Count Your Way Through Germany

by James Haskins

These beautifully illustrated, interactive picture books introduce children to foreign cultures and languages.

Genres: Picture Books, Geography

24 pages, Library Binding

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Haskins, James (1941–2005), author of nonfiction books for juveniles and adults, biographer, educator, critic, editor, and educational consultant. Born into a large family in a racially segregated middle-class section of Demopolis, Alabama, where he was not allowed to visit the town's public library, James S. Haskins was deeply affected by the swirl of events related to the mid-century civil rights movement. He received his bachelor's degree in history at Alabama State College, but limited career opportunities in the South in the early 1960s led him to seek employment in New York City. Two years of selling newspaper advertisements and working as a Wall Street stockbroker brought him to the realization that he was better suited for a career in education and thus he applied for a position in the New York City public school system. After teaching music at several locations, he found a job teaching a special education class at P.S. 92. Obsessed with the plight of his inner-city pupils, he was glad to discuss their problems with anyone who would listen, including a social worker who encouraged him to write his thoughts and experiences in a diary. This resulted in the publication of his first book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher (1969), which was widely acclaimed. This initial success attracted the attention of major publishers who approached him to write books for children and adolescents.

An admitted need to reconcile social disparities and a desire to interpret events to young people and to motivate them to read and be influenced by accomplished individuals—particularly deprived youth whom he felt had far too few role models to read about—led him to author more than one hundred books on a diverse array of topics. Written for a general audience of juveniles, his titles include The War and the Protest: Viet Nam (1971), Religions (1973), Jobs in Business and Office (1974), The Consumer Movement (1975), Your Rights, Past and Present: A Guide for Young People (1975), Teen-age Alcoholism (1976), The Long Struggle: The Story of American Labor (1976), Who Are the Handicapped (1978), Gambling—Who Really Wins (1978), Werewolves (1981), and The New Americans: Cuban Boat People (1982).

Haskins launched his college teaching career in 1970 and continued lecturing on psychology, folklore, children's and young adult literature, and urban education at schools in New York and Indiana before landing a full-time professorship in the English department at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1977. That same year he authored The Cotton Club, a pictorial and social history of the notorious Harlem night club, which seven years later was transformed into a motion picture of the same name directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Among his books intended for adults or college-level readers are The Psychology of Black Language (1973) with Dr. Hugh Butts; Black Manifesto for Education (1973), which he edited; Snow Sculpture and Ice Carving (1974); Scott Joplin: The Man Who Made Rag-time (1978); Voodoo and Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners (1978); Richard Pryor, A Man and His Madness (1984); and Mabel Mercer: A Life (1988). He has contributed numerous critical essays and reviews to periodicals. Still, he is best known for his biographies, tailored for elementary and high school students. Most of these recount the triumphs of well-known contemporary African Americans, with whom many young people readily identify. The long list of persons he has profiled (often using the pen name Jim Haskins) include Colin Powell, Barbara Jordon, Thurgood Marshall, Sugar Ray Leonard, Magic Johnson, Diana Ross, Katherine Dunham, Guion Bluford, Andrew Young, Bill Cosby, Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, Shirley Chisholm, Lena Horne, and Rosa Parks. Biographies of prominent individuals who are not African American include Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, Shirley Temple Black, Corazón Aquino, Winnie Mandela, and Christopher Columbus.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am if truth be told rather majorly frustrated and conflicted regarding James Haskins' 1990 picture book Count Your Way Through Germany (and which also seems to appear in pretty much the same general format in Haskins' other "count your way through" books). Sure, I generally do like how Haskins introduces the numbers from one to ten in German with a very much appreciated pronunciation guide, that the cultural information provided in Count Your Way Through Germany is presented engagingly (with a focus on the positive and not so much on the negative) and that Helen Byers' accompanying artwork does a nice visual job of mirroring, of reflecting James Haskins' textual information (and how Byers' illustrations sometimes aesthetically expand on what Haskins is verbally providing with and in Count Your Way Through Germany).

However, there are three main textual issues I personally have encountered with Count Your Way Through Germany and which do indeed make my final rating for Count Your Way Through Germany only two stars, a pretty high two stars to be sure, but still not in any way enough for a three star rating.

And first and foremost (and yes, for me rather majorly annoyingly and frustratingly), there is some blatantly false information on the German language being given by James Haskins in his introductory note for Count Your Way Through Germany. Because and contrary to Haskins claiming that in German the conjugated verb generally moves to the end of a given sentence, that syntactic scenario is actually ONLY the case for subordinate and NOT for main clauses, that in main clauses the verb always appears in second position, and that no, the German u-umlaut sounds rather like how the u is pronounced in French and not like is claimed by James Haskins in the introduction to Count Your Way Through Germany similar to the u sound in put or in gun (and indeed, the German teacher in my really wants to scream and to shake some sense into Haskins).

For two, and although as mentioned above I do quite majorly appreciate James Haskins focussing on the positives and not on the negatives of German history and culture in Count Your WayThroughGermany (such as for example presenting six German dog breeds, three German composers, four Advent wreath candles etc.), I definitely consider it majorly politically incorrect and hugely uncomfortable for Haskins not to AT ALL mention Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall in Count Your Way Through Germany (as in my opinion, ANY general information book on Germany and on German culture/history should definitely not be ignoring WWII, the horrors of National Socialism and should point out that the Berlin Wall was both a symbol of a divided Germany and also of the Cold War).

Finally and for three, that James Haskins neither acknowledges his sources nor provides in Count Your Way Through Germany a list of books and/or websites for further study and reading, yes, this really does anger and frustrate me (and that therefore I cannot and will not consider a higher rating than two stars for Count Your Way Through Germany and will only recommend this book with the caveat of needing to ignore the error filled introduction and if using Count Your Way Through Germany for educational purposes to also add information on in particular WWII).