Shurik’s Journal
Selections from Shurik’s Memoirs
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1.Introduction: Books & Longevity
Shurik was born Aleksander Tammisson in 1899 in Estonia. He acquired the nickname Shurik while serving in the White Army in Siberia. He wrote in his memoirs, which he started while in his 80s and continued to write off and on for about a decade, “Like most people, I had in my younger years dreams for the future. After achieving them, events beyond my control hurled me in unexpected directions. There were dark moments when I lost everything and chances for survival looked bleak.”
He was often asked, “What’s your secret for a long life?”
He credited longevity to a combination of several things, all of them readily achievable for most people. One item on his list was to read books and magazines and try to include at least one other activity that exercises the mind such as work crossword puzzles, learn a new language, write poetry, keep a diary, play bridge or chess. Research supports the sayings “a book a day keeps the doctor away” and “reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” Other recommendations for a longer life will be listed later as they appear in his memoirs.
He emphasized that reading and being read to are essential for children’s development. Books stimulate the imagination like no other medium, build vocabulary, assist with writing skills, inform, promote insights, and entertain.
Although he was a frugal person, he did splurge on books and donated to five charities/causes, one of them the promotion of literacy. His taste in books was eclectic. It included history, politics, and the classics. He also enjoyed reading works of theology, science, memoirs, poetry, mystery, true crime, and humor. He once said, “If books bore you, you just haven’t found the right ones.”
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Pick of the Month, November 2008
Fiction
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wrobleski, Ecco, $29,95
A memorable novel about a boy born mute, his dogs, and the turmoil caused by the murder of his father.
Nonfiction
The ABC of Literacy: Preparing Our Children for Lifelong Learning by Cynthia Dollins, Cumberland House Publishing, $16.95
The author, an educator, makes a compelling case for the importance of parents reading to their children. The book includes advice on how to encourage children to read and provides summaries of 300+ age-appropriate books.
Children’s/YA
Fancy Nancy by Jane O’Connor, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser, HarperCollins,$17.99
This funny and delightful book, oriented to girls 4 to 8, was published in 2005 and continues to be popular. Parents will enjoy reading it to their children, and children will keep rereading it for its wonderful illustrations and engaging plot.
Specailty/Small Press
Cumberland House Publishing, founded in 1996 and now specializing in nonfiction, has issued titles on a wide range of topics - Abraham Lincoln, the Beatles, the Cleveland Browns, and a disphagia cookbook to name a few. Its The Rebel and the Rose: James Semple, Julia Gardiner Tyler, and the Lost Confederate Gold by Wesley Millett and Gerald White presents a riveting true life mystery. Hope and Help for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia by Alison C. Bested and Alan C. Logan with Russell Howe is one of several books on health & fitness. Jane Austen: Writer of Fancy by Peter J. Leithart will be published in March 2009.
Shurik in high school uniform
Kustas Tammisson, Shurik’s father
Commentary
Remembering
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 89, died on August 3, 2008 of heart failure. Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, he played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ariel Cohen called him “a great model of the power of ideas - and the power of the intellect.” His works include poetry, plays, short stories, novels, and nonfiction.
Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in the gulag. Afterwards he wrote the masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, the definitive work on Stalin’s concentration camps where some twelve million men, women, and children perished. In the 1950s he was diagnosed with stomach cancer that had spread. He incorporated some of his experiences in his battle with this disease into his last novel Cancer Ward.
After a Russian Orthodox service, he was buried in the cemetery of Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery. He is survived by his wife Natalya and sons Stepan (an urban planner in NY), Ignat (pianist and conductor), and Yermolai (a writer).
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Tasha Tudor died on June 18, 2008 at age 92. She is famous for the nearly 100 books she wrote and/or illustrated, most of them for children. They include the delightful A Is for Annabelle: A Doll’s Alphabet and 1 is One. Her last book, Corgiville Christmas was published in 2003. Her work has inspired a cottage industry - greeting cards, prints, grandfather clocks, cookie cutters, collector dolls. A museum is in the works.
Tasha’s immersion into the lifestyle of the 1830s has fascinated the public. It has ranged from wearing clothes of the period to raising her four children in a house without electricity and running water until the youngest was five. One of her traditions was to take food to forest animals during Christmas. Her friend Jill Adams-Mancivalano said, “She was ahead of time, but lived in the past.”
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Michael Crichton, 66, novelist and graduate of Harvard Medical School, died on November 4, 2008 from cancer. He won in 1969 an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel, which he wrote under the pen name Jeffery Hudson. At the time of his death an estimate 150 million of his novels had been sold worldwide, many of them techno-thrillers about technology gone wild, with Jurrasic Park his biggest hit.
“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.” (Michael Crichton, Jurrasic Park) A workaholic, he also wrote screen plays, created the TV show ER for which he received an Emmy, and directed seven films. He is survived by his fifth wife Sherri and a daughter Taylor, 19.
Site content © 2008
The Baltic Crusade by William Urban, Northern Illinois University Press, a book from Shurik’s library
