The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

I would certainly not have picked up William Kamkwamba's stirring The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, were it not Chico State's Book in Common for the year. Reading the book, though, has proved compelling, moving and, more importantly, motivating.

Kamkwamba grew up in a village in Malawi, a small, landlocked country in West Africa. Living in a hut with a thatched roof and no electricity, Kamkwamba lived through famine -- described without a trace of self-pity and therefore all the more moving. An inveterate tinkerer with a shocking degree of mechanical aptitude, he only attended school most sporadically, as his family could not afford the tuition. Consequently, he sweated on his family's farm in the vain hope of coaxing sustenance from the dry ground, while kids his age in our country are going to school, playing video games and watching TV. And eating all they need and more.

But Kamkwamba was not satisfied with the prospect of living out his father's life, and his grandfather's and on and on. Unable to learn in school, he visited a "library" donated by a charity -- just three shelves of books, lined up in no particular order. There, he found a book called "Using Energy" and, with two years of formal education, read this physics textbook, understood it, and from there -- yes, really -- built a functioning windmill.

This should not be dismissed as the miracle story of a young genius. More impressive than his clear and palpable intelligence is his diligence and drive. Our students could learn a lot from Mr. Kamkwamba. Yes, building a windmill is impressive. Building it with absolutely no money is more so. Building it with no tools, yet more so. He had to make his own screwdrivers and drills, even. Everything was done with scrap, torn, prized, and beaten out of rusting hulks in a nearby scrapyard. The tossed-away lines about spending eight hours banging on an old transmission to get a rivet were breathtaking.

Kamkwamba caries on to more and more innovative and impressive feats, but describing them here would be like revealing the end of a novel. Read it and see.

One more thing: Some friends and I have recently formed a non-profit to help children struggling through similar circumstances. We are Feeding Nations Through Education, and in short, this is how it works: We buy a family a pair of bulls and a plow. This lets them grow enough food to sell a surplus. This lets them send their kids to school. And the education of the children of Africa is the only way to end the cycles of poverty and starvation we have all witnessed from afar throughout our lives. So click here, and donate to the cause!

Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman

I begin each release from Neil Gaiman with great optimism. The premises are invariably inventive (in American Gods, for example, all the polytheistic gods are extant, coexisting, and fighting for the attention of the modern world). However, the results never live up to the promise, it seems.

Neverwehere is set in London Below, a sort of extended pun on the London Underground, and many of the settings and characters are literalizations of the fantastic names that apparently caught Gaiman's attention, even when we was a child. Knightsbridge. Blackfriars. Barons Court. Angel. Burnt Oak. Elephant & Castle. To say nothing of Cockfosters.

Here, Angel is the home of an angel. Earls Court is the home of an aging earl. But really, once we are in on the conceit, it is rather unimaginative from there. Blackfriars is home not to the black robe wearing Dominican friars, but to "Black" friars, as in friars of African descent.

The imagery is awash with steampunk and goth flair that make it at once quite easy to visualize the characters but also somewhat dull to do so. Perhaps in part (though only in part) because of its derivative and currently fashionable visuals, the novel feels rather like the film-from-the-bestselling-novel, rather than the more rich source material it ought be. Put Johnny Depp in the role of erstwhile (but hapless) hero Richard and let Tim Burton direct, and you have the film version, made to order.

The only real question that lingered with me as I read was, "Will I get suckered in yet again, and buy his next novel, too?"