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.

Three Titanic Books

• McPherson, Stephanie Sammartino. Iceberg Right Ahead! The Sinking of the Titanic.  2011. 112pp.  Lexile: 1070.
• Hopkinson, Deborah. Titanic: Voices from the Disaster. 2012. 275pp.  Lexile: 1040.
• Denenberg, Barry. Titanic Sinks!  2011. 72pp. 

Students can learn about different approaches to a factual subject by comparing different nonfiction books on the same topic.  The 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic offers an excellent opportunity to do so, comparing three books with different approaches and overlapping but not identical information and photographs.  The McPherson book is the most traditional, a solid narrative about the causes and aftermath as well as the tragedy itself, drawing on primary sources; it has plentiful photographs and useful back matter. The Hopkinson book emphasizes primary sources, weaving in multiple quotes from different people who survived and left records of their experiences.  This gives the book a personal feel without fictionalizing.  Denenberg takes more liberties, creating a narrator, S.F. Vannie, who serves as a correspondent for the fictional Modern Times.  The content is otherwise factual.  The book design echoes magazine format with excellent visual elements including photographs, posters, memorabilia, and ads.

Reading Std #9 for grades 6-8: Compare/contrast texts on similar themes or topics.  Compare McPherson’s straightforward approach with the greater inclusion of primary sources by Hopkinson and the magazine format with slight fictionalization by Denenberg.