synaptic chaos

Illusory

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead, hardcover, 208 pages, Wendy Lamb Books, list price: $15.99

I could wax on about wonderful books for teens, (E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is another great read), but let’s move on to an equally outstanding novel for middle-grade readers: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. Two different librarians — one school librarian and one who works in the public library and is herself the author of middle-grade children’s books — have both predicted that Stead’s book should win the Newbery Award, which is given annually by the Association for Library Service to Children “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” In any event, it should end up high on every critic’s best-of-the-year list. Really, it’s that good. It’s one of those all too few and far between novels that you want to reread as soon as you finish them, just to see how the author so successfully wrote a fantasy that feels completely real.

In 1979, 12-year-old Miranda and her best friend Sal are savvy New York kids. They know what’s safe to do, what places to avoid, and how to deal with the strange and bothersome homeless man on the corner of their street. But when Sal gets attacked — for no discernible reason — by one of their classmates, it kicks off a series of disturbing events: Miranda’s apartment key — carefully hidden — disappears, and she gets the first of a series of disturbing and mysterious notes, all of which have something to do with future events. Even as Miranda tries to figure out what’s going on, she has to deal with the realities of life: her crush on her classmate, Colin; her new friendship with Annemarie; and her dislike of Annemarie’s former best friend, Julie. And that’s leaving out the plot line about helping her mother practice to be a contestant on the television show The $20,000 Pyramid. Still, all these diverse strands come together in a most satisfactory way. Best of all, in addition to its thought-provoking plot and its realistic depiction of preteen experiences, When You Reach Me is a wonderful homage to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda’s favorite book.

I could wax on about wonderful books for teens, (E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is another great read), but let’s move on to an equally outstanding novel for middle-grade readers: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. Two different librarians — one school librarian and one who works in the public library and is herself the author of middle-grade children’s books — have both predicted that Stead’s book should win the Newbery Award, which is given annually by the Association for Library Service to Children “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” In any event, it should end up high on every critic’s best-of-the-year list. Really, it’s that good. It’s one of those all too few and far between novels that you want to reread as soon as you finish them, just to see how the author so successfully wrote a fantasy that feels completely real.

In 1979, 12-year-old Miranda and her best friend Sal are savvy New York kids. They know what’s safe to do, what places to avoid, and how to deal with the strange and bothersome homeless man on the corner of their street. But when Sal gets attacked — for no discernible reason — by one of their classmates, it kicks off a series of disturbing events: Miranda’s apartment key — carefully hidden — disappears, and she gets the first of a series of disturbing and mysterious notes, all of which have something to do with future events. Even as Miranda tries to figure out what’s going on, she has to deal with the realities of life: her crush on her classmate, Colin; her new friendship with Annemarie; and her dislike of Annemarie’s former best friend, Julie. And that’s leaving out the plot line about helping her mother practice to be a contestant on the television show The $20,000 Pyramid. Still, all these diverse strands come together in a most satisfactory way. Best of all, in addition to its thought-provoking plot and its realistic depiction of preteen experiences, When You Reach Me is a wonderful homage to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda’s favorite book.

Have I journeyed too far away
Lost in the distance traveled?
Has what held us close
Become tattered, torn and unraveled?
As I put one foot forward
My journey home is that much nearer.
Thoughts of your frienship
Making my purpose that much clearer.
Driven by this terrible pain in my chest,
Hellish flames will not detour my quest
To deliver a golden thread to mend
The finest tapestry called friend.

Knock, knock, knock.

Hands in her pockets, Life stands on Death’s doorstep.

Knock, knock, knock!

Still Death does not answer the door. Yet light streams from Death’s living room window. Curious, Life creeps through the bushes to Death’s window. She peers in. “That motherfucker IS home.” she whispers. Death is sitting at his desk with his back to the window. He is hovering over a ledger and checking off the names of people he had visited that day.

Disgusted and depressed, life walks home, sits down on the couch and turns on the television.

Luciano Rossetti / ECM Records

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity
Matt Miller

Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University

All Things Considered, February 26, 2009 · Scientists digging in a Kenyan desert have found what they believe to be the oldest humanlike footprints. Several individuals laid them down 1.5 million years ago in what was a muddy track.

The scientists discovered not just one set of footprints, but two. The second set was left about 1,000 years after the first set. “It’s incredible. I’ve never excavated anything like this before,” says team director John Harris of Rutgers University.

Reporting in this week’s issue of the journal Science, the anthropologists say the creatures that made the prints were probably Homo erectus. That’s believed to be a direct ancestor of modern humans, and one that appears to have been built much the way modern humans are.

“The prints match a men’s shoe size of about 9, which gives you a height of about 5 feet 9 inches,” says Brian Richmond of George Washington University, who was part of the excavation team. “Here, we have really compelling evidence that they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have, and the arch puts a spring in our step, which makes walking more efficient,” he says.

The region is rich with animal footprints as well, including antelopes, a form of zebra and birds. During the time the prints were made, the region was probably a river valley near a lake.

The evolution of an arch in the foot indicates a spring ligament in the foot, which increases the efficiency of walking by storing some of the energy from the falling weight of the walker in each step, and then returning it up the leg on the rebound. The big toe is also aligned with the other toes, something not found in earlier ancestors and other primates. Its large size is necessary to absorb the walker’s weight as the foot rolls forward and then lifts off the ground before the next step.

Harris says the area where these individuals lived was undergoing a drying period at the time the prints were made. Trees and water might have been growing scarce, so Homo erectus would have had to walk farther for water and food.

Dan Lieberman, an anthropologist at Harvard University, says the footprints confirm that the evolution of the foot was crucial to becoming human. For one thing, it allowed people to run.

“Imagine you are a Homo erectus and you are hungry,” he says. “And you want to kill something for dinner. The weapons available to you are incredibly primitive, so one thing early hominids might have included in their repertoire of hunting strategies was to run animals in the heat.”

Eventually, he says, the prey would collapse and could then be killed.

The scientific team will return to the site next summer. They say the first track ends at a small hill, and they expect to find more prints underneath the hill.

Gregory Bull, AP

“We were completely taken by surprise. We didn’t expect to find this massive funeral complex,” Salvador Guilliem, in charge of the site for the government’s archeology institute, said when the discovery was announced on Tuesday.

Historians think the Aztecs built Tlatelolco in the early 1300s along with the nearby city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and now the heart of Mexico City, which the Spanish founded after they conquered the Aztecs in 1521.

-Miguel Angel Gutierrez, Reuters

This makes me begin to wonder what archaeologists will discover about our civilization 700 years from now.