Four great booktalks to uncover the past

On Memorial Day weekend last year, I suddenly became intrigued and then obsessed by genealogy. As I followed the twisting roots and branches of my family tree, I was delighted by the surprises I got by peeking into the past. It’s the same delight we all get by digging into history.

Four books—all hugely appealing, all bristling with insight into how our forebears lived—make great booktalks for middle-grade audiences.

First off, Mark Kurlansky’s The Story of Salt (Putnam, 2006) shocks by stating that human beings and other mammals actually eat… rocks. And if we don’t eat them, Kurlansky writes, we’ll die. “Rocks,” of course, means salt, a substance that wars have been fought over!

Without salt, humans can’t survive. Without salt, humans might never have had pets: historians believe that early farmers offered salt to wild animals, thus beginning the long, careful process of taming them.

Salt also preserves food, and once people began preserving food, they could travel farther from home; serious exploration became possible. Another cool fact is that Roman soldiers were often paid in salt. The Latin word for salt, sal, became our word “salary.” Hence the expression “worth your salt.”

Reading Richard Platt’s Doctors Did What? The Weird History of Medicine (Two-Can, 2006) is actually scary. You may not like going to the doctor, but wait ’til you hear what doctor visits were like in the past: “Less than 150 years ago, doctors knew how to cure only a few of the diseases that can kill us or make our lives miserable and painful.” Further back than that, “Medicine was little more than prayer, luck, magic, and superstition.”

Patients weren’t the only ones short on luck. In ancient Mesopotamia, if a surgeon botched the job, he could have his hand cut off! Ancient Indian surgeons confronted with open wounds, meanwhile, enlisted the help of soldier ants. The ants grabbed the wound’s edges, pulling them together. Then the surgeons snapped each ant in two. The insects’ formidable pincers, left behind, worked like modern-day stitches.

What kind of a bed do you sleep in? And what do you wear there? In her delightful survey of sleeping arrangements, What You Never Knew about Beds, Bedrooms, & Pajamas (S & S, 2006), Patricia Lauber describes the earliest known beds, belonging to the Egyptians 7,000 years ago. The head of the bed, Lauber writes, was higher than the foot, and pillows were made of wood. Uncomfortable!

In the early Middle Ages, manor houses had a big room called a hall, where “each person was given a sack and straw to make a bed—that is where our term 'make a bed’ comes from,” Lauber writes.

Straw beds, however, presented another problem: bugs. Until the coil-spring mattress came along 150 years ago, mattresses were made of straw and other materials that bugs found inviting. And pajamas? A fairly recent invention. People used to sleep in the clothes or underwear that they’d worn all day!

This year’s astounding Newbery Medal winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (Candlewick, 2007), by Laura Amy Schlitz, provides more historic surprises. Schlitz offers an eye-opening look at life in a medieval village, using plays or dialogues about kids living in a village and farmlands surrounding a small castle in England, circa 1255. You’ll hear about a kid overjoyed to get dog food to eat and about a girl whose job it is to trap eels. The stories create vivid impressions of life long before your booktalk audience was born. This way, we’re let in on hundreds of little secrets. And who doesn’t like to learn a secret?