Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer & Illus by Ekua Holmes

This beautiful book is about the big bang. How that works as a topic for a picture is hard to imagine, but Bauer and Holmes make it work! 

Euka Holmes does the most amazing work. 

She layers paper collage for these super detailed and subtle images. 

Like woah!!

Seriously. This is a beautifully illustrated book about physics for kids. 

There was talk about this one for a Caldecott last year. That didn't happen, but it did win the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. 

The ash of those dying stars gathered into planets....

So much movement and suppressed passion in these pictures!

All of the universe was preparing and waiting for YOU. 

You took a big breath 

of the same air 

once breathed 

by woolly mammoths.

 You cried tears

 that were once salty seas. 

Your hair 

once the carbon in a leaf. 

I love this spread!!

All of us, the stuff of stars. 

Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier

See how spangled that cover is with medals? This book is a big deal. It deserves all those medals and more. The illustrations are bigger than life (isn't that an incredible portrait of MLK on the cover?!), the words are spare enough really nail you with their simple truth, and the message is one that never grows old. 

All men are created equal. And to make things happen, you have to DO something. 

I also love the concept of Martin's words changing things. Words are big and important. Use good ones!

Martin grew up in a world that was not fair. And his mother never let him think it was right or fair. 

His father was a minister. So he was around beautiful, important words all his life. 

By the time he himself was a minister, he knew as many big words as he needed to change history. To make the world more fair. 

And he changed the world. He was bold and honest. He became the face of his people. 

I saw an article a few years ago about how school teachers and other water down MLK. He had a message of peace and love, but there was also a realist in him that knew there would be a lot of egg carts upset by what he was trying to accomplish. And he didn't shy away from that. He didn't worry about making people uncomfortable. He wanted people to be uncomfortable with the status quo. 

He wasn't going to wait for some distant, future promise. He was going to make today the promise.

And he knew he might be stopped. He knew he was facing some of the fiercest hatred because of the uncomfortable truths he preached. 

Remember,

 if I am stopped,

 this movement 

will not be stopped, 

because God is 

with this movement. 

This movement was not just Martin Luther King Jr. He never meant it to be. He just stepped up to be the leader for a movement much bigger than himself. 

This is my favorite picture in the entire book. I am not artistic, so I can't really tell you why I love this picture so much, but I just love it. The unflinching stare, the tattered flag, put back together--this is what the civil rights movement did. It demanded that the America that was broken for them be made whole again. 

Words are a big deal. Words can change the commonplace into history changing vehicles. 

Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford and Illustrated by Kadir Nelson

I had a promising Martin Luther King Jr. book on order at the library, which I intended to do for today, but  I was a little behind schedule in requesting it. Oh well, I can consider it very early reasearch for next year. Or I could be wild and crazy and post it not on Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day. 

In lieu of MLK books, I will do another amazing African American, Harriet Tubman. 

I am a little conflicted about this book. Harriet Tubman is an amazing woman and the illustration by Kadir Nelson are gorgeous and glowing. But Harriet Tubman is carrying on a conversation with God a lot of the way. Now I have a fierce belief and trust in God, but I also have a...well... for lack of a better term, New England reticence, that makes me feel a relationship with God is a pretty private thing. Not because I am ashamed, but because it is too precious a thing to pull out and have random people poke and prod. 

So in some ways, I feel like I am eavesdropping where I shouldn't be when I read this book. But that is just my own weird hang up. 

This really is an amazing story. 

The words are lyrical.

"I set the North Star in the heavens and I mean for you to be free."

I can't even imagine how much those words would have meant to a slave. 

Aren't the pictures fabulous? 

The book chronicles the difficulties of her own, first journey north, with just a brief mention at the end about her bringing others. 

Being a runaway was almost as bad as being a slave--the constant fear and worry. But the hope and light of the future, of being free, would have been something slaves never had. 

She had to hide for days in a potato hole. Seven days I believe. Can you imagine the endurance? The uncomfortable, crampedness of it all? 

"As far as you can walk with me, my child, and I can carry you."

She reaches freedom safely, (forgot to take a picture of this page, but it is the picture from the cover). Oh the peace and beauty of that moment. Of being able to walk free. Of being safe after the grueling journey and constant vigilance.

And then, life as a freed woman. But all the while, she was thinking of the ones she left behind. 

And for them, and many others, she was willing to go through all that pain, the fear and uncertainty, to win them their freedom too. She took nineteen trips south and brought back as many as three hundred slaves to freedom. 

An incredible, selfless woman.