A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  More than a Hundred Pages

  The last statement children make about biographies, the reference to the hundred-page rule, is so instituted and entrenched in educational settings that one editor suggested, perhaps in jest, that his publisher create a series of biographies of exactly one hundred pages. But this restriction is no laughing matter.

  Notice that books such as Marvelous Mattie (at thirty-two pages) and Young Pelé (forty pages) cover only portions of their subjects’ lives instead of an entire cradle-to-grave story. Biographers typically look for a telling incident that not only holds potential appeal for children but also illuminates the subject. And they do so in few pages, recognizing that unfamiliar contents are best understood in small doses, sometimes in books of thirty-two or sixty-four pages. Often, to ease the reading burden, original illustrations or archival photographs supplement the written word. Illustrations in biography reveal physical characteristics of different subjects, unfamiliar settings, and points that either need emphasis or can best be shown through photographs or original art. A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words, but sometimes illustrations help children read those thousand words. In any case, to expurgate biographies under a hundred pages from a child’s reading life would eliminate some of the finest biographies of this century.

  Russell Freedman’s The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights clocks in, without back matter, at ninety-two pages, and so fails to meet the arbitrary page count. Every word, image, and page turn is carefully chosen as Freedman traces Anderson’s life and career, along with explanations of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. He orchestrates the tension between society’s praise of Anderson the singer and disdain for Anderson’s race until the book’s climax, a crescendo that places Marian on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Readers turn the page, and there is Anderson, her strength, determination, and power captured perfectly in a full-page photograph that takes your breath away. The addition of eight more pages might have made the book work for a book report but would have diminished Freedman’s mastery of his craft.

  At forty pages, Peter Sís’s The Tree of Life: A Book Depicting the Life of Charles Darwin, Naturalist, Geologist & Thinker wouldn’t even be a contender for assigned-biography reading. Yet what Sís has done with this book is remarkable. He asks readers to become Darwin, to observe, think, and learn. The man, with all his demons, his methodical approach to science, and his detractors, fills every page within a book that constantly changes the narrative pattern and demands close attention to both text and illustrations.

  The final endpapers consist of twenty-three squares of great thinkers and great ideas. The twenty-fourth one portrays an outline of a child, presumably the reader with his or her ideas yet to be formed. These ideas won’t come through a single biography, or a single book, or a single idea, but rather through a lifetime of reading and thinking. Biography is part of that life. Someone else writes it. And it’s not necessarily a hundred pages.

  ROGER SUTTON: When you’re writing about someone — Eleanor Roosevelt, for example — how do you balance the facts of what she did and why she did it, either according to her own point of view or a recorded point of view, and your own speculation?

  RUSSELL FREEDMAN: Well, I try not to speculate. I try to find clues in the documented record — from the subject’s own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you’re writing a biography, you’re trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect. I mean, can you really understand anyone? Can you understand yourself? It’s difficult to nail down motivations exactly, so you try to go by the record — what Eleanor Roosevelt says about why she did what she did, what other people say, what the actual behavior was. I try to avoid personal speculation because I think it can contaminate the historical record. Scholars who are doing original research in their chosen field may be uncovering all sorts of new information and may come up with some astounding new take on what happened and why it happened — that’s a good time to speculate. I do original research, too — I interviewed some of Eleanor Roosevelt’s grandchildren, for example, and read many of her letters and newspaper columns. That’s essential. But digging up new information and speculating on it isn’t your primary purpose when you’re writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you find compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.

  RS: Is history what happened or the record of what happened?

  RF: Let’s say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They’ve already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it’s impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values. You simply can’t avoid that. The historian strives for objectivity, does the best he or she can, but the result inevitably reflects the life experience and the values of the person writing the book. Abraham Lincoln lived twenty-four hours a day for fifty-six years. How much of that time has come down to us in the record? A tiny percentage. Now, of all of the material we have about Lincoln, what percentage of that can a biographer actually include in a book, and most especially in a book for kids? So not only do you have a partial record, a very incomplete record of a life, but by the time you finish deciding what to include and what to leave out, it’s even more incomplete. In fact, that’s where I would say that speculation takes place, in the process of selectivity. Deciding what to include and what to leave out is like picking stocks. You’re trying to guess what will pay the best dividend in terms of helping evoke a world and create a character. And every biographer makes different choices. Every book I’ve ever read about Eleanor Roosevelt is about a somewhat different person. And that’s even more true about Lincoln.

  RS: A recent picture-book biography of Lincoln states that the Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves free, when, of course, it freed only the slaves under Southern control. How do you decide when simplification becomes distortion?

  RF: Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That’s obvious. A picture-book biography can’t deal with the same complexities and nuances as a 150-page biography for older kids. You can’t use the picture-book format if you want to go into all those complications, and yet, you still want to capture a sense of a life being lived. In some respects, I suppose, a picture-book biography is actually harder to write.

  With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I’m not going to read this; it’s too intimidating. Or even worse — if I thought that I was writing books just so that kids could write classroom reports, I’d quit. I’m not interested in doing that. I want to write books that a ten-year-old or a teenager or maybe their grandmother will pick up and sit up all night reading, and then can’t wait until they go on to a longer book about the same subject.

  RS: If we look at fiction for children, at least 90 percent is about children, at least as the central character. In a biography, how do you avoid giving undue emphasis to what might be child-appealing aspects at the expense of adult achievements?

  RF: In the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, it was easy. He
r childhood is fascinating, because it was so horrible. It gave her so much to overcome. With material like that, you can hook the reader right away, and by the time Eleanor is out on her own, the reader doesn’t want to stop. I mean, why do kids read biographies? Why does anyone read them? I think it’s because we’re all trying to learn how to live our lives. We want to see how other people have lived and how they have overcome tough problems. A kid reading a novel might want a protagonist his own age or a little older, but a youngster reading a biography has a different motivation, I think. That reader wants to see how the subject of the biography got along in life. If you can establish the conflicts, the problems, the hurdles, at the beginning — in the case of Eleanor it’s easy; and with Lincoln, too, the log cabin, the dirt floor, reading by the fireplace — then I think you can carry the reader through.

  The letters I get from kids are almost never about the childhood of the subject. They’re about something that Eleanor or Lincoln or Crazy Horse did as an adult. That’s what they want to know. Plenty of kids are fascinated by biographies, thank heavens. I get letters from two kinds of readers. History buffs, who love to read history and biography for fun, and then kids who want to be writers but who rarely come out and say so in their letters. You can tell by the questions they ask — How did you get your first book published? How long do you spend on a book? — that sort of thing. So I guess those are the readers that I’m writing for — kids who enjoy that kind of book, because they’re interested in history, in other people’s lives, in what has happened in the world and in what’s going to happen. I believe that they’re the ones who are going to be the movers and shakers.

  RS: How would you articulate the difference between writing history and biography for an adult audience versus that for a child audience?

  RF: A biography for kids has to be lean and approachable. You don’t have eight hundred pages to work with. Blanche Wiesen Cook’s two volumes (so far) on Eleanor Roosevelt amount to some twelve hundred pages, and they only go as far as 1936, I believe, when Eleanor hadn’t fully hit her stride yet. Those books serve an important purpose. They involve original research, they strive to be definitive, and they will become sources for all future historians and biographers. But a biography for young readers, if it’s successful, is a feat of imaginative storytelling that is informed by the historical record. As I said before, it has to be a distillation. You’re writing for a reader who hopefully will be motivated to go on to a longer and more comprehensive work. A children’s biography doesn’t have to be comprehensive, and it doesn’t have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that’s possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading.

  MORE GREAT BIOGRAPHIES

  Candace Fleming, The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary

  181 pp. Grades 4–6. Chock-full of reproductions of primary sources, both textual and visual, and an abundance of interesting anecdotes, this readable, accessible dual biography is equally inviting for reference, browsing, or pleasure reading.

  Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Through the Gates and Beyond

  50 pp. Grades 5–8. In Central Park during the winter of 2005, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude unveiled an art installation, The Gates, more than twenty-five years in the making. The book encourages children to expand their visions of what art is and to better understand the devotion and labor that allow an artistic dream to materialize into a work of art.

  Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith

  278 pp. Grades 6–10. With great empathy, puckish humor, and a lively narrative, Heiligman examines the life and legacy of Charles Darwin through the unique lens of his domestic life.

  Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

  125 pp. Grades 5–8. Nine months before Rosa Parks, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Hoose fashions a compelling narrative that balances the momentous events of the civil rights movement with the personal crises of a courageous young woman.

  Barbara Kerley, illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham, What to Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!

  48 pp. Grades K–3. Spunky and headstrong, Alice Roosevelt Longworth “was hungry to go places . . . do things.” With a palette emphasizing Alice Blue, her signature color, the illustrations match Alice’s energy with zigzag streaks, slanting figures, and circular spot art.

  Kathleen Krull, illustrations by Boris Kulikov, Albert Einstein (Giants of Science)

  143 pp. Grades 4–6. In this engrossing and accessible biography, Krull lingers just long enough over Einstein’s childhood to give readers time to connect with him; she also does an admirable job of explaining his theories. Occasional pen-and-ink illustrations capture Einstein’s curiosity and imagination — and his unforgettable finger-in-a-light-socket hairstyle.

  Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, illustrations by R. Gregory Christie, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal

  40 pp. Grades 2–5. Bass Reeves, born a slave, captured more than three thousand outlaws as a deputy U.S. marshal. This captivating biography, told in colorful language, grabs readers with an 1854 gunfight, then flashes back to Reeve’s early life. Sharply textured paintings offer detailed portraits of Reeves, his black hat conveying unmistakable authority.

  Elizabeth Partridge, John Lennon: All I Want Is the Truth

  220 pp. Grade 9 and up. In her biography of the musical genius Lennon, Partridge contextualizes the Beatles’ story with enough background information, both politically and musically, to illuminate the chaotic world behind the top-ten charts. Black-and-white photos on nearly every page project a visual commentary that adds substantively to an accessible text.

  Steve Sheinkin, The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, & Treachery

  344 pp. Grades 6–10. An ultrareadable, accessible biography of the infamous Revolutionary War traitor places Arnold’s story in its political, social, and military context while maintaining the pace of a great adventure. Gruesome descriptions of winter marches through the northern woods balance a nuanced depiction of Arnold’s character as bold, arrogant, and overweeningly ambitious.

  Should a science book be judged primarily on the basis of accuracy? According to most sources, children’s science books ought to be error-free in text and illustration, and representative of the prevailing theories and ideas of the discipline covered.

  This is not a stunning revelation. Science books are about science; science is full of facts about the natural world; and children shouldn’t be misled by inaccuracies, right? To some extent I would agree; however, the complexity of the (human-defined) realm of scientific practice isn’t easily captured in a fact-centered text. Distilling science to isolated facts leaves out other, equally important qualities of science. Some of these crucial characteristics can be conveyed through books that include portrayals of actual scientists and their practices, discussion of the originality of certain scientific questions, and examples of the relevance of science to children’s lives.

  This is not to say that I dismiss concerns for accuracy — quite the contrary. Books that play fast and loose with factual information, or are written in a manner that oversimplifies ideas to the point of inaccuracy, do not serve readers well. I am especially sensitive to language and images that play into misconceptions commonly held by children. For example, a diagram with colored layers representing different rocks or layers of earth may look pretty straightforward, but in the minds of children, the layers tend to become paint stripes or literal rock colors.

  What other qualities do I look for? One of the most valuable contributions a book can make is introducing children to the community and practices of science. A focus on facts alone might reward inherent interest in the subject, but it can be only a part
ial view of how science actually functions. Science is a dynamic social activity, where a “fact” is more a product of popular consensus than a truth to be uncovered. How those facts become stable is an important component of understanding the context in which knowledge is produced and of understanding the people who are dedicated to investigating scientific questions. Books that include portraits of scientists along with content information help to demystify the work of science — the excellent Scientists in the Field series comes immediately to mind. These books show how scientists actually work, which results not just in more accurate portrayals of science but also in more human images of scientists. In Donna M. Jackson’s Extreme Scientists, for instance, microbiologist Hazel Barton explores caves in a tank top and sports a tattoo — she looks like a real person, not the stereotypical image of a pocket-protected, nerdy scientist.

  These types of books give readers a realistic view of the work of science. They’re an important counter to “hands-on” experiment books that often misrepresent science in order to make it doable by children. Experiment books often go for cool or gross or exciting results, which draw focus away from the science and onto the activities themselves — not bad, but not science. At other times, the “experiment” is matched so unimaginatively to a scientific principle that students are reduced to conducting time-consuming multi-step experiments that give no-brainer results. The gravest sin, though, is the inclusion of an answer or explanation with each experiment. Why on earth go through an elaborate activity when you already know the outcome? Thankfully, books like Enslow’s Science Projects series include some thoughtful, open-ended activities that are actually worth the effort students will put into them. I am also intrigued by Simon & Schuster’s Let’s Try It Out series. These books, written by Seymour Simon and Nicole Fauteux, use experiments as starting points for discussion about science concepts, not as the Answer to All Our Questions.