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Fact and fiction in books for younger readers
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From: Marc Aronson <75664.3110>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 17:30:10 -0500
In the 2/22 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Joanna Long has an expanded and updated version of the Five Owls piece she did on fact and fiction in books for younger readers. It deals with Amistad, movies, books, and some of the broader issues of how to present history in fact or fiction. I suspect it will be hard to get advance copies. But the LATBR is distributed in some Barnes & Noble stores and it is worth reading.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we too often view history the way we too often view math: a disagreeable topic that somehow must be made more palatable to kids by being fictionalized. Perhaps that fits our general mood in which we seem more interested in memoir or autobiography than in national history.
Perhaps we no longer are sure of what history matters to us, what we need to know. We all agree that we cannot teach narrow history, that every group's story counts. But we don't quite know what our common history is, how we piece together all those strands into a grand story that matters to all of us at all ages. Lacking that sense of a grand narrative, we feel more comfortable with personal history -- how one person faced difficulty and overcame it. And lacking those actual narratives from many time periods, we have to invent them.
To put it another way, some adults reenact Civil War battles, but not all adults know or care to know exactly what happened at Gettysburg. We are happy to let some dress up every weekend, and some ignore it entirely. We don't know what we all need to know. And so we are not sure of what we must pass along to children. The one thing we can easily agree on is that we can care for an individual in another time and place. And so we invent them.
Marc Aronson
Received on Fri 20 Feb 1998 04:30:10 PM CST
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 17:30:10 -0500
In the 2/22 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Joanna Long has an expanded and updated version of the Five Owls piece she did on fact and fiction in books for younger readers. It deals with Amistad, movies, books, and some of the broader issues of how to present history in fact or fiction. I suspect it will be hard to get advance copies. But the LATBR is distributed in some Barnes & Noble stores and it is worth reading.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we too often view history the way we too often view math: a disagreeable topic that somehow must be made more palatable to kids by being fictionalized. Perhaps that fits our general mood in which we seem more interested in memoir or autobiography than in national history.
Perhaps we no longer are sure of what history matters to us, what we need to know. We all agree that we cannot teach narrow history, that every group's story counts. But we don't quite know what our common history is, how we piece together all those strands into a grand story that matters to all of us at all ages. Lacking that sense of a grand narrative, we feel more comfortable with personal history -- how one person faced difficulty and overcame it. And lacking those actual narratives from many time periods, we have to invent them.
To put it another way, some adults reenact Civil War battles, but not all adults know or care to know exactly what happened at Gettysburg. We are happy to let some dress up every weekend, and some ignore it entirely. We don't know what we all need to know. And so we are not sure of what we must pass along to children. The one thing we can easily agree on is that we can care for an individual in another time and place. And so we invent them.
Marc Aronson
Received on Fri 20 Feb 1998 04:30:10 PM CST
