THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608120170
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 72 lines
Mennonite elder Susan Yoder Ackerman, 50, is blessed with crisp photo-album recall.
``I grew up in Denbigh, knowing the itch of peach fuzz, the cut of an oyster shell on a sandy bare foot, the piney smell of the deep woods,'' she writes.
``On salty summer afternoons I clambered inside my father's milk truck, hunting among the clear ice chunks scattered over the glass milk bottles for one just the right size to cool my sweaty face and hands. I learned to swim off the sandbar in the salty Warwick River. And every now and then, when my friend Bunni and I were feeling brave, we would row a boat across to Mulberry Island and climb the rickety and forbidden lookout tower.''
Vivid as sun on water.
We readers are blessed with Susan Yoder Ackerman.
``My stories,'' she said on the phone from Newport News, ``are set in a specific place and time, but they address universal themes. The fact that they're true gives them a depth they wouldn't have if I had made them up. The book is my effort to keep the past speaking for itself.''
That book, The Flying Pie and Other Stories (Herald Press, 64 pp., $9.95), is a pristine collection of 14 simple tales, each making a moral point.
Gently.
Like the title story, about Susan's brother Buzzy, so quick to impress her with his superior store of information.
``Centripetal force - it keeps these pies glued to my hands,'' said Buzzy. ``See, I can even turn them upside down and if I keep them moving fast, they just stick right to my hands.'' He moved his arms in wider and bigger circles in the air. . . .
Lemon cream doom.
Ackerman lives in the old gray farmhouse built by her grandfather, but she has not been there from childhood. After earning a B.A. in English from the College of William and Mary, she taught elementary and high school in Virginia and North Carolina. Then she taught English in Africa for 10 years, meeting her husband Robby in Zaire and raising a family in Mauritania.
Now Ackerman teaches French at Hines Middle School in Newport News, and her children are well-traveled images of their parents: Ilse, a graduate student at Cornell, has studied rain forests in Brazil; Hans, a pre-med student at William and Mary, has worked with an AIDS consortium in Kenya; and Anje is a nursing student at Eastern Mennonite University.
``They are givers,'' Ackerman says of her kids.
As a teacher, she is sensitive to the social tumult of the times, in which the traditional nurturing family has become less the norm.
``Some children stay after school because there is nothing for them to go home to,'' Ackerman notes.``That's not confined to the poor. Sometimes welfare mothers are more at home than working ones.''
The essence of great style is simplicity, which marks this graceful collection of sharply remembered moments. It also marks New Hampshire poet Donald Hall's finest work. He is not only a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, but also of a Caldecott medal for his children's book, The Ox-Cart Man.
Now Hall's latest, When Willard Met Babe Ruth (Harcourt Brace, 48 pp., $16), evokes another era with the cheering economy of a candle in the dark.
Hall, a lifetime lover of baseball, manages to convey at once the durability of heroes, the camaraderie of sport and the continuity of generations in half a hundred elegantly framed pages.
When Babe Ruth got a raise in salary in 1931, somebody asked him how it felt to make more money than President Hoover. ``Why not? I had a better year than he did,'' said the Babe.
We should applaud, too, the welcome news that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich is reprinting 10 terrific young-adult sports novels of John R. Tunis (1889-1975), among them The Kid from Tomkinsville (278 pp, $14.95).
Others include Iron Duke, The Duke Decides and Rookie of the Year.
Golden, each one. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB