The Great Fire

Murphy, Jim. The Great Fire. 1995. 144pp. Lexile 1130.

In this piece of outstanding nonfiction, which is one of the Common Core exemplars, Murphy recreates the Great Fire of 1871, which burned for thirty-one hours and destroyed central Chicago.  He uses vivid writings of people who encountered the fire first-hand: a twelve-year-old girl who almost died, a newspaper reporter, a visitor from New York, and the Chicago Tribune editor-in-chief.  Through their eyes, the reader experiences the sounds and sights of the city burning.  Murphy excels at incorporating narrative techniques more often found in fiction that bring a scene to life (without fictionalizing it).  Readers will get to know the main actors and feel suspense as the fire rages. Murphy analyzes what went wrong before, during, and after the tragic event.  Maps, etchings, photographs, and numerous quotes from primary sources create a sense of immediacy in this excellent Newbery Honor Book.

Reading Std #7:  Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, visually and quantitatively, and in words.  Analyze the series of maps that show how the fire spread; explain how the maps relate to the people that the narrative follows.

Blizzard: The Storm That Changed America

Murphy, Jim. Blizzard: The Storm That Changed America. 2000. 160pp. Lexile 1080.

Blizzard! combines the suspenseful story of a natural disaster that paralyzed New York City with fascinating information about weather forecasting and topics like snow removal in the 1880s.  Readers can’t help but marvel at how much has changed since then.  New York came to a halt for three days as city officials tried to figure out how to remove the snow and where to put it.  Murphy skillfully weaves in stories of real people and how they coped, such as two boys who were trying to walk to the next house and instead spent 22 hours in a snow cave they hollowed out.  Newspaper reports, diaries and books from the time flesh out the characters and incidents as do photographs, paintings and etchings, maps, and pictures of newspaper articles.  This Sibert Honor book is the best of both worlds:  readable historical information melded to a dramatic event. Murphy provides eight pages of notes about his research and related reading material in which he lays out how he tackled his subject and what his sources were, including 1200 letters of reminiscences from the Society of Blizzard Men and Blizzard Ladies, located at the New York Historical Society.

Reading Std #7:  Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, visually and quantitatively, and in words.  An author makes choices about what information to present such as which photographs to include.  Photographs make a book more expensive for the publisher to print and authors usually bear the cost of reproducing photographs.  Have students evaluate the photographs Murphy uses, most of which are from the New York Historical Society.  Have students find photographs Murphy didn’t use such as many of the 72 photographs at the Connecticut State Library  (http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15019coll17) and consider what they might have added to the book.

Bad Boy: A Memoir

 Myers, Walter Dean. Bad Boy: A Memoir. 2001. 224 pp. Lexile 970.

Walter Dean Myers is one of the most important, honored, and widely read writers for teens.  Any unit on biography, autobiography or memoir, or units on Myers’ novels would benefit from this inspiring story of his childhood and teen years until he joined the army at age seventeen.  He grew up with adoptive parents in 1940s Harlem, where he had real problems in school.  Constantly teased for a speech defect, he took to fighting, which made the problems worse, but he still gained admission to Stuyvesant, the prestigious Manhattan public high school.  His growing love of books and then of writing redeemed his life but also divided him from his friends and family.  Especially touching is his account of learning to read from his mother’s True Romance novels.  The memoir looks at how how racism affected his life and his view of his future, and concludes with how he made his way back to writing after his military service.  Absorbing and inspiring.

Fiction Tie-in:  Walter Dean Myers won the first Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature for his novel, Monster.  In common with his own memoir, Monster is about a teenage boy who gets in trouble and who expresses himself in writing.  As the protagonist, Steve, deals with being in prison and on trial as an accused accomplice to murder, he writes a screenplay of the trial.  The ambiguity, moral issues, and unusual combination of formats make this popular for teaching as well as independent reading.

Lives of the Musicians: Good Times, Bad Times (and What the Neighbors Thought)

Krull, Kathleen. Lives of the Musicians: Good Times, Bad Times (and What the Neighbors Thought). 1993. 96pp. Lexile 1010.

Meet twenty-four well-known musicians in this witty collective biography.  Large caricatures set the tone so readers know they will be entertained as well as informed about such classical stars as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, and Vivaldi.  American musicians such as Joplin, Gershwin, and Woody Guthrie also put in an appearance.  Krull describes professional highlights and adds sometimes eccentric details about each one, weaving in references to specific pieces of music.  This is one of several books by Krull along the same lines—including artists, famous women, presidents, and athletes. While highly enjoyable, the series is also especially useful for students who benefit from short chunks of text and the support of pictures.

Reading Std #1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and implicitly, citing specific textual evidence to support conclusions drawn from it.  Krull manages to convey the personality of each musician.  Have students each choose one of the musicians and analyze how she conveys a sense of the person through her language and the details she includes.