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Biography and Autobiography -Reply -Reply
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From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 15:46:00 -600
Thank you everyone who has shared book titles and raised questions about biography and autobiography for children and young adults in recent days. Clearly there are a lot of issues - and books - for us to explore! Please continue to share your opinions and ideas.
On May 5, Ruth Gordon asked "Is it really necessary for very young children to have overly simplified biographies of the famous and not-so famous?" Anne Oelke replied that such books are a "good source of basic information for those students whose reading is not at a Gr 4-5 level" and help "encourage students to move beyond the encyclopedia."
I'd like to mention other approaches to biography for younger readers. "Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree" (Lee & Low, 1994) by William Miller, and Floyd Cooper's "Coming Home: From the Life of Lanston Hughes" (Philomel, 1994), are two examples of books in which children are offered a stories about the life - or an event in the life - of a well-known person when they were a child. Obviously such books do not serve the same purpose as a fact-filled biography that spans the life of an individual, but they offer younger elementary school-aged children the opportunity to become truly engaged in the life of someone who actually lived. Each of these stories may be enough in themselves to satisfy some children; others may, at various points throughout their lives, launch into deeper explorations of well-known individuals whom they first met as children themselves.
I do think it is a shame when I see a compelling life reduced to a series of "facts" that have no sense of the spirit or personality of the individual who is being profiled, and this can happen in biography for readers of all ages. I think one of the things that we as adults can keep in mind when evaluating biographies and autobiographies for young people is whether the presentation in a specific book engages us on any level. If it doesn't, chances are it won't engage a child, either.
Received on Wed 08 May 1996 04:46:00 PM CDT
Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 15:46:00 -600
Thank you everyone who has shared book titles and raised questions about biography and autobiography for children and young adults in recent days. Clearly there are a lot of issues - and books - for us to explore! Please continue to share your opinions and ideas.
On May 5, Ruth Gordon asked "Is it really necessary for very young children to have overly simplified biographies of the famous and not-so famous?" Anne Oelke replied that such books are a "good source of basic information for those students whose reading is not at a Gr 4-5 level" and help "encourage students to move beyond the encyclopedia."
I'd like to mention other approaches to biography for younger readers. "Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree" (Lee & Low, 1994) by William Miller, and Floyd Cooper's "Coming Home: From the Life of Lanston Hughes" (Philomel, 1994), are two examples of books in which children are offered a stories about the life - or an event in the life - of a well-known person when they were a child. Obviously such books do not serve the same purpose as a fact-filled biography that spans the life of an individual, but they offer younger elementary school-aged children the opportunity to become truly engaged in the life of someone who actually lived. Each of these stories may be enough in themselves to satisfy some children; others may, at various points throughout their lives, launch into deeper explorations of well-known individuals whom they first met as children themselves.
I do think it is a shame when I see a compelling life reduced to a series of "facts" that have no sense of the spirit or personality of the individual who is being profiled, and this can happen in biography for readers of all ages. I think one of the things that we as adults can keep in mind when evaluating biographies and autobiographies for young people is whether the presentation in a specific book engages us on any level. If it doesn't, chances are it won't engage a child, either.
Received on Wed 08 May 1996 04:46:00 PM CDT
