Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain't gonna study war no more"

War is such stupid, insane, and horrible shit. I felt this way as a kid in the '60s, watching the evening new reports from Vietnam. Back in those days of adolescence and assassinations, my emerging heroes were calling for us to "Make Love, Not War." I've felt these sentiments resurface time and again throughout my life as one crazy madman or faction or government after another (including my own country's government) starts gearing up to slaughter yet another group of people. And I'm especially feeling this way this morning after being bashed about by THE DIVINE WIND: A LOVE STORY.

Who thought up war anyway? Sometimes when I read books that have bullies in them--tales of contemporary times or slavery or the Civil Rights movement or even the Middle Ages--I'm convinced the nature of some portion of humankind has been and will always be that of lethal aggressor. It all reminds me of certain dairy goats I've owned and observed over the years, who spend their lives seemingly compelled to repeatedly and relentlessly put everybody else in their places. Fortunately, the goats' technology limits them to butting heads (or butting butts), so that the victim du jour--the weakest, the least aggressive, or the convenient scapegoat--need only endure discomfort long enough for the troublemaker to eventually get bored and hungry.

It seems that the causes of men's wars have always fallen into two categories: "You're different!" and "I say it's mine, not yours!"

The proposition that there's always been aggression against those who are different is adroitly portrayed by Jon Scieszka in "Homo...Sapiens?" his story of a Neanderthal-bashing party from the TOMORROWLAND collection:

" '...And what's with those big brows, flat heads, and bowed legs? I know chimps who walk a straighter line. That's not human.'
More uneasy shouts and murmurs.
'Did you hear what the Neanderthal said to the maggot chewing on the three-month-old mammoth carcass? You gonna finish that?'
A relieved burst of rowdy laughter...
'I think the only way to make it to the next Big Pile of Rocks is to get rid of the competition before they get rid of us. What do you think?'
The man raises his index finger once more.
'We're number one! We're number one! We're number one!' The chant builds again. A few men raise flaked, stone tipped spears. Others pound clubs. Someone twirls an ax murderously overhead..."

As for fighting over whose is whose, I have always been impressed by the passage that I first read many years ago near the beginning of Michner's ALASKA, in which a family of early people learn from their elder about the movement of mankind away from the hot and temperate climes as population pressures mounted: "And then once more, in the time of the Ancient One's great-great-great-grandmother, or even further back, competition for favorable sites recurred, but now it was the less able who were forced to move on, leaving the most fit to hold on to the temperate zones. This meant that in the Northern Hemisphere the subarctic areas began to be filled with people who had been evicted from the more congenial climates. Always the pressure came from the warmer lands to the south, and always it ended with people being forced to live on cold and arid lands which could barely support them."

Having always been overwhelmed by the complexity and contradictions of World War II, I am relieved to have been born a generation too late to have had to deal with it firsthand. At the same time, that complexity has long made World War II a topic about which I've read and been fascinated.

THE DIVINE WIND: A LOVE STORY is a tense and riveting read set on the northwest Australian coast at the dawn of the Second World War. I don't care that its fiction--I will be clenching my fists for days as I recall the results of the havoc wrecked by the insanity of the adult world upon the story's three young central characters: Hart, who narrates the story, his sister Alice, and Alice's best friend Mitsy Sennosuke--a girl of Japanese parents.

Before moving to California as a young man, I had never heard of the Japanese internment during World War II--nope, it wasn't ever mentioned in the history books they used back on the East Coast in my youth. So, I am not at all surprised to learn from THE DIVINE WIND that a similar "procedure" took place in Australia. Nor am I shocked by the manner in which the Australian white supremacists in the book treat individuals of the various nonwhite groups. But the way in which those prejudices and the War engulf the three young people and totally screw up what should have been their idyllic young lives brought me to the verge of utter despair as I read page after page of Hart's touching love story:

"I fell in love with Mitsy in the darkness of the tin-walled cinema in Sheba Lane, where cowboys roamed the range and airmen spies slipped away from foreign countries in the light of the moon, and great white hunters saved beautiful women from maddened rogue elephants.
"In the daylight, Mitsy was a separate being, slim and restless and full of jokes and mischief like Alice, but when the lights were dimmed and the screen glowed with lovers and heroes, she would grow quiet and still, and settle in her seat, and imperceptibly shift until her shoulder and knee touched mine. Alice, on the other side of her, would crane her head around and meet my gaze, but never say anything, or tease, just as Mitsy would never acknowledge the intimacy when the lights came on at the end but simply treat me as one of the gang again. I sometimes thought that I dreamed of her."

In stark contrast to the other white adult characters, Hart and Alice's father, Michael Penrose, is the one that I'd want to know. A complex, good-hearted guy who makes one awful mistake, he repeatedly stands up and speaks loudly for what is right. In addition, the colorful, multiethnic supporting cast is a lively crowd that had me smiling despite the horrors that they frequently bore the brunt of.

THE DIVINE WIND: A LOVE STORY takes us to a rugged and beautiful place at a tough time in history and introduces us to three young people who I hope are still out there somewhere--old and at peace.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com