The Most Adorable (and Tasty) Star Trek Tribute EVER!

We interrupt our regular educational programming with the following announcement:

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT TODAY IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST STAR TREK EPISODE!!!!!!

Yikes!  I watched Star Trek as a child, and granted, that was 45 years ago, but still, somehow, it seems shocking....

But I've always loved Star Trek, especially the original series in all its cheesy and earnest glory.  My husband was more of a "Second Generation" guy (and, admittedly, the Borg is a great concept), but those characters never captured my heart the way James T. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu, and Chekov did.

Which is why I am so enraptured by this:

from Darla at Bakingdom.com, one of my new favorite blogs.

Can you believe she made the entire cast into cookies?  You can see them all up close on her post, along with details about her recipes and techniques involved in recreating everyone in flour, sugar, and butter.

Her entire site is filled with similarly creative pastries and other goodies.  Truly, her stuff is incredible.  I like to use food to enhance certain educational ideas and subject, like our Presidential Palate series of cooking a meal to represent the US Presidents, but I can't hold a candle to her when it comes to cookie- and cake-based tributes.

However, her tasty Star Trek reminders does make me think about incorporating watching some Star Trek into our 20th century history this year once we get to the 1960's.  The original series had a political agenda; Gene Roddenberry wanted it to support the anti-war, feminist, and pro-Civil Rights positions of the 60's counter culture.  And as I reported in an earlier post, actress Nichelle Nichols has a story of a chance encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., who called himself "the biggest Trekkie on the planet," and claimed that Star Trek gave people a concrete vision of how life could be if we were committed to equality and peace (well, not that there wasn't plenty of fighting in Star Wars, but the goals were always to forward peace).   The show was pretty radical for its time, especially with the racially-mixed crew and television's first scripted inter-racial kiss.

So maybe I can justify revisiting some of my favorite childhood memories for academic purposes!

Hanukkah Book Review: Two Books About the 1960's

Tonight is the last night of Hanukkah, so I thought I would end this series with a big shebang and review TWO books that deal with the same time period--the 1960's--but from very different perspectives.

The first book is Countdown by Deborah Wiles.  On one hand, this is a VERY middle school book, with the characters worrying about how they are viewed by their peers, how they get along with their siblings, who is their friend and who is not, whether or not they are interested in the opposite sex--and whether or not the opposite sex is interested back, all those sorts of things.  However, Wiles takes it to another level by setting all the action during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  The protagonist, Franny Chapman, thinks she has enough to worry about, what with her father being an Air Force Pilot stationed outside Washington, DC, her perfectionist mother, her uncle who is still reliving his World War II combat days, and her goody two-shoes brother who never tells a lie and wants to be an astronaut (not to mention a best friend who isn't acting too friendly and an intriguing boy who may or may not be a romantic interest).  But then nuclear warheads are discovered in Cuba, and Franny and her peers live in fear of atomic attack--on TOP of the usual early adolescent angst.

I think Wiles does an excellent job of conveying what it was like living through those scary and confusing times, especially as a child (where they were drilled in hiding under desks in case of nuclear attack....like that would make a difference!).  She also inserts all sorts of graphics from the days in questions--pictures, posters, song lyrics, protest signs, newspaper articles, and other similar items--to try to capture the essence of that unique time in American history.  The story line also touches on the civil rights movement and other political issues going on at that time.  Maybe one of the reasons she portrays the feelings of those times so well is that she herself lived through them as a daughter of a pilot stationed at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland during the early '60s.  In fact, she calls  Countdown a "documentary novel," and says it is the first of a trilogy she calls the Sixties Project, in which she tries to depict that decade in way that adolescents can really experience what it felt like to live through those times.

I was really impressed with this book.  I thought she was really successful in capturing the feel of the era in a way that today's young people could understand.  I can't wait to read the other books in this series, which are supposed to be set in 1966 and 1968.

Another potential Newbery book set during this decade is One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia. This book takes place during the summer of 1968, and focuses much more on the civil rights issues of the times.  The story is told by Delphine, one of three self-proclaimed "colored" sisters who have been sent from Brooklyn, NY to Oakland, CA to meet their mother, who abandoned the family when the youngest girl was an infant.   But when their mother refuses to deal with them, even when they come to her place in California, the girls spend the day in a Black Panther summer camp for raising revolutionaries--a far cry from their live in Brooklyn, where their father and grandmother coach them in how to be "good Negroes" and adapt as a minority in the majority white culture.   The sisters learn a lot about themselves, the politics of the times, the secret dynamics of their family, and even a bit about their mother during this summer that changes their lives.

Once again, I can't praise the author enough for how well she puts the reader in the shoes of a character that is facing issues that today's youth probably can't imagine.  She is also the only one of all the books I've review that deals with things from the perspective of an ethnic minority--a valuable input, especially for families like mine that are about as WASPy as you can get.  The protagonist is so honest, down-to-earth, responsible, non-victimy, and ultimately kind (if sometimes mis-informed) that I can't imagine people NOT falling in love with her.  And I really appreciate any book that reminds me what it is like to be a minority without making me feel guilty about it.

Both of these books are GREAT books for a middle school reader, and EXCELLENT resources when you are learning about the 1960's.  I recommend them not only for our children, but for ourselves as well.