The Big Book for Peace [First Edition]

Young adult essays. First printing, full number line. Book and jacket near fine and clean, inside and out, price inked out on the front flap. Each essay written by a different author, illustrated by different artists. Cover illustration by Maurice Sendak.

A pantheon of 34 artists and writers come together in an anthology that is both useful and inspiring. Some authors have produced works from real life, as in Jean Fritz' moving story of an Inuit people triumphing over Cold War separation and Milton Meltzer's tale about a Quaker's tragic predicament during the Civil War. Others have written stories. Lloyd Alexander contributes one about the progressively disasterous series of misunderstandings between two princes; Lois Lowry relates the story of the resolution of a rivalry between two friends. Poetry is contributed by Myra Cohen Livingston. Illustrations inspired by the text or the theme are scattered throughout the book: Steven Kellogg does his own version of "A Peaceable Kingdom"; Ben Shecter's charcoal image hauntingly mirrors Charlotte Zolotow's poem "Enemies"; Marc Simont's full-page series of paintings provide a punchline for Marilyn Sachs' "I Was There." Some of the prose is more obviously and schematically didactic than the rest, a problem that afflicts the fiction more than the nonfiction. Yoshiko Uchida contributes a powerful "Letter from a Concentration Camp," but never says whether it is a work especially done for the book or a replication of an actual letter, which does confuse somewhat. Fundamentally, however, this is an exemplary collection. Inspired by an angry children's librarian who was offended by the popularity of books on war, Sachs and Durrell have come up with a powerful, well-done answer. --Christine Behrmann, New York Public Library
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.