George Orwell and me

Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.

Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.” Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

il figlio adottivo di George Orwell parla del suo avventuroso e fragile padre

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

OLIVETTI

A magical typewriter brings healing, reconnection, and new friends to a hurting family. Olivetti, a silent but fully conscious typewriter, has been there since the beginning, living with parents Felix and Beatrice and their children, Ezra, Adalyn, Ernest, and Arlo, a “copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink.” Olivetti, who even took part in Felix’s proposal to Beatrice, watched playfulness and creativity grow as the children arrived, and he faithfully remembers every single word the people have typed. Then, longing to communicate, he watched the family suffer through Everything That Happened. Which is exactly what seventh grader Ernest is still trying to forget. Kirkus

una storia per ragazzini delle elementari che sembra molto carina

Judy Blume Forever

Suddenly Judy Blume is everywhere. Not that the author who carried so many of us through adolescence is ever far from our minds; she tends to be my personal Jiminy Cricket, a gentle conscience asking the same question of every sentence I type: Is it honest?

But now, the creator of “Superfudge,” “Deenie,” “The Pain and the Great One” and so many other beloved novels is having her biggest week since “In the Unlikely Event” came out in 2015. “Judy Blume Forever,” a documentary about her life, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the movie version of her 52-year-old novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” came out on Friday.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. Adam Begley, The Atlantic

bel ritratto dello scrittore. E anche, come è nata l'idea dei libri per bambini, Choose Your Own Adventure Books:

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them? Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Tatum O’Neal

Amazing as Tatum is in this performance, and iconic and penetrating as the film may be, the blockbuster slips into the same old car chase, between the same old cops and robbers. It’s all about stuntmen doing the fancy driving. And yet, Paper Moon has the face, neck, shoulders, hair, subtle morphing expressions, and very punchy attitude of Tatum O’Neal—and it has therefore held up beautifully. Later in life, Tatum would appear for a few seconds now and then on camera between points up in the stands watching her husband, John McEnroe, play tennis at Wimbledon, and she would leave the same sort of indelible impression—by virtue of her gaze and the mystery of her concentration. Jeremy Sigler, Tablet

Adorabile! L'articolo parla, però, soprattutto di Polly Platt, art director del film di Bogdanovich e anche sua ex moglie.

Inoltre:

Is Superman Circumcised? favourite to win Oddest book title of the year, Alison Flood, The Guardian

Do Fathers Matter?

Do Fathers Matter? è il titolo di un libro di Paul Raeburn, giornalista scientifico e padre di cinque figli (FS&G). Il punto del libro sta tutto nella domanda del titolo, la cui risposta in parta è ovvia - se non ci fossero i padri non esisteremmo - in parte molto complicata. Per es. "Raeburn’s book aims to dispel this uncertainty about fathers’ roles in their children’s lives. It turns out, for example, that, just as the healthfulness and mental state of a pregnant mother can influence her child’s health and wellness, a father’s health at the time of conception can affect his children’s health: stressed-out fathers tend to produce more stressed-out children". Joshua Rothman, newyorker.

Woman of Valor

Lihi Lapid, Woman of Valor (Gefen Publishing House). “I realized I have two women living inside of me. One is the donut from Hanukkah, and the other is the champagne from New Year’s. The champagne wants to party all night and the donut needs to wake up tomorrow for the kids. The donut wants the kids to eat only food that she made. And the champagne stopped on the way and bought cold pizza, because she didn’t have time.” 
Lihi Lapid ha 46 anni, è israeliana ed è la moglie del ministro delle finanze di Israele. Tiene una rubrica per Yediot Aharonot che parla di ricette e aneddoti di amore e bambini (un'idea che mi piace molto).  tablet.

Casebook

Mona Simpson, Casebook (Knopf): In the opening scene of Simpson’s new novel, Miles Adler-Hart is hiding under his parents’ bed. He’s trying to eavesdrop on his mother (“the Mims,” he calls her), convinced that she is having vital conversations with the moms of the other kids in his fourth-grade class to decide how much TV he will be allowed to watch. Instead, he stumbles into the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Their divorce and relationships with new partners are shown through the eyes of Miles, who snoops deep into his parents’ adult lives, but has limited understanding of what he discovers there. There’s warm humor and deep feeling in its portrayal of the vulnerability and messiness of family life. newyorker.

Parentology

Dalton Conley, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask (Simon & Schuster). Di lui  Rebecca Traister dice: "His name is Dalton Conley, and he’s a sociologist at New York University who’s taken his own fatherhood, put it in the blender with his professional interest in scientific inquiry, and produced “Parentology.” He characterizes his technique as the opposite of everything uptight, including “old-world parenting; traditional parenting; textbook parenting; tiger mothering; bringing up bébé.” He’s not into that ponderous, prescriptive stuff. His brand, he says, is more like “jazz parenting,” an “improvisational approach.” nyt.

L'ultimo libro di Sendak

L'ultimo libro di Maurice Sendak, My Brother's Book (HarperCollins), è uscito postumo lo scorso 5 febbraio. E' dedicato al fratello, Jack, morto nel 1995, scrittore per bambini e collaboratore di Maurice, e a Eugene Glynn, morto nel 2007, psicoanlista e compagno dello scrittore. Bruce Handy, di Vanity Fair, dice: "Is it possible for someone as beloved and as habitually honored as Maurice Sendak to be, at the same time, under-appreciated? His final book, the posthumous, just-published My Brother’s Book (available February 5th), makes me think yes. It’s not his best work, but what is? That’s the “curse” of having written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are when you were 35 and In the Night Kitchen when you were 42 and then living to be 83. But My Brother’s Book is a perfect coda to a singular career, a lovely and moving distillation. It’s also, as the title implies, Sendak’s most overtly personal book. It’s the work of a man facing loss and death who still had deep reservoirs of craft, imagination, and feeling from which to draw. It’s the work not of a great children’s author and illustrator but of a great writer and artist, period". vanityfair.

Dr. Seuss’s many hats

Random House Children's Books and Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced today the launch of the Hats Off to Dr. Seuss! campaign at the famed 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library in New York City. Inspired by the 75th anniversary of The 500 Hats of  Bartholomew Cubbins [il primo libro del Dr. Seuss], the yearlong celebration salutes the breadth of Dr. Seuss's work, not only the remarkable library of children's books he created, but also the span of his incredible career and legacy as a man who wore many hats: as an ad man, a political cartoonist, filmmaker, and a fine artist, to name a few. To celebrate this partnership there will be a brand new exhibit featuring Dr. Seuss's personal hats which have left his legendary, secret "hat closet" for the first time. The exhibit will be on display in The New York Public Library's Children's Center at 42nd Street through February 11.

American Grown

Questa settimana escono i libri di due mogli "politiche":  Michelle Obama, American Grown (Crown), sull'orto organico della Casa Bianca, e Carole Geithner, moglie del Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, If Only (Scholastic Press), su una ragazzina "navigating a landscape of adolescent awkwardness in the wake of her mother’s death."  newyorkdailynews

Charlotte's Web compie 60 anni

White nel suo studio in Maine

White had loved Maine since early childhood, when his family began spending a glorious month there every summer, in part to discourage his hay fever. Rustic cabins with their rusty screened windows, a canoe in dawn fog, sun-warmed gray wooden docks, fishing from a boat while a moss-lidded bait can waited at his feet — the annual sojourns left such memories surrounded with a golden nostalgia White recalled all his life. ...

Often in his barn White stopped to admire the artistry of a particular spider, and one evening he watched her spin an egg sac in a web over the doorway. When she didn’t return during the next few nights, he cut down the sac, which seemed to be woven of peach-colored cotton candy, and took it along in a small box to his New York apartment. Eventually tiny air holes in the box served as escape hatches for hundreds of spiderlings who then drifted around the room on silken filaments. Michael Sims, nytbr.

The Snowy Day

A proposito di neve... The Snowy Day è il titolo di un bel libretto per bambini di Ezra Jack Keats (Viking). E' uscito 50 anni fa ed è un libro importante, perché è stato uno dei primi a rappresentare un bambino africano-americano, senza metterlo in caricatura. "One morning many years ago, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow. Peter is the hero of the classic children's book by Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day, which turns 50 this year. Peter has a red snowsuit, a stick just right for knocking snow off of trees, and a snowball in his pocket. And, though this is never mentioned in the text, Peter is African-American.

'It wasn't important. It wasn't the point,' Deborah Pope tells. ... Pope is the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. 'The point is that this is a beautiful book about a child's encounter with snow, and the wonder of it,' Pope says. Peter was among the first non-caricatured African-Americans to be featured in a major children's book. But Pope says Keats - who was white - wasn't necessarily trying to make a statement about race when he created Peter." npr.

I Love Pigs

I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent. I think I like them more than I like little human boys. The prospect of drawing pigs was something I could look forward to, and I needed something to look forward to. E' Maurice Sendak che parla del suo nuovo libro per bambini, Bumble-Ardy (HarperCollins). theparisreview.

L'orco cattivo

Norton Juster e Jules Feiffer, The Odious Ogre (Scholastic). Juster, un archetetto, e Feiffer, il noto disegnatore di comic strips hanno collaborato a scrivere e illustrare questo delizioso (e terrificante, a seconda dell'età da cui lo si legge) libretto, da regalare assolutamente a Natale.

Idiot's Books

E' una piccola casa editrice di libri per bambini, fondata da Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, ex graphic designers, che la gestiscono dalla loro casa di campagna in Maryland. "There they live, work and raise two children. Swanson writes and Behr illustrates, and together they distribute their snide, satirical works through a bimonthly subscription service. (Titles include The Baby Is Disappointing, a sarcastic paean to parenting, and Facial Features of French Explorers, a microanalysis of the craniofacial quirks of adventurers like Samuel de Champlain.) They also maintain a blog about their lives." papercuts.