Man on Wire! The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein

As the anniversary of the destruction of the twin World Trade Center towers draws near again, perhaps it is time to recall a different moment in the history of those iconic structures, a moment when one person's daring left the world with awe-inspiring images.

When he watched the construction in progress and saw the towers rise, Philippe Petit looked, "not at the towers but at the space between them.... What a wonderful place to stretch a rope; a wire on which to walk," he thought.

A street performer who was haunted by visions of feats on the high wire since early life, Petit had already won wide attention for his stroll between the twin steeples of Notre Dame in Paris when he began his audacious plan to walk the space between the twin towers. With a few confederates dressed as construction workers Petit and his helpers loaded a giant reel of cable and other equipment on the elevator during the afternoon of August 6, hiding themselves as the builders left at the end of the workday. As dark fell over the still unlighted towers, the small team of conspirators began to execute Petit's plan.

Surrounded by the twin monuments to twentieth century technology, their preparations were amazingly low tech. An arrow shot from a bow carried the guide line across the abyss, where human muscle used it to draw the cable across to the other tower. It took hours to pull the heavy cable across. At one point it sagged hundreds of feet toward the street, 1350 feet below, and Philippe was barely able to retain control of his end. Eventually, just as the first stars began to fade, the wire spanned the space, and Petit changed into his performance costume, a black tee and tights, with soft black aerialist's shoes on his feet.

As sunshine began to light the sky and seagulls soared among the skyscrapers, Philippe Petit took up his 28-foot balance pole and stepped out upon the wire between the towers.

Out to the middle he walked as if he were walking on the air itself.

Many winds swirled up from between the towers and he swayed with them.

He could feel the towers breathing.

He was not afraid. He felt happy and absolutely free.

As early subway riders began to pour onto the streets below, a crowd formed and watched the walker cross, eight times, between the towers, stopping to salute them, kneel, and even lie down on the wire. For close to an hour Petit gloried in his experience before he finally returned to the South Tower and the handcuffs of the waiting police. Briefly held for what came to be known as "the artistic crime of the century," the daredevil finally was freed, his penance a wire-walking performance for children in Central Park.

Gerstein's stately language and breathtaking illustrations capture the wonder and heart-stopping thrills of that day in 1974. A three-page horizontal gatefold shows the view as Petit must have seen it, with the towers stretching below him, the street and docks far away, and Brooklyn beyond the river. A page turn reveals a three-page vertical gatefold which takes the eye of the reader up from the watchers at street level to the tiny figure of the walker silhouetted against the sky.

Rarely has a picture book captured such a iconic event as well as does Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. Awarded the Caldecott Medal, this book presents the memorable event lyrically, without hype or overstatement, in just-right language and images for young readers.

For young adults who want to know more, James Marsh's documentary drama Man on Wire! opened a few weeks ago to good reviews. Just as Gerstein's final page shows the ghostly image of the twin towers among the remaining skyscrapers on the site, the memory of those structures in their last moments will continue to haunt us all. But it is perhaps good for children to see them also with Mordecai Gerstein through Phillipe Petit's eyes, young and soaring and promising great things.

Out of the Dark: The Night World by Mordicai Gerstein

In the dark of the night, the house is still. Everyone is sleeping.

Everyone except Sylvie the cat.

"ME-OUT? ME-OUT?" SHE CALLS.

A tousled-haired boy sits up and sees his cat sitting silhouetted on the open window sill. Outside the world is gray-black in the starlight, but the air is warm and somehow sweet and inviting.

Downstairs, past the goldfish motionless in his bowl, the boy and Sylvie tiptoe to the back door. Sylvie urges him on.

"ME-OUT!"

"IT'S ALMOST HERE!"

They slip through the door into a world that is both familiar and unknown.

It is his own backyard, where he plays in the day, but the colors are not there. The grass is gray, the trees are a darker gray, and...

"ARE THESE LILIES AND SUNFLOWERS?

WHERE ARE THEIR COLORS?"

A shadowy deer and small animal shapes stare at them from the dark shapes of the bushes. And then there's a stirring in the trees. The birds are waking. The animals slip back into the dark trees, ready for their bedtime, as a pink glow begins low in the starry sky. Colors begin to grow down below, too.

THE GRASS TURNS GREEN. THE ROSES TURN PINK AND RED.

"GOOD MORNING, SUN!" SAYS SYLVIE.

"IT'S GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY."

In a lovely celebration of the transformation of night to day, Caldecott winner Mordicai Gerstein's The Night World (Little, Brown and Company, 2015) captures the magic of the night and the glories of the dawn through the eyes of a child. And who better to be his guide than a cat, that familiar but mysterious beast both matutinal and crepescular, active at twilight and dawn, the perfect go-between for the dark nocturnal world and the busy diurnal world best known to us humans. Executed mostly on gray art paper with pencil, Gerstein's nighttime scenes evoke soft wonder rather than fear, and his invocation of the dawn calls forth a sort of primeval awe for the return of the color- and life-giving morning sun that even youngsters will feel.

The stars came out for this new book from all the reviewing journals, signalling a title which may get major attention when award-time rolls around.

For slightly older readers, don't miss the magic of Gerstein's Caldecott Medal book of the famous tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (see my 2008 review here).

This Land Is Our Land: The Camping Trip that Changed America by Barb Rosenstock

"Any Fool can destroy trees.

God has cared for these trees, but he cannot save them from fools. Only Uncle Same can do that." -- John Muir

John Muir was on a mission.

President Theodore Roosevelt needed a break.

The lean, bearded activist saw development destroying the native beauty of California, and on that other coast the rotund president was weary of politics.

Teddy Roosevelt had read Muir's book on the natural wonders of Yosemite and the Sequoia groves of coastal California, so when the dour and zealous Muir almost dared the President to rough it with him in the wilderness, Teddy was on it with his usual fervor. It's not easy for a president to escape from his retinue of advisers and guards, but the two-man camping trip set out at last to brave the wilderness on their own.

Teddy Roosevelt, the advocate of the "rugged life," was in his glory. "Teedie" and "Johnnie" rode along cascading streams and through hushed mountain evergreen forests, camped out beside geysers, viewed valleys carved by glaciers, even waking up in the high mountains, half-buried in a sudden snowstorm and tossing snowballs at each other like two schoolboys on holiday.

"Bully! What a glorious day!" cried T. R.

But the ebullient president was in his element and the devoted naturalist took the opportunity to press his message that these vast areas of America's natural landscape were at risk of being forever destroyed by the press of the nation's advance west.

But it was when the two camped out beneath towering groves of giant sequoias that the deal became a mission for Roosevelt, too.

"These trees grew when the Egyptians were building the pyramids! They never stop growing unless they are cut down.

How can I help?" asked Teddy Roosevelt.

"Keep the wild and protect it forever," answered Muir.

And the rest is history.

That epic camping trip that led President Roosevelt to push the legislation which established the National Park system of the United States is the subject of Barb Rosenstock's The Camping Trip that Changed America: Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Our National Parks (Dial Books). Author Rosenstock captures the enchantment of the natural scene and the boyish joy of the two powerful men on a trip that was both a playful expedition and a pilgrimage that changed the face of America.


The emotional impact of this account is equally heightened by the humorous portrayals of the odd-couple adventurers and the beautiful paintings and detailed pen-and-ink sketches of the natural world (including a vertical two-page, vertical illustration of a soaring sequoia) created by artist Mordecai Gerstein. Gerstein is also the Caldecott Award-winning illustrator of another noted American event in his stunning The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

Says Kirkus Reviews, "You can't ever quite take the boy out of the man, and Rosenstock's use of her subjects' childhood names evokes a sense of Neverland ebullience, even as the grownup men decided the fate of the wilderness. Wonderfully simple, sweet and engaging."

Picture That! The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerson

Some of the oldest drawings ever found were made more than 30,000 years ago in a cave in southern France.

In that same cave there was a footprint of an eight-year-old child.

The juxtaposition of that child's footprint and that paleolithic drawing is the jumping-off point for Mordicai Gerstein's elegant picture book which imagines that first human artist picking up a burnt stick from the edge of the fire and creating the first human art.

But before there is art, there must be an artist, someone who could see what is real in his mind and imagine reproducing it as a painting, and  in Gerstein's telling of it, he is a young boy who loves to watch animals, with his wolf dog at his heels,  looking at a distant woolly mammoth and seeing the shape of that beast in the changing clouds above him.

No one else "sees" what he sees in the clouds and in the shapes of the rocks around him.

"Papa! That cloud looks like a woolly mammoth!"

"It looks like a cloud to me," says his father. "Like a cloud."

"Why can't they see what I see?" the boy wonders.

At night the shadows of the dancing flames from the fire circle looks like running horses to the boy, but although no one else sees  the galloping herd, the boy picks up a charcoal stick and following the curves of the rocky wall, begins to sketch out the shape of one, and then many running horses. The family look at each other and chuckle at the play of this curious child, but then, as he fills in his drawing with a husky, tusky mammoth, someone sees something familiar there.  It is a mammoth.

"This.... is magic!"

"No, Papa. I'm just showing you...."

Caldecott Medalist Mordecai Gerstein (for The Man Who Walked Between the Towers) captures that moment in time which someone, perhaps a child, made the enormous intellectual leap from something visualized in the mind to a concrete, created thing that others can see  and someone can use.  All human creation comes from a personal mental image that is reproduced in the material world, from a carefully shaped spear point to the internet, and Gerstein uses his immense artistic talent as a visual storyteller to take the young reader along to witness such an event.  Using parallel characters, a modern boy with his dog trailing behind and his drawing pencils in his back pocket and the cave boy with his shaggy wolf-pup and his burnt stick, Gerstein takes the modern reader back into a distant historic time, but the same place in the modern mind from which a child artist takes up a crayon to draw a car or an airplane.

"And it's still MAGIC!" says the author.

Gerstein's  latest, The First Drawing (Little, Brown, 2013), displays the artist's skill with word and art, his fine draftsmanship and his skillful use of media, blackline and acrylics, to give a feeling of movement, light and shadows, to the dusky depths of the cave and its walls which provide a canvass for the beginnings of art itself. "Artists see the world differently, but Gerstein suggests their true gift lies in allowing others to share in their visions," says Publishers Weekly. "Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists," adds Kirkus Reviews, and Children's Literature calls it , "another must buy for real library and pre-school and lower grades use."

Gerstein's illustrated author's note provides more of the story of the discovery of  stone age cave art  in those caves of France, making this book a good one to pair with another Caldecott winner's, Emily Arnold McCully's The Secret Cave: Discovering Lascaux.

Moving House! Moose, Goose, and Mouse by Mordecai Gerstein

Even the rubber ducky in the bathtub is unhappy.

MOOSE SAID, "THIS HOUSE IS WET AND OLD."

GOOSE SAID, "IT'S FULL OF MOLD!"

"ACHOO!" SAID DUCK. "IT'S VERY COLD."

Clearly it is time to move to a better house. Moose wants one that's sunny, Goose votes for funny, and Mouse prefers one that comes with a bunny.

The three hop a train to search for a new house, taking a seat in the pink caboose. They all approve of the caboose. But the engineer takes the the mountain route, and the tracks carry the three up and up, and then up and down and up and up, until the caboose, uncoupled, comes loose. Yikes!

"HELP!" YELLED MOOSE.

"IT'S NO USE!" SAID GOOSE.

"THIS IS FUN," SAID MOUSE. "RIDING IN A LOOSE CABOOSE!"

The tracks take the loose caboose down, down, down, until the tracks end, inexplicably, into a palm tree which stops the upended caboose and the three at the edge of the sea. They survey their new neighborhood.

Hey! This isn't so bad. The seaside is sunny!" notes Moose. Goose finds an upside down caboose quite funny!

"IS THAT A BUNNY?" SAID MOUSE.

What more could they ask for, in Mordecai Gerstein's Moose, Goose, and Mouse (Holiday House, 2021), his latest and last book for children, with kid-pleasing digital paper collage with co-artist Jeff Mack in a goofy and good-natured look at an unplanned household move with a jolly surprise ending. A sweet and easy beginning reader in rhyme and a noodlehead tale of three zany housemates who find an new neighbor, this one is a Seussian candidate for a new classic. Says Kirkus Reviews, "Madcap humor at its finest."

Mordecai Gerstein received the Caldecott award as the author-illustrator of his stunning The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (see my review here).