Studies abroad.

As international troubles mount, it becomes clear that our children will inherit a confusing, conflict-sundered world, one that needs them to be empathetic and engaged. But impediments to cultivating empathy abound--starting with the way we get our news. TV newscasters rush from crisis to crisis, this nation to that. The long work of rebuilding societies remains obscured by darker headlines. Denial and disengagement--consider the public silence about our ongoing war in Iraq--are now means of not feeling overwhelmed.

How can we recover our children's innate capacity for empathy? Literature is one way. It promotes both contact and imaginative identification and sympathy. And since as Americans we seem to be suffering from a deficit in both at the moment, I want to write about books that help overcome these deficits.

First: Look for books from other countries. Knowing the stories of other cultures can make one cannier and wiser, and as a result, more likely to be understanding and empathetic. European children, for example, often have a deep sense of history because of their daily physical contact with a land and material culture that are millennia old. By contrast, we have torn down most of our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban spaces in favor of the modern. So take advantage of the historical and cultural resources that the literature of other countries offers.

Second: Choose books in which Americans play no prominent role, or if they do, are neither saviors nor demons, but rather the usual mix of venial and kind. Globalization is full of promise for the emergence of empathy as a universal human value, but it has to be a two-way street. We have plenty of great values to share (freedom of speech and assembly, equal rights for women and minorities, universal public education for children), but seem astonished when countries say, wait, what about our values: our midday family meal, our small farms, our slower pace. America exports a mostly vulgar, violent pop culture everywhere there is a TV--and today, that is everywhere, including Bedouin tents in the desert. Is it any wonder that while many find much to admire here, they also despise us--for our smug sureness that our way is the way, and for the sexual license and violence they have been led to believe is ubiquitous here?

Third, and for me the most important: Look for books that are oases of calm and beauty, whatever their subject. Seek out stories that follow a character for years rather than days. The most radical change in American childhood is the amount of information available to today's children and the rapidity with which they are expected to absorb it. Where is the time to think and dream? Books take the longer view, and their pace is compatible with reflection.

There is a second aspect to the information overload. Given the blizzard of things that can be known, we must help children to identify and pursue their passion, whether it be skyscrapers or rodents. So if you want your child to develop empathy and the goodness that springs from it, maybe you need to get her three really great books on rats. Remember, great art is not just about cultivating the good. It is also one of the deepest sources of human pleasure. And now to my list.

Persepolis (Pantheon, $17.95, 168 pp., ages 13 and up) is Marjane Satrapi's stunning comic-book memoir of an Iranian childhood dramatically shaped by the Islamic revolution. Originally published in French (the thirty-five-year-old Satrapi, a graphic artist and children's book maker, now lives in Paris), Persepolis was widely praised when it first appeared in 2000; it has now been translated into five languages. Comparisons to Maus, Art Spiegelman's seminal comic-book mingling of personal and Holocaust narrative, are apt.

Satrapi's simple black-and-white drawings are pure and powerful. Her chosen point of view keeps the story accessible throughout: all events, even very scary ones, are presented through the eyes of a child--bright, spunky, and naive. Furthermore, Satrapi is uniquely poised to present the ironies and complexities of Iran's history: her great-grandfather was Iran's last emperor. His son, conscripted to be prime minister to the first shah, became an ardent Communist and spent years in prison. The family remains Communist (young Marjane is not so sure, especially as she feels the presence of God--but more on that below.)

Satrapi structures her memoir in episodic chapters. She begins with "The Veil," in which ten-year-old Marjane and her girlfriends are suddenly required to wear the veil, and are no longer educated with boys or allowed to speak French in their "decadent" bilingual school. In "The Dowry," the concluding chapter, Marjane's loving and resourceful parents, increasingly worried that their daughter will be harmed as a result of the Iran-Iraq war or raped by Islamic fundamentalists (fourteen-year-old Marjane is fearless and sassy), send her alone to Austria. In between are episodes both harrowing and delightful. You will fall in love with Marjane's grandmother, warm, old-fashioned, and politically astute, and with her amazing parents.

In the terrifying early episodes, the Shah's forces attack protesters, while the fundamentalists assault and murder rival Iranian revolutionaries. This is when God (an old man with a beard) appears, to rock, console, and simply chat with Marjane. But halfway through the book, after the Islamic revolutionaries assassinate her beloved uncle, she is finished with God. When he comes to console, she says "Get Out!"

Because the illustrations have an emotional directness, because the book is often funny, and because the story is told from a child's point of view, you may feel tempted to give this book to smaller children. Don't. I wouldn't give it to anyone under thirteen. There is much that is disturbing (rape and torture) in it. Still, adolescent rebellion in Iran looks a lot like the local variety, and so does family love. You cannot get through Persepolis without asking, What would I do if my world turned upside down? If ever there was a book to promote empathy and a sense of connection, this is it. As Satrapi herself has said: "If people are given a chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less.... That is why I wanted people in other countries to read Persepolis, to see that I grew up just like other children."

It's not just politics that can turn a family upside down. French comic-book maker David B. [Beauchard]'s memoir Epileptic 1 (L'Association, $24.95, 163 pp., ages 15 and up) shows how illness--in this case his older brother's epilepsy--defines and redefines his family's life. Epileptic is a work of genius: it is like a great novel with layer upon layer of storytelling. There are realistic visual descriptions of seizures and of a 1960s-1970s lower-middle-class childhood. There are also elaborately rendered dream states and a seamless integration of the family story with World Wars I and II as well as the Algerian War. Chilling depictions of an uncaring medical industry and of the fascinating, eccentric, and often corrupt alternative healing world round out the telling. It is interesting to see how many roads are taken to make sense of and to heal suffering in largely post-Catholic France (David attends Mass but finds it boring, though he enjoys the Bible stories his father tells during lunch). Given its density, this comic book requires a certain maturity of readers. Suitable for high-schoolers, it may best appeal to people in their twenties and thirties, for whom postmodern narrative is more familiar.

David B., says Marjane Satrapi, "draws like God." It's true. His black-and-white drawings (more prominence being given to black) are superlative. Ten years her senior, David B. is one of the founders of the cult editorial house L'Association, which first published Persepolis. It was his Epileptic ("L'Ascension du Haut-Mal") that inspired her work; the second half of his memoir, like hers, is already available in France and forthcoming here. I hope that their works undermine the prejudice against comic books that keeps some of our greatest artists (for example, Chicagoan Chris Ware) in obscurity. As Jesuit linguist Walter Ong reminded us, this is a visual (a second preliterate) age, in which people look to images and rely on talk, not text, to get information.

For text lovers (I'm one too!), run out now and get the reissue of Lorenz Graham's four "Town" novels (1958-1976), South Town, North Town, Whose Town?, Return to South Town (Boyd Mills Press, $16.95 each, ages 13 and up). Graham's series was the first set of American novels to depict the everyday life of an unexceptional African-American family. The books are terrific. More than any African-American novel I've read, these brought me inside a black life. Graham's hero is David Williams, a poor African-American teenager who lives in the rural South and wants to become a doctor. His parents work hard to make his dream reality. Every day they must make choices about how much they will give in to the racist caste system. In the two South Town novels, that oppressive regime is embodied by the neighboring Boyd family, which rules the small town. Segregation is no longer enforced by law but is a matter of long-standing social practice; unfair wages are a matter of course.

Graham, a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr., is particularly rich in his presentation of the choices facing the Williams family. While the racist status quo is soul killing and literally fatal, Graham reminds us that the struggle for human dignity and civil rights--however it's waged--will cost lives.

Between the dramatic, often violent, scenes that are both engines of plot and an accurate reflection of the times, there is ample everyday life: family meals, school, churchgoing, first love (a Catholic girl!), and after-school work. In the North Town novels, Graham beautifully renders the quotidian confusions and rebellions of adolescence, which often touch on the civil-rights struggle. David is attracted to a radical activist his new Northern friends take him to hear. His father is firmly opposed to such tactics. That his father steadfastly opposes violence despite having his life permanently altered by a racially motivated police beating in South Town carries weight with David. And yet. Is his father a hero or an Uncle Tom? In the North Town novels you see how David's adolescent indecision about how to achieve racial justice is also a decision, one with a terrible human cost. These are excellent books to read and to discuss with kids.

Last month I had the good fortune to meet Marian Cannon Schlesinger whose charming Cambridge memoir, Snatched from Oblivion, I have long admired. Marian, the first wife of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., is an artist, writer, and children's book maker. In 1934 she spent a year in Peking studying Chinese painting. One result was her 1939 San Bao and His Adventures in Peking (Gale Hill Books, $15,76 pp., ages 4 and up), now back in print. What a find! The writing is so rich in descriptive power you can taste the dirt. Ditto the ink-on-blue-paper illustrations. The graphic and plot designs are beautiful. San Bao tells the story of a country boy allowed for the first time to accompany his father to Peking, where he regularly sells his farm goods. San Bao's world (utterly unfamiliar to an American child) has passed away, and yet the story is so vivid and so universal that children will feel that it is unfolding this very minute. Schlesinger invokes the great literary themes: country versus city life and values, loss and recovery, the adventures of two buddies, and the courage young people exhibit in facing the unknown. San Bao and His Adventures in Peking reminds us how beautiful and memorable books about "the other" can be when aesthetic values come before didacticism.

A group that has maintained the balance between aesthetics and teaching is the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury Vermont (www.vermontfolklifecenter.org). Since 1984, the center has been recording the oral histories of Vermont's elder citizens (more than 3,800 archived so far). In its "Family Heritage Books" series, the center mines this collection and produces one picture book a year. So far, there are five, spanning the early eighteenth century to the 1950s (Vermont Folklife Center, $14.95-$15.95, 32 pp. each, ages 4 and up).

My favorite is William Jaspersohn's well-told The Two Brothers. Circa 1880, a poor young Prussian, tired of poverty and of "strict laws and pushy soldiers," decides to go to America. He tells his beloved mother and brother that until he has money for their passage and a home, he will not write. His entrance interview gets him a ticket to Vermont, paid for by a farmer. Henry (nee Heinrich) works hard in a landscape and country he loves, but he has not accumulated the money before, unbeknownst to him, his mother dies and his grief-stricken brother Friedrich sells the family's possessions and buys his ticket to America. In an eerily similar sequence (though it is at a distance of five years), the freshly renamed Fred also becomes a Vermonter. Though they labor a mile apart, it is fifteen months before the brothers meet one another, only after one is sent to help mend a fence at the other's farm. Michael Donato's painting of their reunion is pitch-perfect (get your child to find the other pairs in it). Later, the brothers are able to buy one of the farms, where Henry raises a family and Fred becomes a beloved uncle.

The series, a model for building a national culture from stories rather then bricks, offers something for everyone. If you are looking for a story about a spunky girl, read Michael and Angela Medearis's Daisy and the Doll (this particular girl is African American and renowned in Vermont for her radio recollections). For horse lovers, there is Willem Lange's John and Tom, a classic tale of a horse rescuing his young owner. Ghost-story fans will enjoy Susan Milford's The Ghost on the Hearth. Those who prefer to get their chills from the real rather than supernatural should reach for William Jaspersohn's The Scrimshaw Ring, which recounts the meeting between an eighteenth-century Rhode Island boy and a pirate. Rhode Island? Not every Vermonter is native born.

I am especially eager to see the center's next offering as it has just brought Anita Silvey on board as Family Heritage Books editor. Past editor of the renowned Horn Book Review and children's book editor at Houghton Mifflin, she is one of the most prominent voices in the field.

Speaking of Silvey, her just-published 100 Best Books for Children (Houghton Mifflin, $20, 192 pp.) is a must-have. She picks the best books (1902-2002) for children to age twelve. She has excellent taste, and the insider information is delicious: Do you know how young Maurice Sendak began his career? Legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom saw his window decorations at FAO Schwarz and on the spot offered him a book to illustrate.

As with any canon, you might disagree with some of the inclusions/exclusions. Silvey, anticipating both quibbling and a thirst for more titles, ends with a very extensive list (more than two hundred titles) of additional books. Grandparents will find this book a real boon for gift buying. And parents, after the reading hour is over and the children are asleep, can put up their feet, read this guide, and dream of the pleasurable hours to come.

Daria Donnelly is Commonweal's associate editor (at large) and co-editor of the poetry section.