Trying to get a young sports-fan into reading? This has to be the coolest-looking sports biography ever. Catch the plastic-lined lenticular cover with three shifting views of Sandy Koufax pitching. Feast your eyes on the silver-gray graphite illustrations, bursting with movement, with red lines highlighting the blue and white Dodgers... Read More

Just when you think you’ve read about every possible subject, someone comes up with a biography about someone you never heard of who did something groundbreaking. Think Wilson “Willie” Bentley (who was the first person to photograph snowflakes, as described in Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, which... Read More

Poet Alice Low has always loved sports and writing poetry, so it's only natural that she should have written a collection of twenty winning poems explaining how each of 19 sports came to be. An introductory paragraph before each poem lays out factual information, but the poems themselves are full... Read More

Here's a book that will break your heart. In 2000, when Fumiko Ishioka, Director of the Tokyo Holocaust Center, acquired the suitcase of a Jewish child who was at Auschwitz during World War II, she set out to discover what happened to that child. First, there's the photograph of the... Read More

"Art is a thing that everybody does different. Nobody's drawing is better than someone else." That's what the author/illustrator states in her remarkable and instructive first book, though you may soon conclude that her drawings are way better than your own. Mind you, the author was only 8 when this... Read More

"There are good things about being president and there are bad things about being president." Thus starts the 2001 Caldecott Medal winner, a riotously funny, trivia and anecdote-loaded picture book tribute to the number one job I the U.S., illustrated with grandly humorous but affectionate watercolor caricatures of our presidents... Read More

Longest snowmobile journey? Largest monkey? Most valuable guitar? Longest fingernails? (The record holder, Lee Redmond, has fingernails 28 feet, 4.5 inches long, and they're still growing strong.) Who publishes the best collection of superlatives year after year? Only one name is on the tip of everyone's tongue, no matter how... Read More

Beginning with one of many well-chosen quotes-"I know that the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it."-this is a somber and absorbing biography of Annie Sullivan, who any schoolgirl can tell you was Helen Keller's... Read More

One day, when I was in third grade, I started to wonder about chalk. I wanted to know if a stick of chalk would melt in a sinkful of water. Unfortunately, I was in school at the time, and though I began my experiment in the bathroom adjacent to the... Read More

Starting with the Stone Age, the informative text and numerous zany illustrations in watercolor, gouache, and pencil take us century by century through the history of cooking and all the utensils we use for eating. It describes the food habits of mostly the well-to-do, who had time to fuss over... Read More

"Uh-oh! Someone needs cartooning help," says the little green-clad Magic Cartooning Elf, showing up at the side of a young princess who is discouraged that she can't draw well enough to make a comic. He starts a "real-life comic book adventure" with her that will serve to explain everything she... Read More

The 35 tangue-tungling poems in this seriously silly book are rhyming tributes to tongue twisters like "Unique New York" (which no one can say fast), about which Agee writes: "Unique New York, unique New York, / You know New York's unique. / You know you need unique New York, /... Read More

First, before you dig in to this handsome picture book biography about inventor, Philo (pronounced Phil-o) Farnsworth, the author includes a one-page essay about life on a farm in the American West in 1906, where Philo was born in a log cabin in Utah. Back then, there were no refrigerators,... Read More

Look no further if you've been wanting to buy a gift-worthy anthology of poetry, not just for your classroom or library, but for all the kids in your life. Julie Andrews, author of many children's books, including two splendid fiction books children continue to read and love-Mandy and  Read More

As part of the "Scientists in the Field" series, author Sy Montgomery has written another stellar profile of an admirable and committed scientist, animal-lover Lisa Dabek, a woman who has spent the past 20 years trekking through the cloud forests of New Guinea, studying the Matschie's (MATCH-EEZ) tree kangaroo of... Read More

While the cover looks like a large picture book fantasy story about dinosaurs, you'll quickly realize that this is the astonishing true account of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who in 1853 put together the first ever life-sized cement-cast models of dinosaurs, including an iguanadon and a forty-foot long megalosaurus. Until Hawkins... Read More

In 1841, seven-year-old Wes Powell was taunted, beaten, and stoned by classmates angry at his father, Reverend Powell's, abolitionist sermons. Wes left school and was tutored by a neighbor, a self-taught naturalist who believed in learning through observation and firsthand experience. Unnerved by a wave of anti-abolitionist violence, the Powells... Read More

Arguably the finest of the many books published for children in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, this scrapbook has it all: good looks; a meaty, quote-filled text that reads like a dream; scientific explanations children will inhale and understand; huge... Read More

The first page of this eloquent picture book will stun readers and listeners of all ages. Look at the handsome full-page painting of a somber young African American boy, barefoot, sitting on an upturned wooden barrel, his back against a brick wall. The text on the facing page states, simply,... Read More

What was the game of baseball like when it began, more than a century ago? First off, back then, you could get a runner out by soaking him. What’s that? First, examine the old-timey yellow and red watercolor and pencil-crayon cartoon illustration on the second page, and you’ll see a... Read More

Kids might not read this whole big compendium cover to cover, but as a book to dip into for truly funny and classic jokes, riddles, practical jokes, spotlights on major comedians, and advice on becoming a comedian, it's an endless source of material. There are more than 1,700 jokes here,... Read More

Look at this book’s comic book cover with tanks blazing and airplanes dropping bombs and explosions everywhere. See that helmeted soldier coming up from the hatch, his fist pumping the air triumphantly? Hold on a minute—that soldier looks like a kid. Hey, it is a kid—it's Jon Scieszka when he... Read More

Get to know the man behind the legend and the famous ride in a clearly written and handsomely laid out biography amply illustrated with stately brown-toned portraits, paintings, reproductions, maps, and photographs. As an apprentice to his French-born father, a master silversmith, Paul learned the family trade but also served... Read More

“Marveling at Marsupials,” is the first of many lively chapter headings, and that's just what you will do when you pore over the amiable narrative, fascinating descriptions, astonishing facts, and the plethora of color photos of that third group of mammals, the metatherians. What’s the largest living marsupial? It’s the... Read More