Redwoods - Jason Chin

Roaring Brook Press (Macmillan),2009
$16.95
36 pages
Five Stars *****
Front endpapers:Gray bark of tree on left, boy sitting on subway bend, looking at book on right
Back endpapers: Gray bark with author's note

I want to go to northern California RIGHT NOW.

A few years ago, on my journey across the country seeking out a new locale for myself, I stopped in many National Parks, traveling down lots of "Blue Highways", coast to coast. I've been down the entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, driven across Texas, the Mojave Desert, Canada, and the midwest. I've traveled from Maine to Florida many times. And I must say that one of the most amazing, overpowering feelings I've ever had is while driving through the Redwood Forest. This book partially explains why.

With words of nonfiction and gorgeous illustrationss portraying a fictional story as well as an informational one, this book is completely entrancing. In other words, the textual part of the story is facts about the Redwood Forest. The visual part of the story is of a young boy discovering a book about the redwoods, and reading it on the subway. But as he reads, he actually goes to the forest, he checks out the cones, he climbs up to the crown, he discovers animals and other plants that live in the giant trees. We get a feel for their enormity - nothing in the world growns taller. Fascinating information given in an extremely interesting way. Pour over the lovely illustrations, where you certainly do see a story going on.

This is a fantastic book!

Some other websites/blogs with lots more information than I gave:
Jason Chin's Website for the book
Fuse #8 Production (School Library Journal)
Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Green Poems - Jill Bennett

POETRY
Illustrated by different (British) artists?
Oxford University Press
1999
Rating: 3
59 poems by various authors

This is a collection of British...and some American....poets, divided into the following chapters:

One world, one home...
Where wild things grow
If we're not careful
Sad or happy?
Tomorrow's now

New Life

Springtime.
The light lingers
a little longer
in the evening sky.

Springtime.
Tiny seedlings
unfold green leaves
to the sun.

Springtime:
and the blossom
is the laughter
in the trees:

for the dead of winter
is defeated.

........Lois Rock

Planting the Trees of Kenya - Claire A. Nivola

The Story of Wangari Maathai
For: Everyone!
Pub: 2008
Rating: Super
Read: Sept. 3, 2008

Wangari Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. Born in 1940, she went to America to college on scholarhip, returning to her native Kenya after five years to find her country much changed. Water was gone from the sreambeds, land eroded, trees cut, and the people no longer living on the food they grew for themselves. This one woman, courageously and without giving up, spent the next 30 years growing trees from seeds, teaching the women of her country how to help her, and giving away tree seedlings to all - school children, prisoners, soldiers. It was hard work.

Text of book

"And so in the thirty years since Wangari began her movement, tree by tree, person by person, thirty million trees have been planted in Kenya - and the planting has not stopped."

An inspiring story. There are two books for adults - her memoir, Unbowed: A Memoir (2005), and The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003) that I'd now like to read. I will read this book to THA Student Government before our Passport to Peace planning begins.

The illustrations are lovely - shade after shade of green, using white as her emphasizing color in bold, beautiful watercolors. And, oh, the African fabrics! Luscious. And inspiring.