It’s October 2022. GHOSTS UNVEILED! was published two years ago and got lost in the pandemic when schools were closed and bookstores had few visits. Talk about creepy and true….!!!
So….here I am sharing a video I made back then when we all were working from home. Follett Learning featured GHOSTS! on its “First Chapter Friday,” so I prepared a talk and recorded it from my desk .
I’m grateful to Follett for giving me a chance to talk about how I started to write this book, and then re-write a big chunk of it. Because, if you are in the writing business, you learn that a first draft is NEVER enough!
Believe it or not, we have passed Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and winter is coming…..
Nonetheless, with summer’s light and heat upon us, I’m sharing one of my favorite activities from Isaac Newton and Physics for Kids. “Power to the Parabola” explains a concept about the hand-sized reflecting telescope that Newton designed and built. Inside is a small concave mirror that captures light.
To illustrate the concept of how this mirror works, kids (and grownups) can build a small solar oven — and roast a marshmallow. Sunny days rule!
Ten years ago, I was working on Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists with Chicago Review Press. I’m giving several programs about these heroes this month to both young people and lifelong learners like me. (Read more here: https://kerriehollihan.com/books/reporting_under_fire/ )
Now comes a new title on a woman who bore witness to the Vietnam War. She was Catherine Leroy, whose name I’d encountered as I researched the American women I wrote about in Reporting Under Fire. Leroy, however, was French.
Today I posted a Goodreads review of this important book…..
Review: Closeup on War by Mary Cronk Farrell
Mary Cronk Farrell’s Closeup on War:The Story of Pioneering Photojournalist Catherine Leroy in Vietnam is a treasure for those who seek a deeply personal glimpse into the Vietnam War. It’s an excellent tool for junior high and high school educators to supplement their lessons.
Farrell’s narrative offers more than one lesson. Closeup on War focuses on combat overseas and how people at home got their news. It’s a chronicle of war and a history of journalism—both in the eyes of a young woman who from all appearances seemed unfit for the task.
At twenty-one, Catherine Leroy left her home in France for Saigon, soon to be armed with two cameras loaded with black and white film and not much more. Fifty years on, it seems almost incredible that a petite Frenchwoman could muscle her way as a freelance photographer in a war zone with no support from a news agency, newspaper, or broadcast network. But Leroy was one of a series of tough, goal-minded female journalists and photographers who worked their way into war zones from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Today, women reporters are far more prevalent—and, one could hope, accepted in the battle zones they cover and by the military officers on whom they rely.
There has been mention that much of Farrell’s book deals with small, daily matters of little import–asking for care packages from home, warm showers, and a good night’s sleep. But after researching and writing about such women across the twentieth century, I can vouch for those small moments in their lives. Thirty years ago, freelance journalist Janine di Giovanni treasured a bucket of warm water in a bombed-out Sarajevo hotel in Bosnia so she could wash her hair—this when she wrote about the young dead men whose bodies rotted in the “shimmering heat” on Gogo Brdo, Naked Hill.
Catherine Leroy did the same, savoring those short breaks of cleanliness and rest from hot, stinking work as a photographer alongside—embedded, we now say—soldiers engaged in ground combat. Among those fighting men, Leroy was a rare bird as she jumped from a C-129 cargo plane and parachuted into the fight. At one point she was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers but managed to shoot their images. She made heart-rending photos of civilians and refugees.
I was in high school when Catherine Leroy went to Vietnam. Farrell’s narrative offers up so many terms we heard on radio and TV: “Khe Sanh,” “Hill 881,” “Da Nang,” “Tet.” These have stuck in my mind over the years, and now they resurface. They are painful.
For her Close-Up on War, Mary Farrell gleaned a number of Catherine Leroy’s photographs, shot in the field with an eye for public view in stark black and white. These are chilling enough. Farrell’s worthy contribution of Leroy’s dispiriting words—not written for public eyes—also ring true to readers a half century after Catherine Leroy wrote them.
I spoke with junior high kids last week in Washington DC, thanks to a wonderful organization, An Open Book Foundation, which puts books in the hands of students who live in our nation’s capital. My topic was BONES UNEARTHED!, my latest in the Creepy & True series from Abrams Books for Young Readers.
It’s February, and so I’m thinking that “love is in the air.” But what’s to love about bones and burials and archaeology. As it happens, a lot! I decided to share what I’d learned when I wrote the last chapter of BONES!, which I titled “Bones and Benevolence.” Benevolence means “kindness,” or “compassion”—caring about others, in this case, the dead.
I showed slides and talked about archaeological discoveries of people buried together in graves. Some, the “Lovers of Valdaro” in Italy, were a man and woman buried in Italy during the Neolithic era, late Stone Age lovers. Another grave from Greece, likely much older, featured a couple buried as one—almost as if they were trying to stay warm.
Most of the chapter dealt with another exercise in benevolence: the repatriation (return) of the bones of more than 400 sailors who drowned when the USS Oklahoma, a battleship, was torpedoed during the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. As older folks will tell you, this was “a day that will live in infamy” that triggered America’s entry into World War II.
In my research, I discovered how the interest of one old man named Ray Emory, who was curious about the mass burial of all those dead sailors in a military cemetery in Honolulu. He wanted to find out whether the bones of one sailor could be identified, and he asked the US Navy to take a look at the matter.
As it happened, along came the discovery of DNA investigations, and eventually the Navy agreed to try and identify these men using DNA, dental records, and other research processes to sort through these masses of bones.
By late last year, the Navy actually did identify nearly 400 of these sailors. One was Navy Fireman Second Class Gerald Ford, a 25-year-old man whose bones were returned and buried near his parents in Nebraska.
Sailor Gerald Ford
**** .
Now for the rest of the story. It’s Black History Month, and I started to wonder whether any sailors of African descent drowned in the Oklahoma.
I found a list of the dead online, arranged alphabetically. Down the list I scrolled, until I found this:
There’s a name, Mess Attendant 1st Class Johnnie C. Laurie, 25, from Bessemer, Alabama. This was a strong clue that this sailor was African American.
I already knew that the US military was segregated during the war, which meant that Black sailors and soldiers and airmen (and women too) couldn’t fight or work alongside whites. In the Navy, Black sailors served as servants, cleaning, doing laundry, and as mess attendants—waiters in the dining areas aboard ships. (“Mess” in the military means where soldiers and sailors eat, as in the “officers mess.”)
More research on a military website, and I found Johnnie Laurie’s photo and more about him. His bones were returned to Alabama in 2019, and he is buried in the Alabama National Cemetery.
This was the exploding Tonga Volcano taken from a boat only two days ago. Incredible footage. https://twitter.com/i/status/1482437044785889286 Reports of destruction continue to pour in. At this early time, it seems that there has been little loss of life, but I’m well aware that could change.
The news agency Reuters, based in Toronto, Canada, reported an example of what happened to a resort and its owners:
“‘COMPLETELY DESTROYED’
The Ha’atafu Beach Resort, on the Hihifo peninsula, 21 km (13 miles) west of the capital Nuku’alofa, was “completely wiped out”, the owners said on Facebook.
The family that manages the resort had run for their lives through the bush to escape the tsunami, it said. “The whole western coastline has been completely destroyed along with Kanukupolu village,” the resort said.
The Red Cross said it was mobilising its network to respond to what it called the worst volcanic eruption the Pacific has experienced in decades.”
I’m relieved to read that help is on the way. Hearing this news brought me back to the chapter I wrote in Bones Unearthed!!about the Krakatoa explosion in Indonesia in 1883. (Krakatoa is also known as Krakatau.) So much devastation. So much death. Not to mention a climate turned around for a year and more.
The Tonga Volcano generated a shock wave from the South Pacific felt all the way to London. The Krakatoa shockwave circled our planet seven times. That was only the beginning.
There’s so much more to learn about Krakatoa. Chapter Two of Bones Unearthed! will help you understand about volcanos and what happens when they blow up. Pick up the book in your library, or buy it here:
Day of the Dead, Día de Los Muertos, is a holiday I’ve written about in the last ten years. Tracing back to its Mexican and Central American roots, we find that this celebration is a mix of Catholic Christian and very old Aztec traditions.
Day of the Dead exhibit, Desert Art Museum, Tucson. “For Julia from Meredith…..”
On November 1 and 2, families welcome back the spirits of their loved ones by building shrines to their memory in their homes, as well as gathering in cemeteries to mark those days with soft music, bright yellow marigolds to guide the spirits home, and even picnic and share their family favorites such as “Grandma’s tamales.” Kids write their names on sugar skulls. Skulls (calaveras) in fact, take a head role in Day of the Dead, as they did during Aztec times.
At a Tucson art museum, I once saw a Day of the Dead memorial, a covered bed filled with notes to their dear departed written by visitors, It was a very touching sight. I came home and decided that I’d make my own shrine in memory of those who’d died, including my mother and my dog and cat.
My shrine. Mama and I are in the photo upper left; Maverick and Cloudy center right.Read more about Day of the Dead in GHOSTS UNVEILED!
At twenty-one, Catherine Leroy left her home in France for Saigon, soon to be armed with two cameras loaded with black and white film and not much more. Fifty years on, it seems almost incredible that a petite Frenchwoman could muscle her way as a freelance photographer in a war zone with no support from a news agency, newspaper, or broadcast network. But Leroy was one of a series of tough, goal-minded female journalists and photographers who worked their way into war zones from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Today, women reporters are far more prevalent—and, one could hope, accepted in the battle zones they cover and by the military officers on whom they rely.
Sailor Johnnie C. Laurie
