I read this book for school when I was about 9 or 10....I absolutely DESPISED it! it was sooooo boring and there was no action or battles or princess or horses or any of that kind of stuff that makes a book, good...I read this book again, it is one of the BEST books ever, it's exciting and suspenseful and amazing and kind of embarrassing because it makes you feel stupid, and it's a true story.
"Carry on Mr. Bowditch"
by Jean Lee Latham
This is a story about a boy named Nathaniel Bowditch, he has two brothers and two sisters and a grandmother that lives with his family. He comes from a looooong line of sea captains, and his father has just lost his ship. He's nine when the book starts and is just getting ready to start school, he had always like numbers, and had pretty much taught himself math, so when he got to school he asked his teacher for a long math problem, his teacher got really mad because he thought he was just a annoying little boy, and gave him one of the longest problems he could. Nat got it done so fast the teacher thought he was cheating or had someone help him or something and he threatened to beat him and tell his father if he didn't tell who had helped him. Nat didn't know what to do so he told his older brother and the next day his older brother told the teacher that if he didn't believe that Nat had done the problem, to give him another one and stand over him and watch him do it, so that's what the teacher did, he gave an even harder problem then the one before, and was amazed when a 9 year old boy did a math problem that would have baffled a 14 or 15 year old.
When Nat was 12 everybody told him if he knew as much Latin as he did math he could go to Harvard right then! So, he started learning Latin. He got a Latin dictionary and a Bible in Latin and a Bible in English and he learned Latin. About that time his mother died and his father was very "out of it" I guess you could call it, and he was so devastated from loosing his ship that he wasn't taking very good care of his family, so he indentured Nat for nine years to a ship chandlery, which is a store that sells stuff for ships. Nat lived and worked there for nine years, and every time he would learn something, he would buy a notebook and fill the whole notebook with just that one subject, he also learned Spanish and French the same way he learned Latin.
When his endenturship was up he started sailing and he discovered a new way to read lunars. He was really good at navigation and would teach all the ships crew to navigate and read lunars, and the captains always said that these were the best behaved crews, (that was because they felt like they were worth something). There's loooooooooots more AMAZING stuff in that book, like at the end when he navigated and got through an area in the ocean during a fog, that nobody could do at all much less in a fog, and like going through the most respected and well used navigation book in the world at that time and finding over 8,000 mistakes, and then getting so frustrated he went and wrote his own navigation book. And getting a degree from Harvard even though he never even went!!!! I would highly, Highly recomend this book, and if you've read it before, and didn't like it...go back and read it again.
Sorry it's not the best written thing, but I had to make myself stop writing it or I would have told all the best parts=o) I really hope you all go and read it and enjoy it as much as I did. There's another book by Jean Lee Latham that I got that I'm going to read to, and I'm hoping it's just as good=o)
~Kluane
