October 2012

So You Want to be President?: The Perfect Kids’ Book for Election Season

by Tom B.

So You Want to be President

It’s good to be the president, eh?

In my last post about the odd and enduring picture book legacy of former U.S. President William H. Taft, I mentioned the Caldecott-winning picture book So You Want to be President?, written by Judith St. George and illustrated by David Small. It is seriously one of the best nonfiction picture books about American history that I’ve ever read and, with the 2012 U.S. President Election rapidly approaching, I actually can’t think of a better history book to share with younger kids who are just starting to register the elections on their radar.

So You Want to be President? is not a partisan book AT ALL, which is one of its best qualities. Rather, St. George and Small go out of their way to portray the American Presidents as human beings – much time is spent breaking down the demographic details of the men who’ve made it into the Oval Office.

So You Want to Be President

If you want to feel good about the American presidency this election season, this is a great place to start…

For example, the book, structured around the question “So You Want to Be President?”, offhandedly mentions at one point, “You probably weren’t born in a log cabin. That’s too bad. People are crazy about log-cabin Presidents. They elected eight.” We learn a lot about where presidents came from, what they did before they were presidents, and both the good and the bad accomplished in the name of the presidency are acknowledged.

St. George does a fantastic job of creating an engaging, data-driven portrait of the history of the American presidency, while, at the same time, really conveying that call that drives a person to become the President as something ultimately positive and aspirational. To quote St. George, discussing the various presidents:

Some succeeded. Some failed. If you want to be President – a good President – pattern yourself after the best. Our best have asked more of themselves than they thought they could give. They have had the courage, spirit, and will to do what they knew was right.

All that plus the book is a hoot to read and is visually brilliant, thanks to David Small. (We even get to see Nixon bowling!) What more could you want?

So You Want to Be President?

The original edition of “SYWTBP” paid a nice tribute to those who hadn’t made it to the White House yet… at least, not when the book was originally published.

I have just one additional note to add about So You Want to be President? – Be aware that there are several editions of the book currently in circulation. The picture book was originally published in 2001 and it’s been revised twice since then. The first revision (in 2004) worked in information about George W. Bush. There were sections in the original picture book that talked about relatives that became presidents and the number of presidents named “George”, so the revision makes total sense. And, according to Penguin, there was also an even newer revision that has incorporated information about Barack Obama. I find that revision to be particularly significant, not because of my personal politics, but rather because both the original and 2004 editions include a page where St. George informs her readers:

Every President was different from every other and yet no woman has been President. No person of color has been President.

And that page is accompanied by an illustration of Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferraro standing in a roped-off section just outside of the oval office. I haven’t seen the new edition – my library only has the original versions – so I’m not sure if Ferraro is now all alone in that waiting area, but I’m definitely pleased to have one less person waiting in the wings to one day make it to the White House.

If you’re interested to learn more about So You Want to be President?, watch this clip from the great Weston Woods animated version of the book (narrated by Stockard Channing) and consider reading it with your children before November 6th. You won’t regret it.

(If you can’t see the video due to Flash issues, click here to see it. You can also find a much longer, less interesting video read-through of the entire book here.)

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How Picture Books Made My Five-Year-Old Fall in Love with President William H. Taft

by Tom B.

William H. Taft

All the hip kids are into Taft these days, right?

One of the best things about having kids is that they just so deliriously, gloriously weird. And I mean “weird” in the absolute best sense of the word. I love how impossibly random my daughter can be. She’s just this beautiful little sponge who soaks up so many inputs and pieces of information from the world around her, and I never can predict how she’s going to process that information and spit it back out again. This is all a prelude to explain why I was so surprised that one family vacation and one trip to our local library could ever inspire my five-year-old daughter to turn to me one day and say, with complete earnestness, “Dad, my absolute favorite U.S. President is President William H. Taft.”

That’s right. William H. Taft. The twenty-seventh President of the United States. Also known as “Not one of our best-known presidents AT ALL.” He’s the guy who came after Teddy Roosevelt, a.k.a. “TOTALLY one of our best-known presidents, plus he was in those Night at the Museum movies, so it REALLY wouldn’t be weird if your five-year-old knew HIM.” But, nope, my kid likes Taft. She’s funny that way.

So, how did my daughter become enamoured with a president whom some might understandably label as “obscure”? Well, earlier this year, we visited some friends who live right outside of Washington D.C., and we spent one day walking around the National Mall, seeing the White House, visiting the various memorials, and generally having a great time. I wasn’t prepared for how much my daughter enjoyed the experience. She was endlessly curious about everything we walked past, and I spent the day trying to explain everything from the legacy of Abraham Lincoln to the cause of the Korean War.

(One of my favorite moments was, while standing outside the FBI Building, finding myself very seriously explaining The X-Files to my five-year-old. I, apparently, want my kid to “believe.”)

But, for whatever reason, the thing that really interested my daughter were the U.S. Presidents and, when told she could pick out one souvenir, she selected a laminated placemat with all the presidents on it from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial gift shop. She combed over that placemat for our whole drive home to Michigan, peppering us with constant questions like “What’s a Whig?” or “Which were the good presidents and which were the bad presidents?”

William H. Taft

William H. Taft: The Man Knows His Food…

We were walking to our local library a few days after we got home from D.C. and my daughter informed me that she wanted to get some books on the presidents. I said that was a great idea, and she then asked me if I knew any stories about the presidents. I paused for a moment and said, “Well, did you hear about the president who was so fat he got stuck in the White House bathtub?” That was, of course, William H. Taft.

My daughter’s eyes went HUGE with excitement. “You are joking,” she said. “Really?” She then started laughing hysterically. Once she stopped, I recounted a half-remembered anecdote about Taft, being the fattest president on record, once getting stuck in the tub – a bathtub that he later replaced with a tub supposedly big enough to bathe four men. My daughter went CRAZY for this story. She loved it. She couldn’t get enough of it. She kept asking me for more details, which I didn’t have. I’d heard the story once before and wasn’t entirely sure it was true.

Once we got to the library, my daughter ran over to the youth librarian and the two of them disappeared into the stacks together. Minutes later, she came running back to me, beaming and holding a picture book. “I found it! I found it!” she yelled.  And she opened her book to a lovely illustration of the late great William H. Taft being hoisted out of a bathtub.

William H. Taft

The picture in question…

I don’t think my daughter thought I was lying about my Taft story, but the fact that she was able to find a book so quickly with such visual proof of my anecdote – she just thought it was the best thing in the world. That something that crazy could actually happen to an American President. It somehow turned Taft into this legendary figure in her mind, far more interesting than John Adams or Richard Nixon. [read the rest of the post…]

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A Slight Defense of Book Orders and Media Tie-In Books: My Ghostbusters Book from 1984

by Tom B.

Frequent readers of this blog know that I typically give media tie-in children’s books a lot of flack. And, normally, they totally deserve it. For whatever reason, when a publisher decides to adapt a TV show, movie, cartoon, or toyline into a kids’ book, the quality is almost always poor. There are some notable exceptions – Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader and Son is transcendent – but, for the most part, they’re fairly awful reads. So, when Megan McKnight wrote her great recent post about her “Rules for Parents Buying Books from Book Order Catalogs or School Book Fairs” and she listed “books based on television, movie, or toy characters” as definite DO NOT BUYS, I nodded my head and intoned a hearty “Here, here!”  I fully support parents who try to steer their kids away from that kind of crap.

But then… I was cleaning out my old bedroom at my mom’s house – enough time has now passed that I refer to it as “my mom’s house” instead of “MY house” – and I found the ONLY book that I ever ordered my school book order catalogs that I MADE SURE that I kept well into my adulthood. I bought loads of books from book order catalogs when I was a kid, but there is only ONE book order title that, over 25 years later, still sat proudly on my bookshelf in my childhood bedroom.

What was that book?

A Ghostbusters storybook, copyright 1984, with 12 collector stickers inside.

Ghostbusters

A cherished tome from my childhood – back before “Slimer” even got his nickname and was known only as the “Ugly Little Spud”

That’s right. It was a media tie-in book. [read the rest of the post…]

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Our Phantom Tollbooth First Read Kicks Off: Chapters One and Two

by Tom B.

The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth

Perfect for Tollbooth obsessives…

Back on September 20th, we celebrated Building a Library’s first anniversary and announced that, the following week, I was finally going to start reading The Phantom Tollbooth – the book that inspired this blog – to my almost six-year-old daughter. And then… I took the following week off. Anti-climatic, I know, but it was a crazy week with swim classes and TWO soccer games and I was exhausted and blocked and I apologize. But, now that all my excuses are out on the table, I DID start reading The Phantom Tollbooth with my daughter last week and, so far, it’s been a pretty positive experience.

Let me state up front that I was a little worried that my daughter was too young for The Phantom Tollbooth. Norton Juster expertly plays with language and various abstract concepts throughout the book and I was concerned that aspects of the text would go over her head. As far as I can remember, I probably first encountered The Phantom Tollbooth when I was eight or nine, so I will admit that I am (still) concerned that I might be trying to introduce the novel to my daughter at too early an age. But, regardless of those concerns, I wanted to give Phantom Tollbooth a shot in our coveted bedtime reading slot last week and I’m going to periodically give updates on how the reading is going so far.

I’m calling this series “Phantom Tollbooth: First Read” and I’m planning to structure the updates in a similar style to the re-read or rewatch series that you can find on Tor.com or The Onion‘s AV Club. For those unfamiliar, in those series, the websites pick a book or a movie and a person episodically blogs their reaction to revisiting those works. For example, the blogger might post their ongoing reaction to rewatching all three seasons of Arrested Development or re-reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, chapter-by-chapter.

For Phantom Tollbooth, I’m going to adopt a chapter-by-chapter model, although some nights, we’ll be reading multiple chapters. For our first week, we started slow, only making it through the first four chapters. In the future, we may be moving through the book at a different pace, largely determined by what we’ve got going on that week. (Fair Warning: A trip to NYC will limit our progress this weekend.) I’ll give a quick summary of the chapter, my thoughts, my daughter’s reactions, and I might even toss in a few pieces of trivia from Leonard S. Marcus’ fantastic The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth as well.

Are we all set? Excuses made and plans delineated? Great. And, with that, let us begin…

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH FIRST READ: CHAPTERS 1 AND 2 – “Milo” and “Beyond Expectations”

CHAPTER ONE: “MILO”

“I do hope this is an interesting game, otherwise the afternoon will be so terribly dull.” – Milo, The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth, Chapter One

Santa got my letter!

The opening passages of The Phantom Tollbooth were what sold me on the book as a kid. In a few short paragraphs, Norton Juster wonderfully captures the itchy, nagging boredom that can easily consume a child in the wrong frame of mind. I love comedian Louis C.K.’s inspired riff on how “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” and it shares some nice thematic parallels to initial mindset of Milo, the protagonist of The Phantom Tollbooth. To quote Juster:

There once was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’s bothered. Nothing really interested him – least of all the things that should have.

It’s an incredibly powerful opening and, after reading into it a few paragraphs, I turned to my daughter and asked, “Do you ever feel like that?” “Yes,” she replied. “I get bored a lot.” [read the rest of the post…]

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