Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team by Steve Sheinkin

Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team by Steve Sheinkin

Roaring Brook Press

Rating: 5 stars

I'm a big, huge fan of this author. Steve Sheinkin writes nonfiction middle grade books that are well-written, well-researched, fast-paced and informative--I really wish they were around when I was growing up. My favorite of his is Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon. C'mon, with a title like that, how can you not pick it up?! 

Undefeated is about Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete who dominated almost any sport he attempted (baseball is the notable exception, as documented in the book). Born around the turn of the century, when Native Americans were being herded onto reservations and assimilated into white American culture, Thorpe was forced to go to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The story centers around the meeting of and relationship between Thorpe and Pop Warner. Warner, in case, like me, you're not a football fan, was a football mastermind who hailed from the top of society, having graduated from, then coached in, the Ivy League.

These two men could not have had more different backgrounds.

Yet, Pop Warner realized Jim Thorpe was the most gifted athlete he had ever seen. He knew that within moments of meeting Thorpe, after watching him outrun a pack of Warner's well-trained and well-seasoned football players. And so the two began their relationship, which has been lauded the "most winningest" combination in sports history.

Sheinkin chronicles Thorpe's rise in football, and how he crossed over to track and field to take advantage of his speed. From there, he volunteered to give decathlons a try. Turns out he was a shoo-in for such a demanding sport, and he represented the United States in that sport and the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. He was the first Native American to earn a gold medal. (Later, due to the fact that he accepted payment as a minor league baseball player, Thorpe was stripped of his medals.)

In addition to Thorpe's fascinating life and sports career, Sheinkin reports on the history of Native Americans in the United States. The chapters about how Native Americans were forced to schools such as the one at Carlisle, stripped of their birth name and given a "white" name, and then punished for remembering or practicing anything from their native tribes is eye-opening and humbling. In addition, Sheinkin writes about the early years of football. I'm pretty much the opposite of a football fan (don't tell my Seahawks-crazed neighbors that), but found that part of the book really interesting.

Clearly, this is not a book for really young children. But it is an excellent choice for curious, history-minded readers age ten or older, and could be read aloud to a slightly younger child (so that younger readers could have their inevitable questions about Native American policies answered right away).

Sweet Home Alaska by Carole Estby Dagg

Sweet Home Alaska by Carole Estby Dagg
Rating: 5 stars

Nancy Paulsen Books

We're moving West this summer--nearly as West as one can move when you live in Virginia. We're moving to Washington State. As a Seattle University alum and a fan of the great Pacific Northwest, I'm pretty excited. To prepare or just get excited for the move, I'm reading books about or by authors from the "other" side of the country.

And that goal led me straight to Sweet Home Alaska.

Carole Estby Dagg writes out of Everett, Washington, a town an hour or so north of Seattle, and the city in which my husband will work. When our family was out in Washington to visit schools and the area in general, Mrs. Dagg was speaking at a local bookstore to promote Sweet Home Alaska, her just-released second book. I didn't go, but the book piqued my interest and I requested it from our local library.

The book is about a girl who does the same thing my kids will do this summer: she moves about as far away as possible.

Terpsichore's family start the story in Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Like many families during that era, times were tough. Her father loses his job at the mill. Her mother sells her beloved piano for money. Terpsichore makes a million things out of pumpkin because pumpkin is what they've got to eat.

But they have one big chance: a move for a better life. Thanks to a New Deal Pioneer program set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Terpsichore's family has the opportunity to move to faraway Alaska and receive land from the government. Better yet, they get a new start on life.

With a little finagling, their family is selected to go. There's a string attached to the adventure: Mother is not happy about it, and she insists that after one year she gets to decide if they remain in Alaska or return to Wisconsin to live with her (straight-laced, well-off) mother.

With that tension set in the story, the family sets off. First, they take a train across the country to Seattle, then head north on a boat. They reach Palmer, Alaska, and receive their plot of land. The challenges they meet are realistic and eye-opening--the bugs and living conditions smack them in the face, but they all prove to have the necessary pluck to keep going.

Terpsichore is determined to remain optimistic about Alaska and about changing her mother's mind, but she jumps right in to make Palmer what she wants, too. She misses her library from home, and decides to start her own. She writes letters to people and organizations back in the lower 48 with a plea to "help start the pioneer library" and she gets boxes of books--the first from her wealthy grandmother, including one book that sets another mystery in motion. She's the first librarian in the "pioneer library."

The book is very well done--I love how it was inspired by the author's son's move to Palmer, Alaska. A little digging into the town's history and Dagg knew there was a story (or two! or more!) that could be made from the plucky people who dared to move so far away all they knew. Terpsichore is a great little hero--she jumps right into her community and aims to make it a better place. She misses home and has her own friendship woes, but she is exactly the kind of character you want your child to read about and love.

Fingers crossed that my own children remain optimistic about their first big move in life and that they have some of Terpsichore's moxie, cheerfulness, and interest in a world new to them!

Papa Is a Poet: A Story About Robert Frost by Natalie S. Bober

Papa Is a Poet: A Story About Robert Frost by Natalie S. Bober, illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon

Rating: 4.5 stars

Sometimes I think I'm overdoing it just a bit.  I mean, how many serious-ish nonfiction books do kids really want to read?  I rationalize my filled-to-the-brim-with-books household by telling myself that I pick out books and leave them lying around, available, in case curiosity motivates one or two or all of my children to pick it up and read it. I also let them choose plenty of books on their own; they are not left to my nerdy selections.

Papa Is a Poet is long and wordy and serious, so it is definitely in that last category.  Bober tells the story of Robert Frost--as told from the perspective of Lesley, one of his daughters.  She tells us, the reader, of the day they returned from a two year, poetry-writing stint in England, when her father saw at a newsstand a published collection of his works, North of Boston.  He was surprised! Frost hadn't been told by any American publisher of its creation, but was overjoyed to have met success on this side of the Atlantic.

Lesley thinks back to simpler times, before her family sold their farm to raise the funds to go to England.  They lived on a farm, and Robert Frost was a poultry farmer.  Theirs was a nature-filled childhood, with streams and flowers and trees and each other to play in and around and with. Robert and his wife home schooled their children, and their life was full of books.  Their days were "ordinary but meaningful. The cupboard was often bare, yet life was filled to the brim."

Poetry--playing with words, finding the humor or beauty in simple things, and creating metaphors--ran through his veins, but he felt that it wasn't an acceptable pastime for a father of a large family.  He felt he was a "disappointing failure" in the eyes of neighbors and family, so they sold the farm and moved. They flipped a coin to decide where to go. The coin landed on heads, so they went to England--if it had landed on tails, they'd have gone to Vancouver. Choosing to be a full-time poet was a crazy, almost reckless decision, but he did it. And look, he did it so very well.

Why tell this story, read this book to young girls and boys like Lorelei (age 7)?

1. Robert Frost is one of the greatest American poets, and now she has a little background, a little context to the lesson she'll soon get from a teacher. She'll know he was a dad and had kids and made up little rhymes for his family, and maybe...maybe his poetry will be not be so intimidating.
2. I don't love how Bober sprinkles in Frost's poetry.  I think she feels obligated to, and I appreciate her attempt. While I don't think it usually works, I love that his most famous lines (see below) are in there, and that Lorelei knows about them and we can talk about them when making choices.
3. Speaking of choices, I really like that this story is about one man struggling to make a choice--and it's a tough one for a man with poems in his head but mouths to feed.  I'm always telling Lorelei and her brothers that there are lots of choices, but no perfect one, but you have to trust your gut, take a risk, and then give that choice your all. Robert Frost did that.
4. Personally, poetry didn't make a lot of sense when I was in school.  I realize now how fun it can be, how poets play with words and say things in tricky ways that challenge the reader to think, and I want to introduce that concept to my kids little by little, stanza by stanza.
5. Their days were "ordinary but meaningful." The book is worth it for just that--a reminder that we don't need lots of gizmos and gadgets.  The simple things, especially when done with humor and appreciation, sure do mean a lot.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Other books on poetry you might want to check out:
Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys (Raczka)
Poem-Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems (Lewis)
Runny Babbit (Silverstein)
And pretty much anything by Dr Suess, of course!

Becoming Babe Ruth by Matt Tavares

Becoming Babe Ruth by Matt Tavares

Rating: 5 stars

I suspect that this will only happen once, and it's happening now: Lorelei and Ben are playing the same sport, and they're on the same team.  They're both playing for the Cincinnati Reds in our local Little League--at the t-ball level.  Lorelei likes it, Ben loves it; they are both soaking up some of the rich history of the oh-so-American, oh-so-tradition-rich sport by the stories they are reading.

Dozens of wonderful nonfiction books exist about baseball that bring out the excitement of a previous era, teach about a famous sportsman, and hold the interest of almost any age of reader.  This is one of those books.

Becoming Babe Ruth came out last year--I read about it in the NYTimes Book Review (click HERE) one Sunday when I actually did read the paper.  The story starts off with a slightly shocking image and with a fact I didn't know: In George Ruth's early years in Baltimore, Maryland, he was a rascal of a kid who skipped school and caused trouble.  Yikes! What else was I about to read my kids?! I wondered as I read this page out loud.

But then the story unfolds: in an effort to straighten him out, George's parents send him to the strict St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys.  There, he first chafed under the tight control...until he found baseball.  He was soon slugging away nearly every afternoon, and the balance of finding something he loved (and that something he loved came along with someone he loved, the brother/coach of the team) made the strictness of the school bearable.  Years later, after he'd been playing baseball there for a decade or so, a scout came to watch him.  He was signed onto the Baltimore Orioles the next day.  While he played for them (for just half a season, before being traded to the Red Sox), he often returned to St. Mary's to play with his pals after practicing all day.  Also while playing for the Orioles, he got his nickname "Babe," which obviously stuck.

He got traded to the Red Sox, pitched less and slugged more, and became a sensation unlike any other ball player had before.  Tavares doesn't highlight his trade to the Yankees, and doesn't bring up the curse that trade famously causes (you and your child can--and should!--read about that in the fine, informative The Legend of the Curse of the Bambino).

Instead, Tavares highlights a story that highlights Ruth's character--which gave me the opportunity to talk with Ben about the importance of being a good man while also being a fantastic ball player.  While Babe Ruth was at his peak, out slamming balls left and right in any field in which he played, he got word that there had been a fire at St. Mary's.  Everything burned to the ground.  He was shocked and concerned--this was his home for so many years, and he loved it.  He returned and figured out a way to help.  He took the St. Mary's baseball team on tour with him--letting them lap up hot dogs and ice cream like they never had before, and letting them soak up games as they traveled around with the Yankees for a good part of the season. At the games, Babe Ruth asked people to donate money to have St. Mary's rebuilt.  They did, and St. Mary's was, in fact, rebuilt.

This is a fantastic book about a sportsman every kid needs to know about--a must-read for sure.

There's so much to love about this sport even if, like me, all the joy of playing it comes from pitching to your kid and watching the joy and pride wash over his face when he actually hears the SMACK of the bat meeting the ball.  It's really the first time in parenting when I've sat on the side and watched my children being coached (by my great friend and great coach for this sponge-like yet attention-challenged age group).  I'm learning so much about it all.

A Boy Called Dickens by Deborah Hopkinson

A Boy Called Dickens by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix

Rating: 4 stars

This is a quirky book I reviewed for Washington Family Magazine, and probably one for the classroom more than personal library, but I like how it illustrates where Charles Dickens came up with some of his most famous characters.


Through nonfiction children’s books, my kids (the older two are 5 ½ and 4) are introduced to important characters from history at a young age.  Their foundation of cultural literacy is slowly but steadily building with the help of books like Deborah Hopkinson’s A Boy Called Dickens.  They will have the ability to converse fluently in idioms, allusions, and content at an earlier age because of early exposure to books, and as many nonfiction books as possible.

Or, like this book, historical fiction.

I never knew until reading Hopkinson’s note at the end of this book that Dickens did not talk about his childhood.   He wanted to forget about it because it was such a horrible time in his life.  While other boys his age attended school, Dickens was forced—by his parents—to work in a blacking factory, which makes polish for gentlemen’s boots.  (I like to keep this in mind when I am at a parenting low during my day with my trio.  Heck, at least I’m not enslaving them to work in a dimly lit factory for eight hours a day!)

To read the rest of the review, please click here. 

Land of the Pilgrim's Pride by Callista Gingrich

Land of the Pilgrim's Pride by Callista Gingrich, illustrated by Susan Arciero

Rating: 3 stars

Halloween is barely over--you're probably still sick from eating too much candy--but I thought I'd throw out a book referencing our next holiday...Thanksgiving.  I'm a bit dumbfounded at the crazy-high rating this book gets on Amazon; I found it to be way too deep for the age range (5-8) it supposedly targets.  But...you decide!

Here's my review from Washington Family Magazine:

My children are all too young for serious history lessons.  Especially the youngest, at 19 months.  Like all of you, I still try to inject the older two (5 ½ and 4) with appropriately-sized bits of information whenever possible.  Through walks around the monuments, trips to historical place and dozens of books in between, they’ve picked up an impressive amount of information.  (Does knowing that Abraham Lincoln wore a top hat count?  Sure!)  

I expected Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride to fit alongside these trips of ours—to be nonfiction and educational, but geared to a young crowd.  I was right about nonfiction and educational, but should have paid more attention to the target age group for the book: ages 5 to 8.  There is a lot of information in the book.  My daughter, Lorelei, has an impressive attention span and is an advanced reader, and she soaked it up.  I was able to quiz her comprehension in a not-so-annoying way when today at the Air and Space Museum she overheard a girl tell a guide that she’d spent part of her winter break in Williamsburg.  

“Mom!  Williamsburg!  Like in the book!”  

I gave myself an imaginary gold star and patted her on the back.  (Maybe I should have patted her on the back first, but…that gives you a glimpse into my self-inflated psyche.)

To read the rest of the review--I actually do talk about the book--click here.