How I Learned Geography: (Caldecott Honor Book)

This is the jolting start to a book with the innocuous title "How I Learned Geography".Shulevitz continues, "Everything we had was lost, and we fled empty-handed".The picture on this first page evokes an almost unimaginable pain and loss. Three figures, faces contorted into masks of suffering, are fleeing from a conflagration. As the father leads the way, the mother turns to hold the hand of a child, who is running to keep up. There is nothing else; the ground is grey and the sky is red.Should your kids be reading this?Well, yes. It's a story of loss, of survival, but ultimately of redemption and freedom.And it's a true story, an autobiography of events that took place when the author was four or five year's old. (This is explained in a helpful author's note that provides the historical context.)"We traveled far, far east to another country, where summers were hot, and winters were cold, to a city of houses made of clay, straw, and camel dung, surrounded by dusty steppes, burned by the sun".This is the city of Turkestan, where the subsequent action unfolds.The Shulevitz family has nothing, is hungry, and truly subsists as strangers in a strange land.And then - freedom.The vehicle is a map of the world, and fuel is provided by the imagination of a young boy. And so the circumstances are overcome, and in the end we sense that all is well.While the content of this book might be seen as weighty, there can be no doubt that it is very worthy.

I have ambivalent feelings about the way this book suits my library. I am a synagogue library, and this book has been praised by most of my colleagues in Cleveland. It is a good story about a poor family in Eastern Europe. The father goes to the market to buy some bread for his hungry wife and son. But instead, he returns with a colorful map of the world. At first the wife and the son are very angry. But after the map is hung on the wall, it immediately brightens up the drab room. The boy begins to imagine the people, smells, geography, dress, etc. of the exotic places labeled on the map. His imagination allows him to forget his hunger and proves to be more fulfilling than the loaf of bread ever would. By the end of the book, the boy is grateful to his father for enriching his life with the colorful map. While the story is engaging, there is no direct Jewish content. The families of many American Jews came from Eastern Europe, but Shulevitz never says that this is a Jewish family, and there is nothing in the story about Jewish life, customs, history, etc. I bought it for my library because it was so highly recommended, but I'm not sure how it would be used by our religious school. This book would be best used by middle school students.

Love this book bought 2 one to donate to the school one for home. We took it to parent read day at school and it covered the timely topic of war immigration, poverty, hunger and a childhood innocence used with imagination to combat all of that and make a happy memory. I will ignite an interest about the world in your little one and break your heart just a little. Over all a great message of hope read it to a 3rd grade class and they all loved it and asked such good questions after about the story. The afterword by the author clears up some of the questions not answered in the book.

With such excellent reviews and an interesting storyline, I had high hopes when I ordered this book. But I was a little disappointed after reading it.The illustrations are certainly captivating...wonderful. And the story is good: a little sobering but also very encouraging. I just felt that the story could have been a little more developed, or that perhaps some compromises were made in re-telling the story in order to keep it short, happy, and politically correct. The 2nd half seemed a little "Disney-fied" to me.

This book has grown on me.I bought it expecting something much different, even after reading the reviews prior to purchase.My first read-through with the kids was a bit ho-hum.But my 4½ year-old picked it again the other night, and the story felt different. We talked about displaced lives. We talked about hunger. And we talked about the world, in general geographic terms.And the fact that the kids are selecting this book to be read says something about what they're getting out of it -- even if it's nothing, it catches their attention.

The book came in a timely manner. Printed images were nice. Good quality book. Would recommend.

Great educational visual book!

Great book and beautiful pictures. Very touching story. My sons really liked it and gave us an opportunity to get our Atlas :)

For children who don’t like geography, I definitely recommend this.

Perhaps I expect too much from this award winning picture book. Both the content and drawings are not appealing to me but all and all, this could be subjective.

Pero solo para los mayores. Ilustraciones bonitas. Ha venido un poco arrugado, eso sí.

Muy bonito y emocionante