Politics in Practice
January 2, 2017 by Betsy Bird
It has been a crazy December. So just in brief then, here are 100 of the books that showed up on my 31 Days, 31 Lists series that I personally enjoyed the most. I do this list each year as a kind of personal bookkeeping. Go about your business. We’ll be back to our regularly […]
December 31, 2016 by Betsy Bird
And that, as they say, is that. A noble experiment runs its natural course. For those of you who followed along every day, I thank you. It’s been a thrill, an exhausting exhausting thrill, to bring you a different list of great 2016 books every day in December. Now we find ourselves on the cusp […]
December 30, 2016 by Betsy Bird
No excuses! These are just the books that I read in 2016 that I thought knocked it out of the park. These aren’t the “best of the year”. These are just the books that were particularly good and that somehow crossed my radar. I read a lot more than what you’ll see here, but I […]
December 28, 2016 by Betsy Bird
I peer into the darkness and at long last I see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’re almost there! Almost at the end of this month’s 31 Days, 31 Lists challenge. I’m certainly delighted, not least because I’ve managed to keep it up so far (knocking on wood now as hard as […]
December 27, 2016 by Betsy Bird
It’s finally come! The list is nearing its end. So it is with great delight that I present to you some of the last of the lists. Today’s is particularly long, celebrating what I consider to be some of the best books of 2016. Since so many of them have shown up on my other […]
December 26, 2016 by Betsy Bird
During the 2016 Boston Globe-Horn Book Colloquium Carol Boston Weatherford and Ekua Holmes spoke together about the art of writing about other people. During the speech they mentioned how part of their job is to break down “the canonical boundaries of biography.” Too often kids read the same biographies about the same people over and […]
ADVERTISEMENT
December 25, 2016 by Betsy Bird
Note that I didn’t specify which holidays, of course. These are just the books I think did a slam bang job of lauding their respective days of celebration. Enjoy one and all! 2016 Transcendent Holiday Titles Babushka: A Christmas Tale by Dawn Casey, ill. Amanda Hall Oh, certainly this isn’t the first Babushka title you’ve […]
December 24, 2016 by Betsy Bird
There were no science books on the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for 2016. Nor in 2015. Nor 2014. Bomb in 2013 was sort of a science book, so we’ll count that. And Moonbird that year certainly was. Yet it’s often surprising how consistently science and nature get overlooked when they’re handing out awards […]
December 23, 2016 by Betsy Bird
For a year or two I helped sit on the committee for the New York Historical Society’s book prize. Each year it goes to books that, “… honor the best children’s historical literature and encourage authors to continue to create engaging and challenging narratives that provide a window into the past for middle readers and […]
December 22, 2016 by Betsy Bird
Earlier this year I had a lovely lunch with an author of nonfiction titles for kids. As we discussed the wide range of nonfiction available to children these days she lamented the fact that we’ve become so narrow in what we deem worthy of our children’s attention. Sticking strictly to what we consider to be […]
Politics in Practice
by John Chrastka
Enter your email address below to receive notifications of new blog posts by email.