Thinking about Father’s Day, I wondered what I still have of my late dad’s things. Ends up our son has his MBA thesis that my late mom typed up when she was seven months pregnant with me. Good enough. The obituary for Vera Putina, 97, in The Economist (June 10) was poignant. She was silenced for years about being Vladmir Putin’s mother. He apparently had a birth father, a stepfather and foster parents before going to military boarding school and joining the KBG, which separated him from them.  So sorry.

The contrast between the  problems faced by the two white boys in Paula Fox’s Slave Dancer, Jean Lee Latham’s Carry on Mr. Bowditch, and the white middle class brother and sister in e .l. konigsburg’s From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was mind boggling. The books all won Newbery Award: Carry On, 1956; Slave Dancer,  1974; and Mixed Up Files, 1968. All three dealt with family life and finding one’s way despite setbacks, but it was easier to see why the two gripping  stories about working boys set in the 1800s won, than an escapade set in NYC in the 1960s. Even so, that was good too.

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