One Thousand Tracings

By Lita Judge
40 pages
Hyperion Books for Children
July 2007

That the story behind Judge's picture book doesn't outshine her text or illustrations is really saying something, because backstories don't get much more moving than the one here. One Thousand Tracings is based on the childhood experiences of Judge's mother, whose parents -- Wisconsin ornithologists -- led a post-WWII effort to help total strangers in Europe keep body and soul together as the continent rebuilt.

The story's unforced drama unfolds in two-page chapters over a two-year period, from the return of the narrator's soldier-father in 1946 to the return to normalcy on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of 1948. Judge's demonstration of American kindness and humanity in post-war Europe is not a new theme in historical picture books -- Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot and Boxes for Katje have covered similar ground -- but she makes her mother's story intensely personal through the art. The book's title refers to the flood of paper tracings of shoeless feet received by the narrator's family, and actual tracings received by Judge's mother and grandparents are reproduced throughout, along with photos and letters sent across the ocean by those in need.

The author's note is unusually satisfying, but the thoughtful and thorough web site Judge has put together for the book is really something else. Readers will come away with an even greater sense of what went into, in the words of the book's subtitle, "Healing the Wounds of World War II."

The Train Jumper

By Don Brown
128 pages
Roaring Brook
August 2007

I'm going to start looking forward to author-illustrator Brown's novels as much as I do his biographical picture books. I say this having just finished his second historical fiction effort in as many years, which immediately drew me in with its tale of teenage hobos riding the rails during the Great Depression.

As did The Notorious Izzy Fink, Brown's story starts fast and ends almost as quickly, inviting readers who may not be opposed to lengthy, intricate tales but sure don't mind a short, punchy one. And like Brown's first novel, this one examines the casually caustic racism of a bygone era. But while the discrimination cuts deeper this time around, it's just one flavor of hard times faced by westward-bound Collie, and it accentuates rather than weighs down his rollicking adventures and hair's-breadth scrapes in this absorbing tale.

The Bee Tree

By Stephen Buchmann and Diana Cohn and illustrated by Paul Mirocha
40 pages
Cinco Puntos Press
April 2007

Even if there wasn't a magical, nonfiction-based tale at the heart of The Bee Tree, this title would be worth seeking out just on the strength of the eight pages of photo- and illustration-packed notes from the book's creators. One fact from those notes stands out and gives some idea of the wonders to be found in The Bee Tree's main text and illustrations: "Over 750 species of trees can be found in just twenty-five acres ... of Malaysian rainforest."

In the pages preceding those notes, readers are plunged into that rainforest for the contemporary story of Nizam, a boy following his grandfather for the first time up a 120-foot wooden ladder for his clan's annual honey hunt. It's a moonless night, by the way. And there are lots and lots of big, angry bees. And fire, cleverly wielded. Equal parts adventure, botany, and folklore, The Bee Tree offers a captivating look both at an unfamiliar culture and a familiar sweetener that may become a bit harder to take for granted.

Old Penn Station

by William Low
40 pages
Henry Holt
April 2007

Nostalgic without being sentimental, William Low's straightforward text and striking paintings pay tribute to a long-gone Manhattan landmark, boldly conceived a century ago and unceremoniously torn down 53 years after it opened. Before the mid-1960s construction of the functional transit hub that Low passes through each week stood what he presents as a work of art, "a magical spiderweb of metal and glass," and the reader first becoming aware of old Penn Station through this book is in for a rich experience.

It's easy to imagine an author-illustrator framing the building's story through the eyes of a retirement-age commuter, looking back on the freshly built Penn Station of his boyhood as its nondescript successor takes its place. But Low refreshingly keeps the focus on the building itself, the reasons for its construction and demolition alike, the life that coursed through it in the meantime, and the lessons learned from the way this "monument to rail travel" was discarded in pieces into New Jersey's Meadowlands. Low's book serves as a monument to that monument, and neither will be easily forgotten.

Jeannette Rankin: Political Pioneer

by Gretchen Woelfle
102 pages
Calkins Creek
May 2007

If you know one thing about Jeannette Rankin beyond the fact that she was the first woman elected to Congress, it's probably that she was the only member of Congress to vote against the U.S.'s entry into both world wars. The biggest news to me, upon reading Gretchen Woelfle's lively new biography, was that Montana's Rankin was in fact the first woman elected to a democratic lawmaking body anywhere in the world.

Or maybe it was that her two big votes against war occurred in the only two terms she served, more than two decades apart.

Or maybe it was that Rankin still had another three decades to go after that before she'd be done actively opposing war. (You'll dig the photo of a 90-ish Rankin standing next to an 11-piece drum kit at a 1970 anti-Vietnam rally.)

I could go on.

Like the recent biography of Jane Addams, Rankin's mentor and sister suffragette, this one offers a captivating portrait of a highly principled American putting those principles to good use for a good long time.

Hey Batta Batta Swing! and other baseball books

Hey Batta Batta Swing!: The Wild Old Days of Baseball
by Sally Cook & James Charlton and illustrated by Ross MacDonald
Margaret K. McElderry Books
2/07

With baseball books, it's easy to take the subject too seriously: It's a metaphor for life! For America! For innocence (or the loss thereof)! Ancient stats and facts get a lot of play because they all mean something.

There's a lot of history and a lot of lore in this new collaboration by Cook, Charlton and MacDonald, but most importantly there's a lot of fun. Packed with old-time lingo and comically over-the-top art, Hey Batta Batta Swing! makes for a great leadoff book in this month's U.S. history reading for 8-year-old S and 3-year-old F.

The other titles in this month's lineup (which overlaps a little with the list offered recently by The Miss Rumphius Effect) include:

• Ballpark: The Story of America's Baseball Fields by Lynn Curlee
• Take Me Out to the Ball Game by Jim Burke, with lyrics by Jack Norworth
• Home Run: The Story of Babe Ruth by Robert Burleigh and Mike Wimmer
• Players in Pigtails by Shana Corey and illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon
• Teammates by Peter Golenbock and illustrated by Paul Bacon
• Say Hey!: A Song of Willie Mays by Peter Mandel and illustrated by Don Tate
• Free Baseball by Sue Corbett (Yes, it's contemporary rather than history. Yes, it's fiction rather than nonfiction. Still, the ump says it's safe.)
  

There are lots of recurring themes among these titles -- two have a character named "Katie Casey," there are multiple (and conflicting) explanations of how Ruth came to be known as "Babe," we get recurring descriptions of the long-gone practice of "soaking" (getting a runner out by hitting him with the ball), and so on. It's discovering these sorts of connections that make reading history with my sons such a pleasure.

Say, maybe these connections all mean something. Maybe baseball is really a metaphor for children's literature...

Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion

by Loree Griffin Burns
Houghton Mifflin
3/07

If I hadn't been following Burns' blog and her tales of her first appearances as an (almost) published author, I never would have guessed that Tracking Trash is a debut book. Her exploration of the ocean currents and the human-produced junk they carry (including, but not limited to, nurdles) is a timely, fascinating, exceptionally well-done work of nonfiction.

The scientists that Burns profiles come off as having some of the most interesting jobs on the planet, even though many of their findings are downright depressing. Just wait until you get to the part about the Eastern Garbage Patch, an unimaginably large and foul collection of flotsam and jetsam on the surface of the Pacific between Hawaii and California.

Burns' writing is both sophisticated and accessible throughout, and Tracking Trash is that rare nonfiction book where there's always a photo or a map or a diagram exactly where the reader needs them to be. Before this book, I'd never given much thought to trash in the ocean, but I sure am glad to know that scientists are tracking this stuff, and that Burns has been tracking them. Read it yourself, and you may be inclined to track something, too: one author's very promising career.

Lightship

by Brian Floca
Atheneum
3/07

I kept waiting for something to happen in this picture book, kept wondering why nothing was happening -- and in so doing kept responding exactly the way I believe Floca wants his readers to.

Lightship is an exquisite, uncommonly distinctive book. The languid pacing of the poetic text nails the unhurriedness of the lives of the crew members as their ship "holds to one sure spot." Floca just as effectively snaps the reader to attention when it's time for the crew to do its thing: fire up the twin beacons and guide ships around fog-obscured hazards in areas where lighthouses aren't practical.

Or rather, where they weren't practical. Some readers captivated by Lightship -- by the illustrations that ably capture both the softness of the ship's cat and the intricacies of its machinery -- will be disappointed to learn that the last such U.S. ship docked in 1983. But perhaps they'll be heartened to know that Light Vessel 87 -- the real ship depicted here -- awaits them, a floating museum in New York City right across the East River from Floca's studio.

Vinnie and Abraham

by Dawn FitzGerald and illustrated by Catherine Stock
Charlesbridge
1/07

This true tale -- sweetened with floral endpapers and invented dialogue -- of how teenaged sculptor Vinnie Ream won the government commission to immortalize Abraham Lincoln in marble is a welcome addition to the canon of picture books about the 16th U.S. president.

Despite Lincoln sharing top billing in the title, Vinnie and Abraham is really the story of Ream, the first woman and youngest artist to win such an assignment from Congress. Ream and Lincoln share only a single spread together, a depiction of the 2 1/2 hours he spent with her each week posing for a bust.

The rest of FitzGerald's frequently pointed telling covers the growth of Ream's prodigious talents, the limited professional options open to young women during the Civil War era, Ream's knack for creating opportunities for herself, and the technical details of how she went about creating the statue, right down to selecting the stone in an Italian quarry.

Stock's lovely watercolors add to the warmth, intimacy, and inspiration of the text, with one particularly noteworthy added touch -- repeated depictions the 1860s construction of the Capitol's dome, beneath which lies the rotunda where Ream's statue resides today.

Do Re Mi: If You Can Read Music, Thank Guido d'Arezzo

by Susan L. Roth in association with Angelo Mafucci
Houghton Mifflin
1/07

The feel of a fable permeates Roth's telling of how music came to be written down: There's the unappreciated protagonist, the inflexible elders, the lonely journey, and the critical role played by a true friend. Guido d'Arezzo's invention of musical notation occurred a thousand years ago, but Roth's intimate dialogue ("'I just can't do it,' he said.") and the felt-board quality of the torn-paper illustrations make the ancient story seem to unfold right before the reader's eyes.

Roth makes palpable Guido's inspiration, determination, despair, and ultimate exuberance upon realizing his vision after many years of trial and error. She also sheds light on the aspect of musical notation that's most familiar to most of us, thanks to The Sound of Music: how the titular "do re mi" came to be. A comparison of Guido d'Arezzo's notation with the modern format, a glossary, author's note, and bibliography return Do Re Mi from the realm of fable to pure fact and end it on just the right note.

Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy

by Judith Bloom Fradin and Dennis Brindell Fradin
Clarion
12/06

If you want to feel completely inspired or totally inadequate, read the Fradins' biography of this indefatigable social reformer from a century ago.

The staid, somber cover doesn't do justice to Addams, her personal warmth, or her tireless, energetic crusading, but the text more than compensates. The authors make abundantly clear (and with generous source notes) why the Nobel winner and founder of Hull House was among the world's best known, most admired citizens in her day.

The Fradins, however, go above and beyond by bookending Jane Addams with effective efforts to place her in a modern context. "Today," their introduction begins, "most people either don't know who Jane Addams was or have only a vague idea that she was somehow involved in social work." (Or children's books, they might have added.)

Nearly 200 pages later, after they've succeeded in making Addams unforgettable, they examine conflicting views on how well her most controversial endeavor -- the promotion of pacifism, even while the U.S. was at war in 1917-18 -- has held up more than 70 years after her death. "[I]f she could come back in 2006," they write, "is there any doubt that she would organize protests against the war in Iraq?"

The truth is, readers can replace "war in Iraq" with any of many causes, imagine how "J.A." would approach it (answer: head on), and then wonder why they themselves aren't doing more.

Satchel Paige and Stealing Home

Satchel Paige: Don't Look Back
by David A. Adler and illustrated by Terry Widener
Harcourt
1/07

Stealing Home -- Jackie Robinson: Against the Odds
by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Mike Wimmer
Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman
1/07

This pair of picture book bios of baseball greats -- Robinson, the intense pioneer, and Paige, the quick-with-a-quip Methuselah -- makes for as interesting a contrast as their subjects themselves.

Burleigh and Wimmer (who previously collaborated on biographies of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth) offer the more stylish of these two new titles. Accompanied by Wimmer's near-photographic oil paintings, Stealing Home's main text consists of a brief burst of free verse describing Robinson's daring theft of home plate during the 1955 World Series, with the title serving as a metaphor for a person's taking what rightfully belonged to them all along. Each spread includes micro-text squeezed onto the back of a baseball card, offering up conversational anecdotes about various aspects of Robinson's life and career.

For Satchel Paige, Adler and Widener (who have teamed for books on Joe Louis and Lou Gehrig, plus a Ruth book of their own) offer not an ounce of flash. Their telling of Paige's life's story is straightforward and chronological, and no less effective for it. Despite Widener's loose-limbed depictions of Paige -- and to Adler he's always "Paige," compared to Burleigh's use of "Jackie" -- their subject is no clown. Only a season and a half separated Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier and Paige's big-league debut on his 42nd birthday, and the struggles that Paige faced will be accessible to readers younger than Stealing Home's likely fans.

Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living

by Anna Redsand
Clarion
12/06

This YA biography of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning), inspired by the meaninglessness that first-time author Redsand sensed in the life of a inhalant-abusing student she was counseling, has its heart in the right place. Luckily -- aside from its generic subtitle -- its head is there as well.

Redsand takes what, to many young readers, may be just another name on an assigned-Holocaust-reading list and fleshes out his life in a way that many in her audience will be able to relate to. Vienna-born Frankl was a free-thinking, intellectually rigorous, precocious teenager (Freud was a pen pal) who, despite his belief that existence surely must have some purpose, knew doubt and despair firsthand.

Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living gives ample attention to the subject's experiences in various concentration camps and the way they tested his emphasis on the necessity of finding meaning even in suffering. But Redsand also examines his love of rock climbing -- it's not hard to imagine Mountain Dew sponsoring a Frankl lecture tour even into his 70s.

Perhaps most importantly, Redsand fills her text with tangible examples of how Frankl's logotherapy treatment can assist adolescents in their own search for meaning while acknowledging criticisms of both Frankl and his approach to mental health. The book is capped off by extensive source notes and suggestions for further reading, and it's not hard to imagine this title being one that a teenage Viktor Frankl himself would have appreciated -- and benefited from.

Dinosaur Bone War: Cope and Marsh's Fossil Feud

During the couple of decades that I stopped paying attention to dinosaurs, those in the know switched from the term "Brontosaurus" to "Apatosaurus." It rankled me a little -- obviously, it doesn't take much to get me set in my ways -- but not enough to make me seek out an explanation of why the switch occurred, or what was wrong with "Brontosaurus" in the first place.

Now that I've read Elizabeth Cody Kimmel's Dinosaur Bone War (Random House, 12/06), I understand and then some. Kimmel offers up a fast-paced, highly readable middle-grade account of the Spy vs. Spy-quality treachery that passed between preeminent 19th century American paleontologists O. C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, not long after the term "dinosaur" was first coined.

It was Marsh who, in his rush to add to his rivalry-leading tally of dinosaur discoveries, stuck the wrong head on a large Apatosaurus skeleton and deemed it a Brontosaurus. And it was Cope who placed the head of Elasmosaurus at the end of its long tail instead of its even longer neck, thus getting himself immortalized in, among other places, Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart's recent Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks & Other Sea Monsters.

Cope and Marsh's goofs while trying to get ahead (har har) pale in comparison to their many discoveries, but for readers, the big discovery in Dinosaur Bone War may be just how entertainingly petty and paranoid a pair of scientists can be.

The Printer's Trial

I remember hearing a mention of John Peter Zenger in my eighth-grade U.S. history class, but I couldn't have told you much about him -- we were in a rush to get to the Civil War by the end of May. He must have come up in the media law class I took in college, but whatever we learned about him didn't stay with me, beyond the basics: He was a printer whose trial had something to do with freedom of the press.

Each of those times, I could have really used this new nonfiction title by Gail Jarrow (Calkins Creek, 10/06), but it's just as welcome today. Of course, there's never been -- and never will be -- a time in U.S. history when a better understanding of the free press wouldn't come in handy. The aims of The Printer's Trial: The Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press are narrowly focused on adding to that understanding.

Jarrow strives for clarity and succeeds. Her straightforward narrative takes readers from the initial dust-up with the worthless new colonial governor of New York through the August 1735 trial of Zenger, a German immigrant who was one of just two printers in Manhattan. She's careful to help readers keep track of the many players, especially the gaggle of influential politicians who (unlike Zenger) remained anonymous in the newspaper where their jabs at the governor appeared.

The Printer's Trial illuminates just how many levers the government could pull to prevent "seditious libel" -- that is, criticism of the government -- and how underdog Zenger came out on top thanks to the jury's willingness to look past the law and vote for free expression instead. Within a generation or two, that outcome had contributed both to the published criticisms of British rule in the run-up to the Revolution and to the First Amendment. And nearly 300 years later, blogs more political than this one still owe a debt to the tradesman at the center of Jarrow's book.

This Jazz Man

The last time I wrote about children's books about jazz music and musicians, I overlooked a major part of their (potential) appeal: the fun to be had when a playful author turns the sounds of jazz into words on a page. Jazz has never seemed more joyful than in this new title (Harcourt, 11/06) by Karen Ehrhardt and illustrated by R. G. Roth.

A counting book set to the rhythm of "This Old Man" (I suppose the text could be read instead of sung, but why would you want to?), This Jazz Man offers two-page spreads devoted to each of nine late, great leading lights of jazz. Each included instrument gets one representative, which means snarly Miles Davis is left out in favor of cuddly Dizzy Gillespie. If you can't think of nine major instruments, perhaps you're forgetting about baton (Duke Ellington), feet (Bojangles Robinson), and congas (Chano Pozo, who I'm guessing is making his picture book debut here).

"Bop-bop! Beeeee-AAAAW!" and Roth's bright art would be plenty, but at the back of the book Ehrhardt also offers succinct, informative, highly enjoyable biographies of each jazz man, with a welcome emphasis on personal details and musical techniques rather than on commercial achievements. Readers inspired to explore more on their own will soon discover what Ehrhardt no doubt knows: There are enough key instruments left over (clarinet, trombone, guitar) to make a decent start on an encore.

***

Other blogs on This Jazz Man:

Booktopia
Chasing Ray

American Slave, American Hero: York of the Lewis And Clark Expedition

York, William Clark's personal slave since childhood, "could not volunteer, or refuse, to go on the expedition." That simple fact lies at the heart of this new title (Calkins Creek, 10/06) by Laurence Pringle and illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu.

At once elegant and packed with adventure, American Slave, American Hero centers the familiar story of the Lewis and Clark expedition around its sole black member, zeroing in on what's known about his experiences in 1804-1806. Besides not having joined the expedition out of his own free will, York's tale is distinct from those of other members in other ways. To the native peoples the expedition encountered, York was an object of fascination, his exotic coloring repeatedly earning him the honorific "Big Medicine." And because Clark kept York illiterate, Pringle and other retellers of the team's history must glean details of York's life from the accounts of other members.

In that respect, York and his feelings -- about being separated from his wife, about being allowed a vote in an expedition decision, about being honored by one group for the very reason he was enslaved by another -- are unknowable. But that's where Van Wright and Hu's watercolors come in. They flesh out this brave man whose owner (who, by the way, comes off as something of a jerk) may well have assumed would be forgotten. With Pringle, they've seen to it that that won't happen.

Be Water, My Friend: The Early Years of Bruce Lee

The scratchy, brown-on-brown artwork in Be Water, My Friend (Lee and Low Books, 9/06) has an ancient quality that reinforces the sense of legend that surrounds Bruce Lee. Ken Mochizuki and illustrator Dom Lee's picture book assumes that the reader will already have an interest in -- or at least familiarity with -- that legend.

The main text carries Bruce Lee through age 18, when he left Hong Kong for America, with an afterword summing up his career and the tragically short remainder of his life. The focus here is not on Bruce Lee's external display of his martial arts skills, but rather on his internal struggles between the gentleness of a boy who loved ballroom dancing with his mother and the aggression of an occasionally wayward youth.

The only depictions of hand-to-hand combat occur in a boxing ring, and the story's turning point takes place not in a competition but in a boat. On the whole, it's a calming story -- the sort of story that might have benefited book-loving young Bruce Lee as he strained to stay on the right path.

***

Other Blogs on Be Water, My Friend:
The PlanetEsme Book-A-Day Plan

Nobody Gonna Turn Me 'Round: Stories and Songs of the Civil Rights Movement

In this third collaboration (Candlewick, 9/06) with illustrator Shane W. Evans, Martin Luther King biographer Doreen Rappaport shines a light on many other African-Americans whose sacrifices helped bring about shamefully past-due social progress in the 1950s and 1960s. As with the trilogy's preceding titles, which focused on the eras of slavery and emancipation, Nobody Gonna Turn Me 'Round combines Rappaport's quiltwork of quotations, topical songs, and original prose with Evans' bruisingly passionate paintings.

From the description and depiction of Emmett Till's body, to the image of doomed civil rights workers as viewed through rifle scopes, to Rappaport's unflinching use of "the ugliest of all words," this book's approach is a blunt one. While the narrative ends with the triumph of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the tone is anything but triumphant. There's still more justice to be done, but as the epilogue makes reassuringly clear, many of the players from 40 and 50 years ago are still out there doing it.

Hero of the High Seas: John Paul Jones and the American Revolution

Michael L. Cooper's handsome volume for older readers (National Geographic, 9/06) gets going by questioning the accuracy of the famous quote attributed to John Paul Jones, "I have not yet begun to fight." While that saying certainly captures the spirit of Jones, regarded as the father of the U.S. Navy, Cooper offers plenty of historically verifiable alternatives.

My favorite: Upon learning that a defeated foe had subsequently been knighted, the scrappy Scottish immigrant wrote, "Let me fight him again, and I'll make him a lord."

As Cooper correctly remarks, Jones' accomplishments may seem modest by modern standards, spoiled as we've been by two and a quarter centuries of military heroics. But it's easy to forget that, unlike his landlocked revolutionary contemporaries, Jones had no American model to follow. Inspired in large part by his own thirst for fame, he was establishing U.S. naval history as he went along.

Once the necessary backstory -- both Jones' and the revolution's -- is addressed, Cooper's tale speeds along. Cooper offers lively descriptions of Jones' exploits as a troublemaker in the British Isles as he brought a bit of the revolution back to the mother country. Granted considerable leeway by the powers-that-be, Jones acquired a reputation among the British as something of a pirate -- and we all know how unpopular pirates are in children's literature these days.

Tsunami: The True Story of an April Fools' Day Disaster

Two things I didn't know about tsunamis prior to reading this new title (Darby Creek, 9/06) by Gail Langer Karwoski:

1. The Black Sunday tsunami of 2004 was so powerful that it made the earth spin faster.

2. The Seattle and Portland, Oregon, areas are at risk for these deadly waves.

Karwoski centers her book around a dramatic episode from 1946 Hawaii but goes much further into the past, present, and future of tsunamis and prediction/warning systems, with loads of engagingly presented science. John MacDonald's illustrations are a treat as well, with the woodcut-style chapter openings giving the Hawaii disaster the feel of modern folklore. A lot of care went into the book's overall design, too: The page numbers themselves are tossed about on tiny waves, a winningly whimsical touch that both underscores and somewhat tempers the overwhelming power of the subject.

The Notorious Izzy Fink

Fans of author-illustrator Don Brown should know straight off that his first novel bears no resemblance to any of his picture books, save one. His Kid Blink Beats the World recounted the true-life tale of newsies on strike in 1899 Manhattan, and it was his research into the immigrant-rich ethnic stew of the Lower East Side that led to The Notorious Izzy Fink (Roaring Brook, 9/06).

While Brown's picture books -- even the gritty tale of Kid Blink -- have a certain softness to them, The Notorious Izzy Fink is the least genteel book for young readers that I can remember. Given the central characters (adolescent boys, gangsters, and corrupt cops) and the setting, that seems appropriate. In the afterword, Brown himself makes a point of offering no apologies for the coarseness.

From this slim novel's opening words ("I clocked Fink so hard on the side of his head I coulda sworn it rang like a bell"), Brown gives notice of the sort of rough-and-tumble, upside-the-head story he's got in store. Narrator Sam Glodsky -- half Irish and half Jewish, though not generally described quite so delicately -- scrapes and scraps his way through a tough, tough existence, supporting his recently widowed and thoroughly devastated Pop. An opportunity arises to score some quick cash by doing a favor for animal-loving gangster Monk Eastman. The hitch is that the gig pairs Sam with the novel's titular thug. Well, there's that, plus Sam's very real risk of contracting cholera.

In one scene, Brown describes "curses flying around like pigeons over bread crumbs." The same could almost be said for the book itself, and you could swap "ethnic slurs," "dialect," and "scatological references" in place of "curses" and still be on target. The Age of Innocence, this ain't. But the vibrant details and dialogue that fill The Notorious Izzy Fink feel authentic rather than gratuitous, and they serve a satisfying, fast-moving story. What more da ya want, ya mug?

The American Story

Jennifer Armstrong and illustrator Roger Roth's new book (Random House, 8/06) makes me feel dang near obsolete. Since I got hold of a copy a few weeks back, it has ignited in my seven-year-old a history-loving fire much stronger than anything I've managed to spark in the past couple of years of trying.

The premise of The American Story is simple: 400-odd years of U.S. history told through 100 stories (starting with the founding of what became St. Augustine, Florida) spread out over 358 pages. Armstrong mostly sticks to the "true tales" promised on the cover, though she does include the legend of John Henry as well as the commonly told story of the creation of the potato chip, only to dismiss that telling as hooey.

What she doesn't do is stick to the stories readers might expect. There's no Christopher Columbus and no 9/11, as she ends her narrative with an optimistic take on the 2000 election. In between, there's no Gettysburg Address, Black Tuesday, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, March on Washington, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Space Shuttle disaster.

Instead, Armstrong offers a magnificent mish-mash of stories both familiar and obscure. (Nobody in this house had ever heard of Boston's Great Molasses Flood of 1919, but we're glad we have now.) She connects them throughout with often surprising post-story notes glancing backwards or ahead, such as the one tying Jonas Salk's polio vaccine back to Pocahontas' death from smallpox. The ethnic and cultural balance she brings to the proceedings is eye-opening as well.

As big an undertaking as this was for Armstrong (she gets bonus points for writing the first children's book -- as far as I know -- to identify Mark Felt as Deep Throat), Roth had his work cut out for him, too. His illustrations grace every story, and his style manages to be at once sober enough for the serious tales (such as the one about the Johnstown flood) and cartoonish enough for the lighthearted ones (e.g. Ben Franklin's failed attempt to electrocute a turkey).

There's no better taste of what you'll find in this book than the adjacent stories from 1981 and 1982: "Pac-Man Fever" and "The Wall." The former delights in how a nation went bonkers over so simple a game and ushered in a new era of popular entertainment. In the latter, Armstrong offers a breathtaking description of the Vietnam memorial while Roth reflects the text with an equally powerful image spread over two full pages. Like the Wall itself, The American Story is a monumental work.

***

Other blog posts on The American Story:
Jennifer Armstrong publicity etc's Spluttering indignation
Redneck Mother's School's out
Susan VanHecke's It's Alive! Bringing History To Life With Jennifer Armstrong And Jonah Winter
Big A little a's Jennifer Armstrong interview

The Legend of Bass Reeves

A few miles east of where I'm sitting lies the city of Round Rock, Texas, where you can travel on Sam Bass Road, catch a performance at the Sam Bass Community Theatre, and sign your kids up for Sam Bass Youth Baseball.

Who was Sam Bass? He was a train robber whose fate it was to get gunned down in Round Rock 128 years ago this month. You just missed the annual reenactments.

It's against such a backdrop of undeserved fame that Newbery Honoree Gary Paulsen has plucked another Bass -- African-American lawman Bass Reeves -- from equally undeserved obscurity. Paulsen's book (Random House, 8/06) is subtitled "Being the True and Fictional Account of the Most Valiant Marshal in the West," and it's hard to know which word in that phrase deserves the most emphasis.

As described by Paulsen, Reeves was certainly valiant -- he went on 3,000 manhunts as a federal marshal, and they all came only after he answered the call to duty at the then-ancient age of 51 -- and the outlines of his life are true, from his birth into slavery to his death in his 80s, just barely off the job. But as Paulsen states outright and makes even clearer in his omission of any source notes, there's relatively little hard data available about Reeves' life, and thus the ride Paulsen takes readers on is largely one of his own imagining.

It's a remarkable journey, and a bloody one. Reeves lived in a violent time and place, and Paulsen is matter-of-fact about this violence: "While Bass watched, a horse kicked a stray dog and killed it and two drunk men came boiling out of a saloon, fighting with knives as big as swords." But what makes the biggest impact is Paulsen's depiction of Reeves' quiet dignity, from his boyhood as a slave through his dramatic claiming of his freedom and on through his heartbreaking arrest of his own son.

We can hope that Reeves' time in the limelight is only beginning, that Paulsen's efforts -- and those of Art T. Burton, author of the new Black Gun, Silver Star -- will encourage others to examine the lawman's life and put their own spins on his story. As fine a tribute as The Legend of Bass Reeves is, even better would be if Paulsen's book becomes simply a legend of Bass Reeves, one of many.

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Other blog posts on The Legend of Bass Reeves:

A Fuse #8 Production's Review of the Day

Aliens Are Coming! The True Account Of The 1938 War Of The Worlds Radio Broadcast

It's hard not to like a book whose text begins with "Hey, kids!" As if the titular extraterrestrials on the cover weren't enough of a tipoff, author/illustrator Meghan McCarthy sets the tone early in this picture book (Knopf, 2/06) about Orson Welles' famously panic-inducing radio play.

Part of this month's U.S. history reading, Aliens Are Coming! combines a smattering of the original script, a matter-of-fact description of the aftermath ("One man thought he saw a Martian spaceship"), and illustrations that offer the old-fashioned kick of cheesy sci-fi. But just when a reader could be expected to ask of Welles and his crew, "Did they get in trouble?" the narrative abruptly ends.

The "Author's Note" that follows is misleadingly named, as it's much more integral to the story than the average back-of-the-book elaboration. McCarthy's fish-eyed characters and sparse text make way for a detailed description of how Welles' version of War of the Worlds came to be, the extent of the public's freakout, and subsequent productions (complete with hysteria) in Chile, Ecuador, and Rhode Island.

A full appreciation of Aliens Are Coming! begs not only for a reading of the Author's Note, but also for a visit to the book's jam-packed companion site, which includes the complete script and directions to Grovers Mill, New Jersey (site of the alien "landing"), among other goodies. Considering the bevy of back matter, one would hope that McCarthy's readers will come away a lot less gullible than their great-grandparents' generation. If they don't -- well, that would be truly scary.

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Other blog posts on Aliens Are Coming!:

A Fuse #8 Production's Title of the Day: Aliens Are Coming
Book Buds' Is history repeating itself?
A Year of Reading's Happy Me!
cynthialord's Tuesday Time-waster: Famous Scientist Hangman!

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

I found myself reminded of Titanic, of all things, by this early reader (HarperCollins, 5/06) by paleontologist Charlotte Lewis Brown and illustrator Phil Wilson. The thing I remember most about James Cameron's movie is the surprising variety of ways that characters met their doom, and that's how I felt while reading this account of what "may have happened" moments before and months after an asteroid or comet slammed into the earth 65 million years ago.

Dinosaurs get eaten, consumed by a fireball, crushed by trees, pelted by burning rocks, washed away by tidal waves, and so on. This is easily the most violent early reader I've ever encountered, and the scariest, too. It's also a vivid, accessible account of a crucial piece of the history of this planet. What's more, it's surprisingly affecting -- Brown's reimagining of the momentous event zeroes in on individual dinosaurs, and without anthopomorphizing them she does makes the reader care about these creatures and their terrible fates.

In fact, she does such a good job that readers may be tempted (presumably in opposition to their own self-interest) to boo and hiss at the end when mammals emerge from their burrows to take over the planet. Or maybe they'll just want to flip back to the beginning of the book, when the dinosaurs still -- for the briefest bit longer -- ruled the roost.

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Other blog posts on The Day the Dinosaurs Died:
Bookview: Review: The Day the Dinosaurs Died (an I Can Read book)

Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon

The caffeinated, supercharged voice used by author Catherine Thimmesh -- imagine the hippest, most amped-up raconteur at Mission Control -- is one of the many pleasures of this new account (Houghton Mifflin, 6/06) of the first moon landing. Thimmesh's enthusiasm for her subject is palpable, and the sense of excitement she brings is as vital to Team Moon's success as the book's very premise: that hundreds of thousands of people not named "Neil" or "Buzz" were actively, crucially involved in the national effort culminating in Apollo 11.

A taste of both the voice and the premise: "Now would not be the time for the two Bobs to miscalculate, miscount, or lose their superhuman powers of concentration. The could not afford to be wrong." Who were the two Bobs? They were the guys in Houston monitoring just how little fuel was left in the lunar module during its descent to the surface, and their story is typical of the anecdotes Thimmesh has included -- tales of spacesuit seamstresses, radio telescope operators, parachute designers and others who made it possible to get men to the moon, get them home, and let the rest of the world watch while it happened.

Occasionally, the narrative voice and sheer volume of you-are-there detail get in the way of clarity -- a segment about rapid-fire software alarms set off during the approach to the moon is especially hard to follow -- but the overall effect is powerful and positive. As for those other pleasures mentioned above, the photography is generous and stunning, and the final fifth of the book's 80 pages are thoughtfully given over to brief bios of the cast of characters, plentiful information about Thimmesh's sources, recommendations "for further exploration," and summaries of the other Apollo missions.

And they were missions, and that's perhaps the most powerful impression that lingers after one reads Team Moon. The idea of a unifying cause, of a valiant, worthwhile effort calling for sacrifices from hundreds of thousands of Americans not serving in the military -- and one that will be watched the world over -- has never seemed more appealing, nor more absent. If young readers wonder what their generation's cause will be, or if they'll have one, and if not, why not? -- well, that's just one more service done by Catherine Thimmesh and this terrific book.

***

Other blog posts on Team Moon:
BookBuds: Moonstruck all over again
Chasing Ray: Team Moon

The Buffalo and the Indians: A Shared Destiny

Prior to reading this latest collaboration (Clarion Books, 6/06) between Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and photographer William Muñoz, my familiarity with the topic didn't go much beyond "The Indians used every part of the buffalo." Those considerable gaps in my knowledge have now been filled in.

Spanning "prehistory to the present," The Buffalo and the Indians offers fascinating details about the mechanics of how the Plains tribes went about hunting and processing the giant herds, as well as the animal's place in their spiritual lives. The enormity of the bison's role in sustaining Native Americans becomes clear in a section about Head-Smashed-In, a buffalo jump in Alberta where 100,000 arrowheads were found -- an especially impressive number when you consider that most buffalo didn't survive their fall off the cliff. No wonder the land-hungry U.S. government viewed the buffalo as, in the words of one general, "the Indian's commissary" and looked the other way until white hunters' slaughter had nearly wiped the herds out entirely.

The 80 pages of Patent's text fly by, thanks to the abundant art and a 15-point font. But before they're gone, she offers a parting fact about today's conservation efforts by the Blackfeet, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara that I had never considered: Maintaining a buffalo herd is not just meaningful but expensive. Attracting visitors to view the herds helps defray the costs, however, and The Buffalo and the Indians is bound to inspire readers to want to see a herd for themselves.

Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels: The Pioneers of Country and Western Music

I would have loved this book when I was a kid. Influenced early by my dad's love for "pickin' and grinnin,'" I became an obsessive weekly listener/stats-keeper of American Country Countdown. This entertaining, whimsically illustrated new collaboration by Holly George-Warren and Laura Levine (Houghton Mifflin, 5/06) would have fit perfectly with my pre-teen passion in the early 1980s.

Since then, of course, country music has become only a bigger business, which makes it all the more surprising that -- near as I can tell -- this is the first nonfiction picture book on the topic by a major American publisher. By contrast, you'll probably run out of digits before you're through tallying up the picture books about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and other pioneers in jazz, a genre that peaked commercially more than half a century ago.

As material for children's books, jazz musicians have at least a couple of things going for them. One, they're predominantly African-American, which means that stories about them help make up for the historical shortfall in titles about black Americans. Two, jazz is typically seen as a greater intellectual accomplishment than country music -- a great intellectual accomplishment, period. So, I understand the appeal of the topic to writers and editors and publishers alike.

But are the life stories of, say, the Carter Family or Bob Wills inherently any less interesting or inspiring than those of Ellington and Fitzgerald? Is the brief, brilliant, tragic path of Hank Williams any less suited to exploration in a children's bo