MARK YOUR CALENDAR
Upcoming Events for Children’s Librarians
BEATTY AWARD
Marian Calabro has been selected as the winner of the California Library Association’s eleventh annual John and Patricia Beatty Award for her book The Perilous Journey of the Donner Party, published by Clarion Books, 1999. The John and Patricia Beatty Award honors the Beattys, who co-authored eleven books of fiction for young readers. On her own, Patricia Beatty wrote over 35 other titles for young people, many with California settings. The Beatty Award is given to the author of a distinguished book for young people that best promotes an awareness of California and its people. An engraved plaque and a $500 prize will be given to Ms. Calabro at the association’s annual conference in Santa Clara, Nov. 10-13, 2000. The Beatty Award is co-sponsored by BWI, Book Wholesalers, Inc., the children’s book wholesaler.
When choosing The Perilous Journey of the Donner Party, for this award, the committee cited the well-researched and clearly written text, the use of primary sources, a great selection of illustrations, beautiful jacket art, and overall high quality of bookmaking. This even-handed, balanced account of the tragic expedition brings to life the families who became known as the Donner Party. Much of the story of this infamous journey to the "Golden State" is told through the eyes of a child that makes this particular book well-suited to its audience. Twelve-year-old Virginia Reed’s diary entries and letters are reproduced and evoke the excitement, drama, and final desperation of their journey. There’s both a gripping narrative and a thoughtful analysis of this tragedy that is in no way sensationalized. Unique to this telling is an emphasis on the experiences and thoughts of the women and children in the group, a recounting of the survivors lives after their rescue, and interviews with their present-day descendants. In fact, Calabro presents the greed, bad decision making, poor planning, and cannibalism with such sympathetic handling it is all seen within the larger context of ubiquitous human frailty. She draws the people of the story real with a respectful hand and her follow-up with descendants returns us full-circle to our own lives enriched with a new perspective and plenty of suggestions for further reading.
Calabro is also the author of Operation Grizzly Bear, ZAP! A Brief History of Television, and Great Courtroom Lawyers. She lives in Kearny, New Jersey, and received her B.A. from Rutgers College.
The 2000 Beatty Award was judged by a committee of five librarians appointed by the president of CLA and reflecting statewide representation. The Perilous Journey of the Donner Party was selected following careful consideration of all eligible books published in 1999. The members of the 2000 Beatty Award Committee are chair Jane Cook from Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, Lisa Dunseth from Burlingame Public Library, Jill Patterson from Orange County Public Library, John Quartarone from Carlsbad City Library, and Maida Lin Wong from South Pasadena Public Library.
The chair of the 2001 Beatty Committee is Chuck Ashton from the Redwood City Public Library.
Jane Cook,
Stockton-San Joaquin PL
NEWS AND NOTES
Institute: Congratulations to ACL Vice President Mary Schrader, for conducting one of the most popular and best-attended ACL Institutes in recent memory. With a capacity crowd of nearly 200 attendees, the seminar on picture book art received high marks on the evaluations, especially for the speakers. Hats off to Mary for a job very well done!
Newbery members: Congratulations also go out to two ACL members who were recently elected to duties in the American Library Association’s division, Association of Library Service to Children. Elizabeth Overmyer from Berkeley Public Library was elected to the 2002 Newbery Committee. Long-time member Kathleen Odean, who now lives in Rhode Island, was elected Chair of the 2002 Newbery Committee.
Alameda County PL Website: Alameda County Library System has a new website for children called "Kidsplace." It is available at: www.aclibrary.org/kidsplace/
The webpage is designed for kids, preschool through 8th grade, and has access to both the Internet and to the library’s catalog. The page includes links to puzzles, games, clubs, and other "fun" stuff, as well as links to popular homework topics like California Missions, booklists, science fair projects, and many other things.
September Traders: Be sure to save some reading logs, bibliographies, and other promotional materials when your cleaning up at the end of this year’s Summer Reading Program at your library. Bring approximately 50 copies of anything you would like to share to the September ACL meeting. This way, you can find ideas for the following year’s summer reading program!
Book Stamps: Senator Edward Kennedy has proposed a bill to expand the food stamp program, to include "book stamps," so children ages 5 and under can purchase books to have at home.
LIBRARIAN WANTED: No, this isn’t a posting for job openings. ACL is looking for a new Book Review Chair, or two people to take over as Co-Chair, to begin at the September meeting. This volunteer position is fundamental to the operation and success of ACL. The Book Review chair assigns the books to each reviewer, and runs the book review portion of the monthly ACL meeting. For more information about the duties of the Book Review Chair, email Marge Sussman at mas5@ci.berkeley.ca.us.
OBITUARIES
Edward Gorey
World-renowned illustrator Edward Gorey died at age 75 of a heart attack on April 15, 2000. His style of eerie ink sketches illustrated 90 of his own books, and 60 books by other authors, as well as illustrating the opening credits of the PBS television series "Mystery!" Gorey also won a Tony Award in 1978 for the costumes for "Dracula."
The Harvard graduate and Army veteran began his career in the art department of Doubleday. One of his most popular children’s books is The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Harcourt, 1963, which offers an alphabetic eulogy to 26 children, from Amy to Zillah, who die under horrible circumstances.
Barbara Cooney
Two-time Caldecott Medalist Barbara Cooney died on March 10, 2000 at age 83 after a long illness. Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, the Smith College graduate later moved to Maine, the setting of many of her books, including Miss Rumphius.
Her first Caldecott Medal was awarded in 1958 for her scratchboard illustrations of Chanticleer and the Fox. She later switched to a folk-art painting style, which she used for the 1980 Caldecott winner, Donald Hall’s Ox-cart Man.
Beatrice Schenk de Regniers
Author of more than 40 children’s books, Beatrice Schenk de Regniers died at age 86 on March 1, 2000. The Lafayette, Indiana native’s first book, The Giant Story, 1953, was illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Her 1964 book, May I Bring A Friend? earned the Caldecott Medal for its illustrator, Beni Montressor.
Jean E. Karl
Children’s book editor Jean E. Karl died on March 30, 3000, at age 72 after a long illness. Karl established Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 1961, and was its editor until she retirred in 1985. She also founded Aladdin Paperbacks. She continued to edit books after her retirement, and she was also an author.
In 1967, Karl received two manuscripts from an unknown author, E.L. Konigsburg. Karl published the two, The Mixed-up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler, which won the Newbery Award, and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, which was a Newbery Honor book that same year. Karl also edited Konigsburg book, A View From Saturday, which won the Newbery Award thirty years after the debut of her first book.
Cynthia King
Longtime ACL member Cynthia King died of a heart attack on March 27, 2000. Retired, King had been the head of the children’s department of the Fresno County Library. She was a volunteer in the Dori Gates Room of the Fresno County Library, and a volunteer at the Fresno Metro Museum. She served on the Newbery Committee in 1982, and the Caldecott Committee in 1990. King was a two-time president of the Association of Children’s Librarians.
Book Awards Announced
Hans Christian Andersen Award
The winners of the 2000 Hans Christian Andersen Awards were announced on April 2nd, the anniversary of Andersen’s birth. The award for illustrator went to Anthony Browne, from the United Kingdom. The award for author went to Ana Maria Machado, who is from Brazil.
The award is given biannually to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature. The formal presentation of the awards will take place at the IBBY Congress in September, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
Bank Street College Awards
The Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education has announced the following awards:
The Josette Frank Award for fiction, given to honor a book of outstanding literary merit in which children or young adults deal in a positive and realistic way with the difficulties of their world, is awarded to Figuring Out Frances by Gina Willner-Pardo, Clarion, 1999.
The Flora Straus Award for nonfiction, given to a book that advances humanitarian ideals and serves as an inspiration to young readers, is awarded to Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges, Scholastic, 1999.
The Claudia Lewis Award for poetry, given to Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonia Sones, HarperCollins.
Golden Kite Awards
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators announced the annual Golden Kite Awards on March 23, 2000, for books published in 1999. They are:
Fiction: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, FSG.
Honor: Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, Delacorte.
Non-fiction: Space Station Science: Life In Free Fall by Marianne J. Dyson, Scholastic.
Honor: Ice Story: Shackleton’s Lost Expedition by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel, Clarion.
Picture Book Text: A Band Of Angels by Deborah Hopkinson, Atheneum.
Honor: The Babe and I by David Adler, Harcourt Brace.
Picture Book Illustration: The Little Red Hen Makes A Pizza, illustrated by Amy Walrod, Dutton.
Honor: Red Berry Wool, illustrated by Tim Coffey, Albert Whitman.
Americas Awards
The 1999 Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature is given to recognize a work published in the United States that authentically and engagingly portrays the culture of Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. The award is sponsored by the national Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP). This year’s award winner is: CrashBoomLove: A Novel In Verse by Juan Felipe Herrera, University of New Mexico Press.
Two honorable mentions were also named:
Cuba: After the Revolution by Bernard Wolf, Dutton, and Magic Windows/Ventanas Magicas by Carman Lomas Garza, Children’s Book Press.
UP FOR DISCUSSION
by Marian Drabkin
Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. by Rosemary Wells and Susan Jeffers, Simon & Schuster, 1999.
There’s nothing new about adaptations of well-known children’s books - heaven knows, in recent years we’ve had more than our share of abridgements (read: eviscerations) of older books, done presumably because it is thought that children either will not or can not read anything whose language is more complex or evocative than that of a basal reader. Nor is there anything new about sanitizing books whose language may have been acceptable at one time, but which is now offensive and/or hurtful. (Think of the smooth, almost unnoticeable way that the McKissacks changed Prince Bumppo’s self-denigrating attitudes, in The Story of Dr. Dolittle.) There is not even anything especially new and startling about the understandable desire to pick up the adventures of a well-loved character, and take them in a different, perhaps equally plausible direction, either as a sequel or as a "what would have happened if...," as was done by Ruth Plumly Thompson in writing nineteen additional Oz books, and Jane Conly with her continuation of the story of the rats of NIMH.
But when all three of these changes happen in one book - when Rachel Field’s original Hitty: Her First Hundred Years is radically cut in length and the deliberately old-fashioned, leisurely narrative is changed to a shortened, more modern, faster-moving style; when removal of objectionable language necessitates changes so far-reaching as to amount to altering or omitting substantial amounts of the book; when the plot itself is changed starting with the end of the original chapter 11 - then this is no longer an adaptation. It appears to be partly rewriting of the original book, and partly an entirely new book.
Is It Worth the Effort?
Is this new book worth the effort it took? That is, of course, a matter of opinion. All the offensive references to "Injun," "heathens," and "savages," the stereotyped brawling Irish, the minstrel-show Black dialect are gone, and their loss will make modern readers much more comfortable. The original Hitty, in its leisurely pacing and interest in the small details of everyday life, might not seem as zippy as the new Hitty, whose adventures start with the first sentence and who manages to meet more people of note during her century than most of her readers ever heard of. In taking Hitty to the South during the Civil War, Wells launches into a new history that has Hitty meeting everyone from Mary Chesnut to Teddy Roosevelt’s family, and includes new episodes involving African-Americans, Jews, and the Crash of 1929. It has more action than does the old Hitty, certainly more awareness of the world, even a bit of historical consciousness (in its half-apologies for historical facts now unpalatable, such as whaling), and if these changes remind some readers of those textbooks that try to sweeten "social studies" by having historical events retold by fictional characters, that doesn’t mean that such exercises can’t serve a useful purpose.
The new and omnipresent illustrations, colorful, glossy, and inescapable, show a Hitty as noticeable and full of individual personality as her predecessor was quiet, prim, and retiring - this new version leaves nothing at all to the imagination, not even the details of Hitty’s new underclothing, now strangely changed from original chemise to "camisole shirt" without any particular reason for the change.
But in these global changes, Hitty, as Rosemary Wells says, "suddenly belonged to me. Now new live branches flowered and Hitty’s adventures tumbled suddenly into a much noisier and more diverse American landscape." The book is no longer a chronicle of the attitudes of a century of American life (including attitudes we now find unacceptable), but has become our current, Year - 2000 interpretation of what Hitty’s century was, and there’s a vast difference.
Hitty as Spokesdoll
From being an observer and recorder of events, with ideas that are of her author’s own time, seventy years before our own, Hitty has become a plot device for conveying currently acceptable attitudes. From commenting on fashions, ideas, and what were once considered appropriate manners, Hitty has evolved into a spokesdoll for the events of American political and economic change. Nuances have been lost, even the old insistence on the randomness of events has been lost in Wells’ rewriting of Hitty’s necklace as an element present at the beginning and at the end also, a kind of alpha and omega of Hittydom that is not necessary in order to appreciate and wonder about what the history of this ordinary little doll might be, and which interferes with that wonder by introducing a facile circularity to the plot.
Are these changes acceptable? Does Hitty now really "belong to" Rosemary Wells, rather than to Rachel Field? Possibly - but in that case, the book should reflect that, and should not be called "Rachel Field’s Hitty," with a cover proclaiming it to be the "1930 Newbery Award Winner." This is no longer the book that was awarded that Newbery; Rachel Field would barely recognize this over-illustrated and drastically changed story. In all her misfortunes and odd adventures, poor Hitty never dreamed of anything like this.
Books of Interest to Children’s Librarians
Burke, Jim. I Hear America Reading: Why We Read, What We Read. Heinemann, 1999. $12.50. ISBN 0325-00134-0.
Jim Burke is an English teacher at Burlingame High School in the San Francisco Bay Area. The majority of his students seemed to dislike reading to such a degree that Burke wrote a letter to The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, asking anyone interested to write a letter to his students, expressing why reading could be personally fulfilling. He was stunned by the thousands of letters he received, and the variety of the respondents.
This slim book is a selection of those letters; many from retired people, some from young children, many from people outside of California. Several of the most memorable came from those incarerated in prison, expressing how books were able to "free" them, even these readers who were behind bars. Eddie Burnett, from Pelican Bay State Prison, wrote "Books contain the solutions to the mysteries that are hiding inside each and every one of us." Any librarian approaching "burn-out" will be inspired by these letters.
The book concludes with an extensive collection of "Top Ten" lists. These lists cover a variety of topics, from "Ten Books To Make You Laugh Out Loud" to "Ten Books In Search Of The Truth." It was a pleasant surprise to see that children’s books made it onto several lists, even those without a theme relating to children. For example, Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince is included on the list, "Ten Books For The Philosophical." This is one to share with the "adult" librarians.
FILMS FOR BIBLIOPHILES
"Nancy Drew, Detective" (1938), "Nancy Drew - Reporter"(1938), "Nancy Drew - Troubleshooter" (1939), and "Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase" (1939). Warner Bros. See Turner Movie Classics for date and time; "Nancy Drew, Detective" available on video for $9.95 or $19.95 on Amazon.com.
It’s not just the recent spate of movies derived from children’s books like Stuart Little that are popular, this is a trend that started back when movies were only available in black and white. The "Nancy Drew" books inspired four movies starring teen actress Bonita Granville, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "These Three," a sanitized version of Lillian Hellman’s "The Children’s Hour." Wanting a vehicle for the thirteen-year-old Oscar nominee, and wanting something comparable to MGM’s "Andy Hardy" series, Warner Bros. bought the rights to Nancy Drew for $6,000.
Nancy as played by Granville is smart and spunky, but a little hyperactive, more Betty Hutton than Myrna Loy. At least she was the right age - old enough to drive the roadster but looking like a high school girl; Granville was actually 15 and 16 when the films were made. Boyfriend Ned Nickerson’s name was changed to Ted, played with a healthy skepticism by Frankie Thomas, who is always slightly irritated with Nancy’s impulsive nature. Nancy’s father also appears, but not her two female friends, Bess and George.
The films each run a little over an hour, so they were made to be "B" pictures, but the stories were easy to follow, had a tight, logical mystery, and were fast paced. There were unfortuate stereotypes, especially of African-Americans, and the heavy use of guns which was not the case in the books. There was a lot of humor, and an occasion musical number.
Turner Classic Movies, a pay-cable television channel, is currently running the four films. Check their schedule or website for day and time, as they rerun films on a regular basis. For more on Nancy Drew, check out the following:
The Nancy Drew Scrapbook, by Karen Plunkett-Powell, St. Martin’s, 1993, or The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys, by Carole Kismaric & Marvin Heiferman, Fireside (S&S), 1998.
Penny Peck,
San Leandro Public Library