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I hope everybody is getting some use out of our latest newsletter, Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book. I’ve been thinking about NF a lot since ALA, where I spent two solid days talking to publishers about what they were planning for the coming year(s). Along with inflicting upon the world way too many books about bullying, they are more justifiably concerned with how to respond to the new Common Core State Standards. Should they be publishing more nonfiction? More teacher guides? How can they convince the lazier and/or busier and/or confused schools that the “exemplary texts” appended to the standards are, just as they say, examples, not required reading?

The thing is that aside from making sure they are publishing a healthy amount of nonfiction (because the CCSS require a lot of nonfiction reading), publishers aren’t really the target here. Teachers (and the librarians who support them) are. If you read the CCSS, you will see that its directives aren’t so much about what kids should read but how they should read. Even when I read the CCSS’s “Publishers’ Criteria” [PDF], I see an awful lot of verbose waffling (“texts” [ed. note: GROSS] should be short except when they’re long; texts should be difficult except when they’re not) without any real guidance.

The CCSS themselves offer exciting opportunities, no question. I would really enjoy, for example, asking kids to “compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided” But that’s a job for the classroom and the library, not a publishing house. Unless, and again GROSS, you decide the world really needs a new series called FirstHand/SecondHand that saves time for the teacher at the expense of the library’s budget. Shoot me now.

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To fulfill the Common Core standards, teachers need resources of increasing complexity, not flattened-out and dumbed-down summaries of concepts and events. Teachers need texts that challenge readers to tackle longer passages, more complex ideas, a richer vocabulary: in short, the content that books of quality nonfiction have to offer. And librarians are there to point them in the right direction while taking seriously the real-life roadblocks teachers face on a day-to-day basis.

The Common Core is built so that each leap adds new knowledge and skill that makes the next leap possible. And so there is the leap coming for us in the library and trade world — the leap into the classroom, into the world of teachers and students where our books should belong. There are challenges, of course: getting school librarians and teachers to rely on each another (assuming the school has a trained librarian), for one thing, and publishing more high-quality YA nonfiction at school-budget-friendly prices. Problems, yes, but these are the problems of three worlds — libraries, classrooms, and publishers — that have been separate for far too long. Look to Nonfiction Notes to help bridge that gap by providing concrete suggestions of high-quality, useful books that are also enjoyable, eye-opening, and mind-broadening.

 From the October 2012 issue of Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book.

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Both the whole language movement and the call for multicultural education brought trade books into the classroom; No Child Left Behind, with its emphasis on standardized testing, not so much. (Who had time?) With the introduction of the Common Core State Standards into most of our nation’s schools, what books are we going to see where?

The initiative’s name — specifically, the “Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects” — seems oddly chosen, given that the term “common core” is best known to us from the University of Chicago’s Great Books program, where a set of classic texts provided the core of undergraduate education. The new Common Core program does not include a list of required reading at all. Instead, it encourages teachers to use a variety of texts, increasingly complex in form and content as the student goes from year to year, to teach a variety of similarly progressive skills in reading and critical analysis “in order to help ensure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school.” (The entire document can be found here.)

A key distinction of the Common Core is its emphasis on the reading of nonfiction texts. Where other standards initiatives have taken great care in requiring students to read classic fiction, folklore, and poetry, the Common Core requires increased use of (again, increasingly complex) informational texts as a student progresses through the grades, culminating in grade twelve with a 70–30 percent split between informational and literary “passages,” a ratio devised by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I love the attention to nonfiction and increased reading across the disciplines; I’m all for increasing complexity. I worry that the mention of “passages” means a return to those oh-so-scientific SRA boxes of the 1960s, where we read from large cards, color- and type-size coded to reflect “increasing complexity,” each one printed with a “passage” appended with reading comprehension questions that taught us only how to game the test.

The success of the Common Core will be in the implementation, of course. As nonfiction author and genre expert Marc Aronson wrote to me, “I love the ELA CC Standards because while we have all long praised ‘critical thinking,’ these standards emphasize critical reading of nonfiction. Instead of asking students ‘what happened when?’ we will now be asking ‘why does this author claim that happened then, and how come that author sees it differently?’ I feel like I’ve died and gone to history heaven.” But Aronson also worries that time- and money-pressed schools will turn to prepackaged, Lexile-stamped, “Common Core Ready!” educational series and packages rather than using the truly Core-adhering books he and our other fine nonfiction authors create. I worry, too: whole language and multiculturalism and books-in-the-classroom all brought forth as many cynical publishing efforts as they did first-class books.

But here is where we are going to try to help. Next month will mark the debut of our new quarterly digital newsletter, at this point rather unimaginatively titled Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book, a companion to our popular free monthly Notes from the Horn Book. Nonfiction Notes is also free and will highlight those new and recent nonfiction books that we believe truly speak to the Common Core’s “vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century.” Current subscribers to Notes will automatically be signed up for the new quarterly; stay tuned for more information as we have it.

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But funny isn’t something we’re taught to respect. That could be why, when writers embark on the serious business of crossing cultural boundaries in their work, they don’t often start out with humor. In 2004, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith spoke at the Reading the World conference about the dearth of funny books with cultural resonance. Why, they asked, are multicultural books so very serious?

It was a valid question then. What’s surprising is the degree to which it remains valid today, especially in books for middle-grade readers. Books set in foreign countries are still largely about oppression, while those in hyphenated-American communities are about the challenges of finding oneself and becoming American. While many have humorous moments, they are not, by and large, funny books.

It seems especially necessary that children’s books, in the balance, convey more than a one-dimensional image of “the other,” yet the identity tale of oppressed people continues to dominate those books dubbed “multicultural.” Perhaps the problem is that the very notion of a culturally grounded story is perceived as worthy and important, not concepts we associate with laughter. But the truth is that you can’t see people as fully human if all you can feel for them is pity. Funny books with cultural contexts are capable of subverting and questioning issues of identity and belonging. By upsetting worthy apple carts, they offer new and necessary views of characters with cultural connections beyond the mainstream.

The pioneer in mixing humor with matters of race, culture, and, yes, oppression is undoubtedly Christopher Paul Curtis. The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 was published in 1995. The scene in which Byron’s lips get stuck to the family car’s side-view mirror is the one most readers call to mind, but there are others, many of them much more pointed than that one, as when the boys are faced with the prospect of going to the bathroom in the woods. Byron says, sardonically, “Snakes? I ain’t scared of no damn snake, it’s the people I’m worried about.” He means white people, of course, on the family’s journey south. The humor slams the reader with the grimness of the circumstances, even while it gives the characters a means of coping.

Humor in The Watsons is a mechanism Curtis uses to lead readers to an understanding of the insidiousness of racism and discrimination. It allows us to align clearly with one group of people and against another, in a deliberate stance that counters the prejudices of the period. If you’re with Kenny and his family, you can’t condone the racism they have to endure. Inequity, discrimination, and injustice give thematic impetus to the characters’ journeys. Because we can laugh, we can bear to navigate those obstacles along with them.

Since 1995, other writers of multicultural books have ventured into humorous terrain. In Julia Alvarez’s How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, the unorthodox use of a strikeout in the title places a tongue-in-cheek tonal stamp on the work before the reader has turned a single page. It’s plain that this relative is about to change young Miguel’s life forever. He can’t hold out against this woman who is practically a force of nature, and neither can the reader. Her character, larger than life and twice as real, creates a playfulness that runs through the book and its sequels.

One way to cross cultural borders is by normalizing customs and preferences that might typically be seen as un-American. Lenore Look does this in her chapter books with Chinese American protagonists. In Ruby Lu, Brave and True, for example, foods like “jook” are casually named in passing. Don’t know what that is? Well, all right, there’s a glossary, but does it really matter? After all, when I read Enid Blyton in my youth I had no idea what scones were. It didn’t stop me for a minute.

Ruby’s Chinese school is cleverly normalized by the elegant teacher, by the funny coincidence of a namesake friend, and by Mom’s memories of English school in China. A bilingual dog responds to commands in Cantonese and English—a subtle suggestion that in this world, both languages are equally privileged. Normalizing the unfamiliar allows the reader to laugh with, rather than at, the character in such a story. It also implies that you don’t need to understand everything about a person in order to share a smile. By placing cultural markers in this way, the writer draws borders between cultures, and then makes them permeable, thereby giving the reader permission to laugh.

Look’s Alvin Ho books feature an endearing boy character with a family and community whose imperatives are often at odds with his own fears. The first two books, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things and Alvin Ho: Allergic to Camping, Hiking, and Other Natural Disasters, and the fourth, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and Other Fatal Circumstances, are laugh-out-loud funny. They adroitly traverse the emotional spaces of Alvin’s Concord, Massachusetts, neighborhood and his Chinese American family. A less felicitous choice in the third title, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects, and Other Man-Made Catastrophes, is a plot line related to “playing settlers and Indians” at a friend’s birthday party. Perhaps unintentionally, it nonetheless objectifies American Indians, and normalizes a controversial playground remnant from the colonial past. To me, it seemed a perplexing and discomfiting element. Sometimes those cultural border-crossing zones contain landmines. Sometimes a joke can backfire. Maybe it’s just that as a writer from an underrepresented group myself, I feel a need to be particularly mindful when I’m engaged in the representation of others.

In Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization, the narrative voice leads readers into a richly funny rendition of 1940s America. The book stars Neddie, son of the Wentworthstein shoelace king, along with a sizable cast of eccentric characters. Nor is race ignored as a social factor of the time—a racist comment made at the Brown-Sparrow Military Academy hits home because of its offhandedness. Neddie doesn’t get it, but the reader will.

The Neddiad and its sequels, The Yggyssy and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, are madcap escapades with space aliens, baffling allies, and true-blue villains. Houses appear and vanish at whim, the Catskills are peopled with giants, reality itself sometimes seems a mirage, and the jokes range from subtle to slapstick and everything in between. Time itself may be the cultural border crossed in these books. They take the reader into a past with many racial, cultural, and even religious strands, from all of which Pinkwater weaves a genuinely American humorous fantasy.

A comparable book with clear cultural context is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where comic book and cartoon conventions meet the movies of Satyajit Ray. The book is a phantasmagorical journey driven by the ill will of a villain who represents the silencing of all stories.

The sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life, draws its inspiration from sources as diverse as Beowulf and Super Mario. While equally filled with dramatic moments, it lacks the ingenuity, the freshness, and the heart of Haroun. Both books, however, are packed with layers of humor accessible to all, along with bilingual jokes that are special treats for cultural insiders.

It’s hard to juggle insiders’ jokes while crossing cultural borders, but they can be used simultaneously as a nod to readers in the know and an invitation to others. In Janet Wong’s verse novel Minn and Jake, Jake’s racial background is never mentioned. In the sequel, Minn and Jake’s Almost Terrible Summer, we learn that he has a Korean grandmother. That makes him one-quarter Korean, or as he says, “Quarpa.” By punning on the insider’s term hapa, the author invites not only Minn to share in the joke but the reader as well.

Humorous outsider narratives are even rarer than funny books written from within the cultures concerned. It’s easy to see why. When you’re treading on unfamiliar ground, humor can seem to add an unnecessary banana peel. The outsider risks being tripped up by nuance and implication, regional specificity and the dangers of caricature. Candace Fleming takes all these risks and more in Lowji Discovers America, her story of a boy from India whose family is Parsi, belonging to the Zoroastrian faith. Lowji’s spunky character and his occasional precocity go far in establishing his appeal. A best friend left behind in India is counterpoint to new friends in America without for a minute implying a hierarchical comparison between the two. Of course, humor can also sometimes have a long fuse, tapping the deep and personal sources that Eudora Welty said give rise to all story. As a result, it’s possible that to a Parsi reader, some element or other might ring false. Sometimes writing funny books can call for bravery in a writer.

An improbable combination (best friends in suburban Maryland and an eccentric Bollywood movie star) served as my entry into the subversive world of humor. My middle-grade novel The Grand Plan to Fix Everything employs cultural fusion to define the relationship between best friends of whom one is Indian-American and the other is not. Eleven-year-old Dini is devastated because her family’s impending move to India means that she and her best friend Maddie will have to miss Bollywood dance camp—in Maryland.

There is no question in my mind that whatever loopiness I’ve succeeded in bringing to the page I owe to those Wodehouse novels I read years ago. They were not written for children, but I read them with my eleven-year-old hunger to understand the world. Humor can help a reader do just that. It must be handled with care, so the reader is laughing with the characters and situations, as in the work of Christopher Paul Curtis, and not at them.

In generous hands, humor can appear to fix the things that need fixing in the world. And then it can turn around and wink at you, the reader, as if you’re complicit in the manufacture of the fiction. Children in the middle grades are eccentric, idiosyncratic, and poised on the brink of reinventing both themselves and their world. The middle-grade reader is a perfect audience for the writer seeking to bridge gaps, make connections, or cross borders of culture, race, place, and language—with laughter leading the way.

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In the same way that talking about fantasy books without mentioning a certain boy wizard would be absurd (see Roger Sutton’s “What Hath Harry Wrought?”), any discussion of YA dystopia must acknowledge the impact of the taut, intricately plotted, and haunting Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. While YA dystopias existed before it (and many of these were spawned by Lois Lowry’s The Giver, for younger readers), there is no discounting the bump in numbers and popularity since The Hunger Games was published, and the movie has only served to draw more attention. Thus, it’s helpful to know what makes for a good YA dystopian novel, and to have some titles in mind when you get the inevitable groan from teens after they finish Mockingjay and want more to read.

A note on definition: while shambling, brain-eating zombies; nuclear holocausts; electromagnetic space pulses that knock out most of the population; or alien invasions all make for compelling reading, they do not necessarily fall into the category of dystopia. Now, if the survivors of those various tragedies form a messed-up society where freedoms are curtailed in order to protect its citizens from imagined future terrible events, then we’re talking dystopia.

There are four major elements that appear consistently in good YA dystopian novels. Certainly a book need not have all of them, but the best do: a setting so vividly and clearly described that it becomes almost a character in itself; individuals or forces in charge who have a legitimate reason for being as they are; protagonists who are shaped by their environment and situations; and a conclusion that reflects the almost always dire circumstances.

In Across the Universe by Beth Revis, the setting is an interstellar spaceship, Godspeed, which is at once wondrous and claustrophobic to Amy, who was awoken from a cryogenic chamber and must now navigate the physical and social anomalies of this self-contained world. The descriptions are riveting, and the layers of lies that are built around the ship (and keep the generations who live and die within its walls docile) make the ship itself as integral an element as protagonist Amy.

In Fever Crumb, Philip Reeve uses gripping, slightly mysterious, complex language to describe his setting. The city of London and its scrambling, scrappy residents, the strange and slowly disintegrating giant head in which the Engineers live, and the very earliest rumblings (this novel is set centuries before Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet) of the mechanics that will allow for the moving cities are stunning. The humor built into the descriptions is an elegant contrast to Fever’s hyper-rational approach to life, and the setting acts as an impressive foil against which she must struggle to remain the same rather than be shaped by the larger, much more wild and unpredictable but simultaneously much richer world.

A clever setting-as-character example is the world of Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. The prison experiment called Incarceron, a now self-aware and tyrannical entity, shapes the dystopia as much as the people who exist there. Fisher’s protagonists are intriguing and well developed, but even they are less memorable than the brilliantly conceived Incarceron that—having escaped the control of its original creators—sees, influences, punishes, and restricts according to its own standards.

A bad guy with no depth, vulnerability, history, or context functions as a foil for the protagonist but adds little else to the story. Depth of character makes the struggle between good and evil (against an individual or society) far more vivid. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Snow is one of many worthy villains; interestingly, he is perhaps the more blatantly malign but also slightly more sympathetic villain (in comparison to Coin) to emerge from the series. It is clear that he is following in a line of leaders who made similar choices, and it is equally clear that he is an exaggerated representation of the society in which he came to power. The lack of a specific “bad guy” but rather an example of a well-intentioned society gone horribly awry is presented in Ally Condie’s Matched, where the earnest and well-meaning Society has evolved into an entity that has whittled down the world into manageable, easily digestible amounts: this society allows exactly one hundred songs (and pictures, poems, etc.) and arranges carefully planned love matches that take any guesswork out of romance. It is all safe and cozy and may not immediately appear dystopian—until the reality of not being able to shape anything in your own life truly sinks in.

In Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari, Lucy is prepared to acknowledge that ninety-nine percent of the population is gone and that her choices are few. What she isn’t ready to accept, and what makes this novel so complex, is that she is apparently the only immune person left on Earth, and she could best help the planet’s survival by giving her blood—all her blood—for medical use. The pace is superb, and the vivid descriptions of the new attempts at society are well crafted, but it is the choices the amoral but brilliant scientists make that push Lucy to define herself as martyr or survivor. The fact that the key scientist still feels like the kindest person Lucy has recently encountered complicates things all the more, as it lays bare how intensely vulnerable and alone she is in this ravaged world.

It is convenient to the story to have a rebel grandparent or elder who remembers how it used to be “before” and can account for how his or her offspring is different than the average citizen, but for the most part good dystopian novels don’t just take contemporary characters from realistic fiction and dump them into dystopic settings. The characters who clearly cannot see beyond the ways in which they have been raised force readers to consider not only how they might respond in that society, but also to thoughtfully assess elements of adolescence that carry across setting (snark, pushing at boundaries, curiosity about and interest in the newest technology, hormonal adjustments). Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, set in a dystopian environment where resources are plentiful but the use of them is highly suspect, offers characters shaped by having been raised in this world of enforced conformity. While some resist and others embrace it, Westerfeld’s protagonists are carefully operating within the boundaries of his creepy, image-obsessed world.

Two prime examples from opposite ends of the dystopian civilization spectrum are M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness. Both address the effects of being permanently tapped into constantly flowing information (in Ness’s world, it is more metaphorical as a virus that causes thoughts to be heard; in Anderson’s capitalist nightmare everything is literally messaged directly into your brain), and both feature protagonists who reflect their environments, even as they catch occasional glimpses of how life could be otherwise. The protagonists are so richly developed, so compelling, and so hopelessly ensnared that they evoke sympathy even as they inevitably exasperate the reader.

Finally, Divergent by Veronica Roth is a movie-ready example of a novel that includes tantalizing snippets of a dystopic society that has led to citizens deriving their identity from belonging to one of five personality-based factions. While much of the focus is actually on Beatrice’s response to not slotting perfectly into one of those factions and her training once she chooses, there is no doubt that she will indeed select from the limited options she is presented, unable to envision what a different path would resemble.

In terms of how a novel wraps up, hopeful is good, and measured optimism works beautifully, but often you just can’t escape unscathed. In some cases, authors are daring enough (or heartless enough, depending on your tolerance for sad endings) to let their protagonists face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and find that they are, indeed, just that. The shocking conclusion of Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick is one of the coolest new examples of this: while the novel is closer to post-apocalyptic than pure dystopia, there is certainly a dystopic community in which Alex finds herself—a settlement that doesn’t try to exist as the world had been before but is shaped by an entirely new set of morals and standards. This paradigm shift, should the members survive their own chilling ethical choices, will surely result in a quintessential dystopic world.

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch is also set as an end-of-the-world survival novel, but the strictly controlled elements of the community that has rebuilt itself to resemble how life used to be (complete with creepy baseball games that feel so…eerily incorrect in their very normalcy) seem like an obvious example of dystopia masking as utopia. Life there is better than what exists outside of Settler’s Landing, but the protagonist is forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a true haven anymore.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother probably represents the purest example on the list—modern technology meets classic dystopic elements—even while the book itself is part instructional guide, part love story, and part rant at the increasingly dictatorial powers that be that consider safety at any cost a reasonable exchange. Small personal victories for the protagonist and his friends are present, but the power of Big Brother is hardly tempered by their work, and the folks who tangled with the government are all permanently scarred by the encounter.

A bonus element from the above titles is the lingering point of consideration with which readers are left—wondering how and where they would fit (disturbing the universe, representing one of the masses, or somewhere in between), and perhaps also contemplating how near or far their own social structure is from what they just read. All the titles above lend themselves to such musings, and the protagonists within are also likely to give some thought to these issues—it is often how they move from quiet discontent to activism. Of course, these questions are moot when you aren’t sure if you are going to survive at all, and there are several dystopian novels that feature characters who (though the reader knows better) would scoff at the notion of philosophical debate, given that they are literally running, fighting, or competing to stay alive. Well-written dystopias, the most memorable ones, offer both: space for asking big-scale life questions along with plenty of adventure and danger to keep things exciting as one cogitates.

Good YA Dystopias

• Feed (Candlewick, 2002) by M. T. Anderson
• Ashes (Egmont, 2011) by Ilsa J. Bick
• Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), Catching Fire (2009), Mockingjay (2010) by Suzanne Collins
• Matched (Dutton, 2010) by Ally Condie (sequel Crossed, 2011)
• Little Brother (Tor, 2008) by Cory Doctorow
• Incarceron (Dial, 2010) by Catherine Fisher (sequel Sapphique, 2010)
• The Eleventh Plague (Scholastic, 2011) by Jeff Hirsch
• Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go (Candlewick, 2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009), Monsters of Men (2010) by Patrick Ness
• Fever Crumb (Scholastic, 2010) by Philip Reeve (sequel A Web of Air, 2011)
• Across the Universe (Razorbill/Penguin, 2011) by Beth Revis (sequel A Million Suns, 2012)
• Divergent (Tegen/HarperCollins, 2011) by Veronica Roth (sequel Insurgent, May 2012)
• Ashes, Ashes (Scholastic, 2011) by Jo Treggiari
• The Uglies series: Uglies (Simon Pulse, 2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006), Extras (2007) by Scott Westerfeld

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This is not about my own school. I prefer to forget that. This is about how a large part of the job description when you write for children is the remorseless visiting of schools. When I was young and strong, I was required to do this almost once a week. Half of the time, the visit was entirely rewarding: the children, as always, were lovely; the staff, enthusiastic; and I could find the school entrance. Even when I lost my way (or, on one memorable occasion, when a silly old man jumped off the moving train and someone had to pull the emergency cord) and I arrived late, this kind of visit was always wonderful. On the occasion of the man jumping off the train, one of the boys actually gave me the idea for my book Howl’s Moving Castle.

These visits kept me going for the other half of the time, in which there was never any problem with the children, but the adults behaved atrociously. At the very least, the Headmaster would rush at me as I arrived, wring my hand in a crunching grip, and say, “I haven’t read any of your books, of course.” I was always too busy shaking my right hand and wondering when I’d recover the use of it to ask the obvious questions: “Why haven’t you? And why of course?” Headmistresses were less predictable. Here the common factor was that they regarded me as an intrusive nuisance and were liable to have arranged for the whole school to do something else. I would arrive at the school at the stated hour, having allowed time to hunt around the buildings for the way in, to be met by the School Secretary saying, “The Headmistress has them all in Maypole Dancing practice. Do you mind waiting an hour and a half?” It often took strong resolution not to simply turn around and go away.

The visit which caused me eventually to decide not to visit schools anymore was arranged as part of a citywide book festival. All schools in the city were supposed to participate. I was escorted to this particular school by two nice but nervous librarians in a small old car. As we chugged up the forecourt to the dark and forbidding school buildings, an obvious School Secretary came rushing toward us, holding out one hand to stop us. We stopped. “No Supply Teachers today,” she shouted. “We don’t need any extra staff. Go away!” Somewhat shaken by this welcome, we explained that we were not in fact spare teachers but an Author Visit arranged by the city. “Oh, then come in if you must,” she replied, “but the Deputy Head won’t be pleased.” The said Deputy Head, whom we encountered at the entrance, seemingly standing by to repel visitors, was indeed not pleased. She told us brusquely that we had better get ourselves to Room Eleven then. After some hunting about, we found this room. It was large, anemically lit, and full of empty desks. Scattered about at the desks were seven or so depressed-looking girls and boys. The skinny, angry-looking teacher in charge said to us, “The rest of the class have gone to a Latin lesson. You wouldn’t want them to miss their Latin, would you?” I suppressed a desire to tell him that, yes, I thought they might miss their Latin just this once, because the librarians by now both looked as if they might cry. Instead I sat where the man told me to and started to get on terms with the remaining children. After six or so minutes, we were beginning to loosen up and enjoy ourselves and the kids were starting to ask questions when the door burst open and the Deputy Head reappeared, energetically ringing a large brass bell. “Everybody out!” she shouted. “Children, go home. The rest of you go away. We’re on strike from this moment on!”

There was nothing to do but go. The librarians and I went and had coffee and stared at one another limply. Schools, I thought, would be fine if it wasn’t for the adults running them.

Diana Wynne Jones’s latest book is The House of Many Ways (Greenwillow).

From the September/October 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Presented by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, A Sense of Wonder: Stories of Nature, Science & History is a one-day conference to be held on Thursday, April 5, for teachers and school librarians. Speakers will include Sy Montgomery, Wendell Minor, Anita Silvey and Catherine Thimmesh. For more information, see the professional development page on the Library’s web site at http://www.jfklibrary.org/Education/Teachers/Professional-Development.aspx

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photo: National Geographic

Rick Bowers’s previous book, Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. The journalist and historian’s latest offering is another compellingly told and meticulously researched account of events surrounding the civil rights battle. Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate uses the appeal of popular culture to illuminate social movements, mass media, and historical research. The result is a complex history of organizations guided by both ideology and profit, people both well-meaning and flawed, and shifts in popular sentiment. Along the way, Bowers demonstrates how a historian works, digging past myths, examining original archives, and reaching tentative conclusions about what happened and why.

1. You went deep into archives on the battle over civil rights to write your last book, Spies of Mississippi (discussed here). Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan is about the intersection of that history with superhero pop-culture. How much did you have to learn about the world of comics?

Rick Bowers: I had to immerse myself in the history of comic books in general and in the Superman character in particular.

Superman was first dubbed the “champion of the oppressed” and only later became famous as the champion of truth, justice, and the American way. The original Superman had a strong social conscience that led him to thwart wife beaters, corrupt politicians, greedy industrialists, foreign dictators, and Nazi spies.

Spawned during the FDR years, Superman was a super New Dealer who stood up for the little guy and believed we could all work toward a better world. He reflected the ideals of the New Deal and the hopes and aspirations of immigrants.

Given all that history it figures that the Man of Steel would one day take on the men of hate. Superman was shaped as a force for openness and fairness and a positive future for all. The K.K.K. was openly anti-Semitic, hostile to liberal democracy, and wanted to turn the clock back.

2. The Superman radio shows at the center of your book were featured in Freakonomics in 2005, but then that book’s authors retracted the story as a myth. How did you go about finding out what most likely happened?

RB: I had the advantage of beginning my research in the wake of the Freakonomics kerfuffle. That debate suggested that the popular version of events was probably not one hundred percent accurate and challenged me to find the most important facts.

Sure enough, numerous documents showed that the basic story of Superman vs. the K.K.K. was true but that certain fabrications had become accepted as fact and had muddied the historical record.

This required me to establish the core facts and stick to those.

FACT 1: In 1946 the producers of The Adventures of Superman radio show aired a sixteen-part series entitled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” It pitted the Man of Steel against a thinly veiled version of the K.K.K. that fooled no one. The series was widely praised for teaching tolerance to millions of kids and striking a blow against bigotry. The episodes were very well researched and contained highly realistic descriptions of K.K.K. activities and beliefs.

FACT 2: Activist Stetson Kennedy had made a career out of getting very close to the K.K.K. and then revealing their secrets to civil rights groups, liberal journalists, and law enforcement. Kennedy was also cited in various publications as a source of information to the Superman radio show for the anti-Klan broadcasts.

THE MYTH: Kennedy (and others) claimed that the shows revealed secret K.K.K. code words that had been gleaned from Klan meetings in Atlanta. As a result, (the story went), Klan leaders had to change their passwords after each episode, much to the dismay of the disgruntled membership. This was first reported in a national magazine in the late1940s and was further embellished by Kennedy in his book The Klan Unmasked.

The reality is that “Clan of the Fiery Cross” — while dramatic and to a degree realistic—did not contain actual code words and did not force the Klan to scurry about changing their code words. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the Superman producers for creating such a powerful program and to give a nod to the anti-Klan efforts of Stetson Kennedy — even if he was prone to exaggeration and tended to grab credit.

3. What were a couple of your biggest surprises in researching and writing this book?

RB: One big revelation was the significant influence of Jewish publishers, artists, and writers on the first comic books. I was fascinated to learn that the Superman character was created by a couple of Jewish teenagers in Cleveland during the Great Depression. At that time Jews were largely kept out of mainstream publishing by prejudice and had to find their own niche. The fledgling comic book business was not yet big enough to attract the interest of mainstream publishers and Jews could operate in that space. As a result Jewish publishers and artists gave us many of our most important superheroes and characters.

I was also surprised at just how controversial comic books were. Even Superman was condemned by critics as a Nazi-style vigilante who used violence to solve problems. Wonder Woman was derided as the very opposite of decent womanhood. By the time the crime and horror comics came along censorship was viewed as the only solution.

4. A fair amount of your book follows Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, though by 1946 they no longer controlled the character and were about to break with DC Comics. How did you decide to keep them as part of your civil-rights story?

RB: Jerry and Joe deserve all the credit for creating a character with a social conscience — an all-powerful being with a burning desire to stand by the little guy and to crusade for a better world. All the artists and producers to come after the publication of those first comic books were standing on their shoulders. So even as Jerry and Joe planned their embittered departure from DC Comics, the Superman character was still carrying out a mission established back in 1938.

Jerry and Joe had not set out to change the world, but they did more than their part to make it better.

5. In a real fight, who would win: 1940s Superman or the K.K.K.?

RB: Hands down: Superman. An actual being with superhuman strength, the power of flight, and X-ray vision would defeat a band of bigots in sheets and hoods in short order. First of all a fully unleashed Superman would have done what the authorities should have been doing — catch the Klansmen in the midst of their criminal acts and bring them to justice for all to see. He also would have nabbed the politicians and police officials who protected the Klan and exposed them as the hypocrites they were. And he would have explained to the whole world that all people deserve equal rights and respect, and those who seek to deny it are wrong. In the end the hooded hatemongers would have no hiding place — and the world would be a better place.

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