Reading Room Blog

          What made Jay Leno crave an audience?  What lesson did Steve Forbes learn early and never forget? What influenced Steve Wozniak?  

          Children’s literature specialist Anita Silvey conducted interviews with these three and over 100 other people in the arts, business, and sciences to discover what inspired and influenced them as children.  The result is her new book, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book, Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life.”

    Some books seem to fly under the radar.  They don’t garner the big awards or make the bestseller lists, they’re just quietly checked out of libraries over and over again.  One of my new favorites in this category is “The Thumb in the Box” by Ken Roberts.

    It begins, “This is a story about a fire truck being driven into the ocean and two people taking off their thumbs.  Don’t worry, though.  Nobody gets hurt.”  No self-respecting third grade audience will let you stop reading after that!

On Thursday, March 18, 2010, Mark Hamilton Lytle of Bard College and author of The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, will give a talk on the scientist. The lecture, part of the University's Great Lives series, is free and open to the public.

    The gold medals get all the attention at the Olympics, but winners of the silver and bronze medals are proud, too.  So it goes with children’s book awards as well.  Anyone would be thrilled to win the Newbery or Caldecott Medals, but earning an Honor (as the runners-up are called) is nothing to sneeze at.

    This year’s honor books – and yes, they earn a silver medal – include one of those fascinating true stories that makes readers say, “how come I never knew that?”