{"id":20166,"date":"2017-01-27T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T13:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20166"},"modified":"2017-01-27T08:00:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T13:00:01","slug":"bringing-history-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20166","title":{"rendered":"Bringing History to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a glorious example of ShelfTalker synergy, my colleague Kenny Brechner just posted a terrific piece on selling active nonfiction<\/a> yesterday. As proof of a trend perhaps, nonfiction has also been on my mind this week over in Texas.
\nWe had the great pleasure of hosting Steve Sheinkin for school visits last week. His newest book,\u00a0Undefeated<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>tells the riveting story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School football team, true underdogs who became one of the most successful teams in history and who Sheinkin credits with inventing the game of football as it exists today. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation who co-founded the National Football League, the team’s star Jim Thorpe\u00a0was also the first Native American to win an Olympic Gold Medal and is still considered one of the best athletes in history. But Thorpe’s\u00a0journey was neither rosy nor easy, and the racism and betrayals he\u00a0faced make this, in Steve Sheinkin’s own words,\u00a0“one of the most inspiring\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cone of the most heartbreaking\u201d stories that he has ever told. While he was here, I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions. It was a great conversation about this important new book, and you can read the interview here<\/a>. I also wanted to pull out something Steve said about making nonfiction appealing to kids.
\nAs a bookseller, I love being able to offer kids Steve\u2019s books. They\u00a0grab\u00a0readers’ attention with fascinating, complex true stories that are so well told that kids practically speed through the whole thing before realizing they\u2019re learning. At the end of our interview, I asked him whether there were any books that did that for him as a young reader. Here was his answer:<\/p>\n

STEVE: As a kid, if you had asked me if I liked history, I would have said definitely not, that I hate it; it\u2019s boring; it\u2019s just where you memorize names and dates. But when I look back at some of my favorite books, I realize they were historical, especially historical fiction. I loved the Mutiny on the Bounty books. Kids today have no idea what I\u2019m talking about when I say that, but those were really exciting. And a Michael Crichton book called <\/em>The Great Train Robbery was a huge influence on me. It\u2019s based on a true train robbery in Victorian London (which is a great setting for an adventure story), and it\u2019s a really detailed behind-the-scenes account of how these guys pulled off a brilliant train robbery. So it\u2019s a combination of history and thriller. I didn\u2019t really know there was such a thing, but I think I\u2019ve been kind of trying to recreate that ever since in the work that I do now, combining that with other things I\u2019ve learned from \u2013 like I like the Nathan Hale comics and I still like to draw comics too<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>I believe in pulling in influences like that from unexpected places. I think kids learn so much more from something when it\u2019s entertaining.\u00a0Like look at the influence of <\/em>Hamilton. Or, one of my favorite things to do with my kids is that we do our own little Lego movies. I think my daughter\u2019s the same as me. If you asked her if she liked history, she would say no. She\u2019s 10. But then if you said all right, make a movie about Lewis and Clark or something, she would have a blast doing it, and she would remember so much more about it. \u00a0So I think that\u2019s the way to approach these subjects.You\u2019ve got to be engaging. Not every story is happy or funny, but it\u2019s got to be interesting.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This whole topic has been on my mind lately, albeit in a slightly different form, because I\u2019ve discovered the real fun of exploring nonfiction (and fictionalized true stories) with my son (age 4). He absolutely loves reading stories based on the real world. We were reading Elizab<\/em>eth, Queen of the Seas <\/em>by Lynne Cox the other day with his cousin, and my son triumphantly flipped to the backmatter at the end and shouted \u201cLook! She\u2019s real!\u201d Other books that have recently captured his interest include The Bear Report,<\/a> Water Is Water<\/a>,<\/em> Follow the Moon Home<\/a>, A Voyage in the Clouds<\/a>, Maybe Something Beautiful<\/a>, The Blue Whale<\/a><\/em>, At the Same Moment Around the World<\/em><\/a> and The Secret Subway<\/a>. <\/em>Of course, he also can\u2019t get enough of National Geographic\u2019s Little Kid\u2019s First Big Book series, especially their\u00a0Little Kid’s First Big Book of <\/a>Why<\/a>.
\nSometimes it\u2019s hard to tell the difference between things I\u2019m \"\"<\/a>learning as a buyer and things I\u2019m learning as a parent. But I will say that there have been so many really cool, beautiful nonfiction picture books coming out that I recently decided to highlight them for parents with a First Nonfiction section in our picture book room and a general nonfiction new arrivals section at\u00a0the front. They’ve\u00a0been really popular.
\nAre other stores experiencing a growing focus on nonfiction? I\u2019m always looking for great book recommendations!
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing the ShelfTalker conversation about nonfiction for kids with some thoughts from Steve Sheinkin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}