Notes From the Shire

A few years ago my wife and I were planning a trip to coastal Massachusetts. I had gotten her to agree to a detour to the Springfield Armory Museum in Springfield. She wasn’t unhappy about going, but she would not have elected to go of her own accord. While looking for other diversions along the travel route she recalled that the Emily Dickinson Museum was also in Massachusetts. Having majored in English and being a long-time Dickinson fan, she was pleased to find that the Museum is in Amherst, along the I-91 corridor, along the route to Springfield. It was settled. We were going.

I am not a poetry enthusiast and never really have been. There was a brief time in high school when I thought I was, but it didn’t last long. I was exposed to Dickinson in my high school American Literature class but was lucky enough to dodge the poetry bullet in college. Surprisingly, I was not at all down on visiting the Dickinson homestead. (Read More...)

Textbooks don't usually top the list of fun reading. Most of us can recall the dry prose and formal style from our high school and/or college textbooks, but few of us recall them fondly. This is a tragedy. The world is an interesting place and a lot of really amazing things have happened (and continue to happen). Fortunately, not all nonfiction writing is textbook-dull. These six exciting titles will entertain as well as smarten you up. (Read More...)

After a rocky try-out period in Detroit and Washington, no one was prepared for the rave reviews and the lines-around-the-block business that “Hello, Dolly!” received when it opened at the St. James Theatre in New York in January of 1964. The show won a record 10 Tony Awards and became the longest running musical in Broadway history until it was surpassed by “Fiddler on the Roof.” Carol Channing’s performance even eclipsed her memorable turn as Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” She would play Dolly Levi more than 5,000 times, winning a Tony over a formidable new star on Broadway -- Barbra Streisand, who would exact a sort of unintentional revenge five years later when she was cast over Channing as Dolly in an expensive and ill-fated movie adaptation. (Read more...)

If given the choice, few would name the snail as their favorite animal: neither fast nor vicious, the snail tends to be little else than a curiosity, a slimy acquaintance relegated to the garden. In Dashka Slater’s (The Sea Serpent and Me; Dangerously Ever After) picture book Escargot, however, one precocious snail hopes to leverage the species into the reader’s heart by confronting assumptions about snails as both reader and snail “race” to the end of the book.

Escargot meets readers at a mollusk’s eye level in its opening pages. (Read More...)

Some of us develop reading habits and patterns we may not originally realize we are forming. For me, I have only recently discovered in myself, over the past few years, a fascination with music biographies. (Read more...)

You do not want to get me thinking. When I do, I ask myself things like: “What is the most popular animal in children’s literature?” Like me, you might think cats and dogs followed by horses. But the fact that I have seen so many books with mice as the main character, or mice that serve a role in a story, is what got me thinking in the first place. While no scientific research has been completed, I would bet you a book or two that mice might just be it. (Read more...)