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| Authors help pilot international children's reading groups Michael Morpurgo and Frank Cottrell Boyce among writers working with discussion groups linking children in the UK with peers in China, Ghana, Egypt and PakistanAuthors including former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and the Carnegie medal-winning Frank Cottrell Boyce are taking part in a pilot project from the British Council that will link young readers in the UK with peers in China, Ghana, Egypt and Pakistan.The initiative is an extension of the Reading Agency's Chatterbooks project, a network of 500 UK reading groups that encourage children to read and talk about books. A link-up with the British Council's international school-linking programme Connecting Classrooms will see the project extended abroad, with schools in Sefton linking with schools in China and Ghana, Staffordshire schools with Egypt and Glasgow schools with Pakistan.Frank Cottrell Boyce's story of a pair of brothers who discover a bag full of money, Millions, will be one of the first books to be discussed by children, with other titles lined up including Michael Morpurgo's This Morning I Met a Whale, about a whale which swims up the Thames with an environmental message for a little boy."A group in Pakistan will be chatting with a group in Wigan, a group in Wigan can talk to one in Accra," said Cottrell Boyce. "I'm going to Beijing next year and I'll be going to talk to a Chinese Chatterbooks group there – it's marvellous ... It's vital that we support children to develop a love of reading worldwide, and through Chatterbooks and the British Council, young people will also gain an understanding of the world outside their communities and share ideas on global issues."Children will email their counterparts abroad about the books they are discussing, with letters and faxes to be sent in regions where internet connectivity is difficult. "We are also looking at setting up web chats with Michael and other writers," said Tricia Kings, senior project manager for Chatterbooks.The pilot will take three reading themes – climate change, migration and sport – and has put together lists of relevant books for schools to work with. The British Council is providing starter packs for all schools doing the trial to ensure children will have copies of at least two books on each theme, and the Reading Agency is also talking to publishers about the possibility of books being translated into different languages.Lauren Child's What Planet Are You From Clarice Bean? and Daniel Pennac's Eye of the Wolf have been selected for the climate change theme, Morris Gleitzman's Boy Overboard and Morpurgo's The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips for migration and Tom Palmer's footballing detective series Foul Play for sport.If the pilot, which launches later this month, is successful, the project will then be extended to other schools and countries. Olga Stanojlovic, head of schools in education at the British Council, said it would "use the power of literature to open young people's eyes to life in other countries and to different global perspectives". She added that "it will broaden pupils' and teachers' international horizons and help to prepare young people for life in a global society," she said.Children and teenagersEnglishAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
One Moment in Time The story of the 1968 Summer Olympics, when black American athletes took a stand. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Moon, Come to Earth by Philip Graham | Book review Philip Graham is a "cosy middle-class" American who drags his family with him wherever he goes, whether among mud huts in Africa or the dazzle, dirt and pork (yes, pork) of Lisbon. When he arrives in Portugal, his apartment "yowls" at him – he turns off the lights, an alarm goes off and everything starts flooding. Not a good start, but inanimate spaces, he argues, are real, resettling themselves at times of crisis – a rather nice, if slightly mad, explanation for why your broadband turns itself off just when you need it. Graham's writing is unobtrusive and gentle, and though he often employs irritating colloquialisms ("whodathunkit"), there is a pleasant luminosity that renders this little book of essays serene and enjoyable.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Tesco gives a little help to independent bookshop Supermarket points shoppers to Linghams in Wirral after manager complains about discounting to supermarket's chief executiveIt's no secret that, faced with cutthroat competition from the supermarkets and Amazon, independent booksellers are struggling to survive. But in a cheering tale of Goliath giving David a hand, Tesco this week agreed to help out a small independent bookshop after its manager appealed to the supermarket's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy.Eleanor Davies, who runs the Wirral-based independent bookshop Linghams, got in touch with Leahy after reading an interview in which he expressed guilt about forcing small shops out of business. A branch of Tesco is situated just across the road from Linghams and it's "a very big problem – people come in and say 'I saw that book for half price in Tesco'," Davies explained. "My husband was reading the article and said 'I bet he isn't really worried about small businesses – you should email him and see if he can put up an advert for you'."She found Leahy's email address after a quick internet search, and dropped him a line that day, laying out how her shop was struggling faced with Tesco's huge discounts on new titles. "I thought, there's nothing to be lost by trying," she said. "I pointed out that although our interests cross in many ways, we are far more specialist, and will track down difficult-to-find books for our customers. And our staff are really well-trained in books, so we are offering different things. Although we can't stop people buying books from Tesco, I said he could suggest that if they can't find what they want there, they could come to us."The very next day, she heard back from a regional manager who thought it was a "great idea", and the Heswall branch of Tesco now has three signs in its books section advising customers that a wider range of titles are available across the road in Linghams, where specialist booksellers are also on hand to advise. The 20-year-old independent bookseller stocks books across the genres, can get hold of titles it doesn't have within 24 hours, and runs a coffee bar, book club and poetry evening.Davies is hopeful about the effect the signs are having. "There are a lot of people who pick up books in Tesco who are impulse buyers, interested in the new Jackie Collins, and they might not think of an independent at all, so this is one way of reaching them," she said.But other struggling booksellers should not get their hopes up. A spokesman for Tesco said there were no plans to roll the promotion out to other branches of the supermarket. "It was a local decision taken at store level and there's no indication it will be happening elsewhere," he said.BooksellersTescoAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Guardian book club: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis For all its cleverness and sombre theme, this seems to me one of Amis's slighter works. Do you agree?When Time's Arrow was published in 1991 it received a few doubting reviews but many more that were extravagant in their praise. These were fulsome even by the standard of the critical love letters that are so often directed at Martin Amis. Rose Tremain said: "Time's Arrow turns the bored, banjaxed, broken-hearted old reader into a breathless, bedazzled young reader for whom the novel becomes once again a source of illumination and an act of hope." James Wood described the book as "a stunning achievement, perilous and daring". Time's Arrow also had the distinction – absurdly – of being the only novel by Amis Jnr to be nominated for the Booker prize.Now though, I suspect it is viewed as one of his lesser works. A search on Google, , brings up far fewer results (by a factor of at least 2:1) for reviews of Time's Arrow than for London Fields or The Information. (Money and Experience have even more results, but too many of those must be false positives). And, speaking personally, unlike other Amis books, I've never had much of an urge to read it. I always thought that the idea of a novel about the Holocaust told backwards, through the eyes of someone living inside the head of a Nazi war criminal, seemed like too much of a gimmick. Carrying it off successfully seemed quite a task, even for someone of Amis's prodigious talent. Now I have read it, I'm only more sure I was right.The war criminal in question is introduced to us, at the moment of his death, as an old man in the US. It is then that the nameless narrator emerges from darkness, trapped inside this newly revived man's head, a fully-formed separate intelligence. He immediately starts cracking jokes (then dissecting them with further displays of wit) and revelling in his own well-turned phrases, telling of nurse's uniforms making "a packety sound", "the quiet ambition of every homestead" and "a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes". In spite of his gorgeous eloquence and oh-so-smart banter, the narrator is confused. He has no control over the body he finds himself in, and doesn't understand why birds are singing strangely, or why everybody walks and speaks backwards."What is the – what is the sequence of the journey I am on? What are its rules?" Amis has him ask, clanging as many bells as he can for confused readers. The sequence is that the recently dead war criminal is living his life in rewind, from comfortable retirement in the north-east of the US, to a career as a hospital doctor (in which he gives money to patients for making them feel worse), to life as a fugitive, to Auschwitz, where he brings Jews back to life, reunites them with their families and sends them home.If it feels vaguely secondhand, that's because it is. In an afterword, Amis readily acknowledges inspiration from "a certain paragraph – a famous one – from Kurt Vonnegut". This must be the passage in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy Pilgrim watches a backwards-run film of the American planes scooping up bombs from Dresden and miraculously repairing the ruined city, before the bombs are sent back to a factory where all the dangerous contents of their cylinders are separated into harmless minerals. Where war becomes a process of redemption and healing, an unarguable point is made about the real thing's horror and idiocy.In Slaughterhouse-Five, this is a moment of power, an astonishing revelation – the Joycean epiphany familiar to anyone who has done practical criticism exams at A-level. In Time's Arrow, sadly, it just seems like a conceit stretched too far and too thin. We become aware that the Nazi doctor is going to heal his victims many pages before the climactic scenes at Auschwitz, so the point has been made long before we get to it. And far too many cracks have begun to show by this stage. Especially the problem that a witty and wise narrator fails to work out the obvious fact that time is moving backwards, and so continues expressing confusion until the end.Amis also repeats the same joke – that the world seems pretty odd when it's running backwards – again and again. New York cab-passengers often hang around on street corners for hours after they have been dropped off, marvelling at the efficiency with which they were initially picked up. Government workers go around dropping litter on the streets, while citizens collect it. Relationships are begun with break-up arguments … Because it's Amis, each joke is well-told, but the repetition soon grates.There are compensations. Other jokes are good. There's funny stuff about pooing backwards and a few good lines about lovers' tiffs being meaningless anyway ("But with this man-woman stuff you could run them anyway you like and still get no further…"). There's also a force to the uneasy fit of this blithe humour with the horror of the Holocaust. A horror that Amis succeeds in making all too vivid. But none of that is enough to stop this book feeling slight, to me. What do you think – did I get it wrong?Martin AmisFictionSam Jordisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |