WORLD BOOK DAY GUEST BLOG - EMMA TAYLOR

Although kids have a short personal history to grow on, that doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate and learn about people and events that happened well before their time. Revolutions, inventors, Presidents, and more can be explored in these fun books that make history come alive.
Biographies
Offer these books to kids who want to learn about important people in history.

1. The Extraordinary Mark Twain: Written from a 13 year old’s perspective, this book shares the story of Mark Twain.
2. What’s the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?: Kids will enjoy this brief biography of the amazing Benjamin Franklin.
3. Where Was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May: This book offers a biography of Patrick Henry from planter to statesman.
4. Millie’s Book: Learn about First Lady Barbara Bush from the perspective of her dog, Millie.

American History
These books cover the Constitution, pilgrims, and much more for kids.

5. Kids Make History: Explore the lives of 20 children living in extraordinary times in Kids Make History.
6. George Washington’s Breakfast: George Washington Allen is a boy who wants to find out all he can about his namesake, including what he ate for breakfast.
7. Lewis and Clark and Me: This book tells the story of Lewis and Clark from Lewis’s dog Seaman’s perspective.
8. We the Kids: We the Kids makes the preamble to the Constitution fun for kids.
9. First Pet: This book discusses the pets of Presidents in the White House.
10. And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?: Find out the rest of Paul Revere’s story in this book.
11. The New York Public Library Amazing Women in American History: Kids can read about facts in American women in history in this book from the New York Public Library.
12. George vs. George: George vs. George shows both sides of the American Revolution.
13. The Crossing: The Crossing explains how George Washington saved the American Revolution.
14. So You Want to Be President?: In this book, kids will learn that anyone can be president.
15. Eating the Plates: This book teaches kids about food and manners for Pilgrims.
16. World War II for Kids: In this book, kids will find a history of World War II with activities.
17. 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet: Kids can meet important American heroes in this book.
18. How the States Got Their Shapes: Read this book to find out how the states became shaped the way they are.
19. My Senator and Me: My Senator and Me shares a dog’s eye view of Washington DC with Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
20. Seabird: Seabird, a carved ivory gull, shares the history of America at sea.
21. We Were There, Too!: Young people in US history share their stories in this book.
22. Children’s Encyclopedia of American History: Let kids look up information and browse through American history in this encyclopedia.
23. You Wouldn’t Want to Be at the Boston Tea Party!: This book brings the history of the Boston Tea Party alive.
24. Minn of the Mississippi: Minn, a young snapping turtle, tells the history of the Mississippi River Valley in Minn of the Mississippi.
25. The Civil War for Kids: Teach kids about the civil war in this activity book.
26. Who’s That Stepping on Plymouth Rock?: Find out how Plymouth Rock became so famous in this book from Jean Fritz.
27. The American Story: The American Story has 100 true tales from American history.
28. Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution: Jean Fritz and Tomie de Paola share an illustrated look at the writing of the Constitution.

World History

29. 100 Women Who Shaped World History: Check out this book that shares the lives of 100 women who are important to history.
30. You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Medieval Knight: Kids can see what life is like as a medieval knight in this book.
31. Pompeii…Buried Alive!: Young readers will be enticed by this book describing the natural disaster of the volcano in Pompeii.
32. King George: What Was His Problem?: This book shares the hilarious story of the American Revolution.
33. Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris: Theodosia’s book shares the history of pre-World War I England through its antiquities.
34. Two Miserable Presidents: Two Miserable Presidents tells the amazing, terrible, and true story of the Civil War.
35. Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George?: Kids can read about King George’s problems in this book.
36. Lives of Extraordinary Women: This book shares the lives of women rulers and rebels in history.
37. You Wouldn’t Want to Explore With Marco Polo: In this book, kids can read about exploring with Marco Polo.
38. The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau: Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s life is covered in this book.
39. Which Way to the Wild West?: This book points the way to the Wild West for kids.
40. Blockhead: This book takes a look at Fibonacci’s work.
41. 100 Men Who Shaped World History: Read this book o learn about 100 men who made history around the world.

Silly

42. Pop!: The Invention of Bubble Gum: Kids can read about the history of bubblegum in this book.
43. Who Cut the Cheese?: Who Cut the Cheese offers a cultural history of the fart.
44. The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle: Read this book about surprising inventions.
45. Hot Diggity Dog: Read about the history of the hot dog in the Hot Diggity Dog book.
46. Fart Proudly: Fart Proudly has fun Benjamin Franklin readings.
47. Poop Happened!: Sarah Albee’s book shares a history of the world through poop.
48. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things: Find out how things like Barbie and honeymoons were invented in this book.
49. Mistakes That Worked: The Tower of Pisa and more are discussed in this book about great mistakes.
50. The Story of Chocolate: Read The Story of Chocolate to find out how the sweet stuff was invented and how it’s made today.

THE COMPLETE LITERARY 007 - For Special Services by John Gardner

Gardner's second Bond novel was an improvement on the first, and the author seems much more comfortable with his version of James Bond - because of the success of his début Bond, Gardner must have been allowed a little more free reign with his narrative and it shows in the finished book. SPECTRE is back which helps connect the new Bond to the old. The book does get a little silly, though and if the inclusion of Blofeld's daughter running the new SPECTRE doesn't stretch credibility too much, then the addition of Felix Leiter's daughter does. The, - will they/won't they, sub-plot between Bond and his oldest friend's daughter is a little creepy too. Mind you, I should point out that Bond behaves like a true gentleman. Though he does have to fight off those little urges.

Fleming's Bond books often went over to the fantastic but they managed mostly to keep a certain edge of realism and even the most absurd events seemed plausible, but unfortunately this aspect is missing from Gardner's light-weight Bond.

The original UK blurb for the first edition read -

In For Special Services, Bond is on loan to the United States Government, his partner none other than the tough and beautiful Cedar, daughter of 007's old friend Felix Leiter. Their enemy? An old adversary, the legendary SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), has reappeared. Bond and Cedar find themselves in some deadly and terrifying situations - from skyjack to plunging elevator, from armies of killer ants in the Mid-West to horror on a private mono-rail - before they come face to face with the heir to Blofeld's iniquitous empire.

For Special Services is paced well and does give a far better hint of Fleming that the author's previous Bond book, but it still reads more like a novelization than a true novel - too many of the Bondian cliches are brought into the mix and many events in the book are variations on events in one or other of the James Bond movies. That's not to say it's a bad book, though - on the contrary the action is clearly described and there are many excellent scenes, Bond is also pretty consistent throughout and although still over reliant on the gadgets, he is something of the action man of old.

It doesn't come anywhere near Fleming, but it's an enjoyable enough book in its own right. Although by now it had become clear that the continuation Bond novels were coming at the character from the perspective of the movies rather than the original books.

The jacket boasted, ' Ian Fleming's Masterspy, James Bond in John Gardner's For Special Services'. Perhaps EON'S masterspy would have been more apropos.

Still the book opens brilliantly, keeps up the tension till the end and offers a lot of Bondian fun - pretty much all you could ask for, really. It is also worth noting that both of Gardner's Bond books thus far had great sounding, Bondian titles. But then most of Gardner's Bonds did. Well with the exception of the single most dreadful title for a Bond book ever - No Deals, Mr Bond. Perversely No Deals would prove to be one of Gardner's better Bond books but then that's something for another time...

James Bond will return:

11/22/63

Stephen King's new book is titled, 11/22/63 and deals with a man travelling back in time to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. Apparently the book is another massive 1,000 page tome.

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas,
President Kennedy died, and the world changed.

 If you had the chance to change history, would you?
 Would the consequences be worth it? 

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. 

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. 

11/22/63 will be on sale from 11/08/2011

Let's shoot a friggin western

I love Quentin Tarantino and I don't care what his detractors say. In my opinion Tarantino will again light up the world of cinema the way he did with Res Dogs, Pulp Fiction and to some extent Jackie Brown. His last big movie, Inglorious Bastards was fine in my opinion, very comic book and will in time attain its deserved classic status. So the news that Tarantino's next movie will be in my favourite genre, the western has got me foaming at the mouth.

Yeah, yeah - I'm a fanboy when it comes to Tarantino - so friggin shoot me.


"Quentin Tarantino has completed the script for his next movie... a spaghetti western. Not only that, but according to reports, the film will reunite him with Inglorious Basterds star Christopher Waltz."

It seems a given that Tarantino's influence will come from the Italian westerns of the 60's/70's rather than classic Hollywood. After all the ear-cutting scene from Res Dogs came directly from cult classic, Django and Tarantino has long talked up his love for exploitation cinema.

This is one to look forward to - let's hope it ain't too long.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JUDGE DREDD

Dredd, the second movie to be based on the Judge Dredd franchise has just wrapped shooting in Africa, and there are high hopes that this movie will make up for the 1995 movie which starred Sylvester Stallone and was directed by Danny Cannon.

Judge Dredd is perhaps the only British created comic book character that has the potential to rival franchises like Batman and Superman. I was there when the character debuted in 2000AD issue two, way back in 1977, Dredd then played second fiddle to Dan Dare, and I still pick up the Judge Dredd mag from time to time, and although the character has evolved through the decades he is still basically the same character we saw tearing down the futuristic streets of New York -yeah it was a future New York in the early days. Mega City One, had not even been thought of when the strip started.

And so if you're late to the party it matters now for here is the Archive with everything you need to know about the character in one concise hit.

MEET THE TOUGHEST LAWMAN OF THEN ALL...The first showing of Dredd, issue 2 of 2000AD, told us it was New York and the year was 2099 - a tarnished city where skyscrapers tower miles into the sky and small building like, for instance, The Empire State Building lay in ruins and now serve as hideouts for vicious criminals. Right from the start Dredd was the most popular strip in the comic and soon replaced the revamped Dan Dare as the main draw - Mega City one developed slowly and from very early issues the name New York was dropped and became America's Mega City and then simply, Mega City One.

The reason Dredd was the succcess Dan Dare was not seems obvious with hindsight - 2000AD was a new kind of comic and it's strips, very much initially influenced by the banned Action Comic, had a very 1970's grittiness to them, while Dare, although upgraded, was still stuck in the traditional space opera vibe. The readers were hungry for the violence of strips such as Flesh, Invasion and yes, Judge Dredd.

Dredd evolved from an idea for a comic strip by John Wagner for an extreme version of the Dirty Harry type character. Wagner had written various Dirty Harry-style "tough cop" stories for other titles, and suggested a character who took that concept to its logical extreme, imagining an ultra-violent lawman patrolling a future New York City with the power to administer instant justice. Mills had developed a horror strip called Judge Dread but abandoned the idea as unsuitable for the new comic; but the name, with the spelling modified to "Dredd" at the suggestion of sub-editor Kelvin Gosnell, was adopted by Wagner for his ultimate lawman. The judges were lawman who were able to instantly pass a verdict as to a perps guilt and also pass sentence there and then.

The Dredd character worked well in epic storylines, split across several month's worth of issues - and over the years there have been many, some that have even redesigned Dredd's world - two early examples were the Robot Wars and The Cursed Earth. The Robot Wars ran from issue 10 - 17 and featured a war between mankind and the robots that had been built to serve. The story was notable for its social commentary - The very first story in which the Judge Dredd series finally comes alive is the Robot Wars, where the parallels between the robots in the story and black slaves is made quite explicit. The Cursed Earth was even more ambitious is scope and ran from issues 61 - 85. When this strip finished its run Judge Dredd and the world he operated in would never be the same. Indeed the world depicted in the modern Judge Dredd strips was very much defined within the Cursed Earth storyline. It may have been knocked about a bit in future epics, such as The Apocalypse War but the feel was right here in The Cursed Earth.

The Cursed Earth was also notable for a lawsuit involving the publishers of 2000 AD, McDonalds, Burger King, and the Jolly Green Giant. Four episodes in the series, written by John Wagner and Jack Adrian, featured copyrighted characters without permission. One storyline depicted wars between rival gangs, headed by the Burger King and Ronald McDonald - including scenes of Ronald executing a gang member who spilled a milk shake. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the owners of these characters objected to the use of their trademarks and sued. Publishers IPC settled out of court, publishing a half-page retraction and agreeing never to reprint the offending episodes

Another point is that, unless we're talking about the Sly Stallone movie, Dredd never removes his helmet -
Dredd's entire face is never shown properly in the strip. This custom began as an unofficial guideline, but soon became a rule which artists were required to follow.

As John Wagner explained:

"It sums up the facelessness of justice − justice has no soul. So it isn't necessary for readers to see Dredd's face, and I don't want you to."

However, on very rare occasions Dredd's face has been shown in flashbacks to when he was a child, in pictures lacking in detail. In an early story in prog 8, Dredd is forced to remove his helmet and the other characters react as if he is disfigured, but Dredd's face was covered by a faux censorship sticker.






An aborted idea was to have Dredd as a non-white character. In Carlos Ezquerra's original design he drew Dredd with large lips, "to put a mystery as to his racial background.However not all of the artists who worked on the strip were told. As a result Mick McMahon spent four months drawing Dredd as a black man, while Brian Bolland and Ron Smith drew him as a white man.

<sup>For many years it became popular for readers to send in drawings of what they thought Dredd looked like - many of these had him terribly disfigured.


Over the years the Dredd series has matured and these days satire, both political and otherwise is ingrained in its DNA.

The WIKI gives us the following bio of Judge Dredd -</sup>  
Senior Judge Joseph Dredd and his brother Rico Dredd were cloned from the DNA of Chief Judge Fargo, the first chief judge, in 2066. Their growth was artificially accelerated so that they emerged with an apparent physiological age of 5, with all the appropriate knowledge for their age electronically implanted in their brains by computer during gestation. The name Dredd was chosen by the genetic scientist who created them, Morton Judd, to "instill fear in the population."

In 2070 they saw action for the first time during the Atomic Wars, when as cadets they were temporarily assigned the rank of full judge and sent to restore order to the panic-stricken streets. Distinguishing themselves, they were chosen to take part in assaulting the White House when the Justice Department deposed President Booth. They were fast-tracked through the Academy of Law, Joe graduating second in his class in 2079 (Rico came first) Later that year Joe was forced to arrest Rico for murder and corruption.

Joe Dredd excelled as a judge, rapidly gaining promotion to the rank of senior judge. Offered the opportunity to become chief judge in 2101, he declined, preferring to serve on the streets enforcing the law. On several different occasions he saved his city from conquest or complete destruction by powerful enemies, and in 2114 he almost single-handedly saved the world from being destroyed during the Fourth World War.
Although Dredd puts his duty to uphold the law above everything, this devotion is not blind loyalty. On two occasions (in 2099 and 2112) Dredd resigned from the force on points of principle, but both times returned to the fold. In 2113 Dredd insisted that the Justice Department gamble its very existence on a referendum to prove its legitimacy as a form of government.In 2116 he risked 20 years' imprisonment with hard labour when he challenged the policy of a chief judge which he was unable to support. In 2129 he threatened to resign to persuade another chief judge to change the city's harsh anti-mutant laws.

After over fifty years of active service, Dredd's career may be drawing to a close. In 2130 he was diagnosed with cancer, though it was said to be operable. In 2132 Dredd was appointed to the Council of Five, Mega-City One's highest governing body.

So that's it, a pretty rough guide but basically all you need to know - just remember, if you put Margaret Thatcher in a figure hugging leather suit, and gave her unanswerable power then you'd have Judge Dredd... Hey, come to think of it - maybe that's why he never takes his helmet off!

IAN RANKIN CLINT DEBUT

Ian Rankin, one of Britain's biggest-selling crime writers who sparked alarm and grief among his fans when he retired his hard-boiled policeman John Rebus, will this week make a foray into comic strip writing.

The Edinburgh-based novelist has written Someone Got to Eddie for the sixth edition of the UK magazine CLiNT, launched last year by Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar.


Rankin follows other high-profile names including Jonathan Ross, Stewart Lee and Frankie Boyle in writing for the magazine. Of course all this is assuming that the latest Clint magazine will get to the shops on time - the title, this short in its existence, has already seen its last two issues arriving late and it seems to have skipped a month somewhere along the line.

Rankin admitted he found the experience hard work and challenging. "If you're a novelist and you're used to working on your own, this is a very different mindset, it's a very different way of telling a story. It's all geared to the visual, it's all geared to you explaining to the artist what you want to show.

The novelist said comic books were an art form like any other. "I've been reading comics my entire life and I'm a great champion of them. I do think they are an aid to literacy which is especially important in high schools and with boys."


Rankin published 18 Rebus books, retiring him in 2007 in Exit Music. Since then he has made his first foray into the comic book genre when he wrote a comic book called Dark Entries featuring the established Hellblazer character John Constantine and – in Complaints – created a new character, Malcolm Fox, a cop who investigates cops.


A follow-up to that is due out this year but Rankin did not rule out a return of Rebus. "I know what he's doing, he's working for a cold case unit, staffed by retired detectives. He's still working as a quasi-detective."

eBook author 100,000 copies and counting

Amanda Hocking is just 26, and she's already making a killing as a best-selling author. But it's not the New York Times list she's topping, rather she is the number one e-book author in the Kindle store.
Hocking, who has self-published nine books, sells more than 100,000 copies of those texts every month, Novelr said. Her books range in price from $0.99-$2.99. All of her books are available in e-book form and paperback, Hocking said on her blog.

Novelr said the Kindle Store can be particularly lucrative, allowing authors to keep 70 percent of the profits. The traditional publishing model is the opposite of this: publishers generally take 70 percent, leaving the remaining 30 percent of sales to the author.

"There is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she's currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all her own," said a publisher cited in the Novelr piece.

But Hocking has never been traditionally published. She's only been self-publishing for about a year, too. Since she started selling her books last April, Hocking said she's sold more than 900,000 copies of nine different books.

Amazon isn't the only company to offer a self-publishing platform. Barnes & Noble launched PubIt this fall, but the terms aren't quite as competitive as Amazon's pricing. Authors get between 40 and 65 percent of the profits, depending on the book price. Borders' BookBrewer platform promises authors "95-100 percent of post-retailer royalties." Apple and Sony also offer self-publishing platforms for ebooks.

Earlier today, meanwhile, Random House announced that it will join the other "big six" publishers in adopting an agency model for e-books, paving the way for inclusion in the Apple iBookstore.