Michael Morpurgo : War Horse (Movie Cover) : Read the Book; Then Go See the Movie!

War Horse(Movie Cover) [Paperback]

Michael Morpurgo (Author)

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“This is a beautiful story, well-written, engaging and lyrical. ” - Ben Kane

“This was a really interesting story with wonderful characters and it is something that will inspire a lot of people who read this book or see the movie. ” - agalli83

“This book is as wonderful for an adult as it is for a 10 year old boy. ” - A. Evans

In 1914, Joey, a beautiful bay-red foal with a distinctive cross on his nose, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer's son he left behind. Will he ever see his true master again?

Gr 5-8-Since he was a young colt, Joey has been loved and cared for by Albert, a young English farm boy. At the beginning of Wold War I, Albert's father sells Joey to a captain in the cavalry. The boy is devastated and promises Joey that someday he will find him. Joey experiences army life and the disastrous consequences of a cavalry charge into machine guns. He is captured as a prisoner of war and becomes a hospital cart transport horse for the German army. The he's used by the German soldiers to pull gun carts through the muddy trenches. Joey bolts after his friend Topflight dies. He ends up in no-man's land between the trenches. By a coin toss, he becomes again the property of the English. Joey is taken to a veterinary hospital where he is reunited with Albert. As the soldiers from both sides of the conflict share their thoughts and feelings with Joey, listeners get unique and perceptive views of World War I. John Keating's' different accents are pitch perfect as he draws listeners into the story (Scholastic, 1982) by Michael Morpurgo. An excellent choice for fans of historical fiction.

Samantha Larsen Hastings, Riverton Library, UT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Review

This is a very exciting and touching book. It really does a great job at grabbing your attention and keeping your attention right from the beginning. Once I started reading this book I quickly felt like I was emotionally invested in the characters and the horse. Great writing style and great character development. If you enjoyed this book you will really like The Navajo (Jake & Rusty). This book takes place during WWII and is very accurate. This is a great story of two soldiers travels that intertwine some great romantic encounters throughout their journey. I think this is a must read. - Walter Staes (New York)

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About the Author

Michael Morpurgo, OBE FKC AKC (born 5 October 1943) is an English author, poet, playwright and librettist, best known for his work in children's literature. He was the third Children's Laureate.

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THE KITE RUNNER By Khaled Hosseini

The Servant

By EDWARD HOWER

THIS powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Amir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan; then he is driven to school in the gleaming family Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house. Yet Hassan bears Amir no resentment and is, in fact, a loyal companion to the lonely boy, whose mother is dead and whose father, a rich businessman, is often preoccupied. Hassan protects the sensitive Amir from sadistic neighborhood bullies; in turn, Amir fascinates Hassan by reading him heroic Afghan folk tales. Then, during a kite-flying tournament that should be the triumph of Amir's young life, Hassan is brutalized by some upper-class teenagers. Amir's failure to defend his friend will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Hosseini's depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction between the nation's different ethnic groups. Amir's father, or Baba, personifies all that is reckless, courageous and arrogant in his dominant Pashtun tribe. He loves nothing better than watching the Afghan national pastime, buzkashi, in which galloping horsemen bloody one another as they compete to spear the carcass of a goat. Yet he is generous and tolerant enough to respect his son's artistic yearnings and to treat the lowly Hassan with great kindness, even arranging for an operation to mend the child's harelip.

As civil war begins to ravage the country, the teenage Amir and his father must flee for their lives. In California, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school; on weekends he sells secondhand goods at swap meets. Here too Hosseini provides lively descriptions, showing former professors and doctors socializing as they haggle with their customers over black velvet portraits of Elvis.

Despite their poverty, these exiled Afghans manage to keep alive their ancient standards of honor and pride. And even as Amir grows to manhood, settling comfortably into America and a happy marriage, his past shame continues to haunt him. He worries about Hassan and wonders what has happened to him back in Afghanistan.

The novel's canvas turns dark when Hosseini describes the suffering of his country under the tyranny of the Taliban, whom Amir encounters when he finally returns home, hoping to help Hassan and his family. The final third of the book is full of haunting images: a man, desperate to feed his children, trying to sell his artificial leg in the market; an adulterous couple stoned to death in a stadium during the halftime of a football match; a rouged young boy forced into prostitution, dancing the sort of steps once performed by an organ grinder's monkey.

When Amir meets his old nemesis, now a powerful Taliban official, the book descends into some plot twists better suited to a folk tale than a modern novel. But in the end we're won over by Amir's compassion and his determination to atone for his youthful cowardice.

In ''The Kite Runner,'' Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence -- forces that continue to threaten them even today.

Edward Hower's latest novel is ''A Garden of Demons.'' A former Fulbright lecturer in India, he teaches in the writing department of Ithaca College.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

ADAM CANFIELD, WATCH YOUR BACK! By Michael Winerip.

All the Principal’s Men

By RICH COHEN
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
Children Books: Pulished March 16, 2008


Life is not like high school. Life is like junior high school. Even high school is like junior high school. That is the real proving ground, the passage from elementary to upper, bliss to hell, where identities are fixed and alliances hammered into place. If you’re a kind of Columbus of the near at hand, wanting to map the world, there is nothing better to be than a reporter at a junior high newspaper, just like Adam Canfield, the hero of Michael Winerip’s new novel. Adam is the star reporter of The Slash, a paper named for the punctuation mark that so aptly describes the school as a place of painful transition: Harris Elementary/Middle School. Of course, Adam, having the body of a middle schooler but the soul of a reporter, likes to think the paper is in fact named for the verb, because the pens of his fellow newshounds “were so mighty, they slashed like swords through thick, swampy lies until they reached the truth.”

This is the story of a good, overachieving, overscheduled American boy, as imagined by Michael Winerip, a good overachieving American journalist (writes for The Times, won a Pulitzer). It opens with Adam walking the streets of his sleepy town on a snow day, shovel in hand, looking to make some cash. “The one nice thing about being the most overprogrammed middle-school kid in America was that doing nothing felt like a special treat,” Winerip writes. “Even shoveling snow seemed enjoyable.”

This episode ends with Adam getting mugged by high school bullies, who make off with 40 bucks and set the plot in motion. A half dozen subplots also play out, giving the book the classic structure of a newsroom drama, wherein each story — a report on a popular old tree that is to be felled; a poll on the school’s most feared bullies; an examination of a plan to gentrify the town’s last poor neighborhood — is pursued until The Slash goes to press. All else is postscript. In this, the book is organized like an episode of the old “Lou Grant” show. Of course, this is a junior high paper we’re talking about, one that semi-regularly outperforms the local newspapers, TV news, etc., so to some degree a willing suspension of disbelief is required.

In fact, now and then, too much so — the characters are seldom allowed to think the thoughts of kids, which are often trivial or cunning or even lowdown and dirty. They instead serve almost as pieces to be moved around to make points about life out here, in the world of adults. The book can seem a little too good for you — the jokes and fine writing like the sugar on the pill.

The novel is a sequel, second in a kind of Philip Marlowe series for the junior high set. At times, it takes on the tone of the old noirs: “They always wanted the big ones from him. Just once in his lousy life, couldn’t he do an easy story?” The series began with “Adam Canfield of The Slash,” in which Adam and other newsroom characters were introduced (Phoebe, the annoying third-grade phenom; Jennifer, his co-editor, Hepburn to Adam’s Tracy). Adam broke a series of stories, the biggest leading to the ejection of that queen bee of all youth-league bogeymen — the junior high principal. “Adam had caught her red-handed ... and once they printed it in The Slash, she was fired.”

With these books, Winerip has set himself a grand task. He does not seek merely to entertain or educate — he seeks to rescue the newspaperman, even to save the newspaper itself in the age of the freebie Web site and blog, by planting the image of the truth-seeking newshound deep in the mind of the next generation. (“Adam had his eyes shut, and Jennifer nudged him. ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered. ‘Unfortunately wide awake,’ he said. ‘It’s easier to spot the lies with my eyes closed.’”)

We see Adam experience the joys of the newsman, the perks that go with the job: the adventures, which are real, that compete with any chase on the far side of the wardrobe, and the occasional glimpse of the big picture that all little stories add up to: “Jennifer was quiet, finally. If this didn’t convince her Phoebe’s tree story was worth saving, nothing would. It was almost dark; they could still see their breath in the cold. Lights were coming on all over town. From up this high, they could spy the red lights of a cargo ship moving down the Tremble River and the green lights of buoys bobbing on the river and the boatyard all lit up.”

In short, the book is excellent — funny and charming, with occasional flashes of big-league beauty that are way more than its junior high school audience deserves, but let’s give it to them anyway.


Rich Cohen is the author of “Tough Jews” and “Sweet and Low: A Family Story.”

THE FUTURE OF LOVE By Shirley Abbott.

Brownstoners

By CLAIRE DEDERER
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
published March 16, 2008

Like most readers, I know too much about New York. I live on a mountaintop in Colorado, and yet I know that on the streets of Manhattan Maclaren baby strollers are becoming passé. How do I know this? Because New York pours into my house through newspapers, magazines and novels. That overexposure puts heavy demands on the author of the Manhattan novel. So many people know so much about New York life that each detail must be spot-on, note-perfect. Which is to say, I wish Shirley Abbott hadn’t set her wise, funny, generous first novel, “The Future of Love,” in New York.

Abbott, author of the celebrated memoir “The Bookmaker’s Daughter,” has assembled a multigenerational cast. Mark Adler has lost his job and found adulterous love with his child’s preschool teacher. His wife, Maggie, works as a book editor and worries about food additives. Maggie’s mom, Antonia, a former radical, is having an affair with Sam, a publishing executive. Sam’s wife, Edith, cloisters herself at the couple’s country estate, sexless as a nun. They’re all caught short by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Although everyone continues much as before, their major weaknesses have suddenly been exposed.

Both before and after 9/11, Abbott’s people pursue love and goodness in equal measure. They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around. They’re deeply, amusingly ethical about small things, especially when it comes to food: “With her, it was a moral imperative to be lactose intolerant,” observes Sam. Antonia, meanwhile, is baffled by the younger generation’s obsession with organic produce and environmental cleanliness, “this determination not to dirty up the world or be dirtied up by it.”

Antonia is by far the most interesting character. The perspective of this aging, widowed lefty is deeply idiosyncratic, whether she’s discovering AARP sex with Sam or marveling at what she calls her “strange green conservative” of a daughter. Antonia is real and fresh, believably surprising.

But when Abbott abandons Antonia’s perspective the novel is less convincing. Abbott’s younger people talk and think like old people — or like the younger people of a bygone era. The book opens with Mark sitting on a park bench admiring his 4-year-old daughter: “His little Toni was a picture in a dotted-Swiss sundress.” Dotted Swiss is a muslinlike fabric that was popular in the middle of the 20th century. It has been resurrected in the current fad for retro-chic children’s clothes, but it’s far from a common term, and I find it hard to believe that Toni’s 40-year-old father would know what it’s called. When I asked my husband, who’s roughly the same vintage, he thought dotted Swiss was something you’d eat for lunch.

Meanwhile, Toni’s mother, Maggie, worries about one of her authors, who’s nursing a cocaine habit. “ ‘Bolivian marching powder,’ he called it.” Couldn’t an editor have gently explained to Abbott that no one has used this term since Jay McInerney’s protagonist hoovered the stuff in “Bright Lights, Big City,” back in 1984?

I’m not teasing out a few isolated instances: these false notes and anachronisms abound. Good novels discipline us to recognize character through fine points. The form Abbott has chosen — the Manhattan comedy of manners — demands a constant supply of ruthlessly exact detail in order to place characters socially, economically and even emotionally. Abbott gets a lot right: She elegantly weaves together her lovers’ stories. She deftly pokes fun at what we call morality. She allows her characters to be both lovable and ugly. But it’s the truth in the details that gets away from her.


Claire Dederer is a contributor to the Arts & Leisure section of The Times.