Nonfiction That Makes the Grade: The Bill of Rights by Christine Taylor-Butler

Under Scholastic, Inc.'s ownership, Childrens Press has been producing new editions of some of their noted (New) True Books series. While holding onto their admirable "just the facts" style, Childrens Press has added some "interactive" features--their Find the Truth! introductory section, new maps, photos, and eye-catching arrows directing attention to factoids, a True Facts summary page, and a brand-new bibliography of books and web sites to aid research.

The Bill of Rights (True Books), by Christine Taylor-Butler covers the history of English citizen's rights beginning with the Magna Carta in 1215 and goes on to describe how refusal to grant the full rights of English civil law to the colonists brought about the War for Independence.

Her second and third chapters turn to the writing of the Constitution (as the fact box points out, the world's oldest and shortest written constitution) and the disputes between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists as to whether protection for the rights of the individual should be written into the document itself. Taylor-Butler points out that, surprisingly, the influential George Mason and two other delegates refused to sign the Constitution absent protections for individual rights. Another little-known Bill of Rights fact is that it was not approved by three states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia--until almost 150 years after the ten amendments were ratified by the other states and added to the Constitution.

It was one of the fledgling Congress's most important acts to refine James Madison's list of rights down to the ten finally approved by most of the new states in 1791. The author does a commendable job of explaining the individual amendments, including the difference of opinion on the right to bear arms as individuals (or as members of regulated state militias) produced by the language of the second amendment and on the rights reserved to the states or to the individual in the ninth and tenth amendments.

Who Was Left Out? Taylor-Butler takes pains to point out that the Bill of Rights as originally written applied only to white men and that these rights were extended to Native American and African American men by 1870 by the fifteenth amendment, but were not made universal--to include women citizens--until 1920 with the nineteenth amendment. Another section, What Was Left Out, features some of the over 100 rights suggested for this list, most serious, but some, in retrospect, rather amusing.

As an introductory resource (Accelerated Reader grade level 5.3) for the study of the Bill of Rights, The Bill of Rights (True Books), does a good job of bringing the importance of this historic document down to the daily lives of students in the middle grades. Avoiding a hagiographic tone in which the Bill of Rights is seen as handed down from on high, Taylor-Butler presents it as a product of compromise, a living document with an interesting past and a significant ongoing influence on individual lives and on the nation.