“Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition”

Though it’s a textbook for early learning professionals, “Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition” ($62 in paperback from The National Association for the Education of Young Children, naeyc.org; also for Amazon Kindle) is a comprehensive guide of interest to parents as well.

Edited by Alicia Haupt, Brittany Massare, Jennifer Nizer, Manjula Paul, and Louis Valenti, the key first chapter, “Health and Safety for Children and Early Childhood Educators,” is co-written by Shaun-Adrián Choflá, Butte College Child Development instructor. 

Choflá, with expertise in empathy therapy, and co-author Julia Luckenbill, Adult Educator/Director of the Parent Nursery School in Davis, flesh out key safety standards for early learning programs.

These standards, write Choflá and Luckenbill, are more than just physical safety practices but also embody emotional safety. For instance, how should educators choose books and other items for their classrooms? “First, partner with families. Engage in relationship planning by asking about the families’ needs, values, and wishes for their children. … Ask also for a list of key words and phrases in the families’ home languages. Setting up the classroom so that the walls and shelving reflect the people walking in for the first time is a wonderful way to support feelings of belonging….”

In addition, educators should remember that “not all families have traditional structures, so your handouts should avoid assuming that families are headed by a mother and a father.”

The authors also discuss the disruption caused by COVID-19. “As early learning programs closed,” they write, “educators lost their jobs and children were left without the in-person support that early learning settings provided, creating trauma and impacting young children’s mental health.” 

The chapter is concerned not only with trauma-informed care of children, but also the well-being of educators themselves and what early learning programs can do to foster the health of their employees (such providing substitutes and regular breaks).

Real-word vignettes throughout the chapter illustrate ways trained professionals can interact with children, like washing their hands with Dee, who is two; or how to bring children out of danger without alarming them.

This is a good guide to the good work done by educators who care for some of the most vulnerable among us.

“Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023”

Oroville teacher William (Bill) Jackson is also a professional magician, lover of theology, and now, a “reluctant poet.” 

“I never understood, nor enjoyed most poetry,” he writes. “So I never considered myself a poet … even while writing poems. However, I have always enjoyed words. I’m fascinated by how they can carry innumerable shades of meaning. … Each word is a seed containing a tree of human thought.” 

Those seeds blossom in “Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023” ($15 in paperback, independently published). Over 45 years, beginning after high school, Jackson penned words that capture a moment but open up into larger vistas, illuminating “who we all are, where we have been, and where we may go.”

Loosely organized into four “seasons,” Spring considers words, love, and lust, Summer is for shadows of light and dark, Fall contains “Treasured Ash” in poems for Paradise, and Winter heralds a journey toward “good grief.” “Grief,” the poet claims, “is not a rest along the way./ You’re not meant to live in despair./ Grief’s never meant to be a place to stay./ Grief is about continuing to care.”

The Appendix is a children’s story, with Jackson’s own sketches, called Mark & Cathy and the Meaning of Life, a tale about misfits who fit. 

The poet knows something fitting: “Darkness falls./ Yet, the sun miraculously rises bright./ Heaviness calls./ Yet, one is not so easily made light./ A secret:/ Gratitude defies gravity.” The poet is grateful for “Table Mountain Wildflowers” which “Tuck themselves in to the tune/ Of songbirds in the evening hours/ Serenading a stoic moon.”

Some poems here evoke smiles, others reflect deep theology. “Fear is/ A certain kind of faith/ In dark uncertainty./ Love is/ The certain kind of faith/ In light risen from adversity.” And: “No matter how logical or critical/ Love is personal, not political.” 

“Only an unchanging God can truly say ‘I AM,’” Jackson writes me. We, on the other hand, continue to change: “I’m a question waiting to form./ I’m an aging man unborn./ I’m becoming but never will be./ It’s only a stepping stone/ In what you call me.”

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870”

In 1833, John Brown married Mary Ann Day, just seventeen. In the first two decades of their marriage, writes Wilbert Phay, “she bore him thirteen children…. Of these, seven died in early childhood. Four of the children were taken by disease of some nature in one year. Two of her children, Oliver and Watson, were killed during the Harper’s Ferry episode.” 

Brown, drawn by the abolitionist movement, was increasingly absent from their North Elba home near Lake Placid. His “attempted seizure of the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry failed.” Found guilty of “treason, murder, and conspiracy” he was hanged December 2, 1859.

The family’s story is told in a 1969 Chico State master’s thesis by Wilbert L. Phay, who passed away in 2020, but not before giving permission to Chico-based ANCHR (Association for Northern California Historical Research) to republish his work and include historical photographs and additional essays from ANCHR members.

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870” ($19.95 in paperback from anchr.org and local book outlets) includes contributions from Josie Reifschneider-Smith, Ron Womack and Nancy Leek. 

In late 1864 Mary Brown “and her four surviving children arrived in Red Bluff” after an earlier encounter with a “rebel” wagon train on the Oregon Trail. But why Red Bluff, with its “Copperheads,” “its nucleus of pro-Southern sympathizers, the most ardent haters of her dead husband,” Phay writes, “and by association, herself, and her family”?

The book answers that question, and more. Others in Red Bluff built a small house for the family in 1865, so family life was complicated, made more so by the attacks of the Red Bluff Sentinel and defense by the Red Bluff Independent. Phay and the contributors create a compulsively readable narrative that makes the past live again. It’s essential reading.

The story continues to unfold. Reifschneider-Smith, ANCHR Publications Manager, has unearthed details about why the “rebel” wagon train was so hateful of Brown and his kin, some of whom are buried in the Paradise Cemetery; she will present her findings to the Paradise Genealogical Society, 1499 Wagstaff Road (530-762-7105) on Thursday, February 15, at 3:00 p.m.; the presentation is open to the public.

“The Queen And The Empress”

Red Bluff novelist William Wong Foey, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Chico State in 1973, mixes fact and fiction in his eighth novel. “The Queen And The Empress” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) traces the parallelism in the nineteenth century between two of the most powerful women in the world, Britain’s Queen Victoria and China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (“pronounced Tz’u-hsi”).

Both are cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking, headstrong, power-hungry rulers, one seeking to extend the reign of the Union Jack to ancient China, the other seeking to protect 400 million Chinese from British control by means of devious plots to upend the conciliatory tendencies of the governing regents and wrest power from them. The women have a grudging admiration for each other even as Cixi survives attempted assassination.

The story imagines two key meetings, the first at Buckingham Palace when Cixi is a mere teenage concubine of the emperor yet willing to tell Victoria (whom she is wont to call “Vicky”) where to stuff it. As the queen muses years later, the dowager “was only sixteen and was addressed as the concubine Yi at that time. ‘That young Chinese tart was strong-willed even then,’ mouthed Victoria softly.”

The second comes in 1897, at the celebration of the Queen’s sixty-year reign, when, in her private room, Victoria and Cixi duel with swords. Cixi accuses the queen of extorting Chinese silver and addicting the population to opium. The Queen replies that “our true ambition for the heathen countries we acquire is to fill their hearts and souls with God, and to be good Christians so the dark races can join civilized society. Think of us as the nurturing parents….”

Cixi wants nothing to do with the gwai los (“whites”) yet she has little choice as she schemes for power. The Empress Dowager works to modernize her country to push back the British threat, but as the twentieth-century dawns it becomes clear that monarchs around the world were becoming more like figureheads.

The two powerful women survived in a man’s world even as they mixed the personal and political at the cost of many lives. Foey’s fiction tells uncomfortable truths.