From the category archives:
Josefina by Jeanette Winter (Harcourt, 1996)
A day in the life of Oaxaca, Mexico folk-artist Josefina Aguilar comes to life in this treasure about her and her painted ceramic figures, one by one.
If you Google Josefina Aguilar’s name, you can find cool images of her work (for sale.)
El Chino by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)
Arizona-born Billy Wong remembered what his father told him-”In America, you can be anything you want to be.” Enchanted by bullfighting, Wong became the first Chinese-American matador.
Read an interview with author/illustrator Allen Say at the Eduplace web site.
A Boy Called Slow by Joseph Bruchac, illustrated by Rocco Baviera (Putnam, 1998)
From “Slow” to “Sitting Bull,” this moving account of the greatest Lakota Sioux warrior’s 1830s childhood shows how he grew into his new name.
The PBS site on New Perspectives on the West offers a biography of Sitting Bull with a number of links.
Lives of the Writers: Comedies, Tragedies (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt(Harcourt, 1994)
Novelist. Poet. Servant in royal court. Japan’s Shikibu is best known as author of The Tale of Genji, one of the earliest published novels of all time.
Read parts of Murasaki Shikibu’s diary online at Penn’s digital library site.
Kate Shelley: Bound for Legend by Robert D. San Souci (Dial, 1995)
A storm. A broken bridge. A train. Fifteen-year old Kate Shelley to the rescue. High drama in Iowa, July 6, 1881.
The Kate Shelley Railroad Museum run by the Boone County Historical Society is open June through September.
