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A review by saidtheraina
The Camping Trip That Changed America: Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Our National Parks by Barb Rosenstock
4.0
Very few people I've asked know the following:
The youngest president ever elected in the USA was not JFK. It also wasn't Obama.
The youngest president ever elected in the United States was Teddy Roosevelt.
That's actually just an aside to this story.
This is a beautiful, picture-book-style retelling of the story of how John Muir helped convince Roosevelt that we need to protect wild land. Rosenstock and [a:Mordicai Gerstein|2695|Mordicai Gerstein|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1317313782p2/2695.jpg] give a little bit of background information on Roosevelt and Muir's lives, then describe a trip they took together exploring what would become Yosemite National Park. Until the men reach the park, the story is told in contained pictures, with white space underneath the text. Once they enter the wild, the images bleed out to the edges of the pages. My favorite spread depicts the giant sequoia trees - the readers has to tip the book sideways to read the text.
I took this book to local elementary schools as part of my summer reading promotional visits in 2013. We talked about how things like national parks don't just happen - someone decided to create them at some point.
This is a great example of a really amazing book that can have a hard time finding an audience, particularly in a public library. The kids didn't show as much interest in this as in some of the other titles I presented. I think many kids worry about seeming babyish when they read stories in a picture-book style format.
But I hope they read this one.
The youngest president ever elected in the USA was not JFK. It also wasn't Obama.
The youngest president ever elected in the United States was Teddy Roosevelt.
That's actually just an aside to this story.
This is a beautiful, picture-book-style retelling of the story of how John Muir helped convince Roosevelt that we need to protect wild land. Rosenstock and [a:Mordicai Gerstein|2695|Mordicai Gerstein|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1317313782p2/2695.jpg] give a little bit of background information on Roosevelt and Muir's lives, then describe a trip they took together exploring what would become Yosemite National Park. Until the men reach the park, the story is told in contained pictures, with white space underneath the text. Once they enter the wild, the images bleed out to the edges of the pages. My favorite spread depicts the giant sequoia trees - the readers has to tip the book sideways to read the text.
I took this book to local elementary schools as part of my summer reading promotional visits in 2013. We talked about how things like national parks don't just happen - someone decided to create them at some point.
This is a great example of a really amazing book that can have a hard time finding an audience, particularly in a public library. The kids didn't show as much interest in this as in some of the other titles I presented. I think many kids worry about seeming babyish when they read stories in a picture-book style format.
But I hope they read this one.