Bartography

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.