Nonfiction Matters

July 3, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

What Do You Like to Do?

My older son just finished a week of basketball camp; most days just after he finished shooting he got into a car to be driven to a game his travel baseball team was playing. He was playing some form of organized sport for about 11 hours a day. There were only three other things he had space for: food, the Yankees, and reading, His choices seem so obvious to me that I wonder why we have any trouble with boys and reading at all. At breakfast: the sports section -- how did the Yankees do, down to the fine print of the stats. After dinner, a bio of a sports hero -- Derek Jeter, Yogi Berra, greatest world series games; and then, to relax some funny book Andrew Clements, Dan Gutman, Louis Sacher. 

I know boys are different -- some would be reading fantasy and hate sports. Charles Smith tells me that his son, also on a select basebal...Read More

June 30, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Always Nice When Our Discussions are Echoed in the Press

We've been talking here about music in history and about historical interpretation. Well what should my morning Times bring me but an article about a NOVA show tonight that features Dr. Oliver Sacks and his case studies of music and the brain, tinyurl.com/m5ff9c and this Science Times piece about Dr. Steve Lekson tinyurl.com/lf252y
Dr. Lekson has a theory about why the predecessors of the Hopi and the Navaho moved from one site to another in the southwest. He believes the leaders of the communities were moving along a single north-south meridian. The focus of the article, though, is not about that theory, but rather his entire approach -- and that perfectly matches our discussions.

Dr. Lekson claims that: &ldq...Read More

June 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

What Design Does in NonFiction

I am working with the editors of the Horn Book on a book about literature for young readers -- aimed at parents, teachers, librarians (the gatekeepers who select, buy, and worry about the books kids read). One of the editors asked me for suggestions for a nonfiction spread to use as an example, to illustrate good NF design. At first I thought of Nic Bishop, but we are already heavy on science images. And so I went to my shelves to look at my own haphazard library of NF to see what I really liked, and why. The more I looked, the more clear the answer became: excellence in NF design comes down to one word: perfection.

In fiction, a designer needs to pick a good typeface and book size. She needs to match the space between the lines and the size of the words to the expected readership. She needs to work with an artist to come up ...Read More

June 26, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Did You See the Articles about the 35,000 Year Old Flute Found in Germany?

Here it is -- and you can even hear music played on a wooden replica of the bone flute: tinyurl.com/l2hjkn Of course while we can reasonably estimate how a person blew into the bone, and we can see where the player put his or her fingers, we don't know what rhythms were used -- what clusters of tones humans were after so long ago. Everything about this find, though, is breathtaking -- the pure aesthetic beauty of the flute itself; how carefully it was made; that it is from so very long ago -- when Neanderthals were still alive; and that it survived.

My last blog was about how we ought to be able to create digital books to explain the now to our readers. I also think we ought to be able to create sound environments, so students can hear the...Read More

June 23, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

All Day While Working On My Own Projects, I Keep Checking for News from Iran, Don't You?

We have had the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, and while this is in some ways the Green protest (the leaders are careful to say it is not a revolution) in so many other ways it is obviously the 2.0 Turnaround. We've all seen how twitter, Facebook, and Google have played a part in opening small cracks in the government wall of censorship, and allowing the opposition in Iran to be in contact. Clearly both the struggle going on there, and the means used, are ideal subjects to share with American teenagers. When Obama quoted Dr. King he was making the analogy every teacher can use -- either way, to allow our kids to identify, and to show how the Civil Rights model is still making change today. 

But what can we do? Any bo...Read More