At the start of the school year, a little attention to art history seems appropriate. This very sparse smattering includes artists ranging from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, with diverse styles, subjects, and life experiences. Although his approach is not one I typically gravitate toward, I find the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, with his contemporary aesthetic and focus on social issues, particularly arresting.
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The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin, by Peter Sis (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2002, 44 pp, ages 6-10) My enchantment with Sis’s work, based on previous encounters (The Wall, Nicky & Vera, Three Golden Keys, Starry Messenger), made this book a must-have when I chanced upon it (for $3, Very Good!). Beyond that, my acquaintance with Darwin is embarrassingly slight, and Sis offered easy access. His intricate illustration style, merging text with detailed images, may be out of vogue. But I love books that reward repeated returns and close examination with a wealth of facts and information. (For a different style with similar effect check out author-illustrator Melissa Sweet, A River of Words, Just the Right Word, Celia Planted a Garden, Some Writer! and more.)
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With a high school graduate in the house, the topic of career choice has received a fair amount of attention in recent months. The picture books draw attention to three individuals with uncommon careers, at least for their time. Allan Pinkerton established the famed detective agency, which was at the height of its power from the 1870s to the 1890s. Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland numbered among the very few female journalists in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.
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Over the past two winters, our resident farmers have erected hoop houses on our property. In the spring my teen daughter and I took to reading, working, and meditating there whenever time and weather permitted (i.e. when it wasn’t too hot).
One day I retreated to a hoop house with my phone for a short, guided reflection. Upon discovering that the billowing of the plastic cover in the April wind was so loud as to drown out the recording, I almost headed back inside my quiet, sturdy home. Fortunately, good sense prevailed—I stayed and put aside my phone.
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Our Mother-Daughter Book Club picked this title in part because one of our members is South African. It turned out to be our first selection in quite some time that every member read to completion. It charmed us all, as well as offering plenty of fodder for discussion.
Eleven-year-old Mercy lives with the rather senior sisters Flora and Mary. They aren’t actually aunts, but they function that way. The reasons for Mercy’s residency with them are a bit murky at first, but they emerge as the story progresses.
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When I started collecting titles for World Refugee Day, I thought I might be hard pressed to assemble a respectable representation. But the abundance of books that came readily to hand testifies to the importance and relevance of this topic.
Circumstances that prompt people to leave behind home, property, and extended family are never felicitous, and the situations into which they arrive are often fraught. The books below sketch some of these departures and the variety of modes by which refugees make their way to a new life, sometimes over a span of years, sometimes in a matter of days or even hours.
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You can read Part I of this series on the Story Warren website or the BirdsBooks blog.
Stories of those who have suffered injustice and resolved to reverse it inspire awe and admiration. Likewise worthy of respect are those who create profound art from sorrow and loss. In his treatise Art and Faith, painter Makoto Fujimura references artists who draw upon their own suffering to create works of deep significance.
Some of the historical individuals below were literal artists—painters, potters, musicians. Others created by shaping society, moving us toward a more just world. Still others left behind words from which authors and artists have crafted their own works of beauty and significance.
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Moses: When Harriett Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, by Carole Boston Weartherford, ill. Kadir Nelson (Hyperion, 2006, 48pp, ages 4-8)
Weatherford’s picture book bio ranks alongside So Tall Within (Gary D. Schmidt, ill. Daniel Mintner, Roaring Brook, 2018) as one of my favorites for Black History Month. It might even be an all-time pick for outstanding children’s biography.
Weatherford pays tribute not just to the indomitable Tubman (c.1822-1913) but to her unquenchable faith. Tubman’s ongoing dialogue with God punctuates and often provides the vehicle for the narrative. Nelson’s paintings, rich with color and form, pair perfectly with spare poetic text, uniting action and emotion.
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WaterBrook, September 2023, 304 pp. ages 8-12
Carolyn Leiloglou’s debut work for middle grade readers incorporates art history and principles of painting into an engaging narrative. Beneath the Swirling Sky isn’t the first book in which characters travel through paintings or engage with art history. Also familiar are tropes of belonging to an endangered ancestral line, questing to save an abducted sibling, and hunting down art thieves.
Such perennial devices nevertheless retain their appeal. What adolescent wouldn’t want to discover inherited gifts that enable them to profoundly change the world? Possibly those chary enough to recognize the probable weight of accompanying responsibility. But who has time to worry about that?
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Hispanic Heritage Month came to my attention only recently, but the annual commemoration originated in 1968. Initially a week in duration, it was extended to one month in 1988. The event begins mid-month because it was on September 15, 1821, that Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala declared their independence from Spain.
I spent my first four years of life in California and Texas, where Spanish presence dates to the 1600s. Like most preschoolers, I was alert to little outside my immediate family, which happens to have northern European roots. By middle school my parents and I were firmly planted in Oregon. If a Latino presence existed in our small town, I remained ignorant of it. Nevertheless my parents, firmly convinced of the value of multiculturalism, enrolled us in a Saturday morning Spanish class at the local community college.
After high school I left the area for more than a decade, returning for grad school and remaining to start my own family. When my daughter started first grade—in the building that had previously been my middle school—she attended Spanish literacy classes alongside the children of the large Latino population that had grown up in my absence. The experience introduced us to a number of the books included here.
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