Reading Room Blog

    Stonewall Hinkleman is a typical twelve-year-old boy whose parents are ardent Civil War re-enactors.  This means that every weekend he’s dragged (his word) to another Civil War battle site.  His father reveres an ancestor, Cyrus Hinkleman, who fought and died in the war, despite the fact that, as Stonewall puts it, “He was shot in the butt… Which can only mean one thing.  He was running away when he was shot.”  Dressed in a scratchy wool uniform and dragging a bugle that he barely knows how to play, Stonewall sulks around wishing he could play his Game Boy.

Born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington went on to become a nationally-known leader and educator. He shared his educational philosophy with U.S. presidents and served as the first president of Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California.

Tooth Painter

On Thursday, January 14, 2010, James E. Goehring of the University of Mary Washington’s Department of Classics, Philosophy and Religion gave a talk on Jesus of Nazareth. The lecture was part of the University's Great Lives series.

    As we all respond to the tragedy in Haiti, share these children’s books about the island for an inside look at the people, the place and the culture.

    Diane Wolkstein visited Haiti to collect the traditional stories in her collection, “The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales.”

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Animals are incapable of reason, or so we’ve been told, but we imaginative humans keep talking to our dogs and cats as if they could do algebra. In this poem, Ann Struthers looks into the mystery of instinctive behavior.

Not Knowing Why

If you like "One Shot" by Lee Child, you may also like these titles and authors:

Protect and Defend by Vince Flynn.
In the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, CIA director Irene Kennedy and operative Mitch Kelly are dispatched to the Middle East to diffuse Iran's sworn retaliation against the United States. (Catalog summary)

Winners of the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal, Printz Award, Coretta Scott King Award, and more were announced this morning at the American Library Association's midwinter conference in Boston.

See the list of 2010 Award-Winning Children's Books and 2010 Award-Winning Teen Books.

For a list of winners for all ALA book awards, see this press release.