Why? ... and a bit about Howard Pease

We were looking through photos on our computer today, including hundreds of scans of book jackets that have passed through our business (most of them still here, actually, as I have deleted many from the books sold). Son Adam, the computer genius, remarked on how nice they looked, and I started talking about one of them in an excited way... next thing I know, a blog has been created. He even started it out with a photo real decent book, that Howard Pease, post #1
Howard Pease was one of my most favorite writers when I was a teenager long ago... read all his Tod Moran sea adventures, etc. In the last few years I've gone back and reread several, and they hold up quite well. I can see why he is still popular. He is been tossed out of the school libraries by now for racism - has stock characters like Limey, with his cockney accent, or Sven the Squarehead. But if you actually absorb the reading, his purpose was just the opposite. One I read last year, for example, was Shipwreck: "The Strange Adventures of Renny Mitchum, Mess Boy of the Trading Schooner 'Samarang.'"
The kid leaves Stanford (as did Pease) and ships out on a tanker because his father was lost in a certain area of the South Pacific long ago, and he wants to find him. There is a Filipino cook in charge of his department who is talked about in the stereotypical racist ways... what Renny slowly realizes is that the Filipino is the most decent person aboard... etc.
I think the book in the photo, Shipwreck, has been sold. (I'd better check!)
The only one that shows up on our DB presently is a 1944 of The Black Tanker, in jacket. I have a few more squirreled away somewhere, I think (trouble with bookselling, and loving books, that's a conflict!)
Thunderbolt House, set during the San Francisco Earthquake, is a very nice story too.
More soon... Truman

Shipwreck!

Howard Pease wrote many fine works of historical fiction for yound adults.