Nikole Hannah Jones and Adam Rubin aim to make children's books more accessible

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Our interviews today are both children's books and even though they are about wildly different topics, they both aim to make reading more accessible for kids. Nikole Hannah Jones, with the help of Renee Watson, has turned the 1619 Project into a picture book called Born On The Water. They told NPR their goal was "to say to young people - to young Black Americans, you belong here." Next, Adam Rubin has written a collection of short stories that are all different but have the same title: The Ice Cream Machine. Rubin told NPR's Rachel Martin that there are so many ways to tell a story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I hated reading as a kid. I thought it was stupid and boring, and why read when you could watch TV? You know, why waste time on the Phantom Tooth when it didn't have anything to do with Power Rangers?
0:19.5	Today, we've got two kids' books that really hammer
0:22.6	home the importance of kids' reading, and what it can do for them. In a bit, we'll hear from
0:28.1	Adam Rubin, whose story collection about ice cream invites young readers to add a story of their own.
0:34.2	But first, you've probably heard of the 1619 project, the collection of essays and
0:38.8	poetry and scholarship that has really reframed the centrality of the black experience to America.
0:45.2	Important work, but it's dense. So, author Nicole Hannah-Jones got together with Renee Watson
0:51.0	to turn it into a picture book. And the folks at all things considered
0:54.5	put together this piece of the two of them talking about how important it is to give black
1:00.2	kids away, a language to talk about their history. In the U.S., national security news can feel
1:07.5	far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:13.9	On our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people
1:19.2	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:29.3	Born on the Water puts Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicole Hannah Jones's 1619 project in the hands of young readers.
1:38.0	It's a picture book. She wrote in collaboration with Renee Watson.
1:41.3	The book starts off with a young black girl receiving a homework assignment
1:45.4	where she is asked to trace her roots and draw a flag that represents her ancestral land.
1:51.1	At first, the little girl feels ashamed. She doesn't know where her family came from.
1:55.3	But her grandmother has answers for her and tells her the story of the Tuckers of Tidewater,
2:00.7	Anthony and Isabella, enslaved together
2:02.9	on a plantation they married and had a son named William.
2:11.0	Renee, we had discussions about the line in the poem about the Tucker's of Tidewater, particularly
	...

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