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NOVEL APPROACH: Turner's topics
include Lincoln (top) and the Gold Rush.
Courtesy Gossamer Books |
publishers weekly
called it “a superb introduction to Lincoln’s
presidency for grade-schoolers.” Its “history
is solid,” judged the Indianapolis Star.
But the School Library Journal found the book’s
take on slavery simplistic and its narrative “pedantic
and inane.”
Ginger Turner, the author of Abraham Lincoln: The
Civil War President (Gossamer Books, 2004), reacts
gamely. “I do enjoy criticism when it offers suggestions
for improvement. If it doesn’t, I just have to
be glad that I inspired strong feeling.”
In large part, it’s the book’s format that
provokes strong feelings. Gossamer says its glossy graphic
novels are designed to get kids excited about U.S. history.
Many parents and teachers welcome this approach; others
recoil at the notion of comic books as teaching tools.
Certainly Turner, ’04, MS ’05, took her
task seriously. She was at Stanford in Oxford during
her junior year when she spotted the online ad for a
“script writer to write about American presidential
history.” The Galveston native had written prize-winning
plays for the Texas Historical Association. She had
won the national Young Playwrights Competition and seen
her entry produced off-Broadway. The job seemed a good
fit.
An economics major, Turner was no Lincoln expert, but
she had something going for her besides storytelling
skills and a love of history. Like the Log Cabin President,
she had been home-schooled. As a teen, she was resourceful
enough to direct her own studies.
Her brief from Gossamer was to produce a 40-plus-page
draft in one month. Turner contacted Stanford history
professor George Frederickson to recommend research
sources and focused on the period from the brink of
the Civil War until Lincoln’s assassination. She
played around with the comic book form, adding a secondary
plotline and a couple of character-revealing flashbacks
to Lincoln’s youth. The president’s dog,
Fido, provided a whimsical yet historically accurate
element.
The graphic novel genre calls for pictures to tell at
least half the story, so Turner had to figure out, for
example, who was with Frederick Douglass when he faced
a sea of top hats and parasols at Philadelphia City
Hall on August 9, 1863, and asked, “What does
the black man want?” Then she had to give detailed
directions to the illustrator, who was based in India.
Gossamer Books, in Belmont, Calif., has put out several
other titles in the series, including Turner’s
second effort, a just-published Gold Rush story. The
company founder, Angel Oberoi, says tutoring students
through Project Read prompted her to start publishing.
The former marketing executive noticed that students
found history texts boring and remembered how the Tintin
books had sparked her interest in history as a child.
There’s no arguing about history texts being boring,
says Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg, PhD
’89, who collects old editions for fun. They are
bland by design, he says, to pass muster with publishers’
overly censorious “bias and sensitivity review
boards.” But Wineburg says teaching kids history
through comic books feeds the nation’s literacy
crisis. “The biggest problem is not bringing history
to life, it’s graduating kids who are primarily
black and brown who can never have a shot at a place
like Stanford because they can’t read,”
he asserts. “We need to stop lying to young people,
and to tell them the truth: if you can’t read
at grade level, you’re preparing for a future
serving burritos at Taco Bell.”
Karen Stanley, the children’s librarian at Turner’s
hometown Rosenberg Library, bemoans illiteracy, too.
But she thinks books like Turner’s can be part
of the solution, noting that lots of kids have checked
it out.
“Today’s children overall are not readers;
it pains me as a children’s librarian to say it,”
Stanley observes. “They go to websites; they want
that instant answer. [Turner’s book] gives them
what they want but hopefully gives them a little bit
more, too.” She’s firmly of the school that
believes “light” reading is better than
none. “Readers read. We read the backs of cereal
boxes, we read flyers, so any reading feeds into that
process.”
Many teachers’ blogs and websites concur. One
chat room correspondent reported finding Turner’s
book “useful in teaching children about Civil
War, slavery and Lincoln’s presidency” and
asked if anyone else had experience using the genre
to help kids read and learn. Nearly all 187 related
postings endorsed the practice.
Turner says she has received similar feedback from teachers
and parents, and would like to do more “writing
and entertainment for education and social change.”
For now, she’s begun work at the World Bank in
Washington, D.C., in the Africa region private sector
area. Previously, she joined several Stanford classmates
bringing low-cost lighting to India and South Africa.
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