David KherdianRecensioni

Considered a classic Chinese novel of the 16th century. It is the story of a Buddhist monk, Tang Zang, who travels to India, by order of the Emperor, to worship the Buddha and bring back sacred texts. Tang Zang has four traveling companions, all fallen individuals who, by making this trip, are atoning for a sin and hoping for a better life (form) in the next life. From the critical reviews that I have read, the point of this novel is the travel toward enlightenment. The Chinese consider this an epic folktale. This book was 404 pages in length. When I had completed it, I discovered it was an abridged edition. Nowhere on the book did it say this was the case. The original version is 872 pages. I will not be rereading.

Beautiful illustrations.

"In this fictionalized autobiography of his mother, Kherdian tells of a little girl's joy in the food and family life in her close Turkish Armenian community, then the horrors and suffering that began when thousands of Armenians are rounded up and marched toward the desert where they were sure to die. A cholera epidemic took Veran's sisters and brothers en route; her mother gave up life after the death of the sons whom she had favored; her father was killed shortly afterward; and Veran spent her growing-up years with a succession of kind and unkind aunts, in an orphanage, and in hospitals after a Greek attack on her Turkish city blew off a chunk of her leg. Veran's early dreams of getting back to her grandmother were replaced by dreams of America, and as the book ends she is 15 and on her way--via a family-arranged marriage to the author's father, whom she has not yet seen. Kherdian well captures the voice of a basically optimistic and very likable young girl, and whether the scene is a garden picnic or mass death and panic at the harbor where everyone is fleeing the Turks, it is seen through her eyes and reported as if from vivid memory." www.kirkusreviews.com

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I really loved this book, the art is amazing. It's so beautiful, it was my favorite book.

Librería 7. Estante 3.

No wonder envy is considered on of the major seven sins in Christianity It could not only destroy others , but also destroy the person who has it, even from people who love you. A beautiful story about a loving king who takes care of his people , accidentally over hear a conversation between three women and immediately fell in love with one of them. Later in the story an evil plot is played , not because of anything, but being envious. However at the end the good prevail and the evil is destroyed. I believe this is a great book to teach children in both ELA and social studies about the concept of self acceptance and wanting the best for others, before we want the best for ourselves. When you want good to happen to people ,good will happen to you , even if it takes a while. However when someone become jealous and envious they are only destroying themselves at the end.

Nonny Hogrogian and David Kherdian are married and live in Oregon. They have worked separately and together. She is winner of multiple Caldecott Medals and he has been awarded a Newberry Honor.

The animal is an alien visitor who is introduced to planet Earth by various members of the animal kingdom who begin to see their own world with wonderment and awe.

MONO UN VIAJE HACIA EL OESTE

"Kung fu cósmico a la altura de la Guerra de las Galaxias!
El cuento de sabiduría favorito de los chinos, alegre y con todos
los ingredientes -incluyendo en este caso la brillante narración
de David Kherdian. Es encantador y absolutamente delicioso"
HUSTON SMITH, autor de The World's Religions
"David Kherdian cuenta una vez más la antigua alegoría china,
de una forma poética y precisa. En el marco de la tradición Zen
Taoista, Mono, quien representa nuestra inteligencia inquieta
--ayudado por graciosos y enérgicos demonios-guia al monje
maestro (el ego buscador) hacia el interior de uno mismo. Una
estupenda lectura!"

VAN DE WETERING, autor de A Glimpse of Nothingness
En parte una epopeya histórica y en parte una sátira social,
la leyenda china "Viaje al Oeste" también conocida como
"Las Aventuras del Rey Mono", es probablemente la obra
clásica más popular de la literatura asiática.

Escrita originalmente en el siglo XVI, la historia relata las
aventuras de un mono pícaro y travieso, y sus encuentros con
un reparto de extraños personajes, mientras viaja hacia la
India junto al peregrino budista Tripitaka en busca de las
Escrituras Sagradas. Más que una aventura picaresca, Mono
es una alegoría profunda que habla de la lucha que antecede
a una posible transformación espiritual. La excelente narración
de Kherdian anima a este clásico de la literatura china,
conservando al máximo la belleza y profundidad del original.

David Kherdian es autor de más de una treintena de obras
de diversos estilos literarios (ficción, poesía, realismo o literatura
infantil). Ha obtenido los prestigiosos galardones Newbery
Honor Book Award,

The story of the author's mother as a young girl and her journey through Turkey as an Armenian refugee, and finally to America.
The pacing is a bit uneven, but the story is an important one, I think, and so worth the read.

This book was an interesting read. It reminded me of a fairytale and I was very interested in seeing what was going to happen. It almost read like a story of what would happen after Cinderella married her prince and her step sisters became jealous and sabotaged her marriage. It was a good book!

The Golden Bracelet is an Armenian folktale about an unconventional love between to people of separate classes. Despite the girl being very against marrying the Prince Haig because he hasn't mastered a craft she ends up marrying him anyway. He became a prisoner and weaves a quilt made of gold with a bracelet so his queen could find him. She finds him and they live happily ever after.

Fun retelling of the Monkey legend. Gives us a hint of how to break through the "normal" and into the "real."

This book is about teamwork and tells a story about how important the moon is to animals and how much they rely on each other.

David Kherdian comes home to Racine, WI, and to his boyhood in ROOT RIVER RETURN. It's a mix of poetry and short essays, a combination I find particularly appealing, separated into sections. David's poems have an intense honesty as he tries to establish his own identity. Is he Armenian or American? Neither? Both? His parents don't want him to forget his Armenian roots, and while David rebels against being labeled as such and attempts to block out what they try to help him understand about their own pasts, he's also not comfortable with being "Steven"—the American name his teachers have given him, taken from Stepan.

He is embarrassed by his parents ("filling the American landscape with their old / country ways, making us yearn desperately / for what we imagined the "American" kids / we chummed with had"). He resents school ("The best part of school / was the window I looked / out of . . ."). He desires freedom but is not quite sure what that is.

Yet, some of my favorite pieces are about trying to reconcile his childhood emotions and memories of his family with the true and complicated people they really were: "Baseball and Father"; "Uncle Jack"; "In Father's Garden"; "Histories"; "1950"; "Root River"; "Private Bakaian." And despite his academic and behavioral struggles, there are a few good school memories, too, poems such as "The Art of Kindergarten" and "Dear Mrs. McKinney of the Sixth Grade" and essays like "Mr. Huber."

David is most at home by the water. It centers him ("For the calm of the lake was in us" and "But what I liked about water was that it helped me to dream. I could follow Root River with my imagination and let it take me to all the places of the world I had never been . . ."). He asks questions of the water. He finds answers.

But the brilliance of this collection is more than the subjects he chooses. It's in the words he chooses that place us not only in Racine with him, but speak to our hearts about our own misgivings and misunderstandings, wonderings and wanderings: "the held breath of grace"; "older, quieter sun"; "youth-wounded." As a bonus, his cover is graced by the work of Nonny Hogrogian, his artist wife.

David invites you to "come now and add your / incense to the hour." I encourage you to do so.

Available from Beech Hill Publishing.http://www.beechhillpublishingcompany.com/new-books-1.html

The Golden Bracelet is an Armenian folktale about unconventional love between two souls of different classes. Noble Prince Haig has fallen in love with a peasant named Anahid after coming across her on his ride near the country side. She asks him a question which increases his attraction towards her. She is not one to be lured by fame and wealth. The only requirement that she requests is for her lover to possess a skill in some craft. The prince goes on to attain a craft in order to gain her hand in marriage. Later, his friend gets thrown in a dungeon by an evil sourcerer. In an attempt to find his friend, Prince Haig becomes a prisoner and weaves a magnificent quilt made of gold with a bracelet for his queen to find him. She discovers his whereabouts and arrests the sourcerer. They live happily ever after as king and queen of the land. I have mixed feelings about this story. First off, the King and Queen would never allow their son or daughter to marry someone that is of a lower class than they are much less associate with them. On the other hand, I like how the story interweaves hope and despair, as in an oxymoron, that has an end result of love conquering all things.

On the homefront, I'm schooling my youngest child in 11th grade. We decided that we'd read some books together--who says you can't curl up on the couch and read in high school? Lillian and I finished The Road From Home, a Newbery Award Winner about the Armenian Holocaust in Turkey. We're studying the 20th Century, and she'd never heard about the Armenian Holocaust.

This is the memoir of Veron, a young girl growing up in Turkey before World War I with her family. As the war approached, the Turks rounded up the Armenians and marched them into the desert. This is mostly from the Armenian viewpoint, but it does bring out the fact that the Armenians were the political enemies of the Turks and Germans during the war. If your child has learned about the Trail of Tears, then they should be able to handle this book. It is geared to a middle school/high school audience. There is tragedy, but she survives.

The big idea in this story was about friends, and helping each other. To me, this story exemplifies the traditional bedtime story. The plot was simple, calm, and I felt a sense of relaxation while reading. The illustrations were subtle and used calming, neutral colors. The characters were not super developed, because there were a lot of different animals that each added something different to the story. No one character was the whole focus, but each was relatable. The dialogue and text remained simple and calm following the pattern of the other textual aspects. The use of repetition of some dialogue like, “Where did it go?” helped create a predictable book that children would enjoy reading along with. I enjoyed this simple story, and would recommend it to anyone as a good bedtime story to get a child ready for sleep.

This is well put together book to read to kids. The book teaches kids kids the value of being humble and the torment of jealously.

David Kherdian’s LIVING IN QUIET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is an intriguing collection with images from his childhood, early days of marriage, reflections about his parents and Armenian customs, his nine years in a spiritual farming community, and more. Each section reveals something about who David is as a person and as a poet. The poems for his wife, Nonny Hogrogian, artist (the cover is one of her woodcuts), sparkle with self-discovery. “Getting Married” made me smile with its innocence and joy and anticipation of the future. The words for his parents, particularly those for his father, contain tortured memories of not understanding how unbearably difficult it was for them to begin a new life in America, living through bombings by the Turks, forced from their homeland during the Armenian Genocide. His years on the farm bring him a peace that I feel he had not known before that, a peace and an awareness of life’s blessings… “O if I could only be to bird and animal / red tractor or green / And come with them at will / across this vibrant, mysterious land / Rejoicing in the food / revealed by each turning tread / And they secure in the halo of my love / this is all I would of holiness be…” My favorite, though, are his growing-up poems. David recalls happenings with intimate detail, remembering what those experiences were like, but adding his now adult perspective: “He was the first person I had ever / known to die. We were maybe / eight years old, and we hadn’t the / feelings to go with the event.” He talks of “The rag and tin man / on his horse-driven cart / and the excited fireman’s / clang clang clang” and of the river and mulberry trees, the grocery store lady, birthday parties, fishing and friends. Two of his best are the poems “Dear Mrs. McKinney of the Sixth Grade” and “The Art of Kindergarten” where a first report card “had come on rose colored crepe paper.” Who could not love a description such as “...written carefully in a feminine— / and this was important—practiced hand, / delineating all the things I had done in / that class: put on galoshes alone, good / at going down the slide, can shovel sand / into a pail…”

David Kherdian notes that “We are known by what we remember, / what we noticed. / Each poet must find his own objects / in the sun.” I know this poet better by what he has remembered and, as one of his lines says, that makes me “just happy as grass.”

To order the book and learn more about this extraordinary writer, visit http://www.davidkherdian.com.

I read this book before spending the holidays with my parents. This book is billed as the Chinese version of The Odyssey. I remember my parents talking about different stories from the epic A Journey to the West when I was younger. This version is just a portion of that long classic covering the Monkey King's pilgrimage accompanying a Buddhist monk as he travels from China to India to bring the holy scriptures back to China. On the journey they encounter many challenges and obstacles and the Monkey King uses cunning and physical agility on his trials. Although the original was written centuries ago, I found this edition very readable and enjoyable.

This story is about a Sultan that goes in his kingdom and helps three peasant women looking for husbands. The youngest one he marries, and later on they get married and have a baby. Her sister's were so jealous that they put the baby in a basket down a river, and did they same thing the second time they tried to have a baby. The Sultan and new Queen were deeply hurt by this. But their children grew up and eventually found their way back home to their parents.

After birth, Farizad was put into a stream by her jealous sisters. She was found by a kind gardener. Farizad was sent to find a talking bird, singing tree, and the water of gold by an old woman while she was working alone in the garden. The old woman convinced Farizad that she could not go on living without these three things. After finding all of these things, Farizad was united with her brother Farid and the Sultan. The Queen was saved and united with her two loving children, while the evil sisters were turned to stone.½

Somewhat weird and typical Chinese tale filled with dragons, gods, magic abilities and all that sort of stuff. The story is about Monkey who travels with a priest to collect some scriptures. Almost every little thing also carries some fancy name (mountains, caves...). It is a fast read (which is good), but the story wasn't all that great. The copy I've read was the Dutch translation of the English version of the story...

I LOVE this book. It's very funny in a dry sort of way (which I like, but this really depends on what kind of humor you enjoy), plus it's a great adventure story and extremely interesting from a historical and also a religious/philosophical viewpoint.