Bartography

I found myself reminded of Titanic, of all things, by this early reader (HarperCollins, 5/06) by paleontologist Charlotte Lewis Brown and illustrator Phil Wilson. The thing I remember most about James Cameron’s movie is the surprising variety of ways that characters met their doom, and that’s how I felt while reading this account of what “may have happened” moments before and months after an asteroid or comet slammed into the earth 65 million years ago.

Dinosaurs get eaten, consumed by a fireball, crushed by trees, pelted by burning rocks, washed away by tidal waves, and so on. This is easily the most violent early reader I’ve ever encountered, and the scariest, too. It’s also a vivid, accessible account of a crucial piece of the history of this planet. What’s more, it’s surprisingly affecting — Brown’s reimagining of the momentous event zeroes in on individual dinosaurs, and without anthopomorphizing them she does makes the reader care about these creatures and their terrible fates.

In fact, she does such a good job that readers may be tempted (presumably in opposition to their own self-interest) to boo and hiss at the end when mammals emerge from their burrows to take over the planet. Or maybe they’ll just want to flip back to the beginning of the book, when the dinosaurs still — for the briefest bit longer — ruled the roost.

Other blog posts on The Day the Dinosaurs Died:
Bookview: Review: The Day the Dinosaurs Died (an I Can Read book)

The caffeinated, supercharged voice used by author Catherine Thimmesh — imagine the hippest, most amped-up raconteur at Mission Control — is one of the many pleasures of this new account (Houghton Mifflin, 6/06) of the first moon landing. Thimmesh’s enthusiasm for her subject is palpable, and the sense of excitement she brings is as vital to Team Moon‘s success as the book’s very premise: that hundreds of thousands of people not named “Neil” or “Buzz” were actively, crucially involved in the national effort culminating in Apollo 11.

A taste of both the voice and the premise: “Now would not be the time for the two Bobs to miscalculate, miscount, or lose their superhuman powers of concentration. The could not afford to be wrong.” Who were the two Bobs? They were the guys in Houston monitoring just how little fuel was left in the lunar module during its descent to the surface, and their story is typical of the anecdotes Thimmesh has included — tales of spacesuit seamstresses, radio telescope operators, parachute designers and others who made it possible to get men to the moon, get them home, and let the rest of the world watch while it happened.

Occasionally, the narrative voice and sheer volume of you-are-there detail get in the way of clarity — a segment about rapid-fire software alarms set off during the approach to the moon is especially hard to follow — but the overall effect is powerful and positive. As for those other pleasures mentioned above, the photography is generous and stunning, and the final fifth of the book’s 80 pages are thoughtfully given over to brief bios of the cast of characters, plentiful information about Thimmesh’s sources, recommendations “for further exploration,” and summaries of the other Apollo missions.

And they were missions, and that’s perhaps the most powerful impression that lingers after one reads Team Moon. The idea of a unifying cause, of a valiant, worthwhile effort calling for sacrifices from hundreds of thousands of Americans not serving in the military — and one that will be watched the world over — has never seemed more appealing, nor more absent. If young readers wonder what their generation’s cause will be, or if they’ll have one, and if not, why not? — well, that’s just one more service done by Catherine Thimmesh and this terrific book.

Other blog posts on Team Moon:
BookBuds: Moonstruck all over again
Chasing Ray: Team Moon

Prior to reading this latest collaboration (Clarion Books, 6/06) between Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and photographer William Muñoz, my familiarity with the topic didn’t go much beyond “The Indians used every part of the buffalo.” Those considerable gaps in my knowledge have now been filled in.

Spanning “prehistory to the present,” The Buffalo and the Indians offers fascinating details about the mechanics of how the Plains tribes went about hunting and processing the giant herds, as well as the animal’s place in their spiritual lives. The enormity of the bison’s role in sustaining Native Americans becomes clear in a section about Head-Smashed-In, a buffalo jump in Alberta where 100,000 arrowheads were found — an especially impressive number when you consider that most buffalo didn’t survive their fall off the cliff. No wonder the land-hungry U.S. government viewed the buffalo as, in the words of one general, “the Indian’s commissary” and looked the other way until white hunters’ slaughter had nearly wiped the herds out entirely.

The 80 pages of Patent’s text fly by, thanks to the abundant art and a 15-point font. But before they’re gone, she offers a parting fact about today’s conservation efforts by the Blackfeet, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara that I had never considered: Maintaining a buffalo herd is not just meaningful but expensive. Attracting visitors to view the herds helps defray the costs, however, and The Buffalo and the Indians is bound to inspire readers to want to see a herd for themselves.

I would have loved this book when I was a kid. Influenced early by my dad’s love for “pickin’ and grinnin,’” I became an obsessive weekly listener/stats-keeper of American Country Countdown. This entertaining, whimsically illustrated new collaboration by Holly George-Warren and Laura Levine (Houghton Mifflin, 5/06) would have fit perfectly with my pre-teen passion in the early 1980s.

Since then, of course, country music has become only a bigger business, which makes it all the more surprising that — near as I can tell — this is the first nonfiction picture book on the topic by a major American publisher. By contrast, you’ll probably run out of digits before you’re through tallying up the picture books about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and other pioneers in jazz, a genre that peaked commercially more than half a century ago.

As material for children’s books, jazz musicians have at least a couple of things going for them. One, they’re predominantly African-American, which means that stories about them help make up for the historical shortfall in titles about black Americans. Two, jazz is typically seen as a greater intellectual accomplishment than country music — a great intellectual accomplishment, period. So, I understand the appeal of the topic to writers and editors and publishers alike.

But are the life stories of, say, the Carter Family or Bob Wills inherently any less interesting or inspiring than those of Ellington and Fitzgerald? Is the brief, brilliant, tragic path of Hank Williams any less suited to exploration in a children’s book than Parker’s? George-Warren hails Hank as “the greatest country artist of all time,” so you know she’d say “no.” I do, too.

There are many things I wish about Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels. I wish there was a discography or bibliography for readers who want to know more about the 15 artists covered than these one- or two-page profiles allow. I wish there was more of a focus on what these musicians had in their hearts than on what they had on the charts (but, as suggested above, this is just the adult me talking).

More than anything, though, I wish for this book to succeed in opening the door for more titles — titles that delve more deeply into the lives of some of the artists included here, plus those who didn’t make the cut. Until those books join this one on bookstore and library shelves, Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels will be so lonesome I could cry.

For less than the cost of half a tank of gas (and for only a little more than a single pit stop’s purchase of enough snacks and Sprite and whatnot to keep everyone content for the next 100 miles), Diane Siebert and Stephen T. Johnson offer a 48-page alternative to a round-the-country ramble.

From the Everglades to an Alaskan view of the aurora borealis, Tour America (Chronicle Books, 6/06) covers a lot of ground — and not just geographically. Siebert’s poems range widely in tone and form: Her environmentalist-minded tweaking of Paul Bunyan is as fun as her Cape Canaveral ode is touching, and the rushed, packed stanzas in her vibrant salute to Chicago’s El contrast nicely with “Badlands,” which looks like that craggy, wide-open South Dakota landscape.

Caldecott Honor recipient Johnson (Alphabet City), meanwhile, must have turned his entire studio upside down to come up with so many different media for the art on these pages. A little oil on canvas, a little graphite on paper, a little digital collage — paired with the variety of the locales honored and of Siebert’s verse, the result is the most fuel-efficient hybrid you’ll find this summer.