Calvin and Jackie Adams: Celebrating 60 Years of Marriage
On March 4, 1961, Calvin Dale Adams and Jane Jacqueline Seay exchanged marriage vows in South Mills, NC. Their enduring love and commitment have been an inspiration to their children, grandchildren and great children. Congratulations and much love to you both on your diamond anniversary.
Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because they use offensive racial imagery, said the business that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel. After Tuesday’s announcement, Seuss book sales soared on Amazon, and debate renewed over how to handle classic children’s books that have negative, stereotyped depictions of minority groups.
The titles: “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), and “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950), as well as “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
Before he became a giant of children’s lit, Geisel drew political cartoons for a New York-based newspaper, PM, from 1941 to 1943. Some used harmful stereotypes to caricature Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Decades later, he said he was embarrassed by the cartoons, which he said were “full of snap judgments that every political cartoonist has to make.” (NYT, Variety)
How much did sales of kids’ and YA e-books rise last year, the first pandemic year? By 70.5%, says the Association of American Publishers. Overall sales were flat from 2019. (Shelf Awareness)
Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is back in the novel “Blood Grove” — and he’s the center of another TV series. It’s been tried before, by USA and NBC. Amblin Television’s series, set in 1950s L.A., “will honor the great traditions of storytelling in the detective genre, while also exploring the racial inequalities and social injustice experienced by Black people and other people of color,” Deadline reported. (Via Shelf Awareness)
The Supremes’ Mary Wilson,
who died Feb. 8, wrote three books over the years, crediting her 12th grade English teacher with inspiring her to become a writer. “Mr. Boone” had said that
“if I wanted to graduate and sing with ‘that little group,’
I’d better pass his class,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “For my senior essay, I wrote a heartfelt paper about my life up to that point. Mr. Boone asked to speak with me privately. I was convinced he was going to fail me. Instead, he said he was moved by my writing and that the paper was fabulous. He gave me an A with plus signs all over the page.” (Shelf Awareness)
New and recent
Stephen King, “Later,”
From
his third installment through Hard Case Crime
(272 pp.). Here, a teenager named Jamie can see dead people. “The short, to-thepoint chapters make for quick reading, the crime-driven plot is propulsive, involving guns, drugs, bombs and kidnapping, but, more importantly, some of the lines just take your breath away,” writes Stephen Graham Jones. (Washington Post)
From Kazuo Ishiguro, “Klara and the Sun” (Knopf, 320 pp.). In this, his first novel since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017, Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android purchased to give a dying teenager companionship. Reviewer Ron Charles writes, “Why young people would need artificial companionship is one of the chilling questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental,” not as visceral as in his “Never Let Me Go.” The “real power” of the novel, he writes, is “Ishiguro’s ability to embrace a whole web of moral concerns about how we navigate technological advancements, environmental degradation and economic challenges even while dealing with the unalterable fact that we still die.” (Washington Post)
Also: Isabel Allende’s memoir, “The Soul of a Woman” ... Sister Souljah, “Life After Death” … Russell Banks, “Foregone” … Eric Berger, “Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched Spacex.”