From: Bonnie Withers <bon2626wit>
Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 18:36:58 -0500

Hi Everyone, This has been a wonderful thread, tugging me back and forth through time and themes. I've wanted to post but it has been, as many of you have noted, very difficult to pick one or two titles. In the one-room schoolhouse in northern Wisconsin I attended for my first six grades, the "library" consisted of one bookcase about 3 feet wide by 5 feet tall. Although the bookmobile came every two weeks, that in-house bookcase was my mainstay. Two items stand out. One was a collection of children's poetry entitled Silver Pennies with an unforgettable poem
"Vinegar Man".

  I believe the most influential book on that shelf was one of a series of biographies. They had orange covers and the illustrations were black silhouettes. (I think they were an early version of the Landmark series.) I read them all, but the one that made the greatest impact was the biography of George Washington Carver. This was my introduction to blacks, to slavery, to the Klan, to the unbelievable struggle of those times for African-Americans and to the will to overcome a degree of adversity and prejudice I couldn't imagine. I read it several times and can still recall staring in disbelief at the simple and powerful illustrations. This story was not anywhere in the school curriculum and I don't remember talking to the teacher or anyone else about it, but it gave birth to a concern for social justice that never left me.

Bonnie Withers School Library Media Program Coordinator School of Information Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Received on Sun 28 May 2006 06:36:58 PM CDT