From the January/February 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Letters to the Editor

I do not normally write letters to journals in response to reviews because I believe reviewers work hard to give as fair a write-up as possible about a book. However, I was quite disturbed by a part of the review of my book, Free at Last!: Stories and Songs of Emancipation (Candlewick) (May/June 2004 Horn Book). The reviewer wrote, “Frustratingly, Rappaport scatters source citations, which appear variously in an introduction, acknowledgments, permissions, and ‘selected sources.’ Why not just list full references in the order the material appears in the book? Not only would it be more convenient for scholars, it would also be a much better model for young readers developing a sense of historical accuracy.”

I organized these notes, actually, the way scholars organize notes in their books. I felt it essential in the “About This Book” introduction to clarify that the dialogue and descriptions of the actions and feelings of various people in the book came directly from their first-person accounts; I did not want children to think that the vignettes were fictionalized, because they weren’t. I needed them to know this right at the beginning of the book, before they plunged into reading it.

That said, the “Acknowledgments” at the back of the book really act as footnotes, clarifying various sources that quotes and poems come from. Official footnotes at the bottom of the page would have completely turned my readers off, and to have listed the publishers of all the material in the “Acknowledgments” would have been too burdensome for them. We have enough trouble getting young readers to delve further into the resources that writers use to create historical books. As for the “Permissions,” which are listed separately, all publishers require that permissions be listed separately, away from all other footnoted material.

I hope that this helps you, and the reviewer, to understand the logic behind the structure of my book.

Doreen Rappaport
Copake Falls, New York

The reviewer, Joanna Rudge Long, replies:

I’m sure Doreen Rappaport did her research, and that she satisfied legal requirements in her acknowledgments. But her book left me still wanting to know exactly how she knows what she knows.
A couple of examples. First, “The Story of Jane Kemper,” on page 8: I don’t spot Kemper’s name among the acknowledgments or “Selected Sources.” She is mentioned in Rappaport’s introduction: “The dialogue and descriptions of the actions and feelings of [among others] Jane Kemper . . . come directly from their first-person accounts.” Where would I find Kemper’s account? Rappaport doesn’t say. Second: in order to find the source of the letter quoted on page 13, one must search among seven narrative paragraphs of the acknowledgments to find: “‘Everytime I gits a letter from you . . .’ was found in Dear Ones at Home”; and it requires a second search, through a different list of forty or so sources, to find the book’s full citation, now listed under the editor’s name, not the title.

The most important issue, however, isn’t abiding by the law or satisfying adults’ academic curiosity. Inspiring children’s curiosity about how we unearth the past and how we can evaluate the truth of its presentation — that’s what’s vital. There are excellent techniques for doing this. For example, Marc Aronson’s endnotes include full citations plus lively evaluative comments about the reliability and prejudices of his sources, which he balances in order to make his own hypotheses — all in full view of the reader. Russell Freedman’s bibliographic essays convey a fine sense of what’s available and what’s useful concerning his subjects. Such authors do far more than survey facts; they model weighing evidence and drawing conclusions — and point out that new evidence may one day alter perceived truth.

Writers of nonfiction for young people have the opportunity and the obligation to nurture youthful curiosity and to foster the habit of evaluating facts. Both qualities are fundamental to education; they are also essential to the effective working of democracy.

My review of Free at Last! was mostly positive, and deservedly so. Still, enthusiasm like Aronson’s and Freedman’s for sharing with young people the process of sifting through information, and of shaping narratives to reflect truth as accurately as possible, would have made it a better book.

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