Booktalk: It’s a challenge to transform the Nutcracker Suite’s romantic orchestra into jumpin’ jazz melodies, but that’s exactly what Duke Ellington and his collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, did.
BONUS! CD recording included.
Snippet:“I want to challenge myself…create music that can’t be categorized,” answered Duke. “Got any ideas?”
Booktalk: The story of the national cemetery–from the Revolutionary War to the present.
Snippet:Born during the Civil War, Arlington would become the last resting place for soldiers from all America’s conflicts, including the Revolutionary War.
Booktalk: Gertrude Simmons, also known as Zitkala-Sa (which means Red Bird) was born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota. She willingly left her home at age eight to go to a boarding school in Indiana. But Zitkala-Sa soon found herself caught between two worlds–white and Native American.
Snippet: The IRON HORSE
February 1884 From my playmates I heard that two paleface missionaries from the Land of Red Apples were in our village. They were from that class of white men who wore big hats and carried large hearts. When they came to our house, an interpreter who knew a smattering of my language joined them.
Booktalk: Alberto loved floating over Paris in his personal flying machine called a dirigible. He would tie it to a post, climb down, and spend the day shopping or meeting friends for coffee. But he wanted to make his invention even better.
Snippet:A crowd gathered around, excited to see the handsome Brazilian in person. “One day you’ll all have a flying machine!” he called out.
Booktalk: A boy named Izzy celebrates Jewish New Year at the water’s edge…
Snippet:Izzy loves this changing time of year. Some days sunglasses, someday sweaters. Apples, honey, the sound of the shofar, and his favorite part of Rosh Hashanah: Tashlich!
by Myron Uhlberg (Author) and Colin Bootman (Illustrator)
Booktalk: It is August 2005, and a hurricane named Katrina is bearing down on the Gulf Coast. See how Louis Daniel and his family cope with this natural disaster…
Snippet: Finally the rain stopped, and everything got real quiet.
Daddy opened the door. “Water’s rising fast,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The Great Moon Hoax
by Stephen Krensky (Author) and Josee Bisaillon (Illustrator)
Booktalk: New Telescope Sees All! Amazing Secrets to Be Revealed! So the headlines read in the New York Sun one day in the summer of 1835. For a week straight, the newspaper printed stories and pictures of the discoveries made using a new telescope in far-off Africa. And on the streets of New York City, hundreds of newsboys shouted the headlines at the top of their lungs: Heavens Filled with Buffalo! Moon Beavers! Man Bats! We Are Not Alone! But was it true?
Snippet:The boys were already in line when Jake and Charlie arrived. Each would pay sixty-seven cents for every hundred copies of the Sun they bought. The newspapers sold for a peny each, so a newsboy could make a profit of thirty-three cents on each hundred. But if he wasn’t careful, he could lose money, because unsold papers could not be returned.
Leonardo’s Monster
by Jane Sutcliffe (Author) and Herb Leonhard (Illustrator)
Booktalk: When Leonard da Vinci was just a boy, he was asked to paint a monster on a shield. See what happens in this biography…
Snippet:A man who worked for Leonardo’s father had made a shield for himself out of a stump of a fig tree. The man was a good friend but he was a terrible shield-maker. His shield was a lumpy, ugly thing.
A Giraffe Goes to Paris
by Mary Tavener Holmes (Author), John Harris (Author), and Jon Cannell (Illustrator)
Booktalk: Imagine a giraffe that can sail from Alexandria, Egypt, to Marseille, France, in a boat with a special hole for her neck. Imagine a giraffe that can walk from Marseille to Paris in forty-one days, wearing stylish boots and a cape. Imagine a giraffe that captures the attention of a hundred thousand spectators in Paris as she parades through the city in 1827…
Snippet:She was a present from the great pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, to the king of France, Charles X. No one in France had ever seen a giraffe. No one. So she was the perfect present.
