by Roger Sutton
Basic question: what is it about nonfiction your child likes? If he (and I do know that there are also many shes) really does like facts, he is in luck. Librarians recognize the appeal of the omnium gatherum of stuff, tables, catalogs, record books (see “Stats” ). But not all teachers are willing to count these kinds of compilations as reading. This is a case where you may need to speak up for your child — the challenge here is not in finding the books, or getting your child to read them, but getting his school to value the books that he reads. But what if your child enjoys nonfiction because he or she likes to think? That is, if your child enjoys knowing about the world not only to collect information, but also to ask questions and formulate theories? Biography aside, children’s publishing does better on this score for science than it does for the humanities. And there are a few math books, such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Number Devil, that capture the dizzying vistas mathematical thinking can open up. We are also starting to see memoirs, from Ji-Li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl to Jack Gantos’s Hole in My Life and Peter Sís’s The Wall, that, like Anne Frank’s diary, give nonfiction lovers an entry into complex subjects through a very personal voice.
My best suggestion is that you make clear to your librarian or independent bookseller what your child likes, and ask her to be on the alert for the exceptional book. Children’s books do experiment more than adult books, so whether it is in the personal and highly emotive power of a book such as Tom Feelings’s wordless The Middle Passage, or the dazzling (but now endlessly imitated) design innovations of the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness books, or the ’Ology books, which are fiction that is one step away from nonfiction (a step they may soon cross), the field is constantly tossing up new surprises. Come to nonfiction knowing what not to expect, and you may find unexpected pleasures.
In fourth grade, what I liked best about American history was the size of my textbook. It was big. Big enough to hide whatever other book I happened to be reading. And since I was always reading, this was a good thing.
History in school never engaged me completely. But eventually it did make me curious about all the missing parts. For one thing, where were the women? Surely Clara Barton and Harriet Tubman weren’t the only females in America’s past. And what about everyone else: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, children? What were the rest of us doing all that time, anyway?
Although I took a number of history courses as an undergraduate and graduate student, I never really learned how to study history. It’s one thing to memorize “Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854” and quite another to explore what people felt, said, and did about it.
Now, as a writer, I’ve found myself searching for all those missing people and stories I wanted to know about in fourth grade. When I visit schools, I ask children how they do research and how they learn about the past. They tell me they use books, computers, and encyclopedias. But invariably, no matter where I am, I have to really dig before a student will suggest that one way to research is to visit a place and see it with your own eyes.
I try to focus on this firsthand aspect of research when I tell them about my books. I show photographs of places I’ve been and people I’ve met, even the listening equipment I’ve used to hear oral history interviews. I tell them, for instance, how Ella Sheppard and the Jubilee Singers gave concerts all over the world to raise money for their school, now Fisk University. Then I show a photograph of Jubilee Hall, the beautiful building they funded, and students gasp in amazement.
I find it harder, though, to speak to a large group about how all this research makes me feel. How I get chills when I walk up the worn steps of Jubilee Hall, how the spirit of another person seems to reach across time through their words and touch mine. Or how people seem to stare out of photographs, daring me to come stand beside them. It’s also difficult to speak in public about how, when the research is done and I’m ready to write, I often just close my eyes and try to “go there.”
I can get part of the way on my own. It’s not, after all, hard to imagine standing in a Gettysburg field on a hot July day. The sky a bright blue, or perhaps hazy in the heat. Robins chirping. The sharp cry of a blue jay. The hot smell of grass.
But it’s never quite enough. I’d love a way in to all those missing parts. I know exactly what I’d say to someone from the past. I would simply say, “Tell me, what is it like here? What is it really like?”
MORE GREAT NONFICTION
Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science
160 pp. Grades 5–9. Two authors who found sugar stories in their own family histories trace how one product first created the hell of Atlantic slavery and then played a key role in the drive to free all people from enslavement.
Don Brown, All Stations! Distress!: April 15, 1912, The Day the Titanic Sank
64 pp. Grades 2–5. Brown recounts the complicated, compact last moments of the Titanic’s only voyage. The glory of the book is in Brown’s moody watercolors done with a brush dipped in stardust and frozen mist; they reach a terrifying crescendo as the ship upends before the final dive.
Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl, illustrations by Alan Bean, Mission Control, This Is Apollo: The Story of the First Voyages to the Moon
114 pp. Grades 4–6. In this outstanding history of the piloted Apollo missions, Chaikin conveys the excitement, tragedy, humor, and quest for knowledge that drove the golden age of the U.S. space program. In addition to historical photographs and technical diagrams, Alan Bean, an Apollo astronaut turned artist, lends his impressionistic paintings of the missions.
Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, illustrations by Brian Floca, Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring
48 pp. Grade 4–6. A remarkable collaboration between choreographer Martha Graham, composer Aaron Copland, and artist Isamu Noguchi resulted in the iconic ballet Appalachian Spring. Concise sentences and fluid, energetic illustrations echo Graham’s spare approach to dance.
David Macaulay, Built to Last
272 pp. Grade 5 to adult. In this omnibus edition, David Macaulay revisits and substantially revises three of his classic architectural histories, Cathedral, Castle, and Mosque. With newly drafted and colored illustrations, Macaulay gives a clear and dramatic sense of how these buildings were built, and what they meant.
Kadir Nelson, We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
88 pp. Grades 4–6. Imagine listening to Willie Mays and Ernie Banks swapping tales. That easygoing, conversational storytelling is what Nelson achieves in this pitch-perfect history of Negro League baseball. The grand slam, though, is the art: in Nelson’s spectacular oil paintings, the from-the-ground perspectives make the players look larger than life.
Elizabeth Partridge, Marching for Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary
72 pp. Grade 5 and up. In this tightly focused, dramatic historical narrative, Partridge writes about the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery from the viewpoint of children and teenagers who participated. The black-and-white photographs add unusual visual force and immediacy.
Tanya Lee Stone, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream
134 pp. Grade 7 and up. The story of the ultimately unsuccessful effort to get women into NASA’s Mercury astronaut training program is meticulously researched and thrillingly told. First- and second-hand sources, interviews, and outstanding historical photographs reveal the personal and physical risks taken by the women in pursuit of their dreams.
David Weitzman, Pharaoh’s Boat
48 pp. Grades 4–6. This handsome book on the construction (and, over four thousand years later, the reconstruction) of the boat Pharaoh Cheops rode into the afterlife focuses on intricacies of design and creation. Clear schematic drawings of the boat’s parts and assemblage are captivating.
Ask your child what a biography is, and I suspect you will get an answer somewhat like this: “A biography is the story of someone’s life.” Wait a f
ew seconds, and you might get: “It’s written by somebody else.” And, if you’re talking to a middle-schooler who’s handled the obligatory biography book report several times over, you will also hear, “And it has to have more than a hundred pages.” Since these responses indicate a child’s thinking, and since each contains a grain of either theoretical or practical truth, let’s start there.
Story
The key word in “the story of someone’s life” is story. An enormous number of biographies lack the elements of story and instead merely list an individual’s accomplishments. Such books offer no more information than would an encyclopedia, a source that may provide much-needed background, a quick spot for fact checking, or a chronological overview of someone’s life. But no story.
Stories contain beginnings, middles, and ends, and many popular biographies of living sports heroes or media celebrities necessarily have no end — an unfinished life is most likely not yet defined. Certainly there are exceptions, such as the 2007 picture-book biography Young Pelé: Soccer’s First Star by Lesa Cline-Ransome. Pelé has already made his mark on sports history, and, barring any future disclosures related to his soccer career, Cline-Ransome’s story of Pelé’s childhood not only has the requisite beginning, middle, and end, but also has purpose and worth. Such accounts are quite different from the biographies of individuals “in the moment,” which often appear to be expanded (and frequently unauthorized versions of) reports in popular magazines — reports that remain static as lives change. Think of biographies of sports or music stars, whose fame can be transitory, or of presidents George W. Bush before September 11 or Bill Clinton before Monica Lewinsky. There is simply not enough perspective on these rushed-to-press lives to give the biographies endings beyond unproven optimism: “whatever the future may hold for Britney Spears . . .”
Are such works — instant biographies, school-report-driven books — bad for children? I like to think of them as metaphorical doctors with incomplete creeds of only (as opposed to first) do no harm. Yes, youngsters are practicing their reading skills, moving their eyes across pages, and encountering words and sentences. Some are collecting facts of interest; others are engaging in wish fulfillment. But these books, and a number of popular magazines that deliver similar short biographical profiles, do not provide the potential for independent thinking that stronger biographies offer. In other words, like the aforementioned physicians, they bring temporary solace through the visit, but little else.
As story, though, biography often provides an early bridge between fiction and nonfiction reading. Teachers typically devote more time and attention to the story narratives in fiction than they do to the multiple prose patterns of nonfiction, and across the country children’s test scores show that they are much more practiced with the former than the latter. Youngsters have two hurdles to overcome when reading a book: content and structure. The structural familiarity with story helps children handle unfamiliar content found in biographies that deal with lives, times, and concepts different from their own.
Some time ago I was listening to my granddaughter, Libby, then a second-grader, read Marvelous Mattie by Emily Arnold McCully. This picture-book biography covers Margaret E. Knight’s attempts in 1871 to obtain a patent on a device that folds paper bags used in grocery stores, but Charles F. Annan, who had stolen Mattie’s idea, challenged her for the rights to her invention. To my knowledge, Libby had never read a biography before, and two major obstacles stood in her way of understanding this one: the unfamiliar past and the notion of intellectual property. As I looked at Libby’s school notebook, adorned with the words “Girlz Rule” in bright pink letters, it was clear that the biography’s setting — the age of industrialization, which didn’t honor the work and ideas of women — did not fit into her view of the world. But here’s where structure saved her. Mattie’s story, which follows a poor but clever heroine as she uses her wit and determination to triumph over a greedy and powerful foe, was as familiar as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Puss in Boots,” or “Cinderella.” Libby’s awareness of long ago and far away, again so familiar in fairy tales, helped her with the nineteenth-century time period. Then only one unknown, the concept of a patent, remained. And with just one strange concept to deal with, she got it.
This familiar story structure allowed Libby not only to understand new content but also to use that knowledge to negotiate the additional information offered in a concluding author’s note. She is now ready for the road to other kinds of reading, perhaps historical fiction, perhaps other works on industrial America, perhaps nonfiction. Whether or not she continues down any of these literary paths is her choice, but she’s developing the rudimentary skills that will allow her to do so if she wishes.
Books such as Marvelous Mattie may contain a story structure closely resembling historical fiction, but they also offer new kinds of reading experiences. In Mattie’s case, the one incident covered in her biography sets the stage for other accomplishments briefly outlined in the author’s note, encouraging readers to dig deeper into either the subject or the times. This kind of inquiry is different from the musings readers may have about the characters they meet in fiction. Readers of fiction resolve their questions largely through their imaginations. Questions about someone’s life, on the other hand, require less fanciful answers. These questions direct readers back to the life itself, to the individual’s actual successes and failures, and to various historical records. Rather than going from an imaginary character to further imagined outcomes, readers can move from a real life, through research questions, to new knowledge. In other words, they may begin to become critical thinkers.
By Someone Else
The second statement that children make about biography, that “it is written by someone else,” separates biography from autobiography. But the power of biography extends far beyond this simple format distinction. The best biographies, those that have the most potential for demanding critical thinking, not only are written by someone else but also let children know what someone else thinks about the subject. For many children, biographies may well be their first introduction to point of view.
Take Leonardo da Vinci. Middle-schoolers will most probably associate Leonardo with art — the Mona Lisa; “The Last Supper” (they’ve seen, heard of, or read The Da Vinci Code); or the iconic Vitruvian Man. In her biography of Leonardo, however, Kathleen Krull emphasizes his contributions to science. She focuses on Leonardo as a pioneer who observed, recorded, and hypothesized about the natural world, a pattern that leads directly to the inductive reasoning in the scientific method (described thoroughly in another Krull biography, Isaac Newton). Similarly, James Cross Giblin, in Good Brother, Bad Brother, raises the biographical curtain on his subject John Wilkes Booth not as an assassin but as an actor. This is not another book about Lincoln or the political turmoil of the times; instead, Giblin emphasizes brothers John Wilkes Booth and Edwin Booth’s theatrical talents and positions their careers and the mid-nineteenth-century arts at the center of his own literary stage. In both cases, Krull and Giblin give a unique slant on their subjects — a slant that may be initially unfamiliar to young readers, but one that shows them that authors deliberately choose a particular point of view and defend that point in their writing. Becoming aware of a writer’s stance is another important step children take in becoming critical readers. Books open up this possibility, one not typically available on websites or in encyclopedia articles.
Sometimes biographies can challenge what children think they know in ways that other works can’t. While my granddaughter was reading Marvelous Mattie, my grandson, Jackson, was hot on the trail of information about Galileo. He had just seen the movie Night at the Museum, in which Galileo comes to life every night holding a telescope. Jackson decided his biography report would be about the man who “invented the telescope.” He checked the Internet but told me, “I don’t know why they didn’t say anything about Galileo inventing the telescope.” The idea that Galileo had not invented the t
elescope wasn’t in Jackson’s universe of thinking, and he figured he was just looking at the wrong sources. I suggested that he read Starry Messenger by Peter Sís, since his assignment was, in part, to read a biography, and perhaps he would find the answer there. He did, and he did. Halfway through his reading, Jackson brought the book to me and with his finger traced the path the development of the telescope had taken through Europe, realizing that Galileo had not invented the telescope but rather improved it. Yes, a book on the history of the telescope would have produced a similar understanding but might not have allowed Jackson to recognize Galileo’s place in history, which was what he wanted to know. His next question was: “So what did this guy do, anyway?”
This process of taking information about a person and evaluating its veracity is a skill that individuals use throughout their lives, beginning with playground gossip, moving through high school’s cliques, and culminating in assessing political figures, operating in the workplace, raising families, and sustaining partnerships and friendships. Reading biographies will certainly not ensure success in all these areas, but it does provide opportunities for youngsters to discover multiple points of view about some individuals and evaluate single points of view about others.
Interestingly enough, these critical-thinking skills are often negated by our desire to use biographies to provide kids with positive role models. Yes, it would be wonderful for our children to grow up and be as courageous as Dr. Martin Luther King, as dedicated as Rachel Carson, or as astute as Thomas Jefferson. But none of these heroes or heroines developed those qualities by reading books populated solely by role models!