From: Lyn Miller-Lachmann <lynml_at_me.com>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:03:46 +0100

OK, I'll bite on this one. I just reviewed a picture book that's coming out this month from Canadian publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside called The Stamp Collector. Author Jennifer Lanthier has based her story on the experiences of two Chinese political prisoners whose cases came to the attention of PEN Canada. The fictional story concerns a "city boy" who grows up to become a prison guard to support his family, and a "country boy" who lands in prison after criticizing factory conditions and the destruction of the environment.

While the activist characters in The Stamp Collector are already adults, the book shows that it's never too early to present issues of human rights to children. Young peoples' activism takes the form of children from all over the world writing to the imprisoned "country boy," and the "city boy," an avid stamp collector, saving the stamps from the letters. Readers see that the letters do gain attention, they result in better conditions for the political prisoner, and while it may be too late to help him, the letters from the world's children raise awareness and create empathy among those who see them. In my review of the picture book, I suggested that exploring human rights issues for children at the primary level can take the form of "How would you want people to treat you?" and "How do we treat each other in this classroom/school community?" extrapolated to "How should governments treat their people?"

A good nonfiction companion to The Stamp Collector is the picture book We Are All Born Free, which presents the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a format and with language geared to readers at the elementary level.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann Gringolandia (Curbstone Press/Northwestern University Press, 2009) Rogue (Penguin/Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013)
Received on Fri 05 Oct 2012 06:03:46 PM CDT