Current Issues of Intermedial Scholarship Discussed with Editors of Book Series and Journals Specializing on Intermediality

Sinikka and Tiina NopolaFinland ★ Authors Lydia Kokkola Sinikka (b. 1953) and her sister Tiina (b. 1955) Nopola were both born in Helsinki, but moved to Tampere when they were children. Sinikka graduated with an MA from Tampere University before returning to Helsinki, where she initially worked as a journalist. Tiina worked for the city of Helsinki and as a specialist kindergarten teacher before becoming a fulltime writer. Together the sisters have written two very successful series, one about Hayflower and Quiltshoe and the other about Ricky Rapper. They have also written the texts of two picture books about Peaceful Erkki, illustrated by Markus Majaluoma. Sinikka Nopola has also written extensively for adults and her writing includes journalism, plays for radio and stage, novels, song lyrics and TV-drama. Tiina Nopola has also produced a series of picture books about a girl called Siiri, illustrated by Mervi Lindman. The sisters write by sitting together discussing each sentence as it is produced. They claim that this is one of the reasons why their works contain so much dialogue. The sisters’ work reflects changes in child-rearing styles in Finland over the past three decades. Much of their humor is directed at overly concerned parents, but they also consider the problems of physically or emotionally absent parents. The parents of Hayflower and Quiltshoe, in the sisters’ first successful series, are a somewhat absent minded but well-intentioned couple who lead an ecologically friendly lifestyle. In the first book in the series, Heinähattu ja Vilttitossu [Hayflower and Quiltshoe], the girls run away from home, convinced they can manage by themselves, but return home in the company of two policemen after a series of valuable adventures. The Nopolas’ series of books about Ricky Rapper features a young boy who lives with his Aunt Rauha (Peace), who is secretly in love with her neighbor, Mr. Lindberg. Film versions of both series have been produced, and they have also been turned into plays and musicals. Many of the sisters’ volumes have been translated, despite the difficulties of capturing the language play and rhythm of the original texts. Selected Publications Rauhallinen Erkki. [Peaceful Erkki]. Illus. Markus Majaluoma. Helsinki: Tammi, 2001. Print. Google Scholar Heinähattu, Vilttitossu ja Rubensin veljekset [Hayflower, Quiltshoe and the Rubens Brothers]. Illus. Markus Majaluoma. Helsinki: Tammi, 2001. Print. Google Scholar Heinähattu, Vilttitossu ja tanssivakonstaapeli [Hayflower, Quiltshoe and the Dancing Constable]. Illus. Markus Majaluoma. Helsinki: Tammi, 2003. Print. Google Scholar Risto Räppääjä ja villi kone [Ricky Rapper and the Wild Machine]. Illus. Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen. Helsinki: Tammi, 2006. Print. Google Scholar Risto Räppääjä ja viimeinen tötterö [Ricky Rapper and the Last Cone]. Illus. Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen. Helsinki: Tammi, 2007. Print. [End Page 22] Google Scholar Copyright © 2012 Bookbird, Inc

Reviewed by: Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams and the Mystique of Flight Robert von der Osten (bio) Fred Erisman . Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams and the Mystique of Flight. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 2006. Having grown up on Tom Swift and the boys' series books I salvaged from our basement and flea markets, I leapt at the opportunity to review Erisman's detailed study of aviation series books from 1905 to 1958. Erisman's project is an important one since all history is also a history of technology, whether it was the stirrup that altered warfare and medieval society (White 38) or the airplane that similarly radically changed warfare and our society. Technological changes that contribute to changes in social relations are related to values and symbols that are incorporated in a relatively unmediated manner in popular literature. As Erisman points out, the series books "lead their young readers into and through a time of awesome change" (26). Therefore, the study of often neglected "marginal" literature such as the aviation series books plays an important role in articulating the conceptual sinews of a culture. Erisman attempts to demonstrate that aviation series books had a significant historic role in promoting an interest in aviation and the values of aviation to young boys. He argues that "In book after book the series writers spelled out the history, the expectations, and the possibilities of flight, linking it with adventure, with commerce, and with romance, and communicating it to the young in the most positive and appealing of manners" (298). To make his case, he provides a detailed history of the series book to indicate how these books often offer an authentic account of aircraft, the vocabulary and techniques of aviation, the procedure for flight, the growing assimilation of aviation into American society, and "the evolving image of 'the aviator' as a paragon of American integrity and manhood" (291). Erisman's study is giddily optimistic in its vision and defined by an almost anachronistic master narrative that aviation and aviation values incorporated in the series books are a driving force for a better world. "Progressive America will lead the way, but, through the agency of popularly accessible aviation as it spreads throughout the world, all mankind will ascend to a new and higher level of human capability. It is an admirable, worthy vision, and its tragedy is that the reality of world events and the accelerating course of technology worked to frustrate its realization" (299). This is a vision that I cannot share because it seems both naïvely technocratic and dangerously colonial; and it offers a constrained narrative that limits Erisman's scholarship. Erisman's first chapter "Setting the Stage: Technology and the Series Book" places the aviation series within a useful and concise history of boys' series books, though I would recommend the collection of essays American Boys' Series Books 1900–1980 edited by Barbara Bishop to [End Page 192] anyone doing research in this area. Erisman traces the history of the aviation series chronologically from the "Airship Boys" of 1909 through both world wars to Isaac Asimov's "Lucky Starr Adventures" that ended in 1958, comprehensively considering a very large number of texts. He places these texts within the context of a concise and detailed history of aviation, one so abbreviated that it sometimes loses the drama of the struggle, including the failures, of a developing technology and becomes a cavalcade of advances, which could be daunting for those lacking any technical enthusiasm for aviation. He provides brief biographies of a number of the authors and summaries of a substantial numbers of books, summaries that were nostalgically satisfying for me, could provide a useful overview for potential researchers, but could be tedious for those less invested in this literature. In discussing the works, Erisman seemed most in his element applying painstaking research in showing how the works included accurate details of aviation development. "Steve's Waco E is a modern private plane, introduced in 1940 and supporting impressive speed and a 23,000 feet service ceiling" (234). Most chapters end with a clear statement of Erisman's analysis of the contribution these books make to the development of aviation whether it is...

Reflecting on Girls' Series Sherrie A. Inness (bio) The Girl Sleuth, by Bobbie Ann Mason. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Rediscovering Nancy Drew, edited by Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. The 1990s are exciting years for scholars interested in girls' series books. An ever increasing number of researchers, many of them influenced by feminism, are studying these popular texts, which have been phenomenally successful throughout the twentieth century. Other critics are turning to these books in order to understand their enduring role in culture and the ways they shape the values of future women. Scholars such as Kathleen Chamberlain, Deidre Johnson, and Nancy Tillman Romalov all have done substantial work in the girls' series field. Johnson's Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (1993) is particularly noteworthy for its thorough scholarship and its chapter on girls' series. Less known than these three critics is Catherine Sheldrick Ross, whose painstakingly researched essay, "If They Read Nancy Drew, So What? Series Book Readers Talk Back" (1995), provides what is probably the most thorough study of series book readers and their motivations. She argues in this essay that "series books do not enfeeble readers or render them unfit for reading anything else" (233). Chamberlain, Johnson, Romalov, and Ross, along with some earlier writers such as Carol Billman and Betsy Caprio, have worked to deepen critics' understanding of girls' series. Now, two new works have been added to the growing number of scholarly books addressing girls' series. Actually, Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl Sleuth (1995) cannot technically be considered a "new" book because it was first published in 1975, but its republication in 1995 will certainly attract a new readership to this classic work in the field. Along with Mason's study, Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov's carefully edited collection of essays about Nancy Drew [End Page 255] should also interest new scholars in the exploits of Nancy and other series heroines. Mason's is the less scholarly of the two books, but because she did not revise the book, she has not had the opportunity to benefit from the last two decades of critical work on girls' series, as have the writers included in Dyer and Romalov's collection. I should also caution that Mason's book is not intended as a rigorous, definitive text about girls' series. Rather, The Girl Sleuth is the award-winning writer's personal reflections about the significance of girls' series for her during her childhood. Although Mason discusses how other girls might read series books, her focus is chiefly on her own reaction to these books when she was growing up on a remote Kentucky farm where she had "to feed the chickens and milk the cows everyday" (4). Because of the personal tone and jargon-free prose, her book, even twenty years later, is still a good starting place for academics and general readers interested in girls' series. The Girl Sleuth was Mason's first book, and it displays the keen sense of humor so apparent in some of her better known works: Feather Crowns, In Country, Shiloh and Other Stories, and Love Life: Stories. The Girl Sleuth was the result of its author's attempt to recuperate after a long period immersed in the arcane issues of graduate school. She recovered by turning to beloved books from her childhood: girls' series books featuring heroines like Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and similar detectives. The Girl Sleuth is Mason's reflection on the profound effect these books had on her childhood and those of countless other girls. As she comments, "I read them all: Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Beverly Gray, Kay Tracey, the Dana Girls, Vicki Barr, Cherry Ames. I was an authority on each of them. But they were also my authorities, the source of my dreams" (4). In 1975, her attention to these series books and others marked her as someone ahead of her time, because she pointed out the significance of studying series books when they were still largely disregarded by teachers, librarians, and scholars. Moreover, Mason connected girls' series books to the burgeoning feminist movement and at one point...

The article considers blog literature as a phenomenon of the current literary process in Russia. Works of contemporary writers based on blogs (on different platforms) are analyzed in the context of the debates among literary scholars and critics about its status: blogging today could be seen as a speech genre, as an Internet genre, or as a literary genre. The analysis is focused on authors’ individual strategies in dealing with the blog, features of the author – reader communication, and in particular on the intra-genre and intraliterary transformations of text. Text in a blog is influenced by both laws of the Internet communication in general and the style of communication in the blog. It also depends on the creative manner and goals of the author. Since the blog is a synthetic phenomenon that exists at the intersection of literature, media, everyday life, as well as visual and musical codes, its study necessarily requires the development of interdisciplinary methods of analysis: the application of methods of receptive aesthetics, narratology and discursive analysis. In accordance with the principles of historical poetics, the article considers new forms of the transformed near-literary genres. The analysis is performed as a case study of a series of blog books (blooks) by E. Grishkovets based on his LiveJournal accounts (A Year of LJ-Life (God Zhzhizni, 2008), The Continuation of LJ-Life (Prodolzhenie Zhzhizni, 2009), 151 Episodes of LJ-Life (151 Epizod Zhzhizni, 2011), From LJ-Life to Life (Ot Zhzhizni k zhizni, 2012), Almost Manuscript Life (Pochti Rukopisnaya Zhizn, 2013), and Simultaneously: Life (Odnovremenno: Zhizn, 2014). The paper studies the processes of the blog’s transformation into literature, traces the individual strategy of the writer’s behavior in the Internet space, considers the significance of blogging in the work of the writer who turned his blog into literary text, into a series of books. The authors of the article come to a conclusion that the literary field is being restructured under the influence of blogging.

Guy Mountfort, 1905–2003

DeLand, M. Maitland. The Great Katie Kate Explains Epilepsy. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Books, 2014. Print.The Great Katie Kate Explains Epilepsy marks the fourth book in this educational series written by M. Maitland DeLand. As a radiation oncologist who specializes in the treatment of children, Dr. DeLand began this series as a way of helping children and their caregivers learn about the child’s particular condition. Each book in the series recounts a story of a child learning about their illness from the Great Katie Kate, a young, readheaded superhero who swoops in to answer their questions and help them combat the “Worry Wombat,” a furry manifestation of the child’s anxieties that only goes away once their questions are answered.Based on the premise that kids are sharp and that information can help them, this book provides concise and clear information about epilepsy. It documents the experiences of Jimmy, a young boy who has seizures and is taken to hospital. There, he encounters the Great Katie Kate, who takes Jimmy and several other young people on a journey where she and the other children explain epilepsy, its diagnosis, and its treatment.Overall, the book provides clear explanations of the types, diagnosis, treatment, and management of epilepsy. Any complex terms in the book are the actual medical names bound to be used by their treatment teams. Although the text may be too long or complicated for a very young child to read on their own it is of an acceptable level for 8-12 age range. The illustrations are colourful and generally informative.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Robin DesmeulesRobin is an Academic Librarian Intern at the J.W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. Robin is an avid devourer of fiction of all kinds.

First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards, another book in the First Aid series, is effectively designed to prepare residents for success on the internal medicine boards. In vein with other books in the series, this one primarily serves to provide a concise yet comprehensive review of the material for “high-yield” preparation. However, the book can be utilized for multiple purposes: rapid review for exam preparation, introductory overview to internal medicine, and reference for medical students and residents. The book includes an introduction section detailing the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) certification exam. This section, helpful to anyone new to the exam, addresses registration, test structure, content areas, score reporting, recertification, and offers general test taking advice. The book subsequently is organized by subjects ranging from cardiovascular disease, dermatology, ambulatory medicine, geriatrics, hospital medicine, and women’s health. Each chapter represents a subject and includes a table of contents outlining the included topics. The book does an excellent job of focusing on essential topics within a particular area in great detail, such as asthma within the allergy and immunology chapter. Included in each chapter are helpful mnemonics and notable clinical pearls that highlight crucial facts and commonly tested information. Well-constructed and easy-to-read tables and figures also summarize important topics. “Need to know” images are presented throughout the book, and a 20-page, full-color insert of images is included. The strengths of the book are its clear and well-organized format and its comprehensive yet focused approach to a substantial body of information. The format allows readers to select specific topics or entire subjects for review. Furthermore, the book could be utilized to read up on common presentations and approaches to management. The variety of subjects covered make the book an appealing reference but ideally would be used alongside a standard textbook. As an examination preparation review book, First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards serves its main purpose, by allowing readers to efficiently review high-yield information. Though the book is specifically geared toward residents preparing for ABIM certification and internal medicine physicians preparing for re-certification, medical students preparing for internal medicine rotations also would benefit tremendously by using the book as a reference or review of important topics. Overall, First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards should be a staple review book for any physician preparing for the internal boards but also could serve as an excellent overview text or reference text for anyone studying internal medicine. Its detailed yet focused approach to internal medicine helps readers tackle a vast amount of information.

The seventh book in the award-winning Basics Design series, Grids focuses on the construction and ordering of the page and screen through the use of the grids. The grid features as a strong element in many areas of design, and presents both the student and practitioner alike with the opportunity to ground their work in solid foundations. This book explores not only how to construct grids, but, more fundamentally, why a designer should construct grids at all. Through detailed investigation of the principles behind grid design, this book will inform and advance your understanding of this key design component, allowing you to devise grids with ease and precision for any situation. Contemporary work is supported by concise descriptions, technical expansions and diagrammatic visualisations, enabling the reader to fully understand the work being discussed. True to the other books in the Basics Design series, Grids is an example in its own right. A reference section, set on a series of different grids, demonstrates the principles discussed in earlier chapters, and the book will serve as a valuable resource and companion to other books in the series. This book is suitable for students of graphic design and established professionals, general public wishing to learn more about design basics, and anyone interested in developing their design skills and knowledge of modern graphics solutions.

We are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis so severe that the U.S. Surgeon General has called it “the defining public health crisis of our time.” By the age of 18, 17.1 million young people are living with a mental health disorder. Alarming statistics show that 60% of teens report feeling sad or hopeless most of the time, and one in three teen girls has experienced suicidal ideation. But there is hope: early intervention can change outcomes. Helping children develop a healthier outlook early on is key—and writing can be a powerful tool in this process. When schools prioritize students’ social-emotional and mental health needs alongside academics, overall performance improves. Writing helps students identify, regulate, and express their emotions, which not only fosters emotional resilience but also improves writing skills and academic achievement. Journaling can increase students’ self-awareness, confidence, and ability to process complex thoughts. Research shows that students who write regularly perform better academically than those who don’t, as writing strengthens conceptual understanding and critical thinking. The first book in a new series on teaching writing,Teaching Writing through Journalingpresents practices that make writing a daily habit, helping students internalize its value for learning and well-being. Instructors who engage in these practices benefit as well—emotionally and physically. It's time to flip the script: success doesn't create happiness; happiness fuels success. Teaching Writing series: This series for K-12 and collegiate writing and English teachers, educators, curriculum specialists, and preservice teacher education candidates provides methods, pedagogy and practical exercises in the teaching of writing. Books in the series explore the vast array of ideas, strategies and topics that actively engage students in developing skills that will help them become better writers, critical readers and critical thinkers. These fresh methodologies will expand students’ ideas on what writing means, as well as what learning can mean. Various approaches in the series will rejuvenate instructors and feed educators' own desires as lifelong learners. Each book is meant to make the educators lives both easier and more fulfilling, as the texts in this series include a plethora of writing exercises, prompts and approaches. Many titles will benefit educators from various disciplines who are interested in implementing more writing into their curriculum.

Vascular and Interventional Radiology: The Requisites

The Analytic that Flesh Makes PossibleA review of Fred Moten Stolen Life Janet Neary (bio) Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018. Stolen Life is the second book in Fred Moten's recent series, consent not to be a single being, published within a year by Duke University Press. Like the other books in the series, Black and Blur and The Universal Machine, Stolen Life is a set of interrelated essays in which Moten uses blackness as an analytic to propose open-ended ways of being in the world that sharply cut and exceed the seeming wholes and totalities that form the commonplace understanding of the modern world. In this aleatoric collection that resists collection (xii), Moten presents his inimitable and endlessly generative mode of thought in encounters with a wide range of primary and scholarly texts. From the opening essay, "Knowledge of Freedom," which draws on Winfried Menninghaus, Olaudah Equiano, David Kazanjian, Ronald Judy, and Bryan Wagner (among others) to produce a sustained analysis of the foundational disturbance of blackness in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, to the concluding essay, "Erotics of Fugitivity," which thinks alongside Sora Han's "Slavery as Contract" to present a fierce and beautiful re-thinking of consent as refusal in order to dismantle the terms of liberal statism, Moten illuminates what he has called the "improvisational immanence" of blackness to show how—as concept, radical aesthetic, political tradition, and mode of being—it precedes and disrupts the regulative discourses that enshrine notions of sovereignty. Situating himself as student and teacher, Moten is both frank pragmatist addressing concrete realities of life in the academy and among subjects who imagine themselves to be sovereign and sonic theorist performing devotional acts of analysis. The dynamic essays collected in Stolen Life enact the black radical tradition, recursively unfolding a reclamation of the antenormative (what he terms the "insistent previousness" of blackness in In the Break), dispatching "normative individuation," "judicial ownership," and "legislative priesthood" in ways that entail a rethinking of every aspect of epistemology and of human relations. If the collection is a kind of intellectual ensemble that returns often to Moten's primary interlocutors (Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nahum Chandler, Hortense Spillers, and Nathaniel Mackey), the essays are predominantly dialogic, each taking flight from a particular intellectual point of departure, drawing in and from many voices but moving by way of a devotional agonism in which one principal text becomes the grain against which Moten thinks. This method of critical close reading is the foundation of Moten's powerful critique of the academy's abetting of liberal individualism, even while he thinks out loud about how to be inside these structures without acceding to their terms. To describe Moten's fugitive engagement with continental philosophy, one could do worse than to cite his comment that in Kant's writings he finds an "unruly sociality, anarchic syntax, extrasensical poetics" (2). Stolen Life extends and amplifies the work of In the Break, presenting us definitions of blackness as boundless, dynamic, and vital, as "non-performed performance[,]…the surrealization of space and time," against the notion of blackness as "death-driven epiphenomenon…[either] bound by [or] originating in the white/nonwhite binary" (33). In Stolen Life, as in his other work, blackness is, rather than is not, and Moten recruits DuBois (via Chandler's reading of his early work) to present "blackness as that which is before the binary that has been said to define our existence" (35). In so doing, Moten presents a temporal and logical challenge to the notion of "blackness as an effect of the color line, which is to say the white/nonwhite binary which orients it and by way of which it is plotted" (33). Moten argues that to imagine that blackness is reducible to this axis is to accede to the very terms of the negation, which, in "its most extreme development," refuses "the idea of blackness as a form of life" (33-34). One consequence of this intervention is the philosophical distinction between blackness and black people. Though Moten is clear that "black people have a privileged relation to blackness" and "that black cultures are (under)privileged fields for the transformational...

An Utile Dulci for Youth: Ungdomens bibliotek as Book Series and Publishing Project
 The Swedish publishing house Svensk läraretidnings förlag published the extensive book series Barnbiblioteket Saga (the Children’s Library Saga) between 1899 and 1970. In this article, the publisher’s less extensive book series Ungdomens bibliotek (the Library of Youth) is analysed as an example of the marketing techniques that the publishing house used to reach different target groups. The article investigates how the publishing house used their smaller book series as a way to diversify and increase visibility for their books at a time when the main series Barnbiblioteket Saga was growing into a vast phenomenon that was becoming increasingly difficult to overview. This is investigated through an analysis of the book series’ paratexts, drawing on different theories from the field of publishing studies about the marketing of literature. The article focuses on marketing – through the book covers as well as material inside the books – and advertising. The study provides an explanation of how the publishing house used their marketing of Ungdomens bibliotek to strengthen their brand and expand their business from the 1920s through the 1940s. They accomplished this by developing strategies for curation: they curated a book series targeted for a more specific audience segment than the larger Barnbiblioteket Saga, while also emphasising the qualities that were associated with all their work: pedagogy, accessibility, richness (in subjects and variety), and formation.

The ICL new open-access book series “Progress in Landslide Research and Technology” was launched in 2022, and the founding issues, Vol.1, No.1 and No.2 2022 were successfully published by active authors, KLC2020 official promoters as well as voluntary volume editors. The starting point of this new book series is the publication of the journal “Landslides” of the ICL in 2004. Based on the experience and the assets of good editors and enthusiastic authors through these 18 years, the ICL and journal editors have been challenged to launch the Open Access Book Series “Progress in Landslide Research and Technology” in 2022.The book series provides a joint platform for the publication of recent progress in landslide research and technology for practical applications and the benefit for the society contributing to the Kyoto Landslide Commitment 2020, which is expected to continue until 2030 and beyond to globally promote the understanding and reduction of landslide disaster risk, as well as to address and help implementing the UN 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals.This short article states firstly the financial management (Book Processing Charge: BPC), which is the most important for the sustainability of publishing an open access book series, and the selection of cover photo and the issue editors on the front cover. Number of issue editors were changed from 5 for Volume 1 Issue 1, to 9 for Volume 1 Issue 2 and 11 for Volume 2 Issue 1. Secondly, the creation of a new Award related to this book series, and the support of the core activities of the International Programme on Landslides (IPL): A Programme of the ICL for Landslide Disaster Risk Reduction through this book series are explained.The countries of the authors, and the number of pages and articles of eight categories were compared in the founding two issues and the first issue of the second year. Finally, the oral presentation opportunity on their results for the authors of P-RLT in 2023 is introduced. We had the first oral presentation opportunity at the ICL 20th Anniversary and IPL-KLC Symposium in November 2022. Authors obtained something different merits from printed publication as from oral presentation. We have a plan to offer the next opportunity for orally presenting the results in June and November, 2023.

Developing educational media for sexual education is essential for engaging young students and assisting parents in delivering early sexual education. This study aims to illustrate how the Lift-the-Flap Book Series “I Can Protect Myself” can enhance children’s knowledge and skills for self-protection. The study used a research and development method and applied ADDIE as a development model. A descriptive analysis was employed as data analysis, with data collected through interviews, questionnaires, and psychological scales. A focus group discussion was conducted with 15 kindergarten teachers in Semarang city to validate the feasibility of the lift-the-flap book series. The implemented stage took place at TK Tanwirul Qulub 01 Semarang, involving five teacher and five child participants. Results showed that the lift-the-flap book series “I Can Protect Myself” is feasible in introducing sexual education to early childhood.

“If they read Nancy Drew, so what?”: Series book readers talk back