Chris Barton's Blog: Bartography, page 46

Booklist gives a star to The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

You spend eight-plus years working on a book, and it’s easy to lose perspective — to no longer have any sense of how your work is going to be received by someone who hasn’t, you know, spent eight-plus years working on that book.

This starred review from Booklist dispelled any worries in its very first sentence:

The fascinating story of John Roy Lynch’s life from slavery to his election to the U.S. House of Representatives at age 25, gets a stirring treatment here.

That makes two stars for Th...

Book trailer for The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

(Narrated by yours truly.)

Many thanks to Don Tate and Eerdmans Books for Young Readers for their work in putting this together, and to John Roy Lynch himself for the inspiring quote at the end.

You’ll find lots more about the book here.

Don, Tom, and me

I had the great pleasure of serving on a panel at last month’s Austin SCBWI conference with illustrators Don Tate (shown on the left) and Tom Lichtenheld (the guy in the middle). If those names sound familiar, it’s because I’ve created a book with each of them.

In fact…

Today (no fooling) is the publication date not only of The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch, which Don illustrated, but also of the board book version of the Tom-illustrated Shark Vs. Train. Both books give readers something to...

Living symbols of the spread of freedom — and its opposite

This graphic is from an upcoming presentation that I’ll be giving about The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch, and I thought a wider audience might appreciate it.

For context, here’s an excerpt from my Historical Note in the book:

During Reconstruction, approximately two thousand African American men served as local, state, or national officials. Some of them were freemen before the war, and others – including John Roy Lynch – were freed only as a result of the conflict. Those who held office i...

Eric Foner on Reconstruction and The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

“Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction.”

That quote comes from “Why Reconstruction Matters,” a new, short essay by Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 and the Pulitzer-prize-winning DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. I can’t recommend enough taking a few minutes to read it.

While Don Tate was working on the illustrations for Th...

Bartography Express for March 2015, featuring The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

This month, at least one subscriber to my Bartography Express newsletter — maybe more! — will win a copy of my new brand-new book.

To celebrate next week’s publication of The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (illustrated by Don Tate, and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers), the children’s department staffers at Austin’s BookPeople came up with several questions for me to answer. I hope you enjoy my answers as much as I appreciate their questions.

If you’re not already receiving Bartog...

What we do for fun around here

Three of us, anyway — my 11-year-old human boy, our terrier-dachshund mix, Ernie, and yours truly.

We’ve been attending agility classes every week or two for the past year. Some days are more agile than others, though. The above video was from two weeks ago. The photo below is from this morning, when Ernie misjudged the dimensions of the pottery he was gratuitously leaping over.

All the college kidlit conferences (as of March 2015)

Or, more formally, “A Comprehensive List of U.S. College- and University-Sponsored or -Hosted Children’s and Young Adult Literature Conferences, Festivals, and Symposia.” (All of them that I could find, anyway).

A few years ago, I was looking for such a list, wondered why I couldn’t find one, and decided to just go ahead and make one myself.

Since then, I’ve periodically updated and reposted it, and I plan to continue doing so. If I’ve missed any, or included some that no longer exist, won’t y...

“Why Study Reconstruction?”

It’s still a month away from the publication date of my book with Don Tate​, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch, the true story of a young man who rose from slavery to the U.S. Congress during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

About that latter, terribly overlooked period, I could not ask for a better summation of why it’s such an important era in U.S. history than this three-minute video published today by Facing History and Ourselves​. I hope you’ll watch it and be inspired to learn more.

Bartography Express for February 2015, featuring Lynda Mullaly Hunt’s Fish in a Tree

This month, one subscriber to my Bartography Express newsletter will win a copy of Fish in a Tree (Penguin) by Lynda Mullaly Hunt.

If you’re not already receiving Bartography Express, click the image below for a look. If you like what you see, click “Join” in the bottom right corner, and you’ll be in the running for the giveaway at the end of this week.