Peanut Wizard: George Washington Carver and Science & Invention in America by Cheryl Harness

Noted biographer Cheryl Harness's The Groundbreaking, Chance-Taking Life of George Washington Carver and Science and Invention in America (Cheryl Harness Histories) (National Geographic, 2008) tells the incredible life story of a little black boy, born a slave, whose love for nature and thirst for education took him from his first school in Neosha, Missouri, to a professorship at the University of Iowa and on to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute.

George Carver was a baby when his mother Mary, slave to Moses and Susan Carver, was abducted to Arkansas during the Bushwhacker/Jayhawk Wars following the Civil War. Mr. Carver located baby George and his brother Jim after his mother died, and trading a good horse for their return, he became a foster father to the two orphan boys. Sickly after the whooping cough, at first George helped Susan at home with her washing, weaving, and gardening, eventually becoming the "plant doctor" for neighbors all around. When he was twelve, George was allowed to leave for a town eight miles away to go to the colored school there, and from that point he began his wandering in search of education. A stint on a sodbusting homestead in Kansas was followed at last by a chance to attend Simpson College in Iowa and then on to Iowa State University, where he drew attention for his mastery of botany and his paintings, which were exhibited in Chicago at the 1893 Colombian Exposition.

But it was his relocation to Tuskegee Institute where Carver found his lifelong vision.

Forty-five years later, old George would still remember his first impression of the sunny South. There was "not much evidence of scientific farming anywhere." As far as he could see, "everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle and the people."

Professor Carver threw himself into his work in Alabama, devising and then teaching what is now called organic farming, rotating crops and nourishing the land by composting vegetation into the exhausted soil, planting legumes, including the peanut he made so famous, to enrich the land further. Always more of an idea man than meticulous scientist, Carver created hundreds of products from what he was able to coax out of the earth in Tuskegee's agricultural station's fields--dyes and oil from peanuts, plastic from soybeans, flour from sweet potatoes. Carver's agricultural bulletins helped replace the South's boll weevil-blasted cotton with other marketable crops, and his "power alcohol" became the first bio-fuel. But it was as a visionary advocate for scientific farming and biochemical development of products that Carver became most famous. A gifted speaker and salesman for his ideas. always attired in his shabby suit with his ever-present flower in lapel, he testified before Congress and was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt and his secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, whom he had known as boy in Ames, Iowa.

In a chatty, casual narrative style, Cheryl Harness weaves George Washington Carver's amazing life story in and out of the events and personages of his times--from that other idea man, Thomas Edison, to Adolf Hitler. A clever feature of this biography is a progressively scrolling timeline at the bottom of each page to let the reader know what was going on in Carver's world at each stage of his life--the capture of Geronimo, the sinking of the Lusitania, the writing of Winnie the Pooh, the landing of Lucky Lindy, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and the Fermi team's first nuclear chain reaction at the Manhattan Project--a device which provides a window for young readers into the history of Carver's time. Back matter includes a "G. W. Carver Chronology," a timeline, "Science and Invention March On," and a full index. Cheryl Harness' fine pencil and ink drawings illustrate the text prolifically. The author sums up Carver's lasting contributions to American life thus:

More than anything, George was a teacher. He taught by example how an individual could live with dignity in an unfair world and how all individuals could practice good Earth-keeping. He was "green" before today's eco-champions were born. He showed folks how to recycle and build up their land naturally instead of using it to death, then standing helpless when soil washed or blew away. He showed how nature and mankind could co-exist in harmony....

Finding a Voice: A Song for Harlem by Patricia McKissack

Noted Tennessee author Patricia McKissack takes on the task of making the concept of the Harlem Renaissance come alive for beginning chapter readers in her latest in the Scraps of Time series, A Song for Harlem: Scraps of Time 3 (Scraps of Time).

McKissack uses the device of a frame story in which the three Webster children, digging up mementos in their Grandmother Gee's attic, uncover a journal kept by their great-great-aunt of a summer spent in Harlem in 1928. An aspiring young poet selected for The Harlem Young Writer's Workshop, Lilly Belle makes the trip from Smyrna, Tennessee to stay with her glamorous Aunt Odessa. Twelve-year-old Lilly is wide-eyed at the day and night bustle and energy of Harlem. Her classes, conducted by famous writer Zora Neale Hurston, meet in the mansion of A'Lelia Walker, daughter of famed black entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker, and her summer experiences bring her into contact with Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Bojangles Robinson, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who publishes her group's work in his legendary Crisis magazine.

Lilly Belle Turner encounters her first posh bathroom and has her first long-distance telephone conversation, sees her first movie, wears stylish dresses from her aunt's upscale shop, and with a full makeover in Madame Walker's hair salon, appears in print advertisements for her products. Lilly also encounters her first experience with intraracial prejudice in Alice Gaylord, a rich student who condescendingly calls the small-town summer students "country mice" and "Russians," the term for poor blacks who "rush-in" to imitate the Harlem upper class. Although challenged by a bit of culture shock and Zora Hurston's high standards for their writing, Lilly's strong family grounding and hard work enable her to find her own voice through this life-changing experience, and as we learn from Grandmother Gee at the book's end, as an adult she becomes a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier.

McKissack slyly tucks in a preview plug for her next book in this series, The Homerun King (Scraps of Time), forthcoming in December, when the Webster kids find among Lilly's treasures an old baseball autographed by Josh Gibson, Satchell Paige, and other Negro Baseball League greats. Previous books in the Scraps of Time series include Abby Takes a Stand (Scraps of Time), in which Grandmother Gee tells how as the ten-year-old Abby she was turned away from a department store circus-themed restaurant and joined the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, and Away West (Scraps of Time), in which a Civil War medal found in the attic gives Grandmother a chance to describe their ancestor's service in the Union Army and his son's trek with a wagon train to the freed slave settlement of Nicodemas, Kansas.

For Black History Month activities, McKissack's substantial but simple chapter novels involve modern readers in American history through the eyes of children who lived during these significant eras. Patricia McKissack is also the author of the Caldecott Honor Book Mirandy and Brother Wind (Dragonfly Books), Color Me Dark, the Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North, Chicago, Illinois 1919 (Dear America, Early 20th Century 1900's - 1930's Book 3), the award-winning The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural: (Newbery Honor Book, Coretta Scott King Author Award, ALA Notable Children's Book) (Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner), and has a string of biographies of significant African Americans to her credit.