Before the fighting becomes too fierce, a small statue of Buddha begins to glow in the darkest corner.

When a monkey takes refuge from a monsoon in a cave, he happens upon a group of bickering animals-a monkey, lion, turtle, jackal, and dove. 5-9)Ī book of the basic teachings of Buddha, presented through a collection of six classic, simple tales. Through her warm, transporting watercolors and her stout text, she manages to turn the world of dots and dashes-hardly the obvious stuff of a compelling narrative-into a tour of a time and an enthusiasm worth taking again and again. Together they build a station for Barasch’s father, where he lets rip his first code and ultimately stars in his own slice of heroism when he passes along vital information as a hurricane pounds distant Florida. He becomes the chum of another, local operator, an older boy who takes the younger under his wing and regales him with a story of how he figured in the rescue of a mother and child when a neighboring apartment house took fire. She charts his progress-and illustrates it with finely descriptive pen-and-wash artwork-of drumming the dots and dashes into his subconscious, memorizing international code words, then taking the test. Not many children bitten by the radio bug went on to get their amateur operator’s license, but Barasch’s father did. In this admiring memoir of her father as a young ham radio operator in New York City during the 1920s, Barasch pulls readers into the initiate world of Morse code and early intercontinental communications.

Radio Rescue by Lynne Barasch