From Cover to Cover (4 page)

Before you begin to read any nonfiction book, you should look at it critically to see how it is organized. In longer books of nonfiction, a
table of contents often provides a clear picture of a book’s organization. Take, for example, the table of contents in Stephen Krensky’s
Comic Book Century: The History of American Comic Books
:

Introduction

Superheroes Take Off

The Comics Go to War

Thriving on the Home Front

Comics under Fire

A New Era

Going Underground

Looking Forward and Back

The World Turned Upside Down

Epilogue

Even without dates cited, we can ascertain that his book is arranged chronologically. Now let’s take the chapter headings in Catherine Thimmesh’s excellent account of the 1974 discovery of what was then the oldest known human ancestor,
Lucy Long Ago: Uncovering the Mystery of Where We Came From
:

It

Child or Grownup?

Boy or Girl?

Known Species or New?

Ancient or Modern?

Wobbling or Walking?

Image?

Lucy

Just by looking at the chapter titles, you can see a logical order in Thimmesh’s arrangement of her subject matter, beginning with the discovery of a fossil skeleton that so completely flummoxed paleontologists, it could only be thought of as “it.” From there, Thimmesh presents the sorts of questions the discovery raised, beginning with the most elemental ones about age and gender, then moving on to more complex questions about where the skeleton fit in the context of evolution, and ending with a more fleshed out identity. Each chapter follows the scientific methods used to answer the questions posed, thus providing readers with a sense of how science works in addition to the answers.

Many shorter books for young children have a straight narrative that is not broken up into chapters. That doesn’t necessarily mean the books lack logical organization. A common pattern in books of information for young children is to begin with the familiar and move to the unfamiliar. A book for young children on the subject of tigers, for example, might start out with house cats, an animal familiar to most children, and then move by extension to the less familiar animal, tigers. This technique takes into account what children are likely to know at a particular age and uses their common knowledge as a foundation. The opening paragraph of
Sisters & Brothers: Sibling Relationships in the Animal World
, by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page, provides a good example:

Each subsequent double-page spread in the book is labeled to show the characteristic it demonstrates: one at a time, quadruplets, sisters, a large family, a very large family, competition, sibling rivalry, playing games, learning together, living together, working together, cooperating, staying together, stepsisters and stepbrothers, only child. Note that even though each page can be looked at as a self-contained whole, there is still a logical progression from one characteristic to the next.

A clear logical sequence can also be seen in Gail Gibbons’s easy picture books about different sports written for very young readers,
My Baseball Book
,
My Basketball Book
,
My Football Book
, and
My Soccer Book
. Even though every volume deals with a different sport, each one follows the same order:

Equipment

Playing field

Object of the game

Number of players on a team

Player positions

Length of the game

How a game starts

What happens in a game

How teams score

Rules and penalties

Breaks in the game

How play resumes after a break

How the game ends

Whenever you set out to evaluate a book of information you should always try to get a sense of the book’s distinct parts and how they are related to one another—in other words, how the information is organized.
Shorter works that are not divided into chapters might have internal headings that will set off the various parts of the text. The distinct parts should, at the very least, be clear to you as you are reading the book; if they’re not, this is likely an indication that the author has not succeeded in clearly organizing the material for a young audience.

One final type of organization of the book’s material is with an alphabetical index that appears at the end of the book. Good indexes give readers access to specific pieces of information within the body of the text.

ILLUSTRATIONS

When the winners of the first Sibert Medal were announced in 2001, many were pleasantly surprised with the inclusion of a graphic novel,
Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned
, by Judd Winick. Using the conventions of a comic book, cartoonist Judd Winick told the moving story of his experiences as part of the cast of MTV’s
The Real World: San Francisco
, when he was assigned a roommate named Pedro Zamora, who was gay and HIV-positive. Getting to know Pedro changed Winick’s life, and his book-length comic provides the perfect vehicle for his seriocomic account of their friendship.

Since the publication of
Pedro and Me
we have begun to see a steady stream of graphic novels aimed at teens and, more recently, at children. Those that fall into the nonfiction category are among the best of the genre, and they range from a candid memoir of a young ballet dancer in
To Dance: A Memoir
to a dramatic visual account of a single escape made by Harry Houdini in
Houdini: The Handcuff King
. The speed with which graphic novels have taken hold in the children’s book industry and their increasing popularity with children and teens is perhaps a testament to a growing recognition of the needs and interests of visual learners.

As traditional children’s nonfiction has become more and more visual in recent years, illustrations have become a more essential part of the overall structure. Indeed, many of the finest books of information engage young readers by asking them to look for some specific thing in an accompanying photograph or drawing, encouraging interplay between the text and illustrations. In Sally M. Walker’s
Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland
, dozens of photographs of skeletal remains from an archaeological dig in Jamestown draw the readers’ attention to notable features, such as semicircular grooves in a man’s teeth and a large piece of broken pottery lying unceremoniously on top of a boy’s skeleton. Here the illustrations are not only being used to illustrate the text but also to draw children into the scientific process by showing that scientists formulate theories from observations.

Color photographs are being used today in a great number of science books to convey information that would be otherwise inaccessible. Seymour Simon has used the extraordinary photographs made available by NASA expeditions in recent years in his books about the solar system, such as
Destination: Jupiter
. NASA photographs of landscapes from Mars are placed side by side with photos taken in the Atacama Desert in Chile to show their similarities in
Life on Earth and Beyond: An Astrobiologist’s Quest
, by Pamela S. Turner. The Atacama Desert is just one of the extreme environments featured here in text and photographs; and whether they were taken here on Earth or on Mars, they give children views of places to which they wouldn’t otherwise have access. Nic Bishop uses high-speed photography and extreme close-ups in books such as
Red-Eyed Tree Frog
and
Spiders
to make it possible for children to see small creatures and observe behaviors that would be impossible to observe in their natural settings.

Recent advances in photo reproduction have opened the door to a
popular subgenre of children’s nonfiction: the photo-essay. These books combine text and photographs to give readers a you-are-there sense and cover a wide range of subjects from a typical day in the life of the raptor rescue center in St. Paul, Minnesota, to the contrasting lives of a Palestinian boy and Jewish boy living in Jerusalem. Author-photographer Susan Kuklin has set the standard for excellence in this genre. Since 1984 she has produced photo-essays on a wide variety of topics for children from preschool through the teen years; all are based on primary research through interviews and observation, documented by her photographs. In
Families
, for example, she combines color photographs with first-person statements from children living in different kinds of families. Kuklin chooses her subjects carefully so that they represent her topic, and yet she always allows for enough diversity that a single person does not carry the responsibility for representing everyone. Houghton Mifflin’s series Scientists in the Field uses the photo-essay technique to document the work of different kinds of scientists while at the same time providing information about the science itself.
The Mysterious Universe: Supernovae, Dark Energy, and Black Holes
, by Ellen Jackson, with photographs and illustrations by Nic Bishop, follows astronomy professor Alex Filippenko on a research trip to the Keck Observatory atop an inactive volcano in Hawaii as accompanying text offers an introduction to Dr. Filippenko’s area of expertise: dark energy.

Color reproduction in books has become so sophisticated lately that it is quite easy to be bowled over by a book’s dazzling illustrations. It is important, however, not to lose sight of the main purpose of illustrations in a book of information: to provide information by complementing, supporting, or extending the text. Look closely at a book’s illustrations to determine what exactly they add to the work. How do they relate to the text? Are they merely decorative, or do they actually enhance the text in some way? Do they make the subject matter more appealing? Are
they up-to-date? Are captions clear and accurate? Do the captions add supplementary information or repeat what’s in the text?

DESIGN

We often speak of book design in terms of overall aesthetic appeal, but when it comes to nonfiction, design becomes an important aspect of getting information across to readers. In addition to making the subject seem more inviting, the design of a nonfiction book can be used to clarify the sequence of ideas and to show how the parts are related. Headings and subheadings can be set in different type sizes and styles to illuminate the organization of ideas.

Loree Griffin Burns’s
Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion
integrates two simultaneous narratives, one that describes the scientist at work and the other, the science itself. Two distinct styles of typography clearly distinguish the two from each other. In addition, the historical background that opens each chapter and the photo captions are also highlighted in different typographic styles. Thanks to design, the points of reference are always clear to young readers.

Design is a big factor in the success of the Magic School Bus series by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen. Open to any page in a book from this series and note the various strands of information operating simultaneously through text, dialogue, and student reports. In
The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System
, for example, a fourth strand is introduced with the teacher Ms. Frizzle occasionally reading from her lesson plans; this is clearly marked off from other dialogue simply through the use of pink lined paper as the background of her dialogue bubbles. There is a lot going on on every page of the books in this series. An innovative design allows not only for this to make perfect sense but also for the story to function as science and fantasy at the same time.

Candace Fleming excels at creating outstanding works of nonfiction
about history using what she terms a scrapbook style. These highly visual volumes are arranged by themes and topics; and each double-page spread includes photographs, drawings, and short bursts of text that provide a context for the illustrative material.
The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary
uses only one style of typography throughout, carefully selected to add historical authenticity; but on any given page, each piece stands out thanks to an exceptional design that uses boxes, bars, borders, banners, headings, and subheadings. The design here has two functions: it provides unity and clarity for the disparate pieces of text and illustration, and it gives a sense of the time period in which the Lincolns lived by using typographical conventions of the mid-nineteenth century.

A fully integrated, successful design does not call attention to itself, so the critical reader must look closely at all the elements of book design to see how they work. Look first at the typography. Is the type size appropriate for the intended audience? Children are very sensitive to the size of a book’s type. Large type and shorter line length make text more readable for children in third and fourth grades; but by the time a child is in fifth grade, large type signals that the book is for “babies” and no self-respecting fifth grader would be caught dead with it. These same children are put off, however, by a sea of type; a medium-sized typeface with lots of white space on each page seems to suit them best.

In addition to type size, look at the type style. Are different styles used consistently to get across different kinds of information? If headings and subheadings are used, do they appear in different type styles, or are subheadings bulleted or indented to set them off from headings?