by Nancy Pearl
From its arresting cover—a skeleton peering through a microscope—to its informative (and relevant) text, charts, and illustrations, Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History by Bryn Barnard demonstrates that learning about science can be both interesting and educational. Jim Murphy focuses on one outbreak plague in particular (that I’d never heard of before, in fact) in An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793.
One of the best sex-education books around is Robie H. Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health. Its matter-of-fact tone is reassuring, and the content is invaluable to answer the questions—asked and unasked—of any child.
If there’s a child in your life who wonders about outer space or dreams of being an astronaut, give him or her Faith McNulty’s If You Decide to Go to the Moon, illustrated by Steven Kellogg. This fact-filled, tender, and entirely wonderful book opens up the world of space for young readers. (I learned stuff from this book that I didn’t know before, and I bet you will, too.)
700s
Any reader with adventure in his or her blood will definitely enjoy Steve Jenkins’s The Top of the World: Climbing Mount Everest, a slim book filled with facts (including what equipment you’ll need when you go) and descriptions of the ascent.The illustrations alone are worth the read.
I Hear America Singing!: Folk Songs for American Families , collected and arranged by Kathleen Krull, is an outstanding collection of sixty-two folk songs, almost two dozen of which are on an accompanying CD.
Quentin Blake uses pictures from an exhibit he developed at London’s National Gallery to promote early art appreciation in Tell Me a Picture, and Jan Greenberg uses the art of a well-known African American painter to tell his story in Romare Bearden: Collage of Memories.
Bruce Koscielniak’s The Story of the Incredible Orchestra would be a good text for an elementary school Music 101 class; it includes the history of orchestras and their various instruments, with useful (and entertaining) drawings to accompany the text. Who would have thought that there was a time—not so long ago, really, prior to 1600—when there were no orchestras? Or that composers didn’t indicate which instruments they had in mind for their written compositions?
You can’t skim through the pages of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s amazing Earth from Above—the aerial photographs, along with Robert Burleigh’s sensitive and thoughtful text, offer such a fascinating view of our world that you’ll want to pore over each page with your child. Whether it’s an artificially constructed lake in Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), a farmer tilling his field on the island of Crete, the Grand Prismatic Spring inYellowstone National Park, or rice fields in Bali, each photo makes us look closely and think deeply.
All of David Macauley’s books about how various buildings are constructed are worth sharing with children (or even just reading yourself ), but Mosque is particularly relevant to today’s world. It would be a very nice follow-up to Ramadan by Suhaib Hamid Ghazi.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Ives, Nadia Boulanger, Woody Guthrie, and Scott Joplin are among the twenty musicians profiled in Kathleen Krull’s Lives of the Musicians: Good Times, Bad Times (and What the Neighbors Thought); it’s filled with all sorts of inside (and fascinating) information—kind of like reading a well-written People magazine article about each of them. For kids especially interested in music, give them Mordicai Gerstein’s What Charlie Heard, a short but enticing biography of composer Charles Ives, and When Marian Sang by Pam Muñoz Ryan, with gorgeous illustrations by Brian Selznick, which tells the story of the life of Marian Anderson and her triumphant concert—at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt—on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.
All she ever wanted to do was pitch on a professional baseball team—a daunting career goal for anyone,but especially for an African American woman during the 1950s, when the major leagues were still racially segregated. But, as Michelle Y. Green demonstrates in her inspiring A Strong Right Arm: The Story of Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, nothing is impossible if you want it enough—Mamie Johnson was one of only three women to play pro ball in the Negro Leagues.
Heroes of Baseball, by New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte, describes the lives and accomplishments of everyone from A. G. Spaulding (a star during baseball’s early years) to Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and the headline-grabbers of tomorrow.
A diverse (African American, Asian American, Jewish, Hispanic, Native American) group of artists offers brief looks at their lives in Just Like Me: Stories and Self-Portraits by Fourteen Artists, edited by Harriet Rohmer. Rohmer also edited Honoring Our Ancestors: Stories and Pictures by Fourteen Artists, with contributions from many of the same artists.
In 1974, when the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were being completed, a high-wire walker named Philippe Petit strung a line between the two buildings and walked high, high, HIGH above the ground between them—his feat is beautifully envisioned in Mordicai Gerstein’s Newbery Award- winning The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.
Peter Golenbock’s Teammates tells the story of the friendship of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, players on the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team.The illustrations include both vintage photos and watercolor paintings by Paul Bacon.
Stunning paintings by Michele Wood (I wish I could get copies of the originals and frame them—I never get tired of looking at them) and an informative text by Toyomi Igus are perfectly integrated in I See the Rhythm, a history of African American music, including the birth of the blues, ragtime, bebop, jazz, and rap.
800s
From Sea to Shining Sea: A Treasury of American Folklore and Folk Songs, edited by Amy L. Cohn and illustrated by some of the leading contemporary children’s book artists (including Jerry Pinkney, Chris Van Allsburg, David Wiesner, and Trina Schart Hyman), is an indispensable addition to any child’s book collection. Some of the 140 examples it includes are the words and music to “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Git Along, Little Dogies,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Emma Lazarus’s poem about the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus,” and tales of Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan.
Teen (and adult) fantasy readers will adore Diana Wynne Jones’s travel guide through the pretty much hitherto uncharted realm of fantasy, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which describes, with witty accuracy, the landscape, attractions, and people (dwarfs, elves, wizards, vampires, demons, et al.) that you’ll encounter on a trip there. This is, as the cover of the book says, “The essential guide to fantasy travel.”The more fantasy a child reads, the more they’ll enjoy this. (The same is true for adult readers.)
The distinctly American genre of music, the blues, is explored in both poetry and art in Walter Dean and Christopher Myers’s collaborative Blues Journey; it has a glossary of words associated with the genre, as well as a timeline beginning in 1865 highlighting the various singers and songwriters, including Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Leadbelly.
Another stunning use of poetry and art—and a book that’s appropriate for kids and adults of all ages—is found in Jazz A B Z, with poems by jazz great Wynton Marsalis and portraits by Paul Rogers. The book celebrates in poetry everyone who’s anyone in the jazz world, from Louis Armstrong, Sonny Rollins, and Art Blakey to Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk.There’s also a brief biography of each musician (written by jazz historian Phil Schaap) at the end of the book.
A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson is not an emotionally easy collection of poetry to read. But these poems, about the lynching death of a fourteen-year-old African American boy in Mississippi in 1955, have a strength and power that draws the reader in and doesn’t let go.
900s
Because I’m a history buff, the 900s are my favorite section of the Dewey run. And there’s so much good stuff here! It only supports my belief that a good place to begin in the search for information about nearly any topic is the nonfiction section of your library or local book
store. I’ve arranged the books that follow in the order in which you’d probably find them on the shelves. Browse away:
I doubt a lot of people have even heard of Ibn Battuta, one of the great travelers of all time, let alone are familiar with his journeys. In James Rumford’s Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354, you’ll discover a fascinating and intrepid individual who left his native Morocco for Mecca when he was twenty-one and never looked back. Text and illustrations, which resemble Persian miniatures and include Chinese and Arabic writings, combine to make almost anyone want to learn more about this remarkable man.
Extraordinarily detailed pictures by Stephen Biesty (with text by Stewart Ross) illustrate daily life in Egypt circa 1200 BCE, in Egypt in Spectacular Cross-Section (and the word spectacular here is not misused). Fans of Biesty’s approach will want to take a look at his books on ancient Rome, castles, and fighting ships.
The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in August of AD 79 buried the Italian towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in hot ash; they were essentially lost to history until the late eighteenth century, when workmen (digging an underground canal) uncovered slabs of marble and the remains of a wall painting. In Pompeii: Lost and Found, Mary Pope Osborne takes the fascinating story from that point on, aided by incomparable illustrations by Bonnie Christensen. Another look at the same event can be found in James M. Deems’s’s Bodies from the Ash: Life and Death in Ancient Pompeii.
In Auschwitz: The Story of a Nazi Death Camp, Clive A. Lawton includes photos and documents, as well as original text, to give readers a sense of the Holocaust. Lawton’s book is useful to read along with biographies and autobiographies that cover the same period. Bartoletti’s book, below, makes a good companion read.
The Queen’s Progress by Celeste Davidson Mannis goes through the alphabet to show the annual holiday that Queen Elizabeth I takes—along with members of her court, her servants, and others. The illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline help make this a great selection for any history fan.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti brings home to readers just what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s as Hitler rose to prominence, in Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, an outstanding example of nonfiction for young adults.
10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of the Vietnam War by Philip Caputo, whose A Rumor of War (written for adults) was one of the best memoirs written about the war in Vietnam, uses maps, photos, and text to describe both the war’s history and what it was like to be a soldier there.
Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan by Mary Williams (illustrated by R. Gregory Christie) is told from the point of view of eight-year-old Garang; when his village is destroyed he begins the long trek that will—at last—take him to America.
Alice Provensen’s Klondike Gold portrays the dangers and excitement of the Canadian gold rush through the experiences of a young man who comes west from New England to search for gold.
Kids looking for an interesting aspect of the Civil War to write a report on can hardly do better than Sally M. Walker’s Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving the Mysteries of the H. L. Hunley, the story of a Confederate underwater boat that, in 1864, was the first submarine ever to destroy an enemy ship. How the sub was found and recovered is a rousing tale of history and archaeology.
Young people are mainly taught about the Civil War in terms of the great land battles such as those at Appomattox or Gettysburg. When it comes to warfare at sea, perhaps a few of us (adults or young readers) could dredge up some memory of the encounter between the ironclad ships Monitor or Merrimack, but as George Sullivan shows in The Civil War at Sea, there were many key naval battles that certainly helped turn the tide (yes, I intended that pun) in favor of the North.
Both Dennis Brindell Fradin’s The Founders : The 39 Stories Behind the U.S. Constitution and The Signers: The 56 Stories Behind the Declaration of Independence offer short and lively biographies of the men involved in bringing the United States together as one nation. The woodblock-like illustrations by Michael McCurdy are quite appropriate to the period.These two books are good fodder for history projects, but they also make entertaining reading for history buffs.
An excellent read, as well as a choice resource for reports, is Gary McGowan’s Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad, which also gives readers a useful sense of how historians work.
It’s difficult to find good, accessible information (except in an encyclopedia) for young readers about the period immediately following the Civil War, so Tonya Bolden’s Cause: Reconstruction America, 1863-1877, with its illuminating narrative and excellent illustrations (many of them vintage photographs) is particularly valuable. In addition to helping with homework assignments, the book rewards anyone looking for thorough nonfiction on American history.
In Free at Last!: Stories and Songs of Emancipation, Doreen Rappaport explores the experiences of black Americans through letters, memoirs, poetry, and music, describing the experiences of both well-known and ordinary people from right after the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision that made “separate but equal” illegal. The oil paintings by Shane W. Evans give the book added depth and a visceral power.
The blizzard of 1888 struck the East Coast, from New York to Virginia, with a vengeance—three days of powerful winds, strong snow, and deadly cold.The story of the survivors and the victims is told in gripping prose—frequently using the words of the people who were there—by Jim Murphy, in Blizzard!
Lynn Curlee’s Liberty tells the story of the how the idea for the Statue of Liberty came about, how a French sculptor was commissioned to design it, and how it was finally assembled in the New York harbor. There’s also a useful compendium of facts about the statue and a timeline of important dates in its history.
It turns out that it wasn’t the fault of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that Chicago nearly burned down in 1871, as related in Jim Murphy’s fascinating The Great Fire. It’s as useful and interesting for adult history fans as it is for middle and high school history assignments. (Anything by Jim Murphy is worth reading.)
The women of the West usually get short shrift in histories of the period, but Candace Savage’s Born to Be a Cowgirl: A Spirited Ride Through the Old West should go a long way to remedying that. Using both original sources and vintage photos, Savage shows the important role that cowgirls played in the settling of Western America.
Another excellent offering in the 900s includes American Heroes: Fifty Profiles of Great Americans Who Set Out, Spoke Up, Stood Tall, Fought Hard, or Truly Dared to Dream by Marfé Ferguson Delano, which includes such varied folks as William Penn, Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Paul (a suffragist leader I had never heard of), Margaret Mead, Thurgood Marshall, Queen Lili’uokalani, and Jonas Salk, among others.
DOGGONE IT, SHE SAID HO(A)RSELY
Between the ages of about seven and ten, basically all I read were horse and dog books. I could probably walk into the Parkman Branch Library in Detroit today and stroll unerringly to the section of the library where they were then shelved. It wasn’t until Miss Frances Whitehead bribed me by offering to let me be the first to check out a new dog or horse book if I would just read another book that she absolutely knew I would love, that I gradually found there were other areas of the library that had titles I enjoyed reading, too.
I didn’t own many books when I was a kid, but the ones I did have were, of course, about dogs and horses—Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague (which the author autographed for me at a book fair); The Magnificent Barb by Dana Faralla (which I borrowed from a friend and conveniently never returned); Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion’s Blood Bay Colt; Marshall Saunders’s very sad Beautiful Joe; Us and the Duchess by Edward Fenton; and Bonny’s Boy, the story of a cocker spaniel puppy by F. E. Rechnitzer. You’ll want to try to find some of these classics of the past as well as the newer titles to satisfy a reader who craves animal stories.
Many of the more recent dog stories ar
e written from the point of view of the animal himself.Two good ones are Ann M. Martin’s A Dog’s Life, the story of a stray dog named Squirrel (the plot grew out of the author’s volunteer activities with an animal rescue organization) and Avi’s The Good Dog, in which McKinley, a malamute, is torn between his settled life and the lure of a wolf named Lupin. (Fans of this book may want to go back and read both of Jack London’s now classic tales, Call of the Wild and White Fang.)
Another book told from the point of view of the dog characters (indeed, most of the characters—except for the villain—are dogs) is Dodie Smith’s The 101 Dalmatians, which became, of course, a Walt Disney film. Even if you and your child have seen the movie, don’t miss this little gem of a novel, which is much more complex (and satisfying) than the screenplay.
Here are some of my other favorite dog and horse stories.
