The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dido:

Sorry, let me be clear: I find the "0thering" of the Jews in *The Singing Tree* to be profoundly troubling.

I wanted, as a child, to read that story as something that would never happen again. The starvation, the loss, the mutilation.

I looked at the date of publication (1939), I thought of their hope and how it was betrayed.

I honestly feel that this helped me understand what war was about.

@63 Epacris: it's "anti-semitic" in the sense that it buys into all the "Jewish" steryotypes there are.

It is, of course, heartbreaking in another way: it won a Newbery (Honor I believe) in 1939 and ended with a speech on how, now that people have been forced to learn, through the roughest methods, how much we are all alike, war is OVER.

In fact it ends (really) with the announcement of the formation of the UN.

Christ.

I first learned about WWI through Kate Seredey's wonderful follow-up to *The Good Master*, *The Singing Tree*, an account from the homefront of the war set in the Hungarian plains on a large farm. It is intensely anti-war, anti-semitic and still breathes the clear air of the agricultural life. There is no book that make me sob more voluminously.

At 11:01 (just after the wireless conked out) my almost entirely Dominican neighborhood exploded. I ran downstairs to just be out there (I'm not big on making noise myself). There are firecrackers going off, horns honking and through the sea of Spanish I hear over and over again, "OBAMA!"

We kept a copy of "Working" on our shelf "For Older Readers" all the years that I worked downstairs at the kid's book shop.

"Working" and "Nickeled and Dimed" made me proud of my working class background.

Requiescet in pace, Studs.

Oh yes, snow most definitely has a smell.

For me it's horses. The combination of sweat, hay and manure. Best smell in the world. I'm also fond of the laundromat smell, especially early in the morning.

@ 33 I didn't realize that a belief in the rule of law was now unpatriotic.

I take Jim and Lee's point that the principal of presumed innocence is hugely important and I like Lee's analogy with random drug testing but I also would like to point out that you are only innocent until proven guilty in LAW.

I don't think it's either unfair or unreasonable (or unpatriotic!) to use your brain to make judgements about people. I have made the judgement that Palin is corrupt, but that doesn't imply that I have any opinion about her guilt or innocence on any legal charge.

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