Doolittle bombs Tokyo, farming cues from infographics, and learning strategies.
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, $35, 648 pp.)
Brush up on a famous name in Alameda history, Jimmy Doolittle, the MIT-educated and highly respected racing and stunt pilot who led the April 18, 1942, air raid on Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe in this substantive work of nonfiction that reads more like a Tom Clancy thriller than a straightforward military history. A daredevil and a highly intelligent engineer, Doolittle planned the attack, a one-way mission that entailed flying 16 B-25 bombers off the deck of the USS Hornet aircraft carrier to destroy Japanese targets, including factories, refineries, and dockyards. The only escape path was one into China. The author, a historian, is a former Nieman Fellow who lives in Charleston, S.C., and draws on new material from survivor interviews and previously unpublished archive records.
Homegrown: Illustrated Bites from Your Garden to Your Table by Heather Hardison (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2015, $16.95, 176 pp.)
If gardening, cooking, and cute illustrations are high on your list, then this is a little guidebook for you. The author, Heather Hardison, lives in Berkeley where she is an illustrator, sign painter, creator of the blog Illustrated Bites, and now (thanks to this book) magazine contributor. Her artistic style is primitive yet whimsical and fits hand-in-garden glove with her elemental narrative and hand-lettered infographics, which advance her philosophy of eating what you grow yourself on a seasonal basis. The book, an odd shape with a sturdy cover seemingly designed to repel a little garden dirt or liquid from a kitchen, is divided by season, going from planting to harvesting to cooking, and including 25 recipes. The back cover perhaps sums it up best: “Homegrown is your ultimate seasonal guide to eating from the ground up!”
Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America’s Schools by Tom Little and Katherine Ellison and foreword by Aylett Waldman (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, $26.95, 254 pp.)
Progressive education, according to this book, is a system that creates “engaged students, lifelong learners, and happy kids.” It represents the life’s work of Park Day School’s longtime director Tom Little, who died in 2013; the co-author is Katherine Ellison, an author and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. Little toured 45 progressive schools around the United States, collected data, and compiled his findings here on how they differ and excel, landing finally on six core strategies to characterize progressive education, the most radical being putting an end to testing. It’s heady stuff but a top-of-mind topic for parents grappling with what kind of teaching and learning fit their children’s needs.
