Steve Cotler Steve Cotler

Category: Literature/Books

A Return to Kamala School

— 10:38 pm · View all 2 comments

I was in Southern California all last week hopping from bookstores to schools in an exhausting and exhilarating schedule of 22 Cheesie Mack book events and two Pobba concerts. All were fun and rewarding, but one visit, a spur-of-the-moment trip back in time, stood out.

In September 1952, Oxnard’s Kamala School (K-6) opened to students. I was one of those students, a fourth grader, full of energy.

Almost 59 years older, also full of energy, I returned to Kamala School Continue reading “A Return to Kamala School” →

Cheesie Mack on Sale Today

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Several years ago I had an idea for a book about an active, inquisitive ten-year-old boy. His name was Ronald Mack, but his friends all called him Cheesie. I envisioned him as full of life, talkative, smart, and funny…exactly the kind of youngster who’d get into complicated kid situations that would require clever kid thinking to get out of.

I gave him a best friend, Georgie, and loving family…with one exception: an older sister who would be much happier if he’d never been born.

I’m a Californian, and it would have been easy to build his world on the west coast. But as I began to write the first book in what will become a Random House series, Cheesie demanded to live in Massachusetts…Gloucester in particular.

Today that book, Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything, appeared on bookshelves across the country.

Cheesie is my little boy, and I held him in my arms this afternoon.

Mark Twain and the N-word

— 11:55 pm · One comment

newsouth bkRecently, NewSouth Books announced the publication of a new version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Bowdlerized by Auburn University’s Dr. Alan Gribben, Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, is described by NewSouth thusly:

In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain’s most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s.

Not surprisingly, Professor Gribben’s decision to replace the word nigger with slave has engendered controversy.

Continue reading “Mark Twain and the N-word” →

Charlie Chan: Chinaman or Chinese Man

— 11:13 pm · View all 3 comments

Charlie Chan racetrackIn the October 28, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Richard Bernstein reviews Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang.

As a child of the first television generation—I was six when we got ours in 1950—I devoured Laurel and Hardy, The Bowery Boys/East Side Kids, westerns, World War II movies, and especially Charlie Chan.

This was a world before the civil rights movement. But there were stirrings. South Pacific opened in New York in 1949, addressing racial prejudice as a main theme. But contrary to Continue reading “Charlie Chan: Chinaman or Chinese Man” →

Curious Readers

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During the past school year, I tutored math and language arts in a local fifth-grade class, so when Public School Success Team (PSST), the homegrown _DSC5163smnon-profit that ran the tutoring program, decided to encourage a continuing flow of student enthusiasm over the summer, I volunteered to lead a course. Conducted al fresco in my backyard, it consisted of six weekly sessions in close textual analysis. I called it Curious Readers.

My plan was Continue reading “Curious Readers” →

Kvetcher in the Rye

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Catcher in the RyeI began writing an obituary of J. D. Salinger, but given his reclusiveness and academia’s already exhaustive shelves of critical essaying, it morphed into a personal reflection on how Catcher in the Rye affected me and my 60’s world. But Greg Palast did it better (and faster), so I reprint his February 1, 2010, reflection below.

In the sixth grade, the Boys’ Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word “fuck” in it. Since the Boys’ Vice-Principal hadn’t read the book – and I don’t think he’d ever read any book – he couldn’t tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger Continue reading “Kvetcher in the Rye” →

Steve with students at an author event

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