Thursday, September 6, 2012

Three Without Fear


A wonderful adventure, Three Without Fear was published in 1947 but is just as engaging today. It's like Gary Paulsen's Hatchet but for a younger age, and instead of a boy alone in the wilderness it's about three kids alone in the desert. I read it to a third grader, and neither of us could put it down.

After a shipwreck, an American boy named Dave is cast ashore on a beach in Baja California. He is found by Pedro and Maria,
brother and sister orphans who have run away from virtual slavery in a foster home at Cabo Blanco and are now hiding in a makeshift shelter in the desert. Dave wants to return to his parents in California, while Pedro and Maria want to find their grandmother in northern Baja. Together they decide to hike north following the desolate Pacific Coast (Baja in the 1940s was much more isolated and unpopulated than it is today). It will be a journey of hundreds of miles, on foot. Accompanying them are a half-coyote dog named Chico and a roadrunner bird with a broken wing.

 It's a story of survival, discovery, and friendship. They improvise and invent. They hunt rabbits with slingshots and dig up clams on the beach. They endure storms and days without water or food. They start fires without matches.  They make tortillas by grinding the seeds of wild plants into flour.  They are held captive by a bad man. They attempt to repair a derelict boat with nearly disastrous results.  They face these adventures, as the title says, without fear while their friendship grows.

The California white boy and the Mexican brother/sister learn their cultural differences and common humanity, which is woven nicely and unobtrusively into the story. In the trek, Dave becomes nearly as brown as his companions.  The ending - and their parting - is both happy and touchingly sad.

Only the rigid gender roles might betray the book's age (Maria cooks; the boys hunt) but the roles are consistent with writing in 1947 and particularly true to the Mexican locale. Maria, by the way, is one tough cookie.

  
The illustrations by Ralph Ray, Jr. are a striking bonus to an excellent story. The book is out of print and costs a small fortune on the used book market (I paid $50 for mine).

Here's the opening:
Dave was never quite sure how it happened.  He only knew that he awoke as he was being hurled from his berth, and mingled with the startled awakening, there was a terrific explosion.  For a moment or more he lay stupefied on the floor of his stateroom, struggling to regain his senses.  Then slowly he realized the steady throb of the engines, to which he had grown so accustomed in the week since boarding the ship, had abruptly ceased.

I recommend it to boys 8 to 12 and to adults who love good books about kids.


Given the nature of this blog, I was particularly enchanted by the inventiveness of the kids in plugging wormholes in a leaky old boat, building a raft, and in Dave's invention of a still consisting of a gourd filled with water sitting on an oyster shell to protect it from flame, heated over a fire with the steam escaping through hollow reeds to drip into another shell, by which they slowly and painstakingly converted salt water to fresh water.

Robert Coleman DuSoe (also spelled Robert C. "Du Soe" with a space between Du and Soe
— it makes a difference when you search) was born February 20, 1920 in Los Angeles, California and died September 1, 1964, also in Los Angeles.  He wrote several books for children, including a nice one called Sea Boots.  He is credited with story or screenplay for two movies, a noir The Devil Thumbs a Ride and a western 20 Mule Team.  That's all I can find out about him.  Whoever are the heirs of Robert C. DuSoe, (or Robert C. Du Soe), I beg you to re-issue at least Three Without Fear — or contact me and let me do it.

8 comments:

  1. I love Three Without Fear too. I have been reading it to my fourth grade students for years. (I first heard it when my sixth grade teacher read it to my class in 1970). I would love this book to be reprinted, and I would love to know more about its author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm glad to know somebody is still reading this book. Your students are lucky to have you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My dad is 75 years old and misplaced his original copy. I would love to get him another copy but I can only find it on Amazon for $400! Crazy! I was hoping my dad could read it with his grandkids. I will keep looking.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, crazy. I see a copy at Abe Books online for $145. That's still crazy. Where did all the copies go? Is somebody hoarding them?

      Delete
  4. Thank you for your post and also for the added information about Robert Du Soe at the end.
    "Three Without Fear" was one of my favorite books growing up, and I read it over and over. I borrowed the book from my elementary school library and never came across it since then. For many years as an adult I searched many antique stores and book stores looking for it, but never found it.
    For some reason today, I searched for the book on Amazon but seeing the price for $398.00, I know that I will never read it again.
    It was heart warming to read how much others loved this story as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a shame that so few copies remain of the book. The story has touched so many people.

      Delete
  5. I saw the Wonderful World of Disney adaptation when I was seven. I remember being completely captivated. Watching a You Tube video about Baja tonight made me remember it. Wonderful story. I wonder why Disney doesn't reissue some of those old shows.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Where did they go? Where were they sold in the first place? They were sold to libraries. There are not as many school and public libraries as you might suppose. I read once that in 1960 there were 6,000 school and public libraries with books for kids. Thus, a publisher like Longmans, Green might try to sell 2,000 copies to cover 1/3 of their perceived market. They thought they were doing well with that. But, after most copies were read to pieces, there are few of these ex-library copies left for the significant demand for certain titles like this one. Low supply and larger demand is the definition of a scarce book and prices may follow.

    Some Amazon listings are the same as you'd find on the used book databases (see https://used.addall.com as one way to check many databases at once).

    Some Amazon listers are not book specialists. Some price by algorithms such that if a particular book is not presently listed, the formula will place a very high figure to see if anyone will bite at that level. The thought is that they can only sell a book once and they can come down later on. Often they do not. One high price for an unsold copy begets other hight prices.

    It would be easier to reprint if the book was public domain. However, the copyright was renewed in 1975 by his widow so this extends the copyright to a ridiculous 95 years for a book that is no longer of interest to a modern publisher but still remembered by people who saw it in libraries in the 1950s and beyond. It is a tough situation.

    There are still some copies in libraries and perhaps a few of them are available for inter-library loan (ILL). If you can borrow a copy like this, you can see about making a personal fair use copy.

    This is a book that will have only increased demand because someone I know has written an article about the author and this book in particular for a series book collector magazine. Once readers are interested in his books, the demand will increase more. It has happened before for the works by authors of library-oriented volumes like Norvin Pallas.

    Five of Du Soe's other books are available on the Internet Archive (https://Archive.org) and it may pay to sample them. They can be read online for an hour at a time. They also have the OpenLibrary (https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2249148A/Robert_C._Du_Soe) which shows the same selection of books available and notes that this one is not available. Internet Archive buys books and scans them. Whether one can be borrowed online for 1 hour or 14 days depends on if they have just one copy or two or more of a work. Right now they have none.

    If you are not in the market for scarce and collectible books, that is fine. Go to a library for your needs. However, just because a price is not right for you, don't assume that the seller is greedy or crazy. Sometimes there are good reasons why some books have high prices attached to them. If there were 30 copies available and two of them were 50 times the price of others, THAT would be a different matter. But in this case the book is just very scarce and there are others who feel just as attached to the story as you do to it.

    James D. Keeline, Bookseller (since 1988)

    ReplyDelete