Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Claire A. Nivola. Candlewick, $16.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-7636-7475-5
As a child in his poor village in South Asia’s Punjab region, Nek Chand found every opportunity to create art from salvaged materials. Partition in 1947 forced Chand to leave his home for the modern Indian city of Chandigarh, “a sharp-edged city of...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Christopher Silas Neal. Calkins Creek, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-62979-440-2
An obsession with shapes serves as a leitmotif as Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) grows to be a master architect. In Rosenstock’s telling, his aesthetic was rooted in a childhood love of his Wisconsin prairie home’s natural geometries (“oval milkweed
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Gérard DuBois. Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek, $16.95 (40p) ISBN 978-1-62979-208-8
Rosenstock lyrically describes photographer Dorothea Lange’s creative development from a polio-stricken child from Hoboken to the photographer behind some of the nation’s most iconic images. As a child, Lange was teased and rejected by her peers for
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Barbara Rosenstock, illus. by John O’Brien. Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek, $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-59078-932-2
Thomas Jefferson “gobbled books the way a starving man eats.” Rosenstock’s (The Camping Trip That Changed America) apt metaphor sets the tone for this jaunty picture-book biography of the third U.S. president. Following Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Katherine Roy. Little, Brown, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-316-39382-9
Rosenstock (Dorothea’s Eyes) provides a vivid account of a history-making dive of the submersible Bathysphere. In 1930, eminent scientist William Beebe and Bathysphere designer Otis Barton descend more than 800 feet in a herky-jerky plunge that Roy (
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Mary GrandPré. Knopf, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-5247-1751-3
Beginning with Chagall’s childhood in the village of Vitebsk, Belarus, Rosenstock’s expressive ode to the artist is laced with references to familiar moments from Chagall’s oeuvre: “Neighbors squabble, rabbis bless, a bowlegged fiddler plays on a...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Mary GrandPré. Knopf, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-525-70817-9
The idiosyncratic painting practice of Claude Monet (1840–1926) foregrounds this engrossing picture book biography by the previous collaborators (The Noisy Paint Box). As Rosenstock deftly describes Monet’s working day—waking at 3:30 a.m., being...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Sarah Green. Calkins Creek, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-62979-908-7
Using a framework based on boxing match rounds, Rosenstock describes the pitched battle between two complicated historical figures. Alice Paul, a fierce advocate for the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, faces the...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Elizabeth Baddeley. Little, Brown, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-316-41571-2
This biographical picture book bills Abigail Adams as a woman who rose to every challenge. The book’s title acts as a refrain as readers see Abigail fly in the face of her era’s niceties (“Everyone knew that good girls kept quiet”), manage a complex
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Mary GrandPré. Knopf, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-307-97848-6
“Is it a house?” “Is it a flower?” “What’s it supposed to be?” When an aunt gives Moscow schoolboy Vasily Kandinsky a paint box, no one knows what to make of the wild shapes he creates. He doesn’t just see the colors. He hears them: “blaring crimson.
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Mary GrandPré. Knopf, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-101-93710-5
Vincent Van Gogh’s persistent insomnia is the frame through which Rosenstock and GrandPré (the team behind The Noisy Paintbox, about Wassily Kandinsky) examine his growth as an artist. Rosenstock’s hushed, lyrical writing shapes a vision of a...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Terry Widener. Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek, $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-59078-992-6
“It started quietly, like a conversation with Joe DiMaggio himself.” With those words, Rosenstock transports readers to the summer of 1941, when war loomed and DiMaggio set a new MLB record with a 56-game hitting streak, uniting a nation: “This was...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Jamey Christoph. Knopf, $19.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-593-37435-1
The Great Lakes—“five blue jewels set a bit off center in a belt across North America’s middle”—get their due in this ardent introduction. Informative moments abound in Rosenstock’s profile, which encompasses discussion of the lakes’
glacial...
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Barb Rosenstock, illus. by Katherine Roy. Norton, $18.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-324-01607-6
Five major currents in the Atlantic Ocean “swirl billions of gallons of water clockwise around and around,” creating an immense body of water, called the Sargasso Sea after the floating sargassum forests within it. Though it’s known as seaweed,...
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