Jon C. Stott

A sort of encyclopedia, with entries, each about two pages long, on genres and (mostly) artists and illustrators arranged alphabetically. Good as far as it goes, but can't convey much information in two pages (I have full books about many of the authors covered here) and can't achieve anything near adequacy, let alone completeness, in 300 pages. I have a book more than twice this size merely listing award winning books and their authors. The book has a strong American bias, covering the show more Caldecott and Newbery awards but not the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie awards; and despite being published in Canada in 1984, does not cover then-emerging authors like Gordon Korman and Robert Munsch, who were both already highly popular and important authors, having published some of their best work by 1980. And yet Dennis Lee gets in - even in 1984 one could tell he lacks the staying power of these two indefatigable stalwarts. The book is highly inconsistent in its approach to literature in translation. I could understand omitting important authors like Tove Jansson (Moomins) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking) if it was a hard and fast rule that only authors writing in English would be included, but random entries on de Brunhoff (Babar), Collodi, and others leave me wondering what the criteria actually were. Authors from the USA and Britain, and from Canada, are found here. There were, however, no writers from Australia or New Zealand that I could find. Margaret Mahy's name leapt to mind, and she was already a Carnegie winner (1982) and author of a Greenaway medal book (1969) as well as other awards, but is not found here. And leaving out Holling Clancy Holling, who was American, is inexplicable.

I think this book, although subtitled "A Guide for Parents and Teachers", is actually more suitable for students in a course on children's literature who need to be able to look up specific people and topics in a reference book to supplement their professor's lecture. Especially if their lecturer was Professor Stott, because my own professor of children's literature at University of Wisconsin would have chosen different authors and topics for inclusion. show less

Review of title story, Why I Live at the P.O.
I’ve long known Eudora Welty was an important name in US literature (she won a Pulitzer), so was glad to sample one of her most anthologised works for The Short Story Club.

It portrays a middle class Mississippi family, presumably around 1940. It’s told by a young woman referred to as Sister. She's broadly content, living at home with her parents and grandfather, and running the post office - until her younger sister turns up. Stella-Rondo has show more left her husband and her unexpected return opens old wounds across the whole family.
“She's always had anything in the world she wanted and then she'd throw it away.”

That could be interesting. I believe it’s meant to be humorous. It didn't engage or amuse me. The closest was this line:
“So I merely slammed the door behind me and went down and made some green-tomato pickle. Somebody had to do it”.
I (almost) wish I’d done some ironing (see Origin, below) instead of reading it.

Image: A pile of items to iron (Source)

Clearly, Sister is resentful and harbours grudges, so the fact everyone in her family seems so irredeemably horrid has to be taken with a pinch of salt. But she's no better herself. They're all utterly awful and it’s all too ludicrously puerile. I don’t mind reading about nasty people; sometimes I positively enjoy it. But they have to be interesting and believable.

Origin - and an alternative

Welty was a photographer as well as a writer. She had the idea for this story when she saw and photographed a woman ironing at the back of a Mississippi post office. It was first published in 1941 in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories.

In the group, my saying that I prefer ironing to this story prompted Leonard to share another short story, I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen. It portrays very different family stresses, but there’s love in it, and it was brilliantly written. See my review HERE.

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

7.0/10

While I acknowledge Welty's skill at painting accurately, both time and place, these are not portraits that engender anything in me but mild annoyance. The characters grate on me, like a mixture of chalk and cheese.

I did some cursory research about the
author, and apparently he is a retired college professor from the
University of Alberta who now lives in Edmonton. He has written a few
books, mostly about literature, but one about independent baseball
leagues.

He opens the book telling how he was visiting his daughter in
Albuquerque in 1994, and after telling her that he missed hockey, was
surprised when his daughter told him there was a local team. He went
to a Scorpions game and was intrigued enough to want show more to investigate
hockey in the American South.

The first major section of the book follows the author as he spends
one week with four teams in four leagues:
(1) Roanoke Valley Vipers - UHL (now masquerading as the IHL) – even
though he was there in early November of the team's only season, it's
obvious how the franchise was doomed to fail, and some comments made
by interview subjects are incredibly ironic with the hindsight we now
have
(2) Odessa Jackalopes - CHL
(3) South Carolina Stingrays – ECHL
(4) Fayetteville FireAntz – SPHL

He interviewed a number of people in each city, ranging from coaches,
players, family members of both, fans, owners, arena personnel, front
office employees, and media, among others. Some of his
behind-the-scenes insights are fresh, but some are pretty standard for
hockey, Southern or no.

The second half of the book breaks down Southern minor league hockey
by league and timeframe, in five chunks of time ranging from
1988-2005, going over league developments – expansions, contractions,
mergers, etc. A glaring mistake (for me) was that he had the
Renegades entering the ECHL a year later than they actually did, which
had me wondering how many other factual errors there were. An
appendix in the next section listed each minor-league pro franchise in
the United States and Canada from 1998-2005, and the dates for the
Renegades are correct there.

The book is on the slim side – only 220 pages counting the appendix,
bibliography, and index, plus a 20-page prefix and introduction.
Unlike most books in this genre, which either have no photos or only a
handful of photos printed on a few consecutive pages bound in or near
the middle, the photos (taken by the author – good, but not great
photos) are interspersed with the text, and most are really helpful in
illustrating issues or giving us a photo of a major character.
However, he also includes three photos of license plates (including
one he saw in a parking lot at a game and assumed was a hockey
reference), which I thought was overkill.

A few criticisms I have of the book:
(1) He never defines the cutoff line for being in the south, and his
analysis of leagues with Northern teams (whatever that cutoff is)
seemed pretty disjointed to me (and personally, I consider the U.S.
Southwest to be a different region from the South, while he lumps them
all together);
(2) He uses a cutoff date of 1998 to begin his analysis, which may be
because that's when the ECHL was formed, but he never says so which
makes it seem arbitrary, and with the exception of a few cities,
ignores those that had any prior history of ice hockey
(3) He says (way too often for my taste, since I know better) that
southern fans often come to the game only to watch the fights (or some
variation of that theme), and only when discussing Florida teams does
he allow that some Southern hockey fans may be transplants from the
north who have seen games before (and never does he allow for fans
having seen the game of TV or ::gasp:: coming from a Southern city
with a NHL team).
(4) One week with each of four teams wasn't enough time for a really
in-depth analysis IMHO, but I assume he had a limited budget and have
to give him credit for undertaking the project.
(5) He bought and read "Zamboni Rodeo" as part of his research for
this book and found it sad. Are you kidding me? Maybe if you are
unaware of the occasionally harsh realities of minor-league hockey,
you would find it sad, but everyone I know who read it (including me)
found it hilarious.

Overall, I found it worth reading, and I especially would recommend it
for anyone who wants a behind-the-scenes view of minor-league hockey.
I think it fills a niche not previously covered by other books about
the minor leagues, even the fine "Zamboni Rodeo" (which followed one
Southwest team over the course of a season), or Hockey Tonk and The
Louisiana IceGators Phenomenon (both of which were written by the team
or someone close to it, and while giving a good behind-the-scenes
view, suffer greatly from sycophantic "we are so great at everything
we do" syndrome), or "They Don't Play Hockey in Heaven," which follows
one man's dream to play pro hockey as he toils in the minors after a
near-death experience. However, unless you are not from the South,
prepare to see yourself (and other Southern hockey fans) stereotyped
as an ignorant redneck who likes to go to hockey games to see the
fights when a tractor pull or rodeo isn't in town. show less