The Ultimate Get Away From It All 

William Pene du Bois' The Twenty-One Balloons 

No matter how many bookmarks I buy - and I buy them by the pack - I can never get my hands on one when I need it.  So I am very grateful to the individual(s) at my local public library for providing a consistent supply of different booklist bookmarks, conveniently located next to the self-checkout stations.

This past week's bookmarks featured a booklist on Microhistory: A Social History of Just One Thing.  Some of the books I've read: Kurlansky's Salt: A World History, Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, Barry's The Great Influenza, and Krakauer's Into the Wild. All great reads, and I'd recommend every one of them.  Others on the list I've yet to read, including Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester. 

Winchester's book caught my eye because it happens to be the setting for Pene du Bois The Twenty-One Balloons. What are the odds of reading a children's book set in Krakatoa (or even the fact that one exists) and then that very same week picking up a bookmark referencing that very place? It's like buying a new car that's bright blue and all of a sudden noticing that every other car on the road is bright blue also. I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon, or maybe not. I tend to over think.

Either way, the appearance of the word Krakatoa twice in the same week must be a portent (in the archaic sense), so here is today's review of William Pene du Bois' The Twenty-One Balloons.

Book #35: The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois (1947), illustrated by the author.  180 pages.

Professor William Waterman Sherman has spent the past forty years teaching mathematics in a school for boys in San Francisco, California, and at the beginning of the story is feeling every minute of those years. With the freedom of retirement looming on the horizon, Professor Sherman begins to take the necessary steps to fulfill a long simmering ambition of sailing the world in a balloon for one solid year. Alone.

The man wants his privacy.

Ballooning has been all the craze in the thirty years since the end of the Civil War, and Professor Sherman has been an avid follower of the sport. He joined the local Explorer's Club in San Francisco. He studied, planned, tested and retested various designs, finally settling on a variation of the plans of the great French balloonists Giffard and Nadar, and their balloons the Clou. and the Geant.  Sherman gave his design to the Higgin's Balloon Factory, and named the final product the Globe.

On August 15th, with little fanfare other than a small article in the back pages of the newspaper, Sherman set off on what he hoped would be a year-long journey across the globe, traveling where ever the winds might carry him. Alas, it was not to be, for on the seventh day the balloon was damaged by an errant seagull and the professor found himself stranded on a tropical island of a very special kind.

Krakatoa, a volcanic island located in the Sunda Strait of Indonesia.

And he wasn't alone.

When Sherman came to, he was greeted by a gentleman in a white morning suit wearing a white cork bowler.  After offering the badly sunburnt professor a similar suit of clothing, along with a set of cufflinks made from four diamonds the size of lima beans, he introduces himself as Mr. H., and explains that unknown to the outside world, the island is inhabited by a group of specially selected families, all of whom support themselves through the periodic sale of diamonds to other countries.

Discovered by a shipwrecked sailor, the diamond mines - truly wondrous to behold - are immense, and capable of supporting the families in opulent style for the rest of their lives. Mr. H takes the professor back to his own mansion, and informs him that he will now need to think of himself as a permanent guest of the island, since the families cannot risk disclosure by allowing him to leave.

During the next few days, the professor learns more of the history of the inhabitants and their manner of living, focusing on exotic architecture, foods, a novel calendar and the unusual education of their children.  The professor also adapts physically to the periodic disruptions of the surface of the island, the result of underground volcanic activities.

When queried by Sherman as to an exit plan in the event of a volcanic eruption, the residents inform him of their plan.  Should an eruption threaten, they have constructed a huge raft, to be lifted skyward via balloons, that will carry them, along with a stock of diamonds, to other lands where they can resettle.  Not that they are particularly concerned; as they informed the professor, the volcano has been dormant for over 200 years, after all.

When Krakatoa erupts, everyone rushes to the balloon raft, and, after a harrowing near-failure to rise, escapes.  All save the professor have a parachute, so he is left to last on the raft, descending into the Atlantic Ocean, where he is eventually saved after being spotted by a passing freighter en route to New York City.

Back home, the professor is returned, with great fanfare, to San Francisco via the Presidential train, and, after being carried to the Explorer's Club and placed in a bed on stage, and recounts the above tale to a breathless audience. At the conclusion of his speech, the professor is asked about his future plans.  He replies that he intends to have another balloon built, a Globe the Second, a seagull resistant one, and spend a year floating around the world. And just how will he finance such an expedition?

With the sale of a single pair of cufflinks.



Balloons was a bit of a slow go at the beginning, but really picked up the pace once the professor took to the air.  I learned a great deal about ballooning, a topic on which I was totally ignorant, and of course that lead to a healthy dose of non-fiction reading up on the subject. Giffard and Nadar are real people, fascinating people, and they and their balloons were quite the sensation in their day.

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is well-documented, and resulted in the deaths of over 35,000 people. It was an event that was literally felt around the globe. For a brief history, go to this link at History.com.

21 Balloons turned out to be a fun read, and I can see older intermediate and middle-school kids enjoying the book. The author's writing style is more adult than geared for children - an example of an author who writes books that children can read versus an author who writes specifically for children. As far as the illustrations, they fit the tale, but I personally preferred his scenery versus his people, who came off as stiff and with slightly diabolical expressions. To each his own.

Like many older books, there are instances throughout the book that come off as dated/unfortunate. There is a scene involving a generic American Indian where the individual expresses himself in Hollywood Indian speak - easy enough to revise, and a reference to a Negro clown performing at the London Music Hall - again, easy to fix if the will/legalities are all in place. Penne du Bois died in1993. Hopefully whoever controls his estate would be open to the idea.

(I see that Amazon sells a 1986 edition of the book.  My version is older, so if anyone reading this has read this newer printing, I'd love to know if it includes any revisions.)


Link to The Twenty-One Balloons at Amazon.com.



William Pene Sherman du Bois was born in 1916 in Nutley, NJ but spent most of his life in France. He served in the army during World War II, and also served as a correspondent for Yank magazine. After the war, he continued to write and illustrate his own books, as well as illustrate books for other authors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edward Lear, and Rumer Godden.  He was the first art director for The Paris Review starting in 1953.

In 1948, he won the Newbery Medal for The Twenty-One Balloons, and was twice a runner-up as an illustrator for the Caldecott Medal.

Penne du Bois wrote or illustrated over twenty-five books during his lifetime.  As always, whenever I review one book by an author, I end up adding more books by the same author to my list of books that I want to read/review. It's a long list. Several that look particularly interesting to me here are The Lion, Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead  (part of an uncompleted series on the Seven Deadly Sins), Squirrel Hotel, and Gentleman Bear.

He died in 1993 at the age of 76 of a stroke in Nice, France.



Read his obituary in The New York Times


William Pene du Bois' papers at the New York Public Library.

William Pene du Bois' papers at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

A Full Moon, An Old Man, and a Dog

Tony Johnston's New England Ghost Story, The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe

A weathered New England farmhouse. A bleak winter’s night; a cold so deep and air so laden with moisture that your bones ache to their very marrow in protest, and not even the finest of down can offer relief. Under the pale, full moon, an old man lays dying, shuffling off his mortal coil at exactly the stroke of midnight.


In the morning, the grieving family hurries through the formalities of Christian burial, and the body of Nicholas Greebe is laid to rest under the thinnest of frozen soil.


But not for long.



New England + Supernatural to me always equals Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. A wealth of scholarly articles have been written about that particular tale, almost all of which I quit reading somewhere before the end. (Disclaimer-the minute someone other than the author starts to wax eloquent regarding the true meaning of any book, short story, poem, etc., I'm out of the room. I'll find my own meaning; thank you very much.) I first read the story in high school, a rare required reading assignment in that I actually enjoyed it, and the story, with all its pervasive sense of ominous foreboding and other-worldliness, has stayed with me ever since. A perfect capture in words of a time, a place, and a people, focusing on the private backrooms as opposed to the public parlor.



I am not, for even a minute, claiming that The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe is the younger set's equivalent of Young Goodman Brown. What I am saying is that Tony Johnston's text, combined with S.D. Schindler's illustrations - wonderful, fantastic illustrations - capture perfectly the mood and setting for a New England tale of the paranormal. And since this is the season for spirits and shadows and bumps in the night, I present…



Book #34: The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe (1996) by Tony Johnston; illustrated by S.D. Schindler. 32 pages.



Yankee farmer Nicholas Greebe, born in the year 1692, dies in his own bed an old man, at the precise stroke of midnight, and is buried the following day, a bone-shivering, brutally cold and damp winter morning. The ground was so frozen that the deceased remains were just barely covered, and marked by a marble headstone with the face of an angel (who just happens to wear a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles).



A year to the day later, during a party at his house where the departed man is toasted by his remaining family, a small dog escapes through the front door and begins to dig at the grave of Nicolas Greebe. His efforts are rewarded with the old man's thighbone, which, through a series of circumstances, travels from it rural resting place to a place on a whaler that sets sail to Alaska from Boston.Nicholas, furious at the loss of his bone, appears as a ghostly specter to his family in the midst of a holiday gathering and declares:

                                                       From this night forth

                                                       I quest, I quest,

                                                       till all my bones
                                                      
                                                        together rest.


All present run shrieking into the night, leaving the ghost of Nicolas Greebe in his house, along with his frightened widow.

Greebe proceeds to haunt the farm, and every year his specter appears in the parlor on the anniversary of the theft, repeating his determination to continue until his bones, once more, together rest.

These shenanigans continue for the next hundred years.

Meanwhile, his bone has been decorated with scrimshaw, survived a shipwreck, and been transformed into the handle of a satchel.  But not any satchel.  This satchel was purchased in far off Alaska, by a seaman who was a direct descendant of Greebe. Betrothed to a local girl, the seaman returns home to marry, on a night that is exactly one hundred years to the day that the bone was carried away by the family dog.

The family still has a dog, a dead ringer for the original canine, and this dog immediately goes to the satchel, and, while the family is busy celebrating, chews off the handle, carried it outside, and buries it in the grave of Nicholas Greebe.  His skeleton whole once again, the spectral Greebe appears before his startled descendants, declares his quest over, and is never seen again.

The same can be said for the face of the angel on his headstone. Visiting the sight of the old man's grave, visitors from that day forward saw a new, and unexplained carving where the angel had been. A small dog was now carved into the stone, and in his mouth, he held - a bone.


The End.



This is not a scary story, but it is a ghost story, and an excellent one for young audiences. Not all ghost stories are scary, after all. The illustrations of the colonial Massachusetts countryside and the wharf at Boston Harbor, the details of the clothing and Schindler's use of grey, brown and white as predominant colors creates a feeling of cold, damp and slightly antique. There is too much quirkiness in the expressions of the people for a reader to feel any type of apprehension, although if the text were used strictly for storytelling, the story could come off as significantly spookier. I read this aloud to my second and third graders and they thought it was just great.

So do I.


The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe at Amazon.com.


Tony Johnston has published over 100 books, over a vast range of subjects, with audiences ranging from Pre-K to YA, written in English, Spanish, and English/Spanish, collaborating with illustrators such as Tomie dePaola, Walter Tripp, Margot Tomes, Lillian Hoban, Leo Politi, Mark Teague, James E. Ransome, Barry Moser, Wendell Minor, Tony DiTerlizzi, Melissa Sweet, and more.

Born in 1942 and named after Tom Mix's horse, she taught grade school and worked as a editor for a number of years before beginning her writing career in 1972. Some of her other books are Five Little Foxes and the Snow (1977), Conchas y caracoles (1979), The Vanishing Pumpkin (1983), The Quilt Story (1985), The Soup Bone (1990), and Day of the Dead (1997).

Johnston and her family lived in Mexico for fifteen years.  In 1999, she adopted the Del Rey School in King City, California, her goal being to provide an ongoing source of classroom and library books.



Biography of Tony Johnston at Penguin Books, Inc.


Tony Johnston's Papers at the University of California, Fresno.



S.D. Schindler  at Encyclopedia.com.

A Rebel with a Cause Wins the 1928 Newbery Medal

 

Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon

In 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, establishing Indian and Pakistan as independent nations and marking the end of two hundred years of British rule. 

Dhan Gopal Mukerji, born into the Brahmin caste, didn't live to see his country free from Britain. But during his lifetime, Mukerji worked tirelessly not only for an independent India, but also as an ambassador of Indian culture and the Hindu religion through his writing and public appearances.  

Mukerji published a number of successful works, including poetry, plays, adults novels, and his autobiography Caste & Outcast, but his most famous book was a children's book, the subject of this review:

Book #33: Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon (1927) by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff. 191 pages.

This is not a book to be read quickly, or to read while distracted.

Mukerji is an exceptional writer, and his imagery is among the best in children's literature. Here is his description of wild geese on their journey to Ceylon:

By the way, are not geese the most ungainly birds when they are not flying or swimming? On the water they resemble dreams floating on pools of sleep...

Gay-Neck is a carrier pigeon, raised and trained by the book's narrator, a boy of fifteen born into a Brahmin priest caste family in pre-WWI Calcutta.  The art of domesticating pigeons goes back thousands of years in India, and is widely practiced from the most humble of homes to the most majestic of palaces.

Gay-Neck's father was a tumbler and his mother a carrier. Gay-Neck's name is Chitra-griva, meaning "painted in may colors" and "neck", hence Gay-Neck, or more formally "Iridescence-throated".

The beginning of the book is dedicated to the art of raising pigeons and the nature of their training in developing their sense of direction. The narrator describes the actions of the pigeons in detail, but never anthropomorphically. It is a fascinating account but only part of the larger story.

Gay-Neck is a novel of India, of the Himalayas, the lamaseries, the religions and a philosophy of life very different from the one held by most of its Western readers. The narrator relates his adventures in the jungle and the mountains with his friend Radja, also a young Brahmin priest, and the old hunter Ghond. And, of course, Gay-Neck.

At one point, Gay-Neck has a close brush with death, but is later healed of fear by a lama at a lamasery.  When Gay-Neck's owner inquired as to how this was done, the lama explained:

...that no animal, nor any man, is attacked and killed by an enemy until the latter succeeds in frightening him.  I have sen even rabbits escape hounds and foxes when they keep themselves free of fear. Fear clouds one's wits and paralyses one's nerve. He who allows himself to be frightened lets himself be killed.

The lama went on to explain since he has been without fear for over twenty years, whatever he touches, in this case Gay-Neck, will also become utterly fearless.

There are several chapters where Gay-Neck tells his story in his own words, including his recounting of his friendship with a family of Swifts, whose legs are close to nonexistent and claws little more than hooks, but whose saliva, when it hardens, creates a nearly indestructible nest.

Finally, the day comes when Gay-Neck, trained as a carrier pigeon, along with Ghond, goes to war with the British army in the battlefields of France. Both survive, in their final reconnaissance it is a feral dog that saves them, but both are broken by the experience.

Returning to India, both Ghond and Gay-Neck need to be healed from fear and hate. Ghond travels to a lamasery near Singalila, with Gay-Neck and his owner soon following. After a final adventure with a wild buffalo that had been attacking a nearby village and killing people, the two are healed.

In conclusion, Mukerji writes:

Whatever we think and feel will color what we say or do.  He who fears, even unconsciously, or has his least little dream tainted with hate, will inevitably, sooner or later, translate these two qualities into his action.  Therefore, my brothers, live courage, breathe courage, and give courage. Think and feel love so that you will be able to pour out of yourselves peace and serenity as naturally as a flower gives forth fragrance.

Peace be unto all!

As I stated at the beginning of this review, this is not a book to be read quickly, or when distracted.  I tried to read this book twice before, and was unsuccessful for both those reasons. One of the pitfalls of being a children's librarian is that we read so many books in shorthand, i.e., not really reading the entire book, but surveying its contents with a mental checklist that takes in writing style, characters, age appropriateness, subject matter, acceptably moderate to unacceptably excessive use of a soapbox by an author in a given story, and so on and so forth. Great for considering additions to the collection, bad for truly experiencing the story and the language.

To truly appreciate Mukerji's tale, you have to slow down, sit down, and focus. When I did that, I was entranced.  Hopefully, you will share the same experience, and pass it on to your students.

Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon was awarded the 1928 Newbery Medal, the first Asian-American title to win the award.

Gay-Neck: the Story of a Pigeon

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born in 1890 in a village near Calcutta.  His family were members of a Brahmin priest class, and at the age of fourteen entered the priesthood, after two years of living as a beggar as a traditional prerequisite. 

Less than a year into the priesthood, Mukerji realized that it was not the right choice for him and subsequently left the priesthood to attend school, first at the University of Calcutta and then at the University of Tokyo, a move that may have been prompted by his growing involvement in groups supporting Indian independence, and his family's desire to keep him safe.

Mukerji spent several years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became more involved in radical groups seeking social justice for society's marginalized populations, groups like the I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies. He then transferred to Stanford, earning a degree in 1914 and marrying fellow student Ethel Ray Dugan. They had one son.

Mukerji's last published work was Fierce Face - The Story of a Tiger published in 1936.  Mukerji died in 1936 in New York City, of suicide. He was forty-six years old.

Books by Dhan Gopal Mukerji at Project Gutenberg

Boris Artzybasheff at the Society of Illustrators

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