Saturday, May 30, 2020

What's New? Stacking the Shelves


Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. Hop on over there to ogle what other bloggers got this week.

For Review:
Image: Candlewick Press
Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford. Illustrated by Michele Wood.  Unpgd. Candlewick Press, April, 2020. 9780763691561.

Publisher synopsis: 
What have I to fear?
My master broke every promise to me.
I lost my beloved wife and our dear children.
All, sold South. Neither my time nor my body is mine.
The breath of life is all I have to lose.
And bondage is suffocating me.

Henry Brown wrote that long before he came to be known as Box, he “entered the world a slave.” He was put to work as a child and passed down from one generation to the next — as property. When he was an adult, his wife and children were sold away from him out of spite. Henry Brown watched as his family left bound in chains, headed to the deeper South. What more could be taken from him? But then hope — and help — came in the form of the Underground Railroad. Escape!

In stanzas of six lines each, each line representing one side of a box, celebrated poet Carole Boston Weatherford powerfully narrates Henry Brown’s story of how he came to send himself in a box from slavery to freedom. Strikingly illustrated in rich hues and patterns by artist Michele Wood, Box is augmented with historical records and an introductory excerpt from Henry’s own writing as well as a time line, notes from the author and illustrator, and a bibliography.
In a moving, lyrical tale about the cost and fragility of freedom, a New York Times best-selling author and an acclaimed artist follow the life of a man who courageously shipped himself out of slavery.

Image: Candlewick Press
The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity by Amy Alznauer. Illustrated by Daniel Myares. unpgd. Candlewick Press, April, 2020. 9780763690489.

Publisher synopsis: A mango . . . is just one thing. But if I chop it in two, then chop the half in two, and keep on chopping, I get more and more bits, on and on, endlessly, to an infinity I could never ever reach.


In 1887 in India, a boy named Ramanujan is born with a passion for numbers. He sees numbers in the squares of light pricking his thatched roof and in the beasts dancing on the temple tower. He writes mathematics with his finger in the sand, across the pages of his notebooks, and with chalk on the temple floor. “What is small?” he wonders. “What is big?” Head in the clouds, Ramanujan struggles in school — but his mother knows that her son and his ideas have a purpose. As he grows up, Ramanujan reinvents much of modern mathematics, but where in the world could he find someone to understand what he has conceived?

Author Amy Alznauer gently introduces young readers to math concepts while Daniel Miyares’s illustrations bring the wonder of Ramanujan’s world to life in the inspiring real-life story of a boy who changed mathematics and science forever. Back matter includes a bibliography and an author’s note recounting more of Ramanujan’s life and accomplishments, as well as the author’s father’s remarkable discovery of Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook.
A young mathematical genius from India searches for the secrets hidden inside numbers — and for someone who understands him — in this gorgeous picture-book biography.

I am really looking forward to reading these in the hopes of adding them to my Sixth Grade Picture Book Biography unit.

Purchased: My signed finished copy of Every Missing Piece arrived! I would've loved to have attended the launch for this one at Words in Maplewood, but alas. I reviewed an arc of this lovely book here.


If you leave a comment, leave the link to your stack. I will pop by and to check out your stack!

2 comments:

  1. I really want to read Every Missing Piece. I’m glad you were able to get a signed copy. I hope you love it!

    Aj @ Read All The Things!

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  2. Happy reading.
    www.rsrue.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete