frank, the "Definitive Edition",  had been pulled from Culpeper County public schools over the voiced complaint of one parent.

During the 50th anniversary of her death in a concentration camp, the Anne Frank Foundation published the unedited definitive version in 1995. This version contains 30% more material than the version most readers grew up with, as Frank's father, Otto Frank, had taken an editing pen to the pages.

On Thursday, January 28, the Culpeper Star Exponent reported that the book was being pulled: "“The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition,” a vivid memoir of Anne Frank’s private thoughts during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, will no longer be assigned to CCPS students, according to Jim Allen, director of instruction for the school system. This book is usually given to eighth-grade middle school English students to read. Citing a parent’s concern over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition, Allen said school officials immediately chose to pull this version and use an alternative copy."

On Friday, January 29, Rhonda Simmons of the Culpeper Star Exponent reported that Superintendent Bobbi Johnson is defending Culpeper County Public Schools’ decision to censor the unedited version of Anne Frank’s diary. “The essence of the story, the struggle of a young girl faced with horrible atrocities, is not lost by editing the few pages that speak to adolescent discovery of intimate feelings,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Exponent Thursday. “While these pages could be the basis of a relevant discussion, they do not reflect the purpose of studying the book at the middle-school level and could foster a discussion in a classroom that many would find inappropriate.”

So censoring is the answer?

As was the case here in Roanoke County when the book "Perks of Being a Wallflower" became the object of a parents' objection, there is a process that public schools are supposed to follow. A book is called into review where the librarian and others read it, investigate reviews and standings of the book, and make an informed decision regarding parental complaint on what to do with it. In Culpeper, according to the school division’s “public complaints about learning resources” policy, censorship decisions do not have to be approved by the school board. The CCPS policy states that a review committee — consisting of the school’s principal, librarian, teacher, complainant, parent and/or student — must gather to discuss the matter. The committee’s responsibility is to read, view or listen to the material in question, read several reviews, check standard selection aids, talk with knowledgeable people about the challenged material, make and file a recommendation with the principal and superintendent and notify the complainant of the recommendation.

On Friday, January 29, Nate Delesline of the Culpeper Star Exponent, reported that an unabridged edition of Anne Frank’s diary will remain available to students and teachers, Culpeper County Public Schools announced on Friday.

Meaning, it is not being pulled.

CCPS issued the following statement: “To date, CCPS has not completed a review process of this book. However, the instruction department will convene a committee during the spring of 2010 to review both versions prior to another teaching in the fall of 2010. The definitive version has not been banned nor removed from the middle schools."

School board member Bob Beard stated, “In my opinion, somebody made a mistake somewhere along the line in not going through the policy that’s been prescribed by the school board. The definitive edition remains in the school library,” he continued. “I’ve been assured of this … it hasn’t been pulled from any other classes. And right now if any teacher chose to use it, there would be no barring it,” he added.

Let's hope the final outcome of this matter leaves the book available. After the review of "Perks of Being a Wallflower" the availability was restricted but not banned. This result was not exactly what a books editor would choose but the process was followed. With the amount of public attention that Culpeper County schools faced upon the release of this story, they have no choice but to follow the guidelines set. Thank goodness.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: A Miracle Girls Novel
By Anne Dayton, May Vanderbilt 
Faithwords
288 pages. $9.99
Young Adult

Reviewed by Madhura Chitnavis
Madhura Chitnavis attends Hidden Valley High School

The miracle girls strike again in Anne Dayton’s and May Vanderbilt’s sequel, Breaking Up is Hard to Do.  In this second installment of the Miracle Girls Series, Christine Lee, a young, aspiring artist has to come to grips with the sudden death of her mother. 

To make matters worse, only a year after her mother’s death, her father is getting remarried to Candace, a former Miss California, and Christine, convinced that her mother’s spirit is trying to break the two of them up, is doing anything she can to prevent the marriage. 

As their sophomore year of high school goes on, the Miracle Girls begin to grow apart, and with her father’s wedding on the way, Christine finds that she needs the miracle girls now more than ever.  But between all the tenth grade drama and, of course, the boy issues, Christine begins to doubt that the Miracle Girls will ever get back together. 

Breaking Up is Hard to Do is very well written, and will prove to be very easy to relate to for the average teen.  Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt do an excellent job at relating Christine’s story to that of the everyday teen, and incorporate some of their own life aspects and values into the book. 

Unlike its prequel, which was written from the point of view of Ana Dominguez, another Miracle Girl, this first-person account is centered on Christine Lee, and her struggle to adjust to the changes in her life.  In addition to having her father’s fiancé, Candace, moving in, Christine must also share her bedroom with her future stepsister, Emma, and live with the prospect that she is the only Miracle Girl to never have been kissed (although she comes pretty close with Andrew, a fellow artist and basketball player). 

Throughout the novel, Christine debates over her belief in God, and wonders if her mother’s spirit is haunting her, and if so, why?  While these events come to pass, the Miracle Girls spend less and less time together.  Overall, this novel shows the great, unfaltering strength of friendship, even when the times are tough.

A Brief History of Montmaray
By Michelle Cooper
Knopf
$16.99. 296 pages

Reviewed by Amy Webb
AMY WEBB is a professional librarian.

In “A Brief History of Montmaray,” author Michelle Cooper introduces us to the charming Sophie FitzOsborne, princess of Montmaray. Through Sophie’s diary, set in 1936, we get a glimpse of a world about to be lost forever.

Sixteen-year-old Sophie lives on a remote, rocky island between England and France with her slightly older cousin Veronica, younger sister Henry, Veronica’s mad father, King John, and a handful of subjects.

Much of Sophie’s diary is concerned with the daily goings-on in their dilapidated castle, her crush on the housekeeper’s handsome son, Simon, and figuring out how to persuade intellectual Veronica to set aside her historical research and accompany her to be introduced to society in England.
However, the specter of the Great War — during which most of Montmaray’s young men were lost — and the looming threat of Nazi Germany are always just on the periphery of Sophie’s narrative. And when a bit of poetry connecting Montmaray and the Holy Grail draws the attention of Nazi scholars, Sophie’s small world is shaken.

Cooper’s writing style is pitch-perfect. Sophie’s voice is sweet, old-fashioned, and entirely engaging, and her story reads like a novel actually composed in the historical period in which it was set. Cooper does a wonderful job of presenting serious subjects in an age-appropriate, yet realistic way.
Fans of “I Capture the Castle” and “Little Women” will feel comfortable in Montmaray.

WE WERE PIRATES: A Torpedoman’s Pacific War
By Robert Schultz and James Shell
Naval Institute Press
212 pages. $34.95

Reviewed by Jeff DeBell
JEFF DeBELL is a retired Roanoke Times reporter and editor.

We should be thankful to Robert Hunt of Decorah, Iowa, not only for his heroic wartime service but for the records he kept of his wild and harrowing experiences. His photographs, meticulous diary and other memorabilia became the foundation on which this compelling book is built.

Hunt served as a seaman on the USS Tambor, a submarine, from 1941 until 1944. Laboring in the forward torpedo room, he participated in — and miraculously survived — 12 missions against the Japanese enemy in various reaches of the Pacific Ocean. And, reasoning sensibly that each shore leave might be their last, he and his mates spent their time in port drinking, partying and chasing the local women (many of whom apparently were more than willing to be caught).

Straightforward accounts of Hunt’s landside adventures are part of “We Were Pirates,” though they are neither overplayed nor unduly salacious. They are one of the reasons that the book bears the ring of authenticity. Another is that Hunt was an enlisted man, whereas wartime chronicles seem to come more often from the memoirs of officers or the research of professional historians.

To this reader, at least, the hazardous and not-uncomplicated firing of a torpedo is much more vivid when described by the man who does it, than when merely ordered by an officer some
where else in the ship.

Robert Schultz is a poet, novelist and English professor at Roanoke College. He learned of Hunt’s war experiences — and his records trove — while the men were neighbors in Iowa, and wisely agreed with the ex-sailor that there was a first-rate story to be told. After moving to Roanoke College and meeting James Shell, he invited the local freelancer to help organize Hunt’s memories and unofficial archive and turn them into a book.

The co-authors do a creditable job of placing Hunt’s experiences against the backdrop of the Battle of Midway, the fighting at Wake Island and other facets of the war’s vast Pacific theater. There are passages about successful attacks, particularly those against Japanese shipping, and there are honest assessments of the submarine corps’ failures at Midway. The Tambor took part in clandestine guerrilla-support missions in the Philippines. And it suffered its lumps from enemy depth charges.
One of the book’s most riveting passages is about a 17-hour depth-charge attack that nearly destroyed the sub and its crew on the floor of the East China sea.

Hardly riveting, but no less interesting, are descriptions of how the submarine works — how it dives and cruises with equilibrium, how it wages war and how it sustains and protects its human crew. In the hands of Hunt and his skilled literary channelers, the vessel almost becomes a living and breathing creature of the sea. In fact, at one point the authors say, “sometimes it was hard to figure whether [the pressurized hull] was more like the snug shell of a turtle or the rib cage of the whale that swallowed Jonah.”

The book takes its title from the Tambor’s piratelike attacks on cargo vessels and from the rowdy antics of the crew every time the war-racked ship survived another mission and made it back to port. Good title, good read.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE
By Dodie Smith
St. Martin’s Griffin
352 pages. $14.99

“I Capture the Castle” is a charming story with a captivating young narrator.

The book is the journal of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain growing up poor in a dilapidated English castle in the 1930s.

Americans break into the pages, and the character’s relationships soon weave themselves into a messy web of love and family.

A tale of growing up and growing wise, the Mortmain family’s story has the reader feeling pangs of jealousy, sympathy, guilt and love for a quirky cast of characters.

I found myself reading a little longer each night, and reliving my own teenage views on love through Cassandra and her sister.

Written in 1948, and made into a motion picture in 2003, “I Capture the Castle” is a hidden classic about young women looking to break into the world.

Smith’s heroine brings to life the complicated inner workings of a young woman’s mind.
 
— Michelle Skeen, Blue Ridge Business Journal