Monday, November 30, 2009

The True Gift

The way I was raised, the Christmas decorations don’t come out until after Thanksgiving — I’m talking to you, CVS — so I haven’t mentioned until now a book I was glad to have the chance to illustrate that came out in October, The True Gift: A Christmas Story, by Patricia MacLachlan. I did a cover painting for the book and eight pencil and graphite drawings for the interior. Here’s the School Library Journal review:

“Lily and her younger brother go to their grandparents’ farm for Christmas, as always. This year something is different; White Cow is the only animal in the field. Liam, certain that she is lonely, sacrifices his beloved books to buy her a calf companion, and Lily overcomes her fear of the large animal. The simple, elegant prose tells a warm family story with a classic holiday theme. Floca’s graphite and ebony pencil drawings are lush with evocative detail and perfectly complement this lovely offering.”

The drawings were done with a feeling similar to those in Avi’s Poppy books. It was nice to make drawings in that vein featuring people, something I haven’t had the chance to do before now for a book. On my web site there’s more about the book here and images from it here. Happy holidays!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Almost heaven, West Virginia

Tomorrow, schools in West Virginia will celebrate Read to Me Day, part of West Virginia Children’s Book Week. Each year for the past nine years Appalachian Power has chosen a book to read and donate to West Virginia schools as part of the day. This year, I learned from an out-of-the-blue e-mail several weeks ago, the selection is Moonshot. The book has had a lot of nice things happen to it this year, I’m grateful to say, but this is one of the nicest. 13,000 students will hear the book tomorrow. Incredible! I'm cranking up the John Denver. Thank you to Appalachian Power and to all the volunteer readers!

An article about the event is here.

11/20 EDIT: And a couple of photos from the day are here.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Countdown: Apollo 12



In the months leading to the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, I put up posts on the anniversaries of the missions that led to Apollo 11. The posting is a hard habit to break, and there’s no real reason to, anyway; the Apollo missions only became more ambitious and interesting as they went on. Which brings us to today, November 14th, the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12, flown by astronauts Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean.

When John Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon, he said nothing about what, if anything, would be done there. The idea was to demonstrate American ambition and ability, to wrest the mantle of leadership back from the Soviets, who at the time of Kennedy’s announcement were logging victory after victory in the nascent space race. And so for some, the Apollo 11 mission was enough, thank you. The point was made. But for NASA landing was just the beginning; real goals of science and exploration had been woven into the Apollo program by the engineers and scientists who planned it. As their experience and abilities grew, so did the ambitions and potential of Apollo.

Consider that Apollo 11 touched down a full four miles from its intended landing site. In the months that followed, systems for navigating the moon were so improved that Conrad and Bean were assigned an incredibly precise target for their landing. They were to set down their LM, Intrepid, within walking distance of an unmanned probe that had been sent to the moon a year and a half earlier, Surveyor 3. True to their task, the astronauts landed within 600 feet of the probe. During two space walks that added up to seven hours walking on the lunar surface (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had spent two and a half hours on the surface in one walk), Conrad and Bean, in addition to other experiments, collected material from the Surveyor probe to see how it had been effected by exposure to space.

Beyond the science and accomplishments, there’s plenty else that makes the mission fascinating. Not least is that Apollo 12 was hit by lighting — twice — during liftoff. “What they had done, they realized later,” Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox write in Apollo: Race to the Moon, “was to launch a 363-foot lightning rod, with the equivalent of a copper wire in the form of a trail of ionized gases running all the way to the ground.” While the Saturn launch vehicle was undamaged, the astronauts spent a harrowing few moments (or it would have been harrowing for me, anyway) watching the electrical systems in the command module go haywire. As the mission teetered on the edge of an abort one of the flight controllers, John Aaron, realized which switch to throw to reset the system. An obscure switch, but Bean knew where to find it. The fix worked, and the mission continued. The lingering question from the strikes was whether the parachute deployment systems had been damaged, but that concern wasn’t allowed to interfere with continuing the mission. Andrew Chaikin writes in A Man on the Moon: “The rationale was simple: Conrad and his crew would be just as dead if the parachutes didn’t work now as they would be after coming back from the moon….”

EDIT: A nice bit about the lightning strike and how it was handled is on YouTube here.

And then there were the dynamics of the crew. Pete Conrad was an effusive, joyful astronaut. You can hear the excitement in his voice at the 1:20 mark (and elsewhere) in this video of the landing, when he first sees that mission planners have delivered Intrepid to the exact intended landing site. “Son of a gun!” “Amazing! Fanstastic!” Not being a particularly tall astronaut, as he climbed down from the LM to the moon he uttered: “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” In doing so he won a bet with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who had insisted to Conrad that NASA dictated to the astronauts what to say on landing. And Alan Bean, after Apollo 12 and service on Skylab, became a painter. You can visit his web site and see his work here. He recently collaborated with author Andrew Chaikin and editor Sharyn November on a beautiful book for young readers about the entire Apollo program, Mission Control: This is Apollo.

After the success of Apollo 12 — the parachutes were fine — NASA was primed to keep on with its goals of exploring and understanding the moon. The next mission was scheduled for April of the next year: Apollo 13.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Happy Birthday

to Robert Louis Stevenson, born today, 1850, or so says Garrison Keillor. I picked up Treasure Island a couple of years ago figuring to do some Duty, check a box, etc., but, oh, it’s fun. If you haven’t ever tried it, put it on your list. It’s the best heist movie you’ll ever read.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

A good week


I haven’t had too many good news weeks like the one I had this past week. First, while I was in Austin, the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List was announced, and it includes The Hinky-Pink, by Megan McDonald. This means good air time for the book in Texas libraries, which is great news. Second, Moonshot was selected for the 2009 New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing list, an honor I’m very glad for the book to have. Third, Moonshot was chosen for The New York Times 2009 Ten Best Illustrated Children’s Book list. (It looks like I picked the wrong weekend to put a vacation stop on my subscription.) Just yesterday I was listening to Adam Gopnik describe the selection process here and though I knew how it all turned out, it still made me anxious to hear it discussed, as though the panel members might yet change their minds. I think that means that this great news hasn’t quite sunk in. Thank you to the Texas and New York librarians (librarians from my native and adopted lands!) and to the committee at the Times!

Buzz



Here’s where I got to see Buzz Aldrin interviewed at the Texas Book Festival. (He was at the Festival with his new book, Magnificent Desolation.) I arrived late, the line literally stretched around the block, and I was sure I wouldn’t get in. But not only did I make it in the door, the reserved rows were being opened up by the time I was finally on scene and looking for a place to sit, and I ended up on the second row. Sometimes it pays to be late.