New Books: Awesome Snake Science!

OK, I know not every kid likes snakes. A lot of adults don't like snakes, not even a little bit. But our older son does, and so when—just a few days after he'd proudly finished his first-grade year-end report on snakes—we came across Cindy Blobaum's new book Awesome Snake Science, well, it just felt like it was meant to be. (Luckily, he's not quite old enough yet to have felt cheated at not having encountered this book before he had to write his report....)

Because if Dash were to describe the perfect nonfiction snake book for a kid his age, he'd come up with this one. It's not merely full of snake facts and figures—though it certainly has enough of those to be suitably comprehensive for even the most obsessed child—but it also includes 40 fun snake-themed activities, from making a set of foldable fangs that demonstrate how the real things work with snakes' malleable jaws, to (safely) simulating cytotoxic venom. (Most parents will be pleased to know that no actual snakes are required for any of these activities.)

It's exactly the kind of hands-on learning book that takes what could be dry subject matter and makes it nearly irresistible to children—really a great achievement by Blobaum. Not that Dash cares about that; after we take this book on vacation to Canada with us, I expect he'll be mimicking rattlesnake noises all month long. (Let's hope he doesn't get too good at it.)


[Cover image courtesy of IPG]

New Books: Black Gold

Since my sons are still just seven and three years old, my coverage of history books for kids doesn't usually get out of the picture-book genre. But I'm enough of a general nonfiction reader myself that occasionally I run across something for older readers that I have to mention here (and save for my own children till they're a bit older).

The history of oil—that is, the petroleum kind—doesn't seem at first like much of a topic for a children's-book author. It's complicated, chemistry-laden, and politically, well, explosive. But the subject is, one must admit, one of the vital ones of our time, and writer Albert Marrin has taken a crack at a short history for middle- and high-schoolers of the greasy, precious stuff and humankind's interactions with it in Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives.

It's an ambitious crack at that, starting with the geological and chemical science of how oil and the other fossil fuels come to exist. Marrin then moves chronologically through man's first fleeting brushes against these powerful energy sources, up through the explosion (that word again) of their use beginning in—fueling, actually, if you will—the Industrial Revolution.

From this point on, the author does a commendable job of balancing the massively positive short-term (no more giant piles of horse waste fouling city streets) and long-term (um...all of modern technology) effects these energy sources have had with their negative counterparts (air and water becoming fouled in different ways; global warming). He concludes with a forthright presentation of the energy challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, from peak oil to melting icecaps to geopolitical power struggles. Somehow he does all this in a remarkably gentle, even-handed, and readable fashion that I think most parents of any nonradical political persuasion will be comfortable with. (Needless to say, those for whom any nonderisive mention of the words global warming is anathema may wish to stay away from this book. As well as most other nonfiction.)

It's a remarkable achievement, presenting this much information in such digestible fashion, and in a mere 181 pages. And when Dash or Griff in future years comes to me saying he has a report to write for school on oil, or energy in general, this is the book I'm going to send him to first.

[Cover image courtesy of Random House]

New Books: George Washington's Birthday & Looking at Lincoln

Most holiday-themed children's books, let's face it, aren't very good. Most are conceived and created mainly to be promoted at their respective times of the year, and accordingly aren't terribly inspired. And Presidents' Day would seem, if anything, an even worse holiday than usual for kids' books; the preponderance of those pegged to it that I've seen through the years have been dutifully dull marches through the cherry trees and log cabins.

But two new books—one for each president, each illustrated by an artist known (among other things) for New Yorker covers—are out to change that. George Washington's Birthday: A Mostly True Tale, by Margaret McNamara and illustrated by Barry Blitt, is a whimsical tale of George's own seventh birthday. The authors don't exactly shy away from the hagiographic details by any means—but, borrowing a page from Blitt's sublime 2006 solo outing The 39 Apartments of Ludwig Van Beethoven, drop in little "fact" and "myth" boxes here and there to set the record straight.

The book makes young George refreshingly human; as he becomes more and more frustrated that his entire family appears to have forgotten his birthday, he quite naturally, well, acts out a bit. Early on it's muted—muttering "I'll be the boss of you someday" under his breath to his older half-brother (who's also his teacher)—but of course it all culminates in big-time vented frustrations on that poor cherry tree.

McNamara's tone is delightful throughout, just breezy enough without losing its grounding in the parts of its narrative that are based in fact, and she makes our first president more approachable and sympathetic than he appears in just about any other children's book I can think of—even the ones in which he's a child. And Blitt's trademark warped-realistic watercolors complement her text wonderfully, adding an additional and quite funny level of expressiveness to our hero. This is one of those books that slowly turns up the corners of your mouth as you read.

Maira Kalman's Looking at Lincoln is similarly imaginative, and even similarly whimsical, but also (as befits its subject) more pensive. In it, a child narrator takes the reader through her own investigation of the guy on the five-dollar bill (as she initially thinks of him). She hits the big historical points, of course, but it's the Kalman-ian flights of fancy that really make this book special: the girl's picturing Lincoln loving apples and vanilla cake, for instance.

Actually, Kalman even lends the historical stuff this extra dimension—when it comes time to recount the president's tragic murder, she opens the scene by noting that after the horrors of war, Lincoln felt the need to laugh at something and thus went to see the fateful performance of the comedic play at Ford's Theatre. It's all presented in a somber, matter-of-fact voice that feels very true and right, both for the young narrator herself and for the children who'll be reading this book. Kalman is masterful at capturing the wonder of discovery that's at the heart of all the best history—and she somehow allows even an adult reader who knows a lot about Lincoln to partake in rediscovery.

[Cover images, from left: Courtesy of Random House; Courtesy of Penguin USA]

New Books: Around the World

Graphic novels have gained a great deal of respectability since I was a kid. With the possible exception of Herge's Tintin books—and those had European cred!—back then, the genre was linked more with its cousin, the comic book, than with other children's books. And comic books were distinctly not respectable in a literary sense: Even the brilliant, complex 1980s and '90s work of Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore (most of which is by no means for children, I hasten to say) had a bit of a discriminatory hurdle to get over before being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Today, major publishers have full graphic-novel (and even comic-book!) divisions, turning out excellent work for both kids and adults that covers nearly every genre and field. To my delight, there are even nonfiction graphic novels, whose leading practitioner would now have to be Matt Phelan. His latest book, Around the World, tells the story of three amazing, adventurous, and absolutely real 19th-century solo global circumnavigations: Thomas Stevens's 1884 journey via large-wheel bicycle, Nellie Bly's 1889 newspaper-sponsored race to surpass Jules Verne's fictional 80-day achievement, and Joshua Slocum's 1895 small-boat trip.

These are the sorts of stories that have long turned up in nonfiction children's books, and I remember reading about Bly's race against time in one myself as a child—which makes it all the more remarkable that Phelan has turned up the relatively undiscovered of Stevens and Slocum, neither of whose names were the least bit familiar to me. All three stories are remarkable, the kind that feel incredibly improbable for their time (especially Slocum's, which seems downright impossible).

And as he proved in the historical-fiction work The Storm in the Barn, Phelan knows what to do with a good story. His accounts of the three journeys move from panel to panel like a well-edited film, and he has the ability able to capture and denote his protagonists' characteristics with a lightly illustrated expression, much as a great film actor can express an emotion in a glance.

The author is also thoughtful enough to move past the actions of the three adventurers to the question of why each is pursuing his or her goal—a question that goes a long way to establishing character and, not coincidentally, to making Phelan's book a lot more interesting than most children's nonfiction, including the similarly themed books I read as a kid. Maybe it's redundant to call a graphic novel a page-turner, but that's the term that comes to mind when I think about how eagerly my seven-year-old reads it.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Drawing from Memory

In my spotty posting of late amid vacations and hurricanes, I've been focusing on children's nonfiction, slowly chipping away at my initial statement that it's hard to find good books in the genre. Allen Say's Drawing from Memory, though, is a particular standout, and particularly unusual: an autobiographical memoir in the form of a picture book.

Say is a revered veteran children's book author, responsible for dozens of charming and always very beautiful picture books whose art bears the influence of his Japanese origins; several have become family favorites in recent years. In Drawing from Memory, he turns his immense talent upon his own life—and specifically on his road to his lifelong career as a cartoonist, artist, and author.

It's a tale with some familiar tropes—aspiring artist is told by his father that art is not a suitable profession, then pursues it anyway thanks to a mentor/substitute-father figure. But the specifics are powerful. (For instance: Say's parents and grandparents sent him to Tokyo to live by himself at age 13 so that he could attend a prestigious school there, with predictable and not-so-predictable effects on his relationship with them, and particularly with his mother.)

And the author's means of conveying his story is breathtaking: He expertly blends words, real family and historical photographs, and his own illustrations of memories of places, people, and situations (along with wistful and occasionally heartbreaking confessions of lapses in that memory, as when he cannot recall the name of a favorite schoolteacher). The resulting combination of media is more or less unique, and makes the already personal tale Say is telling almost impossibly so. You feel at times as if you're right there alongside the author as he journeys through his life.

This is not, clearly, your typical picture-book fare, especially as Say's childhood coincided with World War II, and as such, the intended audience is certainly a little older than one expects a book of this size and shape to be. But his treatment, while it doesn't shy away from the facts of his life and the history going on during it, is never overly grim, and our six-year-old (who's starting to show some interest in cartooning himself) was fascinated by the true story. Kids older than that, particularly if they have any interest in drawing and/or storytelling themselves, will be rapt, I think. As will most adults with such interests—or who have childhoods of their own to remember.

[UPDATE: Though Amazon seems to say you can purchase this book now, I've been told by the publisher that it's not officially out till October, so if you're having problems picking it up immediately, my apologies! (You should at least be able to preorder till then, though, I should think.) I'll update further with any new information.]

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

New Books: Charting the World

It figures that as soon as I write about how difficult it can be to find standout children's nonfiction, a slew of books come along to prove me wrong. The latest discovery is Richard Panchyk's Charting the World,  and where Winter's Tail played its real-life subject matter into a children's-book format, this is more an adult-style book made interesting for and accessible to children. (As a result, we're also talking slightly older children here—the book itself says ages nine and up, but its sweet spot really feels like tweens and even teens to me.)

Simply put, this is a book about maps, and Panchyk covers all the bases, starting with the history of geography itself and then moving on to that of mapmaking, from, as the subtitle says, "cave painting to GPS." It's true history, too, not dumbed down in an attempt to appeal to its younger audience in the slightest, which I know kids who are truly interested in the subject will appreciate.

But what keeps Charting the World from being nothing more than a good middle-school textbook—and mind you, it would be an excellent base for teaching classes on geography, cartography, or even certain aspects of history, I think—is the 21 activities Panchyk has interspersed through the tour. Kids are given the chance to put the skills they're reading about into direct action—using a contour map to build a 3D island model, say, or surveying their own backyard, or making a nautical map of a playground puddle.

This hands-on approach to learning is, of course, a time-tested tool of kids' science books, but it's novel and refreshing to see it applied to a nonfiction children's book that's as much about history as science. And it works like a charm in making a book that could, despite its many vivid images and illustrations of maps past and present, have seemed dry at first glance more appealing and inviting to kids.

[Images courtesy of Independent Publishers Group]

New Books: Winter's Tail

I've become, in my time-pressed adult life, a big nonfiction reader, for many reasons. But I've always found children's nonfiction—at least beyond the work of giants of the genre like David Macaulay—to be difficult territory.

It's not that there's a lack of good nonfiction kids' books out there, especially in the science-and-nature genre, which offers tons of books about all sorts of animals and bugs and plants. It's more that there's not a lot that separates any one of these titles from the rest—most are driven by gorgeous, vivid photography and feature fairly basic writing. I always find myself at a loss to find reasons to recommend any particular one.

The dolphin saga Winter's Tail, from documentary-film and nature-book veterans Juliana, Isabella, and Craig Hatkoff, however, is an exception. While it also has its share of nature photography, this book is driven by its storytelling—so much so, in fact, that its tale is the basis for a major (fictionalized) family film that's coming out this fall. The saga of a dolphin that loses its tail in a crab trap and eventually learns to survive and thrive with a prosthetic one designed by a company that makes artificial human limbs, it grabbed the imagination of our six-year-old from the start and didn't let go.

Of course, we've also added the movie to our agenda later in the year (we’ll see how the true story mixes with Hollywood screenwriters and Harry Connick), but for now, I'm just grateful to have discovered a kids' nonfiction book I can say truly is several notches above the rest.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]

New Books: The Story of Britain

Sometimes a new children's book makes me say to myself, Man, I wish this had been out when I was a kid. And since I’ve always been a history fan—I’m the son of an ancient historian, so it seems to run in the family—Patrick Dillon's The Story of Britain certainly had a head start at that honor. This handsome hardcover for historically inclined middle schoolers and up ambitiously takes its reader, as its subtitle says, "from the Norman conquest to the European Union."

Children's history is a tricky business, though, and most of the attempts I've seen fall into one of two traps. Either they hew too closely to the old-school "just the facts and dates" approach, resulting in dry, dull pages that even the most history-inclined kid would give up on, or they’re so concerned with amping up the action that they skip vital issues entirely—and end up being fairly useless as history.

Dillon neatly walks a path between those two poles, by containing every episode and subject in a short, digestible chapter of a mere page or two in length. With large subjects that would be difficult to sum up in that little space—World War II, say—he expands on his schema rather than deserting it, devoting several of his brief chapters to different aspects.

This pays off marvelously, making The Story of Britain doubly useful, as both a fast journey through the entirety of British history and an excellent quick reference on the individual subjects. (In that regard, it’s even handy for parents who might be looking for a speedy refresher on the Wars of the Roses or the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Hey, it could happen!) The format, and Dillon’s perfectly light touch as a writer, keep everything moving along nicely, while the many evocative watercolors by illustrator P. J. Lynch (some examples are shown below) bring the people and topics he's covering even more vividly to life.

The author is even brave enough to bring his book right up to the modern day, always a risky enterprise for any historian, since politics inevitably color any interpretation of recent events. Dillon chooses balance, presenting both sides of these often controversial arguments. This will tend to frustrate parents of just about any political bent, but does allow the author to avoid any serious accusations of attempted brainwashing of our youth, I suppose. (And to be fair, a child interested in learning more about the policies of Margaret Thatcher, say, will find no shortage of opinionated arguments at easy reach.)

Certainly, when covering so much time in fairly compact space, compromises must be made, and The Story of Britain makes no pretense of being an in-depth, comprehensive history. It’s more a point of first entry into serious history for children: Dillon wants to cultivate their interest and help it grow, rather than stomping on it as many a school textbook has done through the years. I may be a bit predisposed, but I'd say he's succeeded marvelously, producing perhaps the best large-scale history book for kids since E. H. Gombrich’s 75-year old A Little History of the World. (And to be honest, I've never been entirely sure that book—while wonderful—is really for children!)

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Can We Save the Tiger?

Most parents are familiar with today’s earnestly conscientious children’s nonfiction that tries to teach young readers about environmentalism and conservation. Most of these titles, I'm sorry to say, are not so great: lecturing, often self-righteous, and—the worst sin of all for a children's book—dull. Some even take a propagandist, indoctrinating tone, which I find especially alarming in kids’ books even when I agree with the author's argument. (Still, they're mostly harmless, since they bore children stiff and quickly get buried in the farthest reaches of the bookshelf.)

But reading on these subjects for the younger set doesn't have to be limited to the classic allegories of The Lorax; there are a happy few standouts in the genre as well, such as Raymond Bial’s A Handful of Dirt and Dan Yaccarino’s The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau. Joining their ranks is a new picture book from author Martin Jenkins and artist Vicky White, Can We Save the Tiger? Jenkins avoids the high-handed tone of many books on animal extinction, and instead calmly and reasonably puts forward the facts for kids to examine for themselves.

First, he defines the term extinction itself, with references to some of the more famous vanished creatures—the dodo, the auk, the marsupial wolf—each rendered, as is every animal here, in White's stunning, meticulously detailed pencil and oil illustrations. Then Jenkins introduces many of today’s endangered species, leading with the always appealing tiger. (He clearly knows his audience.) In each case, he briefly runs through the situation that has put the animal in such dire circumstances—the fierceness and beauty of the tiger, as well as its need for wide spaces in the face of ever-encroaching human expansion; the introduction of a previously unknown predator to the habitat of the partula snail; and so on.

Perhaps best of all, Jenkins is surprisingly nonjudgmental, writing with understanding about the reasons why people have made decisions that have been so devastating to these animals. Which leads him to his key point: Because the endangerment of so many of these creatures is almost intrinsic to their very state of existence in the modern world, it will take a concerted effort from humanity to save them. Then, to drive home that such efforts are not lost causes, he turns to a success story—the comeback of the American bison—to show it can be done.

Somehow Jenkins accomplishes all of this in a handful of short, informative sentences that take up far less space on most pages than White's marvelous art does, and that are manageable for fairly young readers without being too juvenile for middle schoolers. And in his brief conclusion, he lets the forceful simplicity of his argument speak for itself:

“…Sometimes it might all seem to be too much, especially when there are so many other important things to worry about. But if we stop trying, the chances are that pretty soon we’ll end up with a world where there are no tigers or elephants, or sawfishes or whooping cranes, or albatrosses or ground iguanas. And I think that would be a shame, don’t you?”

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Built to Last

This is a new book that’s also nostalgic for me: My parents bought me a copy of David Macaulay’s Cathedral when I was eleven or so, and it more or less lasted me all my childhood. (A true ethnocentric New Yorker even at that age, I initially thought it was about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was a few blocks from our apartment. I don’t really remember, but I’m hoping I didn’t come across more than a couple of references to medieval times before realizing my mistake….)

All of Macaulay’s work, from the early architectural books to The New Way Things Work and the more recent The Way We Work, is nearly as fascinating to me now as an adult as it was (or would have been) when I was a child. The author is deservedly renowned for his use of illustration to clarify and explain just about anything, and the three books that make up the new compendium Built to Last—Castle, Cathedral, and Mosque—established that reputation. In them, Macaulay delineates, step by step, the amazing process of construction of these three mammoth structures in the 13th (for the first two) and 16th centuries.

Children with a taste for architectural renderings or simply drawing in three dimensions will be dazzled by all three, naturally. But those less gifted in spatial intelligence—and I most certainly count myself among them—will also find a lot to love. As readers of any of Macaulay’s books know, the author is driven to analyze and explain everything about a subject, and so he delves into the historical background of these buildings as well: not just how, but why they were built, and what purpose they served in their worlds politically and socially. It’s a take on nonfiction writing for children that’s had a deep influence on a generation of authors, and for good reason: It provides an awful lot for curious minds of all kinds to latch onto.

While I can’t recommend Built to Last enough to those who don’t already have copies of the original volumes at home—the three-in-one makes a nice gift!—parents who hung on to their old childhood editions for their own kids may want to consider it as well. Because Macaulay wasn’t content to just repackage his books in one volume, in the traditional, low-effort way—instead, he took the opportunity to revisit his old classics. He’s made various changes and additions where he felt they were necessary or helpful, and he’s also rendered all of the first two books in color. (Both were originally all black-and-white.) The result is a book that feels far more integrated as one entity than most compilations of this sort do.

I’ll let the author himself have the last word, in this brief explanation of his goals for the updated, all-in-one edition of these books:

[Cover image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.]

New Books: How Animals Work

There are a lot of science and nature books for kids out there—nearly every publishing house, large and small, seems to have its own line. Unlike with most other genres with this kind of volume, though, most of them are pretty good, covering their chosen subject (bats, say, or animals of the jungle habitat) with the right depth for the age level they’re aimed at and, of course, lots of great full-color photography. We probably own 10 or 15 of these little volumes, all told, all from different series but nonetheless quite similar, and entirely satisfying to our five-year-old.

But I haven’t written about them much, mainly because there’s often so little to distinguish one line of books from another. All of them are good, but it’s rare to find one that stands out. DK’s How Animals Work does, and not solely because it’s a much larger volume than the rest. It’s kind of a coffee-table book for kids, really, 192 pages long with a hard cover, and featuring enough really big full-color photos  to keep a kid happy for months.

But as the title suggests, there’s another reason this book will be especially appealing to the science-minded youngster. It uses all that extra space not only to load up on more amazing images, but also to go beyond the basic factoids you usually find in kiddie science books, and delve into how and why animals do the things they do. So alongside that amazing closeup of a snake, you find out exactly how snakes slither. (No spoilers here.) To Dash’s delight, there are in-depth diagrams of the bodies of those bats, too, demonstrating how each anatomical feature that’s vital to the creature’s survival functions.

It goes on and on like that for pages, in something of a parent’s dream: a long, attractive-to-behold book that even a slightly science-minded child can get lost in for stretches of time, learning all the while. The book’s official age range from the publisher is 8 to 12, and some of the biology discussed will be over the heads of children younger than that, but at five, Dash adores this book. Better still, I think he’s going to treasure it for years.

[Cover image courtesy of DK Publishing.]