Book Report: The Giver by Lois Lowry

When I was my son's age, my mom literally had to force me to go outside.  I wanted to stay inside and read.  She made me take my book and go outside on the steps to read.  I did that, and eventually started making friends with the neighborhood kids, and started playing street baseball, and Hide and seek, and basketball, and kill the kid with the ball, and all those fun street games.

I've been a very dedicated reader all my life, and when the book  The Giver by Lois Lowry came out in 1993, I was 29 years old, and I thought I was really into Young Adult Fiction.  Apparently not, though, as I missed it entirely, and I've since found I've missed hundreds of other books.  And this was a particularly bad miss, as it is a great book, and ended up winning The Newbery Medal in 1994.  It was also ranked in 2012 as the 4th best children's book of all time by Elizabeth Bird's Top 100 Chapter Book Poll.  (more books I've been meaning to read!)

(On an aside: It's a little bit of a fantasy that I'd like to make my 9-year-old child read only Newbery books.  I haven't even read them all (I just did a little count, and I've read 16 of the 412 books that have either won or been honored by the Newbery folks.  I better get cracking!).  Unfortunately, he's the kind of kid who loves his trash reading.



Don't get me wrong, I love that he reads, and through him I've read some really great stuff. He's read all of the Alex Rider novels, all of the Ranger's Apprentice novels, all of the I Funny novels, and all of the Harry Potter novels, as well as many others. Some of these he's read multiple times.  I have to force him to read new books, and when he does, he usually loves them.  I don't know if he's ready for Agatha Christie, but I get the feeling he is going to eat them up when he is.)



Some of the books my son loves.  (CLICK IMAGES TO SEE THEM ON AMAZON)







He's an inveterate reader, and for that I'm glad.  Even if he doesn't always read the books I want him to read (and it makes sense, seeing who his parents are. )  Right now he's refusing to read this next book, and when I do force him to read it  I'm sure he's going to love it!

SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD

Artwork inspired by The Giver. via Pinterest

Back to the Giver:  It's a utopian/dystopian novel, in which we follow a young boy named Jonas who lives in a Utopian society that celebrates equality and sameness... up to a point. The society is very ordered- at 8 you get a bicycle, at 10 you get your hair cut short, at 12 you receive your job- and when you are old enough you retire to the home for the Aged, until eventually you are Released.

Everybody turns age at the same time, and your peer group works together.  It's a polite society where apologies are mandated for even the tiniest infraction of the group. A group of Elders studies you and decides how you are best suited to help society in your job, and who your spouse should be, and eventually, when the people suited to be Birth Mothers deliver, who gets which child and what their name should be. It's a society that seems like it should be operating at peak efficiency.

But as you learn as you read further, things are not necessarily idyllic.  Boys and girls (and men and women) take pills every day to quell their "stirrings."  At a certain point, you realize that the Mother and the Father are not the biological mother and father.And when you get much further into the book, you realize that even the idea of color has been stripped away from the community's life.  Not color as in race, but as in color, red, green, blue, etc.  Whether this is done via drugs or via surgery is not necessarily clear.

As well, you realize that there are some other sinister elements.  There's a young baby who doesn't sleep well, and there's a fear that he might have to be "released."  At first it's unclear if "Released"  means sent to another community, but pretty quickly you get the foreboding idea that released is a euphemism for euthanized.  And the same with the elderly who get "released" as well.

It turns out there are sequels!
Check them out on Amazon

Our hero, Jonas, ends up being selected to be the Receiver of Memories, a special job that requires that he take in memories of the past times from the current Receiver, who is an old man. (And once Jonas becomes the Receiver, he becomes the Giver) Something happened 10 years before to the previous Receiver in Training.  And as Jonas starts to receive memories from the long past, he starts to realize that there's more to his society than meets the eye...

The book is so well written, and takes a simple idea and expands the hell out of it.  I love how there's a sense of foreboding from the first line, and we discover gradually things about this society without being told so much about them.  The version I read came with A Reader's Guide at the end, along with questions for discussion and an interview with the author.

Because of the dystopian element, this book has been on "The Challenged Book List" for a long time.

More excitingly, I just discovered that there are sequels!  She apparently wrote four books in this series.  (Although not exactly a quartet, there are four books set in this world, although they all follow different protagonists. ) Gathering Blue, The Messenger, and The Son Can't wait to read them!



There's also a 2014 movie! Featuring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep.  It didn't get great reviews, but I think it looks well worth seeing.  Except at the end of the trailer, the super high-tech flying machine seems a little too Hunger Games-ish.   Completely missed this one too! I now feel like I've been under a rock about this book.

Has your child read the Giver?  What did they think?  Please tell me in the comments below. I'm trying to build up a persuasive case to get my son to read it!

BOOK REPORT: The Lego Animation Book

See The Lego Animation Book on Amazon

At the recent Chicago Toy and Game Expo, I ended up chatting with one of the authors of a new book that can change a kid's ability to think, create, and imagine.

 It's a book called The LEGO Animation Book, and it teaches kids (in a book format, obviously) ALMOST everything they need to know about creating LEGO Movies.

The authors, David Pagano and David Pickett have impressive LEGO resumes. Together they run a LEGO animation blog THE SET BUMP  Pagano has his own LEGO production studio Paganomation, and his work has appeared in places like the Wall Street Journal, BrickJournal, and of course, Youtube.  His co-author is the filmmaker behind Brick 101 and Nightly News at Nine.

Here's a sample of each of their works (Pagano first, then Pickett)









Really fun right?

In the book, they've gathered together some of their best tricks, secrets, and best practices to be a LEGO Animator.  Some of the topics they cover are

• Building a set so that it is modular and easy to re-use
• How to work in different scales
• Best ways to light a tiny set
• How to storyboard
• shot selection and composition.
• What to look for in software and hardware for recording
• Post-production

Sample page on building a one room set.

The book is full color, 200+ pages, and while suitable for kids, has enough quality information that adult/parent LEGO hobbyists will learn something as well.  There's a lot of technical detail, including a brick-by-brick instruction to build a larger scale puppet that you can reuse again and again, and instructions on how to use spreadsheets to plan out your animations.

More than being easy to read, well-written, and filled with good intel (all of it true), what I really like about this book is the clear zeal that the authors have and communicate about their art form.  Their passion and love of both creating stuff and the tools with which they create stuff is evident on just about every page.

Sample page on animating a walk

 The book doesn't dwell too much on how to get ideas for your creations, although it does talk about brainstorming and improvising/playing as methods.  It also details the incredible amount of work that goes into creating a couple of minutes of very good animation.

 Let's be clear, this book is not going to suddenly make your kid a genius animator.  The only thing that will do that is working his or her tail off, and failing a bunch of times before coming up with something amazing.

What the book will do is give him/her the tools and information to make them a better writer and animator, a bunch of tricks and ideas so they don't make easy mistakes and get discouraged before they can get good at it, and most importantly, show them examples of what is possible if they dedicate themselves to their work.

And really, what more can you ask for in a book like this?

BOOK REPORT: Transmit Joy by Mark Binder (Audio Book)

Mark Binder telling a story.  Photo by Paul Porter

Let me start by saying that Mark Binder is one of my oldest friends.

I met him at the Trinity Rep Conservatory  in 1987 and we've been close friends ever since.  We've worked together on various projects,  I went to his wedding reception, I am the godfather to one of his children, he signed my wedding vows, and when we lived in the same state I averaged eating with him and his family twice a week.

 I ran a New Year's Eve festival for 10 years, and Mark ran the storytelling stage for me every year.  Put plainly, I love the guy. And I admit that bias.

Despite my clear bias, I think I can safely say that you will really enjoy his latest project, Transmit Joy.   (available on Amazon by clicking the title)

It's an audio book of about 65 minutes length that features 10 of Mark's signature stories.  

Listen to samples of the stories here.

The stories are varied, from a re-telling of the classic story of The Billy Goats Gruff to the first story ever told (by Og, Caveman) to a wonderful and personal telling of why he writes stories, which features a word portrait of a candy shop that almost makes you taste the chocolate.

The stories are sometimes silly and sometimes profound,  but they are all done with a sense of lightness and joy and a sense of humor that makes you glad you listened to them.

There's a German/Yiddish word that describes Mark's work well:  Haimishe, meaning homey and well-meaning and comfortable.  Mark's mission (indeed, the name of his website) is to Transmit Joy to his audiences, and I think that he succeeds quite well.

Photo of Mark and I making silly faces on Bright Night in 2011.

Mark has been a storyteller and author for almost 30 years, and his expertise shows through in how he crafts the story and tells the story details.  He uses minimal sound effects, and his simple but effective character voices bring us right into the heart of the story and of the character.

In short, I think this audio storybook makes a fine introduction to Mark's work as a storyteller and will entertain and entrance all of the members of your family.  You should definitely add it to your collection.


To find out more about Mark (and catch the flavor of his storytellingand lots of complimentary accolades), here's his introductory video from his website Transmit Joy:

Book Report: Parent Hacks by Asha Dornfest

A MODIFIED VERSION OF THIS REVIEW FIRST APPEARED ON THE CITY DADS GROUP BLOG.

Parenting is a job no school prepares you for. Every new parent starts a complete neophyte. Sure, you may have been a crazy great babysitter as a teen, or practiced diapering your friend’s kid, or maybe you were great at swaddling the baby doll when you went to your doula. But let’s face it — nothing prepares you for when your baby refuses to sleep at 3 a.m., or when you are not quite sure if your child just swallowed some poison, or how to baby-proof your hotel room, or how to get your child to stop whining (I'm still working on that one!)

You learn by doing, by making mistakes and by improvising solutions. It’s the ultimate in on-the-job-training. But here’s the thing — once you’ve got the experience, once you’ve innovated and tried doing stuff and figured out a great or clever solution to a thorny parenting problem, who can you tell?

Buy Parent Hacks on Amazon.com

Enter Parent Hacks, the online community started by Asha Dornfest in 2005. That community’s mission was to share their on-the-job learning solutions with each other and the rest of the Internet so that new parents would not make the same mistakes, and be inspired to implement and improve upon the solutions already in place. In other words, parent hacking!

Dornfest has collected 134 of the best tips gleaned from the website into a book, Parent Hacks, available April 5, 2016 from Workman Publishing.

There’s actually more tips than that because interspersed between the numbered tips are various listicle suggestions (six ways to get rid of laundry stains, 16 quick-fix dinner ingredients to always keep on hand, seven pretend games you can play lying down, etc.) and some odes to common household objects you can use for not-so-common purposes (the laundry basket, empty baby wipe tubs, pool noodles, among others).

Some of my favorite parent hacks

Many of the book’s hacks are for parents of kids ages birth to 5; however, there are still a lot of great shortcuts here for parents of older children (my child is 7.)

 Here are three I’ll continue to use (as you can see, some are not specifically parenting related, although they definitely apply):

• No. 10: Use toothpaste to mark the spot for picture frames.
• No. 66: Trace your kids feet so that you can shoe shop without them.
• No. 81: Put the ketchup under the hot dog, rather than over the dog.

Number 81-  It's a great idea, but I live in Chicago, so I think we will stick to mustard: ketchup on a hot dog could get you reported to Child Protective Services!

A few of the hacks seem pretty obvious. No. 78: “Cut food with kitchen shears” is an example. I mean, how does that qualify as a hack? That’s why they call them “kitchen” shears, right? But I’m guessing that some of my favorites might seem obvious to someone else.

Hacks for moms … and dads?

Most of the hacks are unisex, meant for any parent, but probably about 15 of them are mom-centric and not meant for the dads who are reading.

(No. 8: “Use a frozen sanitary pad to help with vaginal healing” comes to mind. Although I’m sure many new dads pray for quick vaginal healing, so there’s that.)

 I didn’t see any dad-specific hacks in the book, and a quick browse of the website didn’t reveal any either. Fatherly.com did have some pretty funny videos of some pretty clever hacks by dads;

I especially liked this one, which featured a video of a dad solving the problem of not being a pony-tail expert. Maybe this should be in the sequel!

Craighton Berman illustrated  Parent Hacks in a fun and whimsical style, and each hack is clearly illustrated. The background of each page is graph paper, which adds to the feeling that you are getting the ideas directly from the hacker.

Sample page from Amazon.com's LOOK IN THIS BOOK

Overall, I think this would be a great book to get for a new parent, or if you are a parent of a toddler. It will still be of value if you are a more experienced parent, but you may have already solved that solution (And if you have, and you’d like to share it with other parents, publish a photo or video using social media with the hashtag #parenthacks. Future parents will thank you for it!)

If you’ve got a great parent hack, or more specifically a dad hack, please share it in the comments!

BOOK REPORT: NatGeo Kids Guide to Photography

Book arrives in stores Aug 4!

My son (almost 7) has gotten very interested in photography. He loves to view my various photo accounts, and see all the pictures that people post on instagram, facebook, etc.  (Sometimes I have to do a little quick editing/flipping, because there are definitely some NSFW images floating around my social stratosphere. )

As for equipment, he's got my old disabled iphone, an Ipad, an older digital camera, and a discontinued flipcam.  In other words, this kid is loaded with equipment.

But having the tools doesn't make you able to see which photos are great shots, any more than having a paintbrush makes you a great painter. You have to learn to use the tools.  And you have to practice.

Annie Griffiths

I recently received for review a book that aims to help kids learn to use photographic tools. The book National Geographic Kids  Guide To Photography , written by awesome and experienced National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths and accomplished children's author and editor Nancy Honovich, covers all facets of photography, from aperture to editing to composition to selecting your equipment.  (sorry kid, you've got whatever I used to have!)

 Hard to understand terms and tricky concepts are clearly laid out for kids to see and comprehend.

The book is written in short and easy to understand segments, and has a series of exercises after each chapter so that kids can practice what they are learning.  Tips are given, and even bad shots are dissected to see what went wrong.

Kids are also invited to (with their parents permission) set up an account and showcase their work on the National Geographic Kids MyShot site.

MYSHOT is the only moderated online photography community where kids can safely share photos, comment on each other's pictures, and take challenges from National Geographic editors.




This is a great book.  It's comprehensive, it's interactive, it's easy to understand, and it is the next best thing to having Annie Griffiths come to your house teach your kid a workshop in photography. (And that is probably prohibitively expensive!)

The book starts shipping on August 4, but you can pre-order it online at Amazon or you can pre-order it directly from the National Geographic store.  After August 4, it will be available in bookstores.

If you do get the book, let me know how you like it in the comments!

Book Report: The Martian by Andy Weir

Just finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir.  It's a great novel with a hard science edge.

The story starts on Mars, where one of the astronauts on Mars has been left behind by his crew.  There was a freak sandstorm, and they thought he was dead, so they abandoned the mission.  Meanwhile, the astronaut Mark Watney managed to survive, but now he's got some bigger issues.  The crew took the communication radio with them.  He's got no way to talk to them, or Earth, or anybody.

Throughout the story he uses ingenuity to battle malfunctioning equipment, lack of resources, unintended consequences, and lots of other problems.  Many times, the solutions to his problems end up causing more problems.  This Martian Macgyver is ingenious, and I loved following along as he solved seemingly insurmountable problems, and ends up cheating death multiple times.

This is a first novel by the author, and it's heavy on tech and math and figuring stuff out.  But the character is very likable, his problems are intriguing, and his solutions are innovative. Overall the story was compelling and the book was hard to put down.

There's a little bit of language, and a little talk of sex, but I think the book would be appropriate for high school students.  If you took away maybe one page, it would be suitable for 12 year olds.

The story of how he wrote the book is pretty interesting.  A self-professed "Science Nerd" he started writing it on his blog a chapter at a time.  His friends encouraged him to collect it and put it on Kindle, and he did.  He would have put it on for free, but Kindle required a .99 minimum charge.  He charged it, and soon thousands started buying.  That ended with a bidding war for the movie rights, and a re-publishing by an actual publisher (and a stint on the NY Times best-seller list.)

After reading the novel, it seems like it would be possible for someone to eventually colonize Mars, like the Mars-One project, which is gathering resources and volunteers for a one way trip to Mars.  (I'm fascinated by this, and want to find out more and write about this.)

Or at least South Dakota.  (This is an actual ad for South Dakota, based on the interest for Mars One.)