Pop's Bridge: A Riveting Story About a Father, a Skywalker, and the Golden Gate Bridge for Kids (Ages 4-7) - Hardcover

Bunting, Eve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0152047735 ISBN 13: 9780152047733

Publisher: Clarion Books, 2006

Synopsis

The Golden Gate Bridge. The impossible bridge, some call it. They say it can't be built.

But Robert's father is building it. He's a skywalker--a brave, high-climbing ironworker. Robert is convinced his pop has the most important job on the crew . . . until a frightening event makes him see that it takes an entire team to accomplish the impossible.

When it was completed in 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was hailed as an international marvel. Eve Bunting's riveting story salutes the ingenuity and courage of every person who helped raise this majestic American icon.
Includes an author's note about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

About this title

About the Author

Eve Bunting was the beloved, award-winning author of more than two hundred and fifty books for young people, including the Caldecott Medal-winning Smoky Night.

Reviews

Grade 1-4–Robert and his friend Charlie Shu spend many an afternoon at Fort Point watching from afar as their dads work on the crews building the Golden Gate Bridge. Robert's father is a high-iron man, a skywalker, and, in his son's eyes, has a far more important and dangerous job than the painting Charlie's dad does. When Robert's mom gives the youngsters a jigsaw puzzle based on an artist's rendering of the yet-to-be completed bridge, Robert hides a piece to give his father the honor of completing the puzzle. When a scaffold falls and 10 men die, however, he realizes that the work is equally dangerous for all involved. While the two families are celebrating the completion of the bridge, he cuts the last puzzle piece, offering half to each dad. Finish it. It's your bridge. It belongs to both of you, he says. The text is followed by an author's note recounting the Golden Gate's history. Payne's striking mixed-media illustrations bleed off the pages and offer interesting views of the impossible bridge–against a star-filled sky, through a binocular lens. The spread featuring delighted throngs, both boys front and center, walking across the bridge at its opening and that of the dads, index fingers meeting across the page to complete the puzzle, say more poignantly than words that people of different backgrounds can come together to accomplish the unthinkable. Deborah Hopkinson's Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building (Random, 2006) features more skywalkers at their dangerous jobs.–Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT
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K-Gr. 3. The bridge is San Francisco's fabled Golden Gate, and Robert's father is helping to build it. Pop is a high-iron worker, what folks called a "skywalker." And, in the year 1937, he is one of more than a thousand men who are engaged in constructing the "impossible bridge." Robert's friend Charlie Shu's father, a painter, is also involved, but Robert secretly feels Pop's job is more important than Mr. Shu's. Then an accident forces him to rethink things. Distinguished by its lovely, understated text and Payne's lavish and affectionate mixed-media pictures, this picture book does a quietly successful job of humanizing one of the most important feats of civil engineering in American history. For more about skywalkers, recommend Deborah Hopkinson's Sky Boys (2006), about workers who built the Empire State Building. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0152047735
• ISBN 13: 9780152047733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Payne C.F.
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32