Maye day has new meaning

The Big Story – Education of Drake Maye: They lost another tight one where he again was driving in the final two minutes. But it was undone by an interception after miscommunication between Maye and DeMario Douglas to end it at 27-22. But overall it was a solid effort with career highs all around for the rookie QB as he went 30-40 for 283 yards and a pair of TDs, along with two turnovers. Plus they stayed in contention for a Top 5 draft pick while giving an encouraging effort. Win-win.

Sports 101: Nikola Jokic is trying to become the sixth player to win four or more MVP Awards. Name the five who’ve done it.

News Item – Sox Hot for Soto: Who’s buying that they are? Or that the “JuanSoto Was Impressed With Red Sox Presentation” idea is anything more than a Scott Boras-planted story to ratchet up leverage on the big-spending Yankees, Mets and Dodgers? Likely just the latest Red Sox PR ploy to get fans and the media off their back.

News Item – Alumni News: Not going well for Mac Jones in Jax. In two losses filling in for Trevor Lawrence, including Sunday’s 52-6 pasting by Detroit, he’s gone 31 of 51 for 249 yards with three interceptions and no TD passes as the Jags scored just 13 points.

News Item – Dimwit Analytics Mavens at it Again: No argument on Chris Sale being named NL Comeback Player of the Year, as his spectacular season followed years of injury travails. But exactly where did Garrett Crochet come back from to be the AL winner? He was a relief pitcher who never threw more than 56 innings in his career before going 6-12 this year. Which means he got it on analytics numbers because, I forget, wins by a pitcher don’t matter. What’s more important for those guys are WHIP, BIP and DIP.

The Numbers:

4 – woeful number of the 15 teams in the NBA’s Eastern Conference that had a win-loss record over .500 as the new week began.

9.3 – best-in-the-NFL yards-per-rush average by Patriots rookie Drake Maye.

16.2 – points scored per game averaged so far by Celtic sixth man Payton Pritchard

… Of the Week Awards

Thumbs Down – NBA In-Season Tournament: I know the announcers are forced to talk it up like it’s the greatest thing ever, but who actually gives a flip about the NBA Cup? It’s a European thing that will never make any impact here. You know why? ’cause it’s stupid.

Clutch Play of the Week and Season – Josh Allen: His 26-yard TD scamper on fourth down with less than 3 minutes left in the game not only prevented another Patrick Mahomes miracle finish by icing Buffalo’s 30-21 win; it ended KC’s quest for an undefeated season as well.

Dumbest Thing of the Week: That 65 million people watched 58-year-old Mike Tyson step into the ring for the first time in two decades against someone no one ever heard of. Who won? The better question is, who cares?

RIP – Gerry Faust: Those of a certain age remember he was the coach of powerhouse Moeller High in Cincinnati shockingly hired by Notre Dame to take over their storied football program in 1981. He passed away last week at 89. He was on ND’s radar because he went a remarkable 174-17-2 in 17 seasons at Moeller. The story was different at ND, however, where his tortured five-year run ended after going 30-26-1.

Random Thoughts

Soto’s really good but not worth Ohtani money.

Anyone else noticeIme Udoka has Houston off to a 9-4 start?

Sports 101 Answer: The five who have been MVP four times are Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and LeBron James.

Final Thought – Garrett Crochet: Yes the 209 strikeouts in 146 innings this summer were impressive. But as the robot used to say on the 1960s TV Show Lost in Space, WARNING! WARNING!, over rumors of Boston’s interest in trading for the White Sox lefty. First, there are durability concerns where he already missed the 2022 season due to Tommy John surgery. Then those 146 were by far the most innings he’s ever thrown, with next high being 56 in 2021. He also didn’t go more than four innings in any of his 14 starts after July 1. So he’s not exactly an inning-eating horse. Then there were rumors he wanted a multi-year extension to OK any deal at the trade deadline. Which means he was OK staying on the worst team in history over going to a contender unless he got paid. That’s a big mark against for me. All of which pushes him way down my priority list behind the best free agent pitchers. They’d be much better off adding someone to their exciting young core, like 23-year-old Japanese import Roki Sasaki, rather than subtracting some from that core to get a guy with red flags like Crochet.

Email Dave Long at [email protected].

NH on skis

A look at the history of ski season in the Granite State

Professor Emeritus of History at Plymouth State University John Allen was awarded the International Skiing History Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He serves as historian for the New England Ski Museum in Franconia and is the author of several books on the topic, including From Skisport to Skiing: One Hundred Years of an American Sport and The Culture and Sport of Skiing from Antiquity to World War II. He has been a consultant for films on skiing, and will be giving his presentation New Hampshire on Skis on Thursday, Nov. 21, at 6 p.m. at the Lane Memorial Library (2 Academy Avenue, Hampton). Visit newenglandskimuseum.org.

How did skiing start, and how did skiing start in New Hampshire?

Always very difficult to pin down because usually you find that when you find somebody who’s done something first, a year or so later you discover that they weren’t the first. But generally speaking, in the late 19th century there were odd people on skis in various places in New Hampshire. For example, in the New Hampshire Historical Society, there are some papers from a fellow who was a boy at school who made skis. I can’t remember the date exactly, but let’s say it’s in the 1870s, something like that. He went to the dentist on skis and he went to school on skis, and so on and so forth. And there were sort of odd people like that around, but there was nothing organized at all.

The skis themselves, like the equipment, have they evolved or changed much?

Oh, terrifically. For thousands of years wood was the ski of choice, was the [material] of choice. Then there were a variety of woods that were used. Ash was one of the only ones. Pine was another one. It certainly depends on what woods were around. And hickory only came into use … really late in the 19th century. That lasted pretty much as the wood of choice up through until the invention of metal skis. And metal skis have a long history too. You always think of Howard Head in the 1950s and ’60s experimenting with his cheetah skis, or what were called cheetah skis because they were easy to ski on, metal skis, and then it’s gone on to various other modes of using metal and so on, largely because they don’t break, whereas the others always do.

When did skiing become more of a sport?

Right, the great change between skiing for, as it were, some sort of utilitarian use … came when a student at Dartmouth by the name of Fred Harris started basically the Dartmouth Outing Club, [and] other colleges became involved. This was started in 1910, 1911, and then almost immediately, as I say, other colleges became involved. Middlebury, for example, UNH, UVM, Harvard, Yale, and then … up at McGill, who also were early skiers, and the Harvard and the McGill people used to come down to Hanover every once in a while for sporting skiing. Fred Harris was interested in getting the Dartmouth students, he graduated in 1911, but he was interested in skiing as a kind of, what shall we say, a healthy antidote to industrialization, urbanization, students sitting on their behinds on radiators and so on. …

Is there any interesting skiing history tidbit or facts you’d like to mention, something I haven’t asked you about?

These days when you go onto a ski slope, you will always see people who are skiing with two poles. … That was not normal a hundred years ago … a Dartmouth student was actually given two poles as a present, he tried them out at nighttime so that he wouldn’t be laughed at. One pole was the way to ski, that was the way Norwegians skied, and what Norwegians did and said and wrote about skiing was the sort of the word. … from about 1910, certainly from 1920 on, you get two poles being in use. Although I have seen pictures of people using one pole as late as 1931, but they were in Maine, they weren’t in action.

—Zachary Lewis

New Hampshire on Skis
Thursday, Nov. 21, 6 p.m.
Lane Memorial Library, 2 Academy Avenue, Hampton
nhhumanities.org

Featured image: John Allen. Courtesy photo.

News & Notes 24/11/21

Carrot concerns

Grimmway Farms issued a recall of select organic whole carrots and baby carrots that may have been contaminated with E. coli, according to a notice on its website, grimmway.com. The recall, initiated Nov. 16, includes carrots that are no longer on store shelves but may be in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers, the website said. The items from the Bakersfield, California, based company were sold nationwide; whole carrots were for sale Aug. 14 through Oct. 23 and the baby carrots had best-if-used-by dates ranging from Sept. 11 through Nov. 12. Photos of the packaging of the affected items are on the Grimmway website and include Bunny-Luv, 365 Organic, Good & Gather, Nature’s Promise and Trader Joe’s, among others. See the website for product specifics, such as package sizes.

Snow rider

According to a press release, free in-person snowmobile safety education classes are now being scheduled in the Granite State. To operate a snowmobile or off-highway recreational vehicle (OHRV) in New Hampshire any person age 12 or older must either have a valid motor vehicle driver’s license or have successfully completed an approved OHRV/Snowmobile Safety Education class.

Classes are taught by instructors and staff trained by the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and those interested in attending should register by visiting wildlife.nh.gov/highway-recreational-vehicles-ohrv-and-snowmobiles/ohrv-and-snowmobile-safety-education, according to the press release. OHRV/Snowmobile Safety Education classes can also be taken online, and with recent changes to the state laws all online classes will include a combination of practical OHRV and snowmobile safety and the rules that apply to all trail riders. The cost for the virtual class is $34.95, according to the same release. To register for an online safety class, visit offroad-ed.com/newhampshire.

Even after course completion, all riders under age 14 must be accompanied by a licensed adult over the age of 18 when operating a snowmobile or OHRV, including on property belonging to their parents, grandparents or guardians, according to the release. Operators of all ages are invited to join one of the more than 100 snowmobile and 26 OHRV clubs in New Hampshire, according to the release. For more information visit nhsa.com and for OHRV club information visit nhohva.org. Almost 37,000 wheeled vehicles and snowmobiles have been registered for the 2024-2025 season, according to the release. For information on registering a snowmobile, visit wildlife.nh.gov/highway-recreational-vehicles-ohrv-and-snowmobiles/registering-your-ohrv-or-snowmobile.

Education Freedom Accounts

According to a press release, more than 5,300 students throughout New Hampshire are now enrolled in Education Freedom Accounts during its fourth year of implementation,

The number of Education Freedom Accounts increased from 4,663 during the 2023-2024 academic year to 5,321 at the start of the 2024-2025 academic year, which represents an increase of about 14 percent, or 658 students, according to the same release.

In a statement, Frank Edelblut, education commissioner, said “it is clear that there is a growing demand for more schooling options in the Granite State. The Education Freedom Account program is offering lower-income families assistance to choose whichever school or learning environment best meets the needs of their child. New Hampshire continues to deliver high quality educational pathways to families and the Education Freedom Account program for a fraction of the cost to taxpayers of a traditional education.”

Education Freedom Accounts allow eligible New Hampshire students to direct state-funded per-pupil education grants toward select educational programming of their choice for a variety of learning experiences, and there are currently 5,321 children enrolled in the EFA program that is offering grants totaling nearly $27.7 million this school year, or an average of $5,204 per student, according to the release. Families earning up to 350 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible to participate in the program, and a family of four with an annual income limit of $109,200 may participate, according to the release.

More details are highlighted in the New Hampshire Department of Education’s 2024-2025 EFA Financial and Demographic Fact Sheets and more info can be found on education.nh.gov

Bank drive

According to a press release, the Merrimack County Savings Bank will be holding its annual Mitten Tree Drive until the end of December, collecting cold-weather essentials. New items of clothing, handmade or store-bought, such as mittens, gloves, hats and scarves, can be dropped off at any of the Merrimack’s nine locations, according to the press release.

In a statement, Linda Lorden, President of the Merrimack, said “The Mitten Tree is all about giving back to our neighbors in need. Every donation helps provide warmth and supports local food pantries.” The Merrimack will donate $2 for every item collected and will send donations to the following organizations: Friendly Kitchen (Concord), Twin Rivers Food Pantry (Franklin), Bow Food Pantry, Hopkinton Food Pantry, Hooksett Food Pantry, Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter, The Upper Room Food Pantry (Derry), White Birch Center (Henniker). Visit themerrimack.com/locations.

The Loon Center (Lee’s Mills Road, Moultonborough) on Nov. 21 at 7 p.m. will host a presentation by Dana and Bob Fox, “Hornbills — A Unique Old-World Family of Birds.” Hornbills first evolved in Africa over 60 million years ago. The presentation will include photos by Tim Layman.

Henniker Handmade & Homegrown will celebrate Small Business Saturday, Nov. 30, with a pop-up event at the Henniker Community Center, 57 Main St., from 2 to 5 p.m. In addition to locally crafted items, the event will feature live music from Beechwood and the food truck Taco Beyondo.

The Grace Food Pantry Yuletide Treasures Fair takes place Saturday, Nov. 23, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Mercy Hill Church (750 Pine St., Manchester). Admission is free. There will be live music, crafters, a bake sale, a 50/50 cash raffle and a Fleamarket Bazaar section. Free coffee, hot cocoa or hot cider will be available. Shoppers are asked to please bring a canned or boxed item for the pantry.

This is his time

Willie Nile on making the best music of his life

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

“The Benjamin Button of rock ’n’ roll” is what VH1 Storytellers creator Bill Flanagan once called Willie Nile. “Because my career has been ass backwards,” Nile said recently. It’s true; the Buffalo-born rocker made two great albums early and waited 10 years for his third. Since then, he’s released over a dozen more, including nine in the last 12 years.

Nile’s energy level is up to 11, and he’s so confident he can inspire a crowd with his high-energy rock that he offers a guarantee. “If you want to see a spark and some light in this darkness, come to a show,” he said. “If you’re not blown away and you don’t feel better walking out the door, you’ll get your money back … and I don’t mean you’ll just like it.”

Every night, Willie Nile leaves everything on the stage, exiting fully soaked in sweat, usually after more than one standing ovation. He’ll play great songs from the early days like “Vagabond Moon” along with rave-ups like “This Is Our Time,” a cut from 2013’s American Ride and “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” the title track from his last studio album.

“Nothing’s changed, except I think I’m singing better,” he said. “My voice has gotten just a little richer. Maybe I wouldn’t go that far; I’m a little Sam Cooke, but I mean, I’m having more fun. The set lists are never better than this, and it’s a ball. I’m still feeling it in every pore of my body, and I’m not the only one.”

If the measure of a person is the company they keep, Nile is a star. He got his first big break when the booker at Kenny’s Castaways convinced Robert Palmer, the New York Times’ premier critic in the 1970s, to arrive early for a show he was covering to catch Nile’s opening set. The rave review led to a record deal and a tour opening for The Who.

Bruce Springsteen invited Nile to open for him in front of 70,000 fans in New Jersey’s Giants Stadium, and in 2009 pulled him from the audience to sing Jackie Wilson’s song “Higher & Higher” at a show that turned out to be Clarence Clemons’ last with the E Street Band.

Nine years ago he stood between Springsteen and Pete Townshend to perform “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a band that included Billy Idol and Who lead singer Roger Daltrey. Nile also played “Substitute” and “Kids Are Alright” at the show, a Grammy MusiCares tribute.

“I remember thinking, what’s wrong with this picture?” he recalled, and talked about working out how to play the Who classic backstage with the Boss, who also didn’t know the song. “For 15 minutes, like two high school kids … we learn ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ You can’t make this stuff up; I’m living a dream.”

Nile, however, isn’t the least bit starstruck by the music legends who love him.

“I’m just too dumb to know any better, but fame was never what I cared about,” he said. “It was always about the songs … that’s gotten me through some really small keyholes into some unique places.”

The inverse of that is what led him to leave music in the wake of his first two critically lauded albums when the industry harshed his mellow, then return in 1991 with Places I Have Never Been. He just wasn’t feeling it anymore. He and his then-wife — he’s now married to Italian photographer Cristina Arrigoni — moved back to Buffalo and had four kids.

“I stayed there through the eighties,” he said. “I stopped playing, but I was always writing. That’s what I do. I’ll write till I drop. At this rate, I’ll be playing till I drop, but it’s like my dad says … he asks, ‘How you doing?’ and I’ll say, ‘I’m working really hard, I’m pretty beat.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, but you get to do what you love. You’re a lucky guy.’ And he’s right.”

Even in conversation, one can hear the raucous Nile’s rock ’n’ roll heart beat. When he’s up on stage blazing through his massive catalog or covering a gem like the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” — Lou Reed was another New Yorker Nile knew — it’s like attending a revival tent party in 4/4 time.

So don’t go to The Rex on Nov. 15 with any thoughts of getting a refund. Rather, expect many moments when Nile’s spirit lifts the crowd to its feet. “I’m a 76-year-old dude and having the time of my life and doing the best shows in my career,” he said. “I’m having a ball, still writing at the top of my game, and the songs are still coming.”

An Evening With Willie Nile
When: Friday, Nov. 15, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $35 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Willie Nile. Courtesy photo.

My Old Ass (R)

A newly minted 18-year-old is suddenly confronted with her 39-year-old self in My Old Ass, a very sweet coming-of-age comedy.

Elliot (Maisy Stella) has gone to the woods with her two best buddies to celebrate her birthday by taking mushrooms. Her friends seem to be seeing euphoric discos; Elliot is stuck sitting by the campfire complaining nothing is happening. And then Elliot (Aubrey Plaza) shows up. Old Elliot is bemused by Young Elliot, who is initially shocked but then wants to know, like, what stocks to buy so they can be rich in 20 years and what awesome things might happen to her. Old Elliot is wary of messing with the future too much but she does tell Young Elliot to spend more time with her family, to please wear her retainer and to stay away from anyone named Chad. Elliot doesn’t know a Chad — until she meets her dad’s summer worker on the family cranberry farm and he is, of course, Chad (Percy Hynes White).

Elliot, who has always been attracted to women, is shocked to learn she’s attracted to the potentially troublesome Chad. While dealing with this confusion, she is also approaching the big life change of heading to college. She has always been eager to leave her family’s farm and small town but now that it is a reality she finds herself full of conflicting emotions.

My Old Ass thinks a lot about last times — the last time you do a thing and whether you know when you’re doing it that it is the end of something. Some lasts sneak up on you — the last time Elliot’s mom (Maria Dizzia) rocked a toddler Elliot to sleep. Some, like the last times Elliot is suddenly encountering as she prepares to leave for college and have her “life start,” as she says, are clearly last times and she has to deal with all the bittersweetness of them while in the middle of them. My Old Ass approaches this — life transitions, what we miss and how we deal with it all — with genuine emotion and melancholy-tinged sweetness while also being funny and having just the right touch when it comes to the older-self-talks-to-younger-self aspect of the story. Great performances all around help sell the realness of this world, with special kudos to Stella. A

Rated R for language throughout, drug use and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Megan Park, My Old Ass is an hour and 29 minutes long and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. It is available for rent or purchase and is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The Substance (R)

Demi Moore gives a very good, frequently quite funny performance in the goofy body horror The Substance.

Aging star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) attempts to recapture the “best version” of herself with an underground treatment called the Substance. The neon green serum does not lift and tighten — it pushes a whole new younger, flawless version of yourself out of you, violently, creating a seam down the back that this new person has to sew up. The operating rule of the Substance is seven days on, seven days off — the perfect Substance-created version of yourself gets to be for seven days while the older you sleeps. In seven days, you must switch back. Both versions are “you” and the younger version needs a “stabilizer” (fluid syringed out of the older version’s back) to continue existing.

Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s “best version,” is able to win a spot as the host of the exercise show Elisabeth was just fired from and is quickly getting spots on billboards. When Elisabeth reawakens she is both proud of what her alter has accomplished and, very quickly, jealous. Later Sue’s carelessness with the seven-day-switch rule has immediate and disturbing consequences for Elisabeth.

The Substance has lots of tight shots gleefully highlighting the grossness of the human body even before the movie’s final third, when what feels like a tidy dark comedy horror about beauty, age and media takes a hard left turn into total bonkers territory. Like so bonkers that the movie pushes past where you think it will stop, enters a new realm of absolute lunacy and then keeps going, so that actually by the end I kinda respected the whole crazy circus of gore the movie became. What holds it together throughout is Moore, who really does some solid work here with both the desperation Elisabeth feels (and that the Substance exacerbates) and the movie’s comedy. B+

Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Mubi.

The 4:30 Movie (R)

Kevin Smith makes his The Fabelmans with The 4:30 Movie, a nostalgia-rich tale of teenage friendship and love and ye old 1980s pre-stadium-seating movie theaters.

Ben David (Austin Zajur) gets up the courage to ask Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong), a girl he likes but ghosted after he got nervous when they kissed, to the 4:30 screening of what sounds like a middling detective movie — their local theater in suburban New Jersey isn’t playing Poltergeist II, the current hot ticket. The screening will come in the middle of a day of movies Ben has planned with his friends, dork Belly (Reed Northup) and dork-who-wants-so-badly-to-seem-greaser-cool Burny (Nicholas Cirillo). Belly seems perfectly happy for Ben but Burny is clearly nervous about how it will change the friendship dynamic. In addition to friend friction, obstacles to Ben’s romantic movie moment include a power-drunk cineplex owner (Ken Jeong), assorted burnout theater employees and Ben’s and Melody’s parents.

From the lingering shots of the post-rotary push-button desk phone to jokes about the surely-finished-forever Star Wars trilogy, The 4:30 Movie is all about the gooey nostalgia for a very specific late 1980s time and place and for the impact it had on Smith’s life. Actually, just how Fabelmans-y this movie is becomes ever more apparent as the movie goes on, culminating in a fun little credits scene. This much Kevin Smith-itude might not be for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. B

Available for rent or purchase.

Bambi, by Felix Salten

Bambi, by Felix Salten (Knopf, 211 pages)

If all you know of Bambi is what Disney served up, you don’t know Bambi.

With many of Disney’s early movies, the stories weren’t written in-house — Snow White came from a German fairy tale, attributed to the Brothers Grimm, and Pinnochio was written by an Italian journalist in the 19th century. The source material for Bambi, which Disney released as an animated film in 1942, was a slim novel by the same name written by Felix Salten. It’s been re-released this year as a gold-embossed hardcover book, part of Alfred A. Knopf’s “Children’s Classics” series — which is fine, so long as this elegant, disturbing little book doesn’t fall into a child’s hands. This is not your 5-year-old’s Bambi, and Thumpers in the rear-view mirror are not as they seem.
That said, Salten’s Bambi, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” is better than Disney’s, and I love that the foreword is the original one from 1928, which concludes, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Like George Orwell with Animal Farm and E.B. White with Charlotte’s Web, Salten created characters who are fully animal but at the same time quite human. The book opens with an exchange between Bambi’s mother, exhausted from giving birth, and a magpie who keeps chattering about its own life. “Pardon, I wasn’t listening,” Bambi’s mother says after a while, and the magpie flies away thinking, “A stupid soul. Very nice, but stupid,” which, fair or unfair, could encapsulate a lot of conversations we all have in a grocery store line.

Soon enough, as Bambi enjoys his solitary time with his mother they encounter a ferret that has killed a mouse. And a “vast, unknown horror clutched at his heart” as the fawn gets a blurry view of some unknown horror that exists beyond his idyllic life. But his mother is not yet ready to speak of it, trying to keep Bambi innocent as long as possible while teaching him about the joys of the meadow, where “he rejoiced with his legs and with his whole body as he flung himself into the air,” and gazed at the sky, where “he saw the whole heaven stretching far and wide and he rejoiced without knowing why.”

He is introduced to three other deer, one of which, Faline, will become his mate, and catches his first glimpse of his father, who passes the cluster of deer with another proud stag without acknowledging them. Crushed, Bambi asks his mother why; she replies, “They don’t ever stay with us, only at times. … And we have to wait for them to speak to us. They do it whenever they like.”

Bambi’s mother herself grows increasingly colder to her son as he matures, once snapping at him, “Go away and let me be.” When he cries for her, a stag appears and tells him, “Your mother has no time for you now.” And this is before we ever get to the cruelty of man, the hunter, who is described throughout simply as “He.”

The word “Bambi” itself has become Bambi-ized, more associated with cartoon characters and porn stars than its source. But Saltzer’s book, while simply written, is gritty with the hard reality of animal life in which fear and death are constants. In one interaction with a squirrel, Bambi inquires about the rodent’s father, and the squirrel replies, “O, the owl caught him a month ago.” One chapter is a conversation between two autumn leaves, clinging to the top of a tree, contemplating their mortality. (“Can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”)

All this is to say, perhaps this was a “children’s” book when it was first published, five years before antibiotics were discovered and when many people still slaughtered their own meat and death had not been sanitized and swept aside to nursing homes and hospitals. Now, it’s nightmare-inducing stuff, particularly with the running theme of abandonment by parents, and a scene in which Bambi’s “Friend Hare” — which Disney named Thumper — is terrified and writhing in a trap.

In the end Salter’s Bambi is both a coming-of-age story and circle-of-life story, as the deer matures and accepts his role in the forest. Like every good story, it has a clear villain — the human — who is threaded with complexity. He both terrorizes the forest creatures and provides a safe and loving home for his dog, and even cares for an injured deer.

In one scene, a hunting dog and his wounded prey, a fox, have an emotionally charged conversation, the fox calling the dog a turncoat and renegade, since they are genetically brothers. The dog replies, “Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He’s all powerful. He’s above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him.”

And just when you think you’ve got the book’s theological implications figured out, Salter goes elsewhere, because this is, at its heart, a morality tale.

Stephen King once called Disney’s Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw because of its effect on him as a child. That genre doesn’t describeSalter’s Bambi the book, except maybe for vegans. But it’s a deeply affecting little book that, like A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm, shows that the impact of a book has nothing to do with its length. A —Jennifer Graham

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