Pure Grit - a review

Today is a perfect day to highlight Mary Cronk Farrell's latest book which chronicles the actions of Army and Navy nurses serving in the Phillipines during WWII.  Although amazingly, none of the nurses perished during their harrowing years on the forward battle lines and in prison camps, their service to their country and the fighting men was nothing short of heroic.

Farrell, Mary Cronk. 2014. Pure Grit: How American WWII Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific. New York: Abrams.

Pure Grit is a narrative nonfiction account, told with compelling human details. Photographs, quotes, correspondence, newspaper accounts, maps and military records were combined to create a gripping story that breathes new life into a little-known story that is fading from our collective memory.  Farrell was very fortunate to have interviewed the last surviving nurse of the seventy-nine who were taken as POWs by the Japanese.

Containing a Foreward, Introduction, Glossary, List of Nurses, Select Timeline, Endnotes, Bibliography, Web Sites for More Information, Acknowledgments, Image Credits and an exhaustive Index, Pure Grit could easily be considered a scholarly treatise on the topic — but Farrell has chosen to present her topic in a manner that simply cannot be ignored: a gripping story with personal and human details that will appeal to anyone over age 12 with even a passing interest in history.  Highly recommended.




Links of interest:

• Kirkus book review of Pure Grit
• An essay by Pure Grit author, Mary Cronk Farrell
• An interview with Mary Cronk Farrell
• Teacher's Guide for Pure Grit
• A history of Memorial Day as compiled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

As you enjoy today's kick-off to the summer season, perhaps celebrating with friends or family or enjoying a well-deserved day off from work, consider participating in the National Moment of Remembrance.

From the U.S. Dept. of Veteran's Affairs:

...in December 2000, the U.S. Congress passed and the president signed into law “The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” P.L. 106-579 ...

The National Moment of Remembrance encourages all Americans to pause wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of silence to remember and honor those who have died in service to the nation.

Urgency Emergency! Easy reader fun!

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you'll know that I'm not a fan of many beginning readers.  I am constantly frustrated by the lack of consistency in the labeling of beginning readers (the difficulty variation in similarly labeled levels is maddening), and discouraged by the insistence of some adults that children must choose a particularly numbered or labeled book regardless of whether or not it appeals to him.  That's why I so seldom review beginning readers. Of late, however, I do like many of Toon Books' offerings, Holiday House's I Like to Read series, and Eve Bunting's Frog and Friends series).

Now I have another series that makes me happy because it's funny in that dry sort of way in which the Brits are so accomplished - and it's leveled (see below), but not labeled.

Urgency Emergency! Big Bad Wolf
Urgency Emergency! Itsy Bitsy Spider
Dosh Archer, 2013
Albert Whitman & Company

The Urgency Emergency! series follows Doctor Glenda, Nurse Percy, and the patients they see each day in the emergency room.  Patients are the inhabitants of fractured folktales and nursery rhymes that should be familiar to most readers.

In Itsy Bitsy Spider, Itsy has a gash on her head that requires stitches.  How did it happen? We hear the report of a bystander,

"I don't know what happened," cried Miss Muffet. "I was just walking along when I found the spider lying in a puddle of water at the bottom of the waterspout." 

And the patient relates,

"The last thing I remember is a big whoosh of water rushing toward me."

But fear not! Everything turns out fine - even the weather,

Outside the sun had come out and dried up all the rain.

Nurse Percy and Doctor Glenda are the anchor characters of the series, and the straight man and woman in this fun and silly series.

48 pages, brightly-colored illustrations and limited text on each page, many double-spread paintings
Looking for reading levels?  Here they are:

Age Levels: 5-8, Grades: Kindergarten-3
CCR-RL.K,1,3.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10
RL.2.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10

UK version, Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2009

These are new to the US, but apparently at least one was published under a different title in the UK, Choking Wolf (Urgency Emergency).