Searching within the Children’s Books Section of Amazon, I made a series of biographical queries that yielded the following number of “results.”
George Washington 4146
Martha Washington 366
Abraham Lincoln 3162
Abe Lincoln 545
Martin Luther King Jr 2064
Theodore Roosevelt 1204
Teddy Roosevelt 4870
James Madison 794
(Jim Madison actually returned one James Madison book!)
Dolley Madison 224
(My Dolley Madison Saves George Washington (Houghton Mifflin 2008) found a place within both the Washington and Dolley Madison queries.)
Robert E. Lee 796
U.S. Grant 818
The Union Wins again!
Wright Brothers 975
Neil Armstrong 871
Amelia Earhart 833
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the Earhart obsession.
Muhammad Ali 486
Sitting Bull 624
Charles Darwin 923
Intelligent Design 70
Okay, ID isn't a biography, but I couldn't help myself.
Washington Roebling
(Brooklyn Bridge Builder) 25
Stephen Decatur
(Forgotten Vanquisher of the Barbary Pirates) 46
Muhammad 1145
(Many of the results referred to Muhammad Ali)
Buddha 1582
Jesus 11,488
Remember, the results aren't book titles, but books that in some fashion relates to the query.
The results were many times wildly off-subject. For example, the search for Jim Madison yielded a book about Jim Thorpe. Odd.
So, does it say more about Children's biography than it does about Amazon's search algorithms?
Beats me, but it was fun playing….
Monday, July 21, 2008
Fun With Amazon Results
Monday, June 16, 2008
Just The Facts?
The exacting constraints imposed on the writer of a 32 page, non-fiction picture book humbles grand ambitions. Or should. I’ve seen the sad results of those who believe otherwise: tedious biographies that shoehorn facts without context into long- winded stories that still leaves the reader ignorant of the person behind the facts.
I’ve chosen to avoid the full-blown biography and focus instead on the revealing chapters in a person's life.
Nevertheless, the trick still is to winnow a meaningful story to about 1500 words–I don’t’ believe kids will sit still for more–without sacrificing narrative drive and in a manner that doesn’t substitute fluff for meat.
Reducing the scope of the book is strewn with pitfalls. For example, in Uncommon Traveler, I followed the adventures of 19th Century Englishwoman, Mary Kingsley. Kingsley traveled to equatorial east Africa, displaying more than a dash of pluck for a woman who’d spent most of her life sequestered at home tending to her family. The book portrayed an epic trek through the jungle. Garbed in a thick skirt and long sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck, Mary survived rapids, swam with hippos, and even battled a crocodile who tried to join her in her canoe.
But the incidents are drawn from Mary’s two trips to Africa. The number of visits notwithstanding, I decided that the underlying tale of her courage and curiosity was of one piece, and I wrote it that way. Doing otherwise, I was convinced, would have destroyed the narrative arc for no foreseeable profit. I was careful to clarify the reality in the afterword.
The incident goes to the heart of the problem of writing history: It is not a simple chronological recounting of “true facts,” but a reflection of the historian’s point of view. When the history writer includes one bit of information while discarding another, or emphasize one episode at the expense of others, the reader must decide: Did the writer egregiously injure the truth?
I start each new project with the readers’ ultimate verdict weighing on me.
As it should.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Take That, You Scoundrel!
Candidate Thomas Jefferson described opponent John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
During the 1828 election, John Quincy Adams and his Federalist Party called Andrew Jackson’ wife: a “dirty…wench”, a “convicted adulteress” who was prone to “open and notorious lewdness.”
(For the record, she was a perfectly respectable woman. It’s been said that the accusations killed the unwell Mrs. Jackson.)
While campaigning for President, Stephen Douglas called Abraham Lincoln: a “horrid-looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman,” and “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”
Lincoln returned the favor and described the diminutive Douglas as “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way.”
In the 1884 Blaine vs. Cleveland contest, news of Cleveland’s support of child he had fathered during his bachelorhood, led to opponents’ taunt of “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?”
During the 1804 election, detractors of Thomas Jefferson reprised the outrageous claim that Jefferson, "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves…Her name is Sally," and that Jefferson had "several children" by her.”
…Of course, the outrageous claim ultimately proved to be true.
Monday, April 21, 2008
History: What's the Point?
I love history, always have, and I’m astonished that other people–most others!–don’t.
History is life and death, war and peace, courage and betrayal, sex and violence…a lot of sex and violence!
What’s not to like?
But dislike it they do, and from that distaste ignorance has grown.
“We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate,” popular historian David McCullough has warned.
Evidence of that illiteracy is rampant…and hilarious.
Dr. Anders Henriksson, a history professor, has collected college students’ history bloopers in a book, Non Campus Mentis. Among many other hysterical things, you will find that some students think:
Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.
Gothic cathedrals were held up by flying buttocks.
At the end of World War Two, Hitler had his wife Evita put to sleep, and then shot himself in the bonker.
Ouch.
Appalling, right?
Yet another professor, Sam Wineburg, insists we shouldn’t be too, surprised or upset. Testing that dates back to 1917 has show American students have always had a tenuous grasp of history. He further notes that “ when historians trained at Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard answered questions from a leading high school textbook, they scored a mere 35 percent – in some cases lower than a comparison group of high school students taking Advanced Placement U.S. History.”
Geez, Prof, that’s supposed to make me feel better?
Most disturbingly, though, is a study in which people “were asked to "pick one word or phrase to describe your experience with history classes in elementary or high school.”
"Boring" was the most frequent answer.
David McCullough is not surprised, saying, “The textbooks are dreary, they’re done by committee, they’re often hilariously politically correct and they’re not doing any good.”
But there is a solution and it comes from famed historian Barbara Tuchman: “Tell stories.”
“That’s what history is: a story,” McCullough explains. A story “calls for empathy on the part of the teller…and of the reader or listener to the story…. (Children) should not have to read anything that we, you and I, wouldn’t want to read ourselves. And there are wonderful books, past and present. There is literature in history.”
For a writer of history, they’re not bad words to hang a career on.
Monday, March 17, 2008
In Praise of Edwin Tunis
I’ve written a book in which a biplane played a major part of the story. In another, it was an old time car. But you’d never be able to recreate the airplane from one of my drawing, nor build a car using my image of the auto. That’s okay. Biography is my interest, not machinery. The images did their job: to advance the story about a person.
But that doesn’t diminish my admiration for writers and artists who specialize in things.
One of the best was Edwin Tunis.
He was born in 1897. His father’s work took his family from town to town. Edwin studied art, became a World War One pilot, held design & art jobs, lost design & art jobs, and chased work as a freelancer.
“As a commercial artist I lacked the ‘snappy’ style beloved of advertising agents, but I could draw furniture, architecture, and historical stuff, so I made out well enough.” he said.
He designed a Maryland commemorative stamp, and painted historical murals. The Depression hit him hard and he took a momentary career detour as a radio announcer. World War Two arrived and he found himself working for the Black and Decker Company.
In 1943, the McCormick Company commissioned Tunis to paint a “History of Spices” mural in its Baltimore harbor office. It was 145’ long and took him two and a half years to finish. While researching the subject, he discovered “there was no one book which recounted the whole basic story of the development of ships in a simple way that might interest young people.”
“An outline, a dummy, some pages of text, and one finished illustration went to a literary agent who sold Oars, Sail and Steam within a week, he said”
It was published in 1952, launching fifty-five-year-old Edwin Tunis on a brand new career.
Other books followed: Weapons, 1954; Wheels, 1955; Colonial Living 1957; Indians, 1959; Frontier Living, (a Newberry Medal Honors winner), 1961; Colonial Craftsmen, 1965; Shaw’s Fortune, 1966; The Young United States, ( runner-up for the National Book Award), 1969; Chipmunks on the Doorstep, 1971; The Tavern at the Ferry, (an A.L.A. Notable Book), 1973.
Tunis believed that “illustrations should be as pleasing as the illustrator's abilities permit, but their prime purpose…is clear explanation. They must try…to put the object itself on the page.”
Chairs, chests, tilt-top table, gate-leg tables, sailor’s knots, samp mortars, stirrup stockings, sugar cutters, mill gears, wagon wheels, pugmills, saw mills, querns, hetchels, hats, horses, horns, pewter mugs, and pocket-hoop farthingales.
Do you want to learn how to scutch flax? Play huzzlecap? Pack a hogshead? Tunis shows you.
All are remarkably drawn with painstaking accuracy, yet with a buoyancy and immediacy that gives the images a singular liveliness.
I’m especially fond of Tunis’s elaborate scenes that combine landscape, houses, wagons, people… and horses. I’m jealous of his horses. Whenever I sketch horses, they have an odd anatomy of misplaced, jutting bones and it takes me forever to correct. (Don’t ask me about cows. They’re impossible. I’m convinced cows were designed in a rush on a late Friday before a long, holiday weekend.)
Tunis died in 1973. In time, his fabulous books fell from print.
But sometimes a bit of serendipitous good luck prevails, this time in the shape of Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Edward Tunis’s work has been known to me for years, owing to his Pratt Library (Baltimore) map of Maryland,” History Editor Bob Brugger said. “ We (at JHU Press) realized that rights to his books on early America were available and reprinted the major ones. ”
Good for them!
And great for us.
There is much to admire about Tunis: His extraordinary artistic skill, and his dedication to accuracy, to be sure. But his dogged pursuit of a life in the arts, one that didn’t find success until late in life is also inspirational, at least to this battered ex-freelancer who didn’t come to children’s books until he was over forty.
But life, being what it is, delivers a piquant end to the Tunis story.
In 1989, The McCormick Building was demolished. With it went Tunis’s Spice mural. And just like in the Joni Mitchell song, in its place they put up a parking lot.
Monday, February 18, 2008
3 Books
I came to children’s literature through reading to my two daughters. The Oxcart Man, In the Night Kitchen, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and Owl Moon, among others, thrilled me. But it was the difficulty of finding compelling books about real people who accomplished real things that set me to the task of creating a biographical picture book myself.
I loved history, had read endless volumes of it, and was a professional cartoon illustrator with oodles of experience. Still, I worried that my light illustration style was inappropriate, and that only realistic art could be the handmaiden to non-fiction.
Then I found 3 non-fiction books that simply brushed the problem aside:
The Glorious Flight, Alice and Martin Provensen’s lighter-than-air tale of Louis Bleriot and the first flight across the English Channel in1909, employed cartoon-like illustrations and won the Caldicott.
War Boy by Michael Foreman and October ’45 by Jean Louis Besson. Both are memoirs of growing up during World War Two. Each is illustrated in light cartoon styles, yet the images of Foreman under the German’s bombs in England, and Besson under the German’s thumb in France, are as compelling and poignant as any photograph.
To them, I owe inspiration and a career.
