Books for the Presidents' Birthdays
To celebrate the presidents’ birthdays, let’s look at some recent American history books engaging enough to hold a kid’s attention.
Born in 1929, Russell Freedman is the master of old-school historical writing. The Newbery Medal is rarely given to nonfiction, but he won it for his biography of Lincoln in 1988.
Freedman’s books are illustrated with engravings, paintings and maps– nothing cute or quirky, nary a cartoon balloon in sight. Reading his latest, “Lafayette and the American Revolution,” I imagined narration by James Earl Jones.
Freedman opens with a grabber chapter that describes an aristocratic mystery man’s secret rendezvous in a gardener’s house in a French village. The man, all of 19 years of age, is Gilbert de Lafayette, and he’s meeting with emissaries of 13 rebellious colonies who hope to enlist him to cross the Atlantic and fight for the great ideal of freedom.
How cool is that?
Freedman then backtracks to Lafayette’s isolated childhood in a chateau on a hill, his adolescence wearing embroidered coats, stockings and buckled shoes at the court of Louis XVI, and his dreams of a military career, thwarted by peacetime. With minimal military experience, he seems an unlikely hero when he finally sails for America in 1777, meets General Washington, and spends the winter with the troops at Valley Forge. Even more unlikely for someone raised in luxury, it’s Lafayette’s grit, humility, and willingness to suffer the deprivations of a soldier that distinguish him as he learns the ropes.
You couldn’t honestly ask for a more romantic or heroic story – a young man defying king and family to fulfill what he believes to be his destiny – and darned if he isn’t right. As Freedman puts it toward the end of the book:
[Lafayette] had sailed to America as a teenager in pursuit of military glory and had learned what it is like to fight a war…. Tested in battle, bonded to his troops, he had proved his courage. In working for personal acclaim he had come to worship the ideals that would guide him for the rest of his life.
For historiography in a more peppy and irreverent vein, think narration by Jack Black, take a look at Steve Sheinkin’s “Two Miserable Presidents – Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn’t Tell You About the Civil War.” 
The not-especially-enticing cover shows the eponymous presidents, Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis, as headachey cartoon characters, and the book is illustrated with caricatures and the occasional map or chart. Told in gossipy segments, this is character-driven history, with stories of spies, women who dressed as men to fight, heroes, cowards and common people. As for the famous, Sheinkin focuses on fun facts, like Stonewall Jackson’s propensity for napping and sucking on lemons.
Sheinkin also assumes kids love gross, so lice, excrement, rats, weevils, and amputated limbs all make featured appearances. Lest I make this sound like fun facts that don’t add up to anything, I hasten to mention that Sheinkin does a good job on the big picture. The first section opens with a cliffhanger – a southern lawmaker poised to cane a northern one in the senate chamber – then backs up to explain in 13 steps how the country got itself to this moment.
Sheinkin, who is cleaning up on awards for his new book on Benedict Arnold, is an erstwhile textbook author who busted out, and the extensive notes indicate his research is solid.
As for age range, I’d say nine and up for these books because they contain nothing a well-read nine-year-old couldn’t handle. At the same time, they are novella-length and information-packed, not kiddie-lit. High school students would find enlightenment in these pages, as in fact did I.