21 February 2012

Dave the Potter


Title: Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave
Author: Laban Carrick Hill
Illustrator: Bryan Collier
Copyright: 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-10731-0

Dave the Potter is a hauntingly simple story written in verse and telling what little we know about a slave who lived in the 1800's named Dave.  "To us it is just dirt, the ground we walk on," but to the potter clay is everything that he lives for.

This week at the library we have been holding our Art Adventures program during Presidents week winter break.  Many of the artists that I have shared with the participants have been well known, Warhol, Picasso, O'Keeffe.  Nothing unusual or surprising, up until Thursday that is.  On Thursday we are celebrating the work of two very different Potters, Dave who lived in South Carolina as a slave, and George Ohr who lived in Biloxi,  The lives of these two men overlapped though they never met.

February is Black History month and today I highly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of Dave the Potter to share with your students, children, or friends.  It tells the remarkable story of a slave who still managed to leave his mark on the world through the poems he etched into his jars.  The illustrations by Bryan Collier show what Dave's studio and life might have looked like.  The details included in the illustrations of Dave throwing pots is mesmerizing and for anyone who has worked with clay will recognize the steps are just right.

"Dave belongs to Mr. Miles/
wher the oven bakes & the pot biles///
--July 31, 1840"

The last few pages contain historical information about Dave's life as a slave, his work as a potter, and his haunting pottery that has left it's mark on the world.  


14 February 2012

Bird in a Box

Title: Bird in a Box
Author: Andrea Davis Pinkney
ISBN: 978-0-316-07403-2
Copyright: 2011

While everyone knows that Fantasy is the hot genre right now, what you might have missed is that historical fiction is working hard to make a comeback.  Most new historical fiction is set between the great depression and the 1980's.  I know most people wouldn't consider 1980 to be historical, but trust me it is! 

Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney, is one of my top picks for Black History Month.  This is a total "boy book" (forgive my stereotyping please!).  Joe Louis is absolutely famous during the Great Depression and in the small town of Elmira, New York Joe Louis is going to change the lives of three children: Hibernia, Willie, and Otis.  This is a story about the power of hope and the effect it can have on young children. 

Willie is living at the Mercy Home for Negro Orphans after his stepfather burned his hands so he couldn't box anymore and his mother gave him up.  Otis' parents are killed in a car accident leaving him no one to take care of him and all he has for memories is his dad's old radio and a handkerchief of his mothers.  Then there is Hibernia, the reverends daughter who dreams of following her mother who abandoned her to be a great singer in Harlem. 

Andrea Pinkney weaves a beautiful story that makes the reader feel as if he is taking a step back into the 1930's filled with all the good and bad that the era was filled with.  Plus she includes real live radio broadcast commentary of Joe Louis fights.  For those of us who weren't alive in the 1930's they are pretty amazing to read. 

Give this book to your favorite sports fan!

07 February 2012

One Crazy Summer

Title: One Crazy Summer
Author: Rita Williams-Garcia
ISBN: 978-0-06-076088-5
Copyright: 2010

This book actually came out in 2010, the library didn't buy a copy until 2011 when it started getting nominated for numerous awards including:

2011 Coretta Scott King Award Winner
2011 Newbery Honor Book
2011 Scott O'Dell Prize for Historical Fiction
2010 National Book Award Finalist

Normally I don't push award winning books on this blog.  I assume that most people have heard of the books that have won awards.  Usually people who like books have already heard about the "good ones"  but occasionally we all need to make a change and this is mine.  I absolutely adore One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams- Garcia.  I was hooked by page two while describing an airplane ride eleven year old Delphine says "The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people."  With the words, "A grand Negro Spectacle" I knew that this was going to be a good book.  Vonetta, Fern, and Delphine get sent to live with their mother in Oakland, CA during the summer of 1968.

One Crazy Summer is for all the girls in the world who have a mother who doesn't love them.  Delphine and her sister aren't sure why Pa is making them stay in CA for the summer with their mother Cecile who abandoned the family.  Even more mysterious is what Cecile is doing in the kitchen with all the men with afros, and why suddenly the girls need to spend all their time at a summer camp run by the Black Panthers getting a "real education."

This is an elegantly written story which will leave readers wanting more.  More of Delphine, Vonette, and Fern, and occasionally even more of Cecile and the Panthers.  This book is an excellent introduction to the civil unrest that was taking place in California in the 1960's.