A well-documented, thorough history.
Who really decides what American children read? Children’s book historian and critic Marcus (A Caldecott Celebration: Seven Artists and their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, 2008, etc.) answers this question by deftly tracing the evolution of American children’s literature from colonial primers to Harry Potter.
The author approaches the story from the little-known perspective of the publishers, librarians, critics, educators and booksellers who shaped the genre over three centuries. Beginning with American publisher Isaiah Thomas, who in 1779 offered American children pirated copies of London bookseller John Newbery’s toy books, Marcus shows the gradual shift from didactic, moralistic texts to illustrated books that entertained as well as instructed. He tracks the 19th-century emergence of entrepreneurial publishers in Boston and New York who recognized the potential kid-lit market in Jacob Abbott’s popular Rollo series and Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley tales. He chronicles the post–Civil War competition among children’s magazines like Our Young Folks, Riverside Magazine for Young People and St. Nicholas, which led to publication of high-quality stories and illustrations from the best authors and artists. Marcus provides an in-depth look at the impact of powerful children’s librarians like Anne Carroll Moore, such creative female editors as May Massee and Louise Seaman Bechtel, and emerging critics like Horn Book founder Bertha Mahony Miller. He explores the effects of Children’s Book Week, the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott prizes and the increased mass-marketing of popular culture in comic books, Golden Books, Disney spinoffs and series like Nancy Drew. Marcus notes the rise of multiculturalism, new realism, overseas printing, independent bookshops and single-editor imprints as evidence of the profound social and technological changes in late 20th-century America and astutely parallels trends in children’s books with movements in the larger culture. Throughout he features insightful anecdotes about such luminaries as Mary Mapes Dodge, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Wise Brown, Robert McCloskey, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), E.B. White, Ursula Nordstrom, Maurice Sendak, Margaret McElderry, Robert Cormier and John Steptoe.
A well-documented, thorough history.Pub Date: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-395-67407-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
