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Reviewed by: Lisa Rice, Middle School Librarian Title: America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History
Author: Ariel Aberg-Riger
Illustrator: Ariel Aberg-Riger
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Year: 2023 Good for Grades: 7-12 Genre/Type of Book: YA nonfiction, US History, social issues
Content Warnings, or things that other School Librarians should be aware of: References to people being beaten and killed.
Recommended for a school library: Yes Reason(s) for choosing the book: The cover grabbed me, with its bright colors and the Statue of Liberty's torch with pictures from Amercian history as the flames. I opened the book to its unique format and was immediately drawn in!
If you were tasked by the publisher with writing a short quote for the back cover of this book, what would it be:
"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." -James Baldwin, 1963
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Review:
This is a really cool book to look at and to read. I loved the unique way the information is presented with bold color, lots of pictures, maps, and graphics- and it is all handwritten by the author. The author states that presenting information this way helps your brain to see things differently (page 4), and I agree. Sometimes I had to put the book down to process and think about what I had just read. I thought I knew a lot about American history, even some of the uglier parts. I had no idea the depths of ugly. This book points fingers at all of us, as it should. I liked that it told American history and gave historical context and primary sources, and yet was not a 500-page book that few will ever read. I was really proud to see that the author is from Buffalo, NY! I highly recommend this book, especially for a high school library (I have it in my middle school library) and US history classes.
It doesn't look like a "stuffy" US history book which makes me hope that students will pick it up, get caught up in the graphics, and then start reading. It's not a linear, chronological telling of history either- it jumps around. At first, I didn't think I'd like that but very quickly, I didn't even notice. There are so many great quotes from this book that I want to make into posters, especially if I was teaching US history! Pauli Murray says, "When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them" (page 35). If I were using this book in a history class, of course I would want to read it and discuss, but if I did not have time, I would pick some of the quotes and start class by sharing the quote and having students guess who said it, what it means, and what time period in history it was said.
This book addresses a wide variety of happenings in history, some expected topics, and probably some that you wouldn't expect- guns, AIDS, women's rights, land ownership, the environment, automobiles, housing, internment camps, baseball, farming, Niagara Falls, MLMs, incarceration, and more. The Niagara Falls topic was interesting as I had some ideas about the chemical waste issue, but I did not know that in the 1940s, the chemical companies produced so much waste in the city of Niagara Falls that they got rid of it however they could, including giving workers $50 to take home a drum of waste and "make it disappear" (page 229). Yikes. I love this book and although I didn't always like what I learned, I appreciate what I learned (I am especially looking at you, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton!) as we can't keep putting our heads in the sand when it comes to American history and what we acknowledge and teach. We can be proud, and we can be better. As George Carlin says on page 237, "That's why they call it the Amercian dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
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