Curiosity, humor & courtesy
Donnelly, Daria
CHILDREN'S BOOKS Curiosity, humor & courtesy Daria Donnelly Iknow a successful MIT graduate who regularly trawls the children's section of his local public library for books about...
...is a sobering and well-organized introduction to contemporary child labor...
...The novel is a wonderfully full portrait of the cultural and scientific milieu of sixteenth-century Italy...
...It is in similar improvisational exchanges that we—adults and children—learn how to love...
...Both Anno and Macaulay make more "whimsical" picture books which solicit and repay a child's careful attention to detail...
...by contrast, is a marvelous book of heroes for both young people and adults because it shows the variety of ways one can live a life of "heroic sanctity...
...We learn about social class, medical practices, educational institutions, political events, women's roles, the uneasy relationship of astrology to astronomy, and the social, intellectual, and political role of the church...
...So, caution...
...For himself...
...collects five of Jane Breskin Zalben's beautifully illustrated portraits of the Jewish holidays...
...Read it and use it to advocate for better textbooks for children...
...Her tenvolume work is superlatively written and radiant with the interest of history...
...You will never see as many underemployed words in a child's book again (unless it's in his own hilarious Farmer Palmer's Wagon Ride...
...Parents in flight from the Berenstain Bears will appreciate his personality-filled mice...
...My favorite contemporary information artist is David Macaulay...
...As baby boomers, my siblings and I were lucky to grow up with masterpieces of visual information: Holling Clancy Holling's 1941 Paddle-to-the-Sea (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95...
...Cooney's quiet attention to life at all ages makes her akin to Tomie dePaola...
...They teach me what to look for in selecting new informational books: engaging writing...
...discusses moral themes in select children's stories for parents and teachers who wish to use such stories to nurture the moral life of children...
...Hilarious and tender, impeccably timed and delightfully understated, Marshall's George and Martha stories are modern classics...
...What makes both the new and the original The Way Things Work so great is not only Macaulay's consistent movement from principles to applications and imaginative presentation of difficult concepts, but his daring mix of physical scales and his effortless use of an incongruous woolly mammoth to explicate everything from screws to holography...
...Picture books help children deal with powerful feelings like fear, sorrow, anger...
...In The New Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin, $35,400 pp...
...Other fine new informational books in brief: Physician and photographer David L. Parker's Stolen Dreams: Portraits of Working Children (Lerner, $19.95, 112 pp...
...Daria Donnelly writes regularly on children's books for Commonweal...
...In the second pile are books which attempt to model virtuous behavior, mainly through imaginative stories...
...Anew science novel, Tibaldo and the Hole in the Calendar, by theoretical physicist and philosopher Abner Shimony (illustrated by Jonathan Shimony, Copernicus, $21,165 pp...
...I found his concluding bibliographical essay a helpful guide to selecting additional stories...
...The sweet-tempered, the self-righteous, the calm, and the neurotic all have the capacity for holiness...
...Another fabulous artist of information is Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno, who has made many excellent picture books on mathematics...
...More recently, Kevin Henkes has reinvigorated the "situation" virtue book...
...These were great books then, and they are great books today...
...The World Mourns: A Reporter's Story (Candlewick, $17.99, 96 pp...
...Commonweal 25 April 23,1999...
...which present mathematical concepts, such as classification, measurement, and proportion, in the form of appealing visual games...
...If you can get only one children's book this year, make it William McCleery's 1947 Wolf Story (book design and illustration by Warren Chappell, Linnet Press, $16.50, 82 pp...
...Her illuminated-manuscript-style illustrations are beautiful, and the map of France in 1429, guide to French pronunciation, and bibliographies for readers of varying ages, are very helpful...
...Joy Hakim, a former teacher and journalist, was so frustrated by the quality of history textbooks that she wrote her own...
...Random House, $14...
...William Bennett's Children's Book of Heroes is perhaps the best-known recent example...
...In terse journalistic prose, Hampton tells a new generation what happened that day, and the part he played in getting the story...
...Read Wolf Story both for itself and as an antidote to the current hyperbolic sense of crisis in morality and attendant calls for more explicit and formulaic moral instruction...
...Recent history books of note are Diane Stanley's picture book Joan of Arc (Morrow Junior Books, $16), Wilborn Hampton's Kennedy Assassinated...
...Too many new informational books (produced by a more consolidated trade industry less committed to nonfiction and hybrid works) are hastily conceived, emphasize eye-grabbing pictures over organization, and project an "attitude" about learning onto children...
...Beni's Family Treasury (Henry Holt, $18.95, 115 pp...
...These deal with natural and social phenomena, historical events, and mental constructs concerning space and quantity...
...It has been a huge hit with both children and professional historians, who have particularly praised Hakim's sense of proportion in selecting and organizing material...
...Within a narrative about an intelliCommonweal 22 April 23,1999 gent and resourceful young boy who will lose his twelfth birthday as a result of the 1582 Gregorian calendar reform, Shimony comprehensibly presents the astronomical calculations behind that reform...
...These piles collapse upon one another physically and conceptually, our moral imaginations being inextricable from the world, and our moral lives sharpened by attention to it...
...While Guroian convincingly reasserts the moral depth of the Victorian imagination, his stress on present-day cultural decline is unfortunate...
...In 1997, PaperStar republished his Anno's Math Games I, II, III (each volume $12.95,103 pp...
...Because Alfie is growing up with the series, start with her 1994 collection, All about Alfie (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $18...
...narrative design that allows children to progress in understanding...
...His theological readings of (among others) Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Charlotte's Web, and The Princess and the Goblin are very fine and well-seasoned with the views of thinkers as varied as G.K...
...His most recent picture book, Pete's a Pizza (HarperCollins, $13.95), affirms once again that with a little imagination you can turn straw into gold, or Pete into a pizza: and voila...
...The overt book is hard to do well, and I do not recommend William Bennett's collections for children, because the quality of poems and stories he offers is so uneven...
...Written from a pyschoanalytic perspective, Ellen Handler Spitz's Inside Picture Books (Yale, $25,225 pp...
...When American nonsense poet Gelett Burgess created the weird loose-limbed "Goops" in 1900, he fathered the droll book of virtues...
...Stanley, a historian rather than a hagiographer, tells the story of Joan in fascinating detail...
...does she know how to tell a story...
...Hampton, now an editor with the New York Times, was a cub reporter in the Dallas UPI office when the call came that three shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade...
...and Richard Scarry's 1968 What Do People Do All Day...
...The rough and tumble antics of a fiercely competitive predigital news industry, especially juxtaposed to such a grave event, make for fascinating reading...
...should provoke conversation between parents and children about vocation, grace under pressure, and the workings of powerful institutions...
...Famous for his books on architecture (Cathedral, Mill, Unbuilding, etc...
...Why can't Johnny read...
...This "underground classic" finds an inventive and exasperated father telling a wolf story to end all wolf stories (so he hopes) to his inventive and demanding young son...
...Miroslav Sasek's 1959 This Is Paris (sixteen This Is titles, Macmillan, out of print...
...I divided my other stack of books, written to model virtuous behavior, into books designed to instruct overtly, and those whose instruction is covert...
...introduces young children to Catholic liturgical objects...
...Among the 365 men and women whose life stories Ellsberg tells so well you will find activists and contemplatives, poets and politicians, saints of obedience and saints of rebellion...
...Chesterton, Martin Buber, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Robert Coles...
...Virginia Lee Burton's evolutionary 1962 Life Story (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95, 67 pp...
...Theologian and ethicist Vigen Guroian's Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (Oxford, $22,198 pp...
...Dramatist McCleery perfectly captures the irritation, affection, tricks, admiration, and sheer surprise that pass back and forth between parent and child in everyday family life...
...I was particularly sorry that Spitz passed over Barbara Cooney, whose epic presentations of a whole human life— in the acclaimed 1985 Miss Rumphius and 1988 Island Boy (both Puffin, $5.99) among others—are so unusual and so suffused with moral interest...
...My favorites are the wordless 1977 Anno's Journey (PaperStar, $5.95) and Macaulay's 1995 coincidence-packed Shortcut (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95...
...Written from a Catholic perspective, this is not a conventional Catholic compendium of saints: Ellsberg includes holy men and women from other faiths and even nonreligious moralists like Albert Camus...
...Every Bennett hero is obedient, and, in instances where not entirely nice, Bennett cuts off the tale before things get nasty: so sail Theseus and Ariadne into the sunset...
...I was grateful for the balance Spitz maintained between a firm trust in imaginative literature and awareness of the subtle gender roles that girls and boys are learning in some of their earliest picture books...
...Bennett's desire to provide a set of heroes alternative to those offered by contemporary popular culture can only be applauded, but his selections in The Children's Book of Heroes (Simon and Schuster, $21, 110 pp...
...Another genius working in the comic tradition was the late great James Marshall, whose stories about an unforgettable pair of hippopotami have been collected in one volume: George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 340 pp...
...Macaulay, assisted by Neil Ardley, presents the principle of binary digits (or bits) and the machines that use them—personal computers, robots, cash machines, supermarket scanners, and so forth...
...It allows him to dismiss too easily the ambiguities that distinguish these aesthetically and morally compelling stories, and the turmoil of emotions we experience while reading them...
...illustrations which secure the connections between the big picture and local phenomena...
...Marshall had a deep appreciation of friendship, that capacity we all have to accommodate each other's foibles and idiosyncrasies...
...Gertrud Mueller Nelson's A Walk through Our Church (Paulist, $14.95, 57 pp...
...Because his books—written by committees hired by timid publishers trying to please and appease too many adult constituencies— are unreadable...
...Her most recent is Alfie and the Birthday Surprise (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $16...
...She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...Commonweal 23 April 23,1999 I first learned about Joy Hakim's The History of US from an impassioned essay, "The Betrayal of History," by Alexander Stille in the June 11,1998 New York Review of Books...
...So many delights for the eye and mind, so much understanding offered in so appealing a form...
...Given that the shady of science in schools is so often conducted in isolation from its history, I think that children would be thrilled to read about such a dramatic period and instance of science in action...
...Hakim calls herself a "storytelling historian," and boy...
...His wonderful 1973 Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs, well-described by Spitz, has just come back into print (Putnam, $15.99...
...Let's hope their assent to Hakim's multivolume presentation (each well-designed volume fits comfortably on a child's lap) signals the demise of the doorstop textbook...
...the young lad's bad mood is also transformed...
...CHILDREN'S BOOKS Curiosity, humor & courtesy Daria Donnelly Iknow a successful MIT graduate who regularly trawls the children's section of his local public library for books about language, nature, geography, and history...
...In a nutshell: broad, deep, and original presentation...
...and Joy Hakim's ten-volume A History of US (Oxford, paper, $10.95 each...
...seem informed more by ideological and political agenda (amelioration in race relations, moms at home, voluntarism instead of government programs) than by the rich variety and beauty of heroic tales that Western culture offers...
...Chester's Way (1988, Greenwillow, $16), Julius: The Baby of the World (1990, Mulberry, $4.95), and Lilly and the Purple Plastic Purse (1996, Greenwillow, $15) are household favorites...
...While gently mocking the latest behavior-modification methods, such as the time-out chair, Henkes helps parents help their young children learn to recognize and accommodate other people's feelings...
...In a similarly quiet mode, English artist Shirley Hughes offers picture book stories about a fetching contemporary English boy named Alfie, whose family and neighbors are living lives of ordinary virtue...
...He does so with amazing clarity and idiosyncratic humor...
...Macaulay has just updated his award-winning work on the principles and workings of machines with a new sixty-three-page section on inventions of the digital age...
...I was stunned that the same Laura Richards who wrote the great nonsense poem "Eletelephony" was capable of a story as maudlin as "About Angels...
...For the past year, I have been gathering such instructive works of fiction and nonfiction, and have been sorting them into two piles...
...Robert Ellsberg's All Saints (Crossroad, $19.95, 576 pp...
...Like Joan of Arc, the absolutely riveting Kennedy Assassinated...
...Because of her faith in the imagination, her hesitations, and her excellent taste, Spitz's selection and analysis of books in four picture-book subjects—bedtime, loss, anger, self-acceptance—are strong and provide a good model for choosing among the contemporary offerings that she so disCommonweal 24 April 23,1999 appointingly neglects...
...There may be well-placed anxiety about trends in juvenile nonfiction, but the feast remains astonishing...
...Reading aloud is a momentous activity: In the company of a loving adult, a child enters an imaginary world and takes the measure of this one...
...The books in my first stack are sometimes called "informational" literature...
...They encourage empathy and self-understanding...
...The story is illustrated with blackand-white photographs suitable (with the exception of page 79, Oswald's face, the instant before he was shot by Ruby) for most children age eight and older...
...H. A. Rey's 1954 Find the Constellations (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95, 72 pp...
...The present master of this genre is William Steig, whose recently reprinted 1972 chapter book Dominic is for the ages (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $4.95,146 pp...
...Steig, still going strong at ninety, has always known that a child's moral life depends on a sense of humor, a large imagination, and a joy in language...
...also argues that books play a central role in a child's moral development...
...miniature-friendly graphics...
...is highly recommended for older readers (ten and up...
...In 1947, at the very moment when the evidence of man's capacity for evil was fresh and staggering, McCleery offered his own child a book with a very modest lesson: curiosity, humor, and courtesy keep the mind just and heart generous...
...Oxford initially printed only 8,000 copies: over a million copies have already been sold...
...Every Steig book is radiant with the values of endurance, forgiveness, humility, and joy...
...They give a child a sense of possibility and also limitation...
...This particularly American genre wears its instruction lightly, and reports that being good is at least as much fun as making mischief and infinitely more stylish...
...That is a powerful message for young people, who will also learn a lot of history by reading these biographies...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
