Rusch, Elizabeth

Your Call This Democracy?: How to Fix Our Government and Deliver Power to the People. Illustrations by Ellen Duda. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 

What is the Electoral College? Why do we have one? Who can vote? Does it matter what state you live in? This informative and engaging book answers those and many other often confusing but important questions about voting rights - or lack thereof - in the United States. Its publication in 2020 couldn't have been more timely. Covering issues such as how voting rights vary across state lines, the problem of gerrymandering, the power of money in politics and where it comes from, this book clearly explains the problems recent elections have brought front and center to our political discussions. Charts, graphs, and other descriptive illustrations by Ellen Duda add visual clarity to Rusch's informative but engaging text. Young or old, native born or new citizen, first-time voter or lever-puller from the days when everyone voted on the same day, we all have something to learn from this book.  

Undefeated

Sheinkin, Steve. Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. 
New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2017.

Long before there was a National Football League, there were college teams, the  "big four" of that early twentieth century time being Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. One of their chief rivals was a team from the Carlisle Indian School, in Carlisle Pennsylvania, and their most famous player, Jim Thorpe. 

Undefeated tells Jim Thorpe's story, while also shining a light on the cruelty of the U.S. Government's misguided attempt to "educate" Native American students by, essentially, erasing their culture. Life at Carlisle was difficult, at times brutal. Thorp tried to escape more than once. Football became the outlet for his remarkable physical abilities, as well as his rage. 

The book includes some fascinating "out-takes" from college football history, such as Thorpe breaking away from an attempted tackle by two future American war heroes, Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower, in a game against Army. It also tells the story of Thorpe's incredible feats in the 1912 Olympics in Sweden, where he won gold medals for both the pentathlon and the decathlon. In a racially based move by the USA's Amateur Athletic Union, however, he was stripped of those medals because he had spent summers earning money by playing for minor league baseball teams. He was not the only "amateur" athlete to have done so, but he made the mistake of playing under his own name. 70 years later, those medals were restored. 

Steve Sheinkin is a master at bringing to vivid life the stories of important characters in our nation's history. Undefeated is a fascinating read as well as an insight into the origin of many of the issues that continue to affect our lives in the United States today. 

Standing Up Against Hate

Farrell, Mary Cronk. Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII. New York: Abrams Book for Young Readers, 2019.

In her latest book, Mary Cronk Farrell has uncovered yet another little-known story of women who played a significant role in our country's history. As the United States geared up to enter WWII, thousands of African American women volunteered to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, or WAAC (later just WAC). Throughout the book, Farrell recounts the stories of particular women, highlighting their accomplishments as well as their difficulties, including the racial prejudice that pervaded the American military during WWII. These women became telephone operators, secretaries, auto mechanics, pilots, and nurses, among other occupations. One battalion, the 6888th, or six-triple-eight as it was known, was the only group of WAACs sent overseas. In Birmingham, England, they were assigned to direct or redirect several thousand pieces of mail that had accumulated over several years. Working 3 8-hour shifts every day, the women of the 6888th sifted through piles of bagged and boxed letters, matching names, some barely legible, to lists of regiments stationed in various places throughout the European Theater of Operations. They accomplished their mission in half the time time that had been expected. They also experienced something entirely new to them - a land without segregation laws. These women didn't have to ride in the back of any buses in Birmingham, England.
      By connecting young readers to the stories of these pioneering women, Farrell also connects them to the underlying  roots of many of the social problems we still face in this country. History matters!

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

Ignotofsky, Rachel. Women in Science:  50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
  Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2016

Of the 50 women scientists featured in this delightfully illustrated book, I recognized the names of only 9. Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress of old, also invented the "frequency-hopping spread spectrum" still in use in today's GPS systems. Marjorie Stoneham Douglas I knew only because of the tragic events that occurred in the school that bears her name, and Katherine Johnson, who helped John Glenn return safely to earth, is known today because of the movie Hidden Figures. Thanks to books such as this, the names of the women it portrays will no longer be so "hidden." The detailed profile of each of the women describes their backgrounds, including the difficulty they had in gaining recognition for their discoveries. For some, that recognition came only after their deaths. We can hope that today's budding inventors, both male and female, will not suffer the same fate.

Donald Hall and Ox-Cart Man

Remembering Donald Hall

Hall, Donald. Ox-Cart Man. Illus. by Barbara Cooney. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.

I first read the poem, which is the text for this picture book, when it appeared in The New Yorker magazine in the late '70s. I was immediately drawn to the simplicity and the strength of both the poem and the oxcart man himself. I was working in an adult literacy program at the time. Reading the poem, then discovering the picture book soon after, was one of my earliest recognitions that  certain pictures books could be used with adults learning to read. 

The book depicts a nineteenth century New England farmer and his family who use or sell everything they raise, even their beloved ox. The illustrations match the quiet lyricism of the text and capture the integrity of a life lived in harmony with the cycles of nature. 

Donald Hall died on Saturday, June 23, 2018. He was 89 years old. 

The Camping Trip that Changed America

In honor of our National Parks



Rosenstock, Barb. The Camping Trip that Changed America: Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Our National Parks. Illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 2012.

John Muir was well ahead of his time. It was 1903. Muir, an avid hiker and outdoorsman, already recognized the threat that growing land development was to the extraordinary landscapes he explored in the American west. He also recognized that President Theodore Roosevelt was something of an outdoors man as well, so he invited the President to join him on a camping trip to one of his favorite places. Just as Muir had hoped, Roosevelt was overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the towering sequoias, majestic mountains, and massive glaciers he observed. Traveling on horseback and camping in the wilderness, the two men bonded over their love of the natural world and their recognition of the need to preserve the most spectacular parts of the nation's geographic heritage. Roosevelt's creation of the National Park system was the result. 

Illustrator Gerstein, who also illustrated The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, portrays the two very different characters - the rambunctious Roosevelt and the studious and steadfast Muir - amid the cathedral-like splendor of the land that would become Yosemite National Park.  

  

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers

In Remembrance of Courage and Hope 



Gerstein, Mordicai. The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2003.

On the morning of August 7, 1974, before the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City actually opened, New Yorkers walking on the streets below the towers witnessed an amazing sight. With his balancing pole in hand, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit stepped on to a tightrope that he and a few friends had stretched between the towers the night before. A quarter mile above the busy streets of a New York morning, Philippe walked, danced, and even lay down on the wire, as a gathering crowd of astonished New Yorkers looked up. After almost an hour, he stepped off the wire into the waiting hands of the New York City police who arrested him and brought him into court. The judge, after scolding him for endangering himself and others, ordered him to perform his feats for children in the city parks. He was happy to comply.  

Gerstein's Caldecott Medal-winning illustrations convey the courage as well as the playfulness and sheer beauty of this amazing act of human artistry and skill. They, too, are part of the legacy of those once imposing towers.