Edible Pyramid: Good Eating Every Day
by Loreen Leedy
Holiday House, 2007
ISBN: 978-0823420742

Childhood obesity is a hot topic, but you can’t expect kids to eat right without the proper knowledge of what they need to eat. Leedy’s book is aimed at elementary school aged children. Animal characters go out to eat at a restaurant where the cat waiter introduces them to the pyramid menu, which breaks foods down into the food groups they need to eat every day. Readers are also told how much they need to eat, for example, two cups from the milk and dairy group.

Using double page spreads, she provides lots of labeled pictures of different foods within a group. In grains, we find pretzels, rye bread, corn tortillas, waffles, as well as pasta, popcorn and granola. Meats, seafood, poultry and eggs include lots of examples to satisfy carnivores. The next page shows beans, nuts and seeds, but tofu and vegetarian eating guidelines are missing, an oversight that reduces the book’s reach, as well as it’s aim to encourage healthier diets. Desserts and oils are mentioned here with a warning that too much will make you gain weight.

The book wraps up with a helpful explanation of how to calculate healthy servings, sneaking a little math into the menu. How much is six ounces of grains? It shows you that one slice of bread or several crackers equals one ounce, so two slices of bread and several crackers would be three ounces of grain, in one meal.  There are fun breakdowns of more complex foods like pizza, or a fish sandwich, to show kids how to calculate what parts come from which pyramid food groups.  The book ends with a note that kids need to exercise one hour a day to stay healthy, something that for some kids may be as difficult these days as avoiding junk food.

—Cathy Camper

Guinness World Records To The Extreme
Lisa L. Ryan Herndon and Paula Manzanero
Scholastic Reference, 2007
ISBN: 978-0439865623

Maybe you think a couch that can travel 87 miles per hour is not interesting. Even if it had a steering wheel  made out of a pizza pan, a chocolate bar to shift gears and a cola can to brake, you probably wouldn’t be interested in it. If the couch mobile seems so dull you’d rather dig into a Henry James novel then you also won’t be interested in records like ‘longest ear hair,’ ‘largest popcorn sculpture’ or ‘most valuable comic book.’ All are duly recorded in Guinness World Records: To The Extreme (Scholastic Reference, $14.99). Record books of all kinds, especially the Guinness kind with their silver reflecting colors and copious pictures of outrageous things are a hit with reluctant readers.  For years, I’ve kept record books like these in the back seat of the car for spontaneous reading to and from practices and events. They usually invoke deep philosophical quandaries like, ‘How does the woman with the world’s longest fingernails pull down her underwear to pee?” Or “Does ear hair create significant drag in a swim meet situation?” Your children will doubtless be as brilliant as mine—or at least as much fun at birthday parties—if you buy them books like these.

—Sue Stauffacher

Mysteries of the Mummy Kids
by Kelly Milner Halls
Darby Creek Publishing, 2007
ISBN: 978-1581960594

Just because mummies are thousands of years old doesn’t mean you have to be old to be a mummy. Many mummies never made it to their fifteenth birthday, during their human lives. Sometimes children, like the Incan boy El Plomo, were sacrificed to ancient gods, to thwart bad weather, ill health of the Emperor, or natural disasters. Other mummified children, like the Blue Bonnet Baby, buried with its bottle and little cup in China, may have died of natural causes, and were buried with their families. Some, like eight-year-old King Tut, were mummified because they were famous rulers. Others, like the bog mummies in Europe, were strangled or stabbed to death and thrown into bogs, perhaps to punish them as criminals, and then coincidently preserved for thousands of years.

This book looks at mummified children from around the world, and from all different time periods. A teenager that lived during the Civil War was found mummified in a metal coffin in Washington D.C. In Sicily there are thousands of mummified people lining the walls of Capuchin Chapel, from the 1500’s through the 1920’s, some of them children mummified with their families. And there’s even information about how people today are paying $25,000 and up, to be mummified for future generations to discover.

The book includes a list of American museums with mummy resources, and an extensive bibliography, listing books, interviews, websites, videos, articles and audio, as well as a glossary and index. Detailed color drawings, and riveting color photos of these long-preserved people make this a perfect book for homework research or for armchair archaeology, for readers who, like mummies, get “wrapped up”—only in their reading.

   —Cathy Camper

Helen Keller: Her Life in Pictures
by George Sullivan
Scholastic Nonfiction, 2007
ISBN: 978-0439918152

It’s ironic that a book filled with photographs would be a way to introduce young readers to the dark silent world of Helen Keller. But Helen Keller: Her Life in Pictures by George Sullivan does just that. Pairing a spare text with photographs, many that have never been published before, is a way to lend new insight to the struggles of child who became deaf and blind through illness before the age of two. Helen’s story is familiar to millions, but, perhaps because she did not like to be photographed (her left eye bulged), we don’t often picture her. Think Helen Keller. Think Marilyn Monroe. See what I mean? 

But the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is at play in many of these photographs. For instance, when you read “Helen lived here with a nurse,” you might picture a bustling efficient white-skinned matron in a traditional nurse’s cap. But when we see the Keller children pictured with their nurse, they are accompanied by a young black girl certainly no older than ten. Photos of Helen and Annie Sullivan, her teacher and companion, depict the wordless bond they forged through trials and friendship as each struggled to find meaning and a place in the world. How striking to see Helen strolling alone around the garden of her first house, her fingers lightly touching the stone wall as a guide. It is also wonderful to roam far beyond the familiar story of Helen discovering the meaning of Annie’s signs to her later life, her loves, her travels and her second steadfast companion, Polly Thompson.

This book would be a great companion to Sara Miller’s re-creation of Annie Sullivan’s young life with Helen in Miss Spitfire. Miller’s unerring eye for Annie’s young character and how Annie’s needs contribute to both the conflict and the tenderness between the two will breathe additional life into the photos. 

—Sue Stauffacher

Our Liberty Bell
by Henry Jonas Magaziner
Illustrated by John O’Brien
Holiday House, 2007
ISBN: 978-0823418923

Our Liberty Bell is a great book for introducing young readers to important moments in America’s evolution toward freedom and liberty. Using the Liberty Bell as a catalyst, Magaziner takes the reader from the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Pennsylvania charter, for which the bell was ordered from English bell makers, through the time when it heralded important Revolutionary War events. He then follows the bell through the decades showing how it became a noble symbol for abolition, suffrage and civil rights movements. The bell, cracked and too fragile to travel any more, was finally placed in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, where it remains to this day, one of America’s national treasures.

O’Brien’s cover illustrations and interior black and white line drawings are vibrant and lively. Known for his sense of humor, O’Brien brings comedic relief to an authoritative text. My only wish would have been to see the line drawings as full-colored illustrations.

When considering Our Liberty Bell, be aware that it is written for a strong reader. The vocabulary is difficult and there are long passages with few breaks. This book is for mid-elementary school readers or older.

—Jane Bedell

Nothing But Trouble: a story about Althea Gibson
by Sue Stauffacher, illustrated by Greg Couch
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
ISBN: 978-0375834080

From the brilliantly colored tennis balls on the endpapers to the kinetic movement of color across the title page to the shining words that relate tennis legend Althea Gibson’s path to winning the US Open in 1957, this is a book suffused with light and hope. “The wildest tomboy in the history of Harlem,” Althea lived for sports and played by her own set of rules. Thanks to many people who saw a diamond inside the rough-and-tumble exterior, and particularly to Buddy Walker, an activities supervisor, Althea learned to refine her ways and stop wanting to beat everybody up. “You’ve got to decide, Althea. Are you going to play your game, or are you going to let the game play you? When I go to the jazz club, I play like a tiger, but I wear a tuxedo.” She learned to take out her aggressions on the tennis ball. In fact, she learned it so well that she became the first African American in history to win the US Open. She won the Wimbledon Cup twice. Half of Althea’s story belongs to those who helped her along the way and that is ultimately the hope in this book, people selflessly helping other people. An excellent picture book biography, easily read out loud, be sure to read the Author’s Note and the timeline at the end of the book. Nothing but Trouble is a fine example of a book that combines the author’s and illustrator’s contributions seamlessly to create a greater whole.

—Vicki Palmquist

The Incredible Book Eating Boy
Oliver Jeffers
Philomel Books, 2006
ISBN 978-0399247291

Henry loves books, he craves them, he devours them. Literally (pun intended).  He starts out nibbling words, builds up to sentences and pages, and soon he’s swallowing fat tomes in one gulp. Dictionaries to joke books, he gobbles them up, and begins to notice they have a nutritive value: the more he eats, the smarter he gets.

He aims to become the smartest guy on Earth, but it all goes sour. The piles of books are too much to digest, his stomach hurts and his facts come out garbled. He’s forced to give up books. What to do? He picks up a half-eaten book and begins to read instead. “It was SO good!”  He makes the switch from eating to reading, with only an occasional fall back to his former behavior (the evidence of which readers’ fingers will discover, when they grab for the corner of the last page only to find it’s been bitten away).

A big part of what makes this book so tasty is its artful presentation, Using the snug hues of old yellowed documents and brown paper bags, Jeffers collages together the flotsam and jetsam of books- bits of dictionary pages, lists, graph paper and end papers - to create the wallpaper behind his tale.  As Henry’s knowledge increases, it’s marked by maps and equations. But when he falls ill, letters and numbers bubble out of his mouth like incoherent burps. 

A fun tale for both adult book lovers and preschool children, who themselves have just begun to appreciate books as bearers of stories they enjoy, learning to turn pages instead of teething on them.

—Cathy Camper

A School Like Mine
UNICEF Contributor
Dorling Kindersley, 2007
ISBN 978-0756629137

I’ve been immersed in non-fiction for kids lately. There are a bevy of books to delight young readers, from notes on the history of underwear to all-female big bands during World War II. But the one that seems most tempting to readers of all ages and ability levels is A School Like Mine ($19.99), the latest in a series of books jointly created by Unicef and the publisher, Dorling Kindersley. The theory behind the series, which began with Children Just Like Me is to show kids around the world how their daily lives—work, play, religious practices—compare with one another. Using high quality photos and spanning the entire globe, the editors of DK help children meet others like them in other countries and on other continents. In addition to the lovely photos, the children featured give readers a tour of life at school, including what’s for lunch, what their lesson books and schools look like, and how they get to and from school. From Semira in Ethiopia, who is an AIDS orphan and goes to a school of 2,500, to Lukasi from an Inuit village in Quebec, Canada, children share their hopes as well as their daily struggles. There are so many points of departure for teachers and parents with this book, beginning with having kids make a collage of their own school and home experiences with interviews and photos that illustrate their daily lives. If nothing else, the youthful exuberance, energy, and hope of these young people from varying backgrounds will give young readers the sense that we really are more alike than we are different.

—Sue Stauffacher