School Library Journal» Kathleen Baxter

Getting High: These incredible stories will catapult kids to surprising new heights | Nonfiction Booktalker

Kathleen Baxter — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:04 +0000

I’m not interested in extinct birds. Or Mars rovers. I’m marginally intrigued by Mohawk ironworkers. But give me a really good book on those topics, and I’m hooked.

Phillip Hoose can get me engrossed in anything, even Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95 (Farrar, 2012). B95, a four-ounce red knot shorebird, was captured and tagged in 1995, and that tag became his name. Athletes would be awed by his stamina; every year B95 flies from the tip of Argentina to the Canadian Arctic and back—9,000 miles of hurricanes, near-starvation, and predators. He has logged enough miles to reach the Moon (and more than half way back!). Hence the nickname “Moonbird.”

Hoose has filled his book with flocks of excellent photos. But the author also notes that it’s getting harder for these fliers to survive. Humans encroach on the shores where the birds find food and shelter. Plus, the climate is changing, affecting where the birds locate appropriate nesting grounds. Since B95 was tagged, more than 80 percent of these birds have disappeared. So here’s a question to ask your booktalk group: Has B95 disappeared, too? Google it for a real high!

I was stopped cold when I read David Weitzman’s Skywalkers: Mohawk Ironworkers Build the City (Roaring Brook, 2011). I had an aha! moment when I learned about the connection between steam locomotives and ironworkers. Of course, trains are built of iron, but they also need tracks. And bridges.

In 1886, construction began on the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River, between Montreal and the United States. This same area was home to the survivors of the Mohawks. Two hundred years earlier, much of the Mohawk population had been wiped out by smallpox. The proud nation that had once covered most of New England was now confined along the U.S.-Canada border.

The Mohawks were in the right place at the right time. Their land, and the stone on it, was needed to build the bridge. And when the Indians impressed everyone with their fearlessness walking in high places, they were hired as workers, which ultimately brought them to New York City as laborers on the early skyscrapers. They made a good living doing something that terrified others. I still get a shiver looking at those photographs, and so will your audience.

You can’t get much higher than outer space. Elizabeth Rusch’s The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity (Houghton, 2012) starts firmly planted on Earth with 13-year-old Steve Squyres watching the 1969 Moon landing. There are photos of him as a kid with his first telescope, building a robot, and standing on top of a mountain. Squyres had no idea that these hobbies would become his life’s work. But instead of looking down at rocks—he wanted to be a geologist—he’d be looking up at rocks, 40 million miles away!

In 1976, Squyres was gripped by the photos beamed from the Mars Viking landers. He wanted to pick up the rocks he saw, turn them over, feel their weight. Unfortunately, neither of the landers could move after touching down.

So Squyres proposed that NASA fund a Mars “rover,” a machine that would take photos as it moved, picking things up and examining them thoroughly as it sent data back to Earth. When NASA finally agreed, they decided on two rovers. Their task: build a device that could survive a blast-off, fly through space for months, land safely, and then fully function.

Amazingly, they did just that. Planned to work for only three months, one of them is still going—it’s been on Mars for almost nine years.

Fifth graders are fascinated by these incredible stories. They’re even more amazed with my admission that I believed they wouldn’t be interested. We can’t all know everything, but we shouldn’t let our ignorance stop us from making connections and discoveries. And like the red knot shorebird, we can all soar, year after year after year.

Kathleen Baxter is the former head of children’s services at the Anoka County Library in suburban Minneapolis, a BER presenter, and a popular speaker at school and library conferences.

The Secret Lives of Presidents: A behind-the-scenes look at the residents of the White House

Kathleen Baxter — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 05:01:01 +0000

Every U.S. president had a mother. Most of them had children and pets. Combine these obvious, but often-unconsidered facts with a touch of humor and they spell can’t-miss booktalks.

Start with Beverly Gherman’s First Mothers (Clarion, 2012), a catalog of powerful women who had powerful influence. Abigail Smith Adams, the wife of John and the mother of John Quincy, urged her husband in a letter to “Remember the Ladies… Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.” She was always willing to tell both of them what to do. Even after her son Lyndon became president, Rebekah Baines Johnson edited his speeches and reminded him to stand up straight. George H. W. Bush’s mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, was a great athlete. She disliked braggers, and she always told her children to remember how lucky they were.

Other First Mothers had traits they passed on to their famous sons. Ida Stover Eisenhower had brilliant organizing talents, which her son Dwight, the future general and commander-in-chief, inherited. Susanna Boylston Adams had a terrible temper—a flaw her son John shared. Abe Lincoln had two strong mothers: Nancy, his biological mother, who loved to wrestle and insisted he go to school, and Sarah Bush Johnston, his stepmother, who had a house full of books and a great sense of humor. The opinionated Sara Delano Roosevelt scolded her son, Franklin, for not letting her meet Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, who was fighting the Nazis. She wanted to tell Churchill how to run the war. Like mother, like son.

Joe Rhatigan’s White House Kids: The Perks, Pleasures, Problems, and Pratfalls of the President’s Children(2012) points out the pros and cons of being an offspring in the most famous house in America. The downsides include a lack of privacy, extremely busy parents, and the possibility of doing something embarrassing that could end up in the media. The upsides? You get to travel in Air Force One with your dad. Your new home has a movie theater, a basketball court, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and a tennis court.

Some First Kids had personalities as remarkable as their fathers’. Abraham Lincoln’s boy Tad set up a table and sold refreshments to visitors by the White House entrance. Gerald Ford’s daughter, Susan, held her high school prom in the East Room. Ulysses Grant asked his son Jesse why he often showed up late for breakfast. “When I was your age, I had to get up, feed four or five horses, cut wood for the family, take breakfast, and be off to school by eight o’clock,” the president said. Jesse smiled at his father and replied, “Oh, yes, but you did not have such a papa as I have.” And then there was Alice, Teddy Roosevelt’s beautiful daughter. She attended formal dinners with her pet snake, Emily Spinach, wrapped around her arm.

Emily Spinach wasn’t the only unusual pet that lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, according to Julie Moberg’s Presidential Pets: The Weird, Wacky, Little, Big, Scary, Strange Animals That Have Lived in the White House (2012, both Charlesbridge/Imagine!). Lewis and Clark sent two grizzly bear cubs to Thomas Jefferson, who sometimes walked them on leashes on the lawn. John Quincy Adams kept an alligator in the East Room bathtub for two months.

Andrew Jackson owned a parrot that swore at his guests. The people of Bangkok gave Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes the first Siamese cat in America. William Taft kept a cow because he liked to drink lots of fresh milk, and Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon. Imagine the conversations this title will spark among your booktalk audience.

People have always been fascinated by how the heavily guarded White House residents really lived. Here’s a chance to do some snooping. And in a busy election year, these three books, perfect for fourth through eighth graders, will add a welcome human touch to your discussions.

American Heroes: Four Books Highlight the Fight Against Racism | Nonfiction Booktalker

Kathleen Baxter — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 05:05:39 +0000

It doesn’t matter to students whether superheroes are real or fictional. It’s all the same battle as long as they fight injustice. These four books bring the struggle against prejudice and inequality blazingly alive.

Rick Bowers’s Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate (National Geographic, 2012) offers a fresh angle in the fight for freedom. After World War II, the Last Son of Krypton quickly took on some new bad guys. Appalled at Hitler’s hatred of “non-Aryans,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Jewish teens who created the Man of Steel, made their next villain the Hate Mongers Organization, based on the Ku Klux Klan. The bullies who terrorized blacks—and anyone who wasn’t white and Protestant—wore terrifying disguises, just as villains did in superhero comics. Bowers shows the power of a popular cartoon character in changing the attitudes of readers, especially young children.

But a fictitious hero needs back-up from real ones. By the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was catching fire. Cynthia Levinson interviewed several people featured in We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March (Peachtree, 2012), starting with Audrey Faye Hendricks, who was nine when she told her parents that she wanted to go to jail. Their reaction? Pride and support. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted to fill up the city’s prisons to protest desegregation, and kids could do it as easily as grown-ups. Fifty years ago, all Audrey and her friends had to do was walk together or hold a protest sign to end up behind bars.

African Americans in Birmingham, AL, were sick of the shameful way they’d been treated for generations. Larry Dane Brimner’s Black & White: The Confrontation between Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Eugene “Bull” Connor (Boyds Mill Press, 2011) describes the local minister and civil rights leader who faced a ruthless opponent. Connor, a racist police chief, used attack dogs, beatings, and blasting water hoses against blacks who demanded their Constitutional rights. Reverend Shuttlesworth was imprisoned multiple times. His home was bombed. Miraculously, he and his family escaped unharmed, but he was accused of setting the dynamite himself to get attention. Connor also accused him of being a Communist and told the New York Times “Damn the law—down here we make our own law.” Eventually, Connor’s tactics backfired. Photos of young people being attacked and waterhosed drew national attention. Kids in the overcrowded prisons got noticed, too.

The tipping point came after four young girls were killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964, but change didn’t happen overnight. In Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights, and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Final Hours (National Geographic, 2012), Ann Bausum describes an unforgettable time in Memphis, TN, when African American garbage collectors were treated shamefully. Unlike white workers, blacks worked six-day weeks with one 15-minute break a day, and had no access to restrooms. In 1968, two black workers were crushed to death by a garbage truck grinder. Sanitation workers went on strike, and garbage piled up in the streets. Protest marchers carried the iconic signs “I AM A MAN.” Community tension grew, and Civil Rights leaders arrived to help.

Dr. King gave one of his most powerful and famous talks, the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Tell young listeners how Dr. King was assassinated the next day outside his motel room. Bausum’s excellent photos, with their depictions of modern Americans caught up in the conflict made me realize how recently these events happened. And, of course, the struggle continues. Not all superheroes fly or have x-ray vision. Some of them simply stand up for what’s right. Your fourth- to eighth-grade listeners will be inspired by these young fighters.