CHILDREN'S BOOKS.

Curiosity, humor & courtesy

I know a successful MIT graduate who regularly trawls the children's section of his local public library for books about language, nature, geography, and history. For himself. So many delights for the eye and mind, so much understanding offered in so appealing a form. There may be well-placed anxiety about trends in juvenile nonfiction, but the feast remains astonishing.

As baby boomers, my siblings and I were lucky to grow up with masterpieces of visual information: Holling Clancy Holling's 1941 Paddle-to-the-Sea (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95); H. A. Rey's 1954 Find the Constellations (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95, 72 pp.); Miroslav Sasek's 1959 This Is Paris (sixteen This Is titles, Macmillan, out of print); Virginia Lee Burton's evolutionary 1962 Life Story (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95, 67 pp.); and Richard Scarry's 1968 What Do People Do All Day? (Random House, $14).

These were great books then, and they are great books today. They teach me what to look for in selecting new informational books: engaging writing; miniature-friendly graphics; narrative design that allows children to progress in understanding; illustrations which secure the connections between the big picture and local phenomena. In a nutshell: broad, deep, and original presentation. Too many new informational books (produced by a more consolidated trade industry less committed to nonfiction and hybrid works) are hastily conceived, emphasize eye-grabbing pictures over organization, and project an "attitude" about learning onto children. So, caution!

For the past year, I have been gathering such instructive works of fiction and nonfiction, and have been sorting them into two piles. The books in my first stack are sometimes called "informational" literature. These deal with natural and social phenomena, historical events, and mental constructs concerning space and quantity. In the second pile are books which attempt to model virtuous behavior, mainly through imaginative stories. (William Bennett's Children's Book of Heroes is perhaps the best-known recent example.) These piles collapse upon one another physically and conceptually, our moral imaginations being inextricable from the world, and our moral lives sharpened by attention to it.

My favorite contemporary information artist is David Macaulay. Famous for his books on architecture (Cathedral, Mill, Unbuilding, etc.), Macaulay has just updated his award-winning work on the principles and workings of machines with a new sixty-three-page section on inventions of the digital age. In The New Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin, $35, 400 pp.), Macaulay, assisted by Neil Ardley, presents the principle of binary digits (or bits) and the machines that use them-personal computers, robots, cash machines, supermarket scanners, and so forth. He does so with amazing clarity and idiosyncratic humor. What makes both the new and the original The Way Things Work so great is not only Macaulay's consistent movement from principles to applications and imaginative presentation of difficult concepts, but his daring mix of physical scales and his effortless use of an incongruous woolly mammoth to explicate everything from screws to holography.

Another fabulous artist of information is Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno, who has made many excellent picture books on mathematics. In 1997, PaperStar republished his Anno's Math Games I, II, III (each volume $12.95, 103 pp.), which present mathematical concepts, such as classification, measurement, and proportion, in the form of appealing visual games. Both Anno and Macaulay make more "whimsical" picture books which solicit and repay a child's careful attention to detail. My favorites are the wordless 1977 Anno's Journey (PaperStar, $5.95) and Macaulay's 1995 coincidence-packed Shortcut (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95).

new science novel, Tibaldo and the Hole in the Calendar, by theoretical physicist and philosopher Abner Shimony (illustrated by Jonathan Shimony, Copernicus, $21, 165 pp.), is highly recommended for older readers (ten and up). Within a narrative about an intelligent and resourceful young boy who will lose his twelfth birthday as a result of the 1582 Gregorian calendar reform, Shimony comprehensibly presents the astronomical calculations behind that reform. The novel is a wonderfully full portrait of the cultural and scientific milieu of sixteenth-century Italy. We learn about social class, medical practices, educational institutions, political events, women's roles, the uneasy relationship of astrology to astronomy, and the social, intellectual, and political role of the church. Given that the study of science in schools is so often conducted in isolation from its history, I think that children would be thrilled to read about such a dramatic period and instance of science in action.

Recent history books of note are Diane Stanley's picture book Joan of Arc (Morrow Junior Books, $16), Wilborn Hampton's Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter's Story (Candlewick, $17.99, 96 pp.), and Joy Hakim's ten-volume A History of US (Oxford, paper, $10.95 each). Stanley, a historian rather than a hagiographer, tells the story of Joan in fascinating detail. Her illuminated-manuscript-style illustrations are beautiful, and the map of France in 1429, guide to French pronunciation, and bibliographies for readers of varying ages, are very helpful.

Like Joan of Arc, the absolutely riveting Kennedy Assassinated! should provoke conversation between parents and children about vocation, grace under pressure, and the workings of powerful institutions. Hampton, now an editor with the New York Times, was a cub reporter in the Dallas UPI office when the call came that three shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. In terse journalistic prose, Hampton tells a new generation what happened that day, and the part he played in getting the story. The rough and tumble antics of a fiercely competitive predigital news industry, especially juxtaposed to such a grave event, make for fascinating reading. The story is illustrated with black-and-white photographs suitable (with the exception of page 79, Oswald's face, the instant before he was shot by Ruby) for most children age eight and older.

I first learned about Joy Hakim's The History of US from an impassioned essay, "The Betrayal of History," by Alexander Stille in the June 11, 1998 New York Review of Books. Read it and use it to advocate for better textbooks for children. Why can't Johnny read? Because his books-written by committees hired by timid publishers trying to please and appease too many adult constituencies-are unreadable. Joy Hakim, a former teacher and journalist, was so frustrated by the quality of history textbooks that she wrote her own. Hakim calls herself a "storytelling historian," and boy! does she know how to tell a story. Her ten-volume work is superlatively written and radiant with the interest of history. It has been a huge hit with both children and professional historians, who have particularly praised Hakim's sense of proportion in selecting and organizing material. Oxford initially printed only 8,000 copies: over a million copies have already been sold. Let's hope their assent to Hakim's multivolume presentation (each well-designed volume fits comfortably on a child's lap) signals the demise of the doorstop textbook.

Other fine new informational books in brief: Physician and photographer David L. Parker's Stolen Dreams: Portraits of Working Children (Lerner, $19.95, 112 pp.) is a sobering and well-organized introduction to contemporary child labor. Gertrud Mueller Nelson's A Walk through Our Church (Paulist, $14.95, 57 pp.) introduces young children to Catholic liturgical objects. Beni's Family Treasury (Henry Holt, $18.95, 115 pp.) collects five of Jane Breskin Zalben's beautifully illustrated portraits of the Jewish holidays.

I divided my other stack of books, written to model virtuous behavior, into books designed to instruct overtly, and those whose instruction is covert. The overt book is hard to do well, and I do not recommend William Bennett's collections for children, because the quality of poems and stories he offers is so uneven. Bennett's desire to provide a set of heroes alternative to those offered by contemporary popular culture can only be applauded, but his selections in The Children's Book of Heroes (Simon and Schuster, $21, 110 pp.) seem informed more by ideological and political agenda (amelioration in race relations, moms at home, voluntarism instead of government programs) than by the rich variety and beauty of heroic tales that Western culture offers. I was stunned that the same Laura Richards who wrote the great nonsense poem "Eletelephony" was capable of a story as maudlin as "About Angels." Every Bennett hero is obedient, and, in instances where not entirely nice, Bennett cuts off the tale before things get nasty: so sail Theseus and Ariadne into the sunset.

Robert Ellsberg's All Saints (Crossroad, $19.95, 576 pp.), by contrast, is a marvelous book of heroes for both young people and adults because it shows the variety of ways one can live a life of "heroic sanctity." Written from a Catholic perspective, this is not a conventional Catholic compendium of saints: Ellsberg includes holy men and women from other faiths and even nonreligious moralists like Albert Camus. Among the 365 men and women whose life stories Ellsberg tells so well you will find activists and contemplatives, poets and politicians, saints of obedience and saints of rebellion. The sweet-tempered, the self-righteous, the calm, and the neurotic all have the capacity for holiness. That is a powerful message for young people, who will also learn a lot of history by reading these biographies.

heologian and ethicist Vigen Guroian's Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (Oxford, $22, 198 pp.) discusses moral themes in select children's stories for parents and teachers who wish to use such stories to nurture the moral life of children. His theological readings of (among others) Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Charlotte's Web, and The Princess and the Goblin are very fine and well-seasoned with the views of thinkers as varied as G.K. Chesterton, Martin Buber, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Robert Coles. While Guroian convincingly reasserts the moral depth of the Victorian imagination, his stress on present-day cultural decline is unfortunate. It allows him to dismiss too easily the ambiguities that distinguish these aesthetically and morally compelling stories, and the turmoil of emotions we experience while reading them. I found his concluding bibliographical essay a helpful guide to selecting additional stories.

Written from a pyschoanalytic perspective, Ellen Handler Spitz's Inside Picture Books (Yale, $25, 225 pp.) also argues that books play a central role in a child's moral development. Reading aloud is a momentous activity: In the company of a loving adult, a child enters an imaginary world and takes the measure of this one. Picture books help children deal with powerful feelings like fear, sorrow, anger. They encourage empathy and self-understanding. They give a child a sense of possibility and also limitation. I was grateful for the balance Spitz maintained between a firm trust in imaginative literature and awareness of the subtle gender roles that girls and boys are learning in some of their earliest picture books. Because of her faith in the imagination, her hesitations, and her excellent taste, Spitz's selection and analysis of books in four picture-book subjects-bedtime, loss, anger, self-acceptance-are strong and provide a good model for choosing among the contemporary offerings that she so disappointingly neglects.

I was particularly sorry that Spitz passed over Barbara Cooney, whose epic presentations of a whole human life-in the acclaimed 1985 Miss Rumphius and 1988 Island Boy (both Puffin, $5.99) among others-are so unusual and so suffused with moral interest. Cooney's quiet attention to life at all ages makes her akin to Tomie dePaola. His wonderful 1973 Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs, well-described by Spitz, has just come back into print (Putnam, $15.99). In a similarly quiet mode, English artist Shirley Hughes offers picture book stories about a fetching contemporary English boy named Alfie, whose family and neighbors are living lives of ordinary virtue. Her most recent is Alfie and the Birthday Surprise (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $16). Because Alfie is growing up with the series, start with her 1994 collection, All about Alfie (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $18).

When American nonsense poet Gelett Burgess created the weird loose-limbed "Goops" in 1900, he fathered the droll book of virtues. This particularly American genre wears its instruction lightly, and reports that being good is at least as much fun as making mischief and infinitely more stylish. The present master of this genre is William Steig, whose recently reprinted 1972 chapter book Dominic is for the ages (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $4.95, 146 pp.). Steig, still going strong at ninety, has always known that a child's moral life depends on a sense of humor, a large imagination, and a joy in language. You will never see as many underemployed words in a child's book again (unless it's in his own hilarious Farmer Palmer's Wagon Ride). Every Steig book is radiant with the values of endurance, forgiveness, humility, and joy. His most recent picture book, Pete's a Pizza (HarperCollins, $13.95), affirms once again that with a little imagination you can turn straw into gold, or Pete into a pizza: and voila! the young lad's bad mood is also transformed.

Another genius working in the comic tradition was the late great James Marshall, whose stories about an unforgettable pair of hippopotami have been collected in one volume: George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 340 pp.). Marshall had a deep appreciation of friendship, that capacity we all have to accommodate each other's foibles and idiosyncrasies. Hilarious and tender, impeccably timed and delightfully understated, Marshall's George and Martha stories are modern classics.

More recently, Kevin Henkes has reinvigorated the "situation" virtue book. Parents in flight from the Berenstain Bears will appreciate his personality-filled mice. While gently mocking the latest behavior-modification methods, such as the time-out chair, Henkes helps parents help their young children learn to recognize and accommodate other people's feelings. Chester's Way (1988, Greenwillow, $16), Julius: The Baby of the World (1990, Mulberry, $4.95), and Lilly and the Purple Plastic Purse (1996, Greenwillow, $15) are household favorites.

If you can get only one children's book this year, make it William McCleery's 1947 Wolf Story (book design and illustration by Warren Chappell, Linnet Press, $16.50, 82 pp.). This "underground classic" finds an inventive and exasperated father telling a wolf story to end all wolf stories (so he hopes) to his inventive and demanding young son. Dramatist McCleery perfectly captures the irritation, affection, tricks, admiration, and sheer surprise that pass back and forth between parent and child in everyday family life. It is in similar improvisational exchanges that we-adults and children-learn how to love.

Read Wolf Story both for itself and as an antidote to the current hyperbolic sense of crisis in morality and attendant calls for more explicit and formulaic moral instruction. In 1947, at the very moment when the evidence of man's capacity for evil was fresh and staggering, McCleery offered his own child a book with a very modest lesson: curiosity, humor, and courtesy keep the mind just and heart generous. n

Daria Donnelly writes regularly on children's books for Commonweal. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.