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Summary
Summary
Having fled from war in their troubled homeland, a boy and his family are living in poverty in a strange country. Food is scarce, so when the boy's father brings home a map instead of bread for supper, at first the boy is furious. But when the map is hung on the wall, it floods their cheerless room with color. As the boy studies its every detail, he is transported to exotic places without ever leaving the room, and he eventually comes to realize that the map feeds him in a way that bread never could.
The award-winning artist's most personal work to date is based on his childhood memories of World War II and features stunning illustrations that celebrate the power of imagination. An author's note includes a brief description of his family's experience, two of his early drawings, and the only surviving photograph of himself from that time.
How I Learned Geography is a 2009 Caldecott Honor Book and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Author Notes
Uri Shulevitz is a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He has written and illustrated many celebrated children's books, including the Caldecott Medal-winner The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship , written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure , Snow , and How I Learned Geography .
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a work more personal than Caldecott Medalist Shulevitz (The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship) has ever before offered, he summons boyhood memories of WWII and shows how he learned to defeat despair. Fleeing Warsaw shortly after the Germans invaded in 1939, the child Uri and his parents eke out a miserable existence in Kazakhstan. One day, Father comes home from the bazaar with a huge map of the world instead of food. Uri, only four or five, is "furious," and as the couple sharing the one-room hut eats that night, the husband noisily chewing a crust "as if it were the most delicious morsel in the world," Uri hides under his blanket to cover his envy and rage. But shortly after his father unrolls the map, the boy is swept away by exotic place-names ("Okazaki Miyazaki Pinsk,/ Pennsylvania Transylvania Minsk!"), picturing them remote from his hunger and suffering. As Uri taps into his artistic imagination and draws maps of his own, Shulevitz's illustrations shed their bleak, neorealist feel, and his beaten-down younger self becomes a Sendakian figure--sturdily compact, balletic, capable of ecstatic, audacious adventures. The story and its triumphant afterword demonstrate that Uri masters much more than geography; he realizes the importance of nurturing the soul. Ages 4-8. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Primary) Though Shulevitz's story is catalogued as fiction, his concluding note suggests that it is close to fact (early in World War II, he and his parents "fled empty-handed" from Warsaw to Kazakhstan, where they remained for six years). The book focuses on a transformative incident in the city of Turkestan: one hungry evening, Father brings home a map instead of bread ("I had enough money to buy only a tiny piece...we would still be hungry," he explains). Understandably, the famished boy and his mother are angry at this quixotic purchase. Still, once the huge map is hung on the wall, the boy is entranced -- studies its bright patterns, copies it, strings the exotic place names into rhymes, and dreams he's exploring the world, from beaches to ice-clad mountains, tropical forests to cities. In Shulevitz's skillfully composed, emotionally charged art, evocative scenes of the family leaving war-torn Europe on foot and traversing Asia's "dusty steppes," with its dour, angular villages, give way to the dreamlike splendor of the boy's escape into imagination. "I forgave my father. He was right, after all." Though appropriate for younger children, this is a natural to pair with Peter S?s's The Wall (rev. 9/07) for its depiction of a gifted young artist finding inspiration and expressing himself despite profoundly daunting circumstances. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Recasting a childhood memory as a fictional tale, Caldecott Medalist Shulevitz revisits the journeying theme from his recent The Travels of Benjamin Tudela (2005), while harking back to the fanciful simplicity of Snow (1998) and So Sleepy Story (2006). Driven from home by a war that devastated the land, a family flees to a remote city in the steppes. One day, the father returns from the market not with bread for supper but with a wall-filling map of the world. 'No supper tonight,' Mother said bitterly. 'We'll have the map instead.' Although hungry, the boy finds sustenance of a different sort in the multicolored map, which provides a literal spot of brightness in the otherwise spare, earth-toned illustrations, as well as a catalyst for soaring, pretend visits to exotic lands. Shulevitz's rhythmic, first-person narrative reads like a fable for young children. Its autobiographical dimension, however, will open up the audience to older grade-schoolers, who will be fascinated by the endnote describing Shulevitz's life as a refugee in Turkestan after the Warsaw blitz, including his childhood sketch of the real map. Whether enjoyed as a reflection of readers' own imaginative travels or used as a creative entrée to classroom geography units, this simple, poignant offering will transport children as surely as the map it celebrates.--Mattson, Jennifer Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SINCE 1963, Uri Shulevitz has commanded attention. In that year, a refugee in his 20s, he published his first picture book, "The Moon in My Room." Forty-five years, a Caldecott Medal, numerous honors and more than 40 titles later, Shulevitz now gives us his first explicitly autobiographical story. It is a masterpiece. "How I Learned Geography" begins with action and drama: In 1939, 4-year-old Shulevitz flees his smoking home in Warsaw and with his parents travels "far, far east ... to a city of houses made of clay, straw and camel dung, surrounded by dusty steppes, burned by the sun" - the city of Turkestan, according to a biographical note. The prose, far more burnished than Shulevitz's language of 1963, could easily frame a reader's experience, but fortunately this is a work for children, who still remember to look at the pictures. And pictures, in Shulevitz's books, can tell the story virtually by themselves. In the illustration that accompanies the quotation above, the narrator's family appear off to the side, dressed in black like mourners, exiles as they enter the sun-scorched village where men sit in brightly colored clothes or confidently advance in the streets. No other children can be seen. The small family suffer: they share a tiny, bare hut with strangers, and they don't have enough to eat. One night the father returns from the bazaar without food - lacking money enough to feed the three of them, he has instead purchased a map. Going to bed hungry, hearing one of the strangers chew his crust "as if it were the most delicious morsel in the world," the boy thinks he will never forgive his father. Here, when the main dramas have already taken place, Shulevitz's genius begins to emerge most clearly. As he has shown in his earliest books, the events of a child's world can look plotless to outsiders. The action in "The Moon in My Room," for example, could be summarized as "a boy looks for his toy bear"; in effect, however, the artist ushers readers into the boy's bedroom and explains that "in his little room there is a whole world." The theme repeats again and again. In "Rain Rain Rivers" (1969), a solitary girl in her bedroom envisions the falling rain as it streams into brooks that "rush into rivers and race to the seas"; from her attic room Shulevitz gradually moves readers to an endless, swelling ocean. For the narrator in "How I Learned Geography," the journey is slower - he has no toy bears, nor noises to prompt him, nor does he have a room of his own. But the wall-size map begins to show him a world he can claim. Exotic place-names become "a magic incantation": "Okazaki Miyazaki Pinsk,/Pennsylvania Transylvania Minsk!" In the illustration the boy has used the magic to take flight, and he soars over an arc of a magnificently colored globe. In the remaining sequences, the boy visits beaches, snowy expanses, dazzling cities, and in escaping his misery without walking one step, he at last comes to realize his father's wisdom. What is this book but a sequence of the folk tales Shulevitz has been telling from the beginning? The destruction of family happiness, the reversal of fortune, the foolish bargain, the impossible task: all these classic themes control this story. In framing his own story, replacing autobiographical fact with archetypal forms, Shulevitz keeps the focus on the inner world that he has so consistently illuminated. Once again, he reminds us that folly is not the opposite of wisdom, but so close a relative that the two are often mistaken. Elizabeth Devereaux is the children's reviews editor at Publishers Weekly.
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 3-In this story based upon Shulevitz's childhood, a World War II Polish refugee living in Turkestan purchases a map of the world instead of food for his family. Enchanted with this treasure, his young son envisions faraway places. Illustrations provide a stark contrast between the reality of the boy's bleak existence and the wonders of his imagination. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A refugee boy learns more than geography from his father in this autobiographical memoir. A small boy and his parents flee war's devastation and travel "far, far east to another country," where summer is hot and winter is cold. Aliens in a bleak land, the boy and his parents sleep on a dirt floor and are very hungry. One day the boy's father comes home from the bazaar with a map instead of bread and the boy is furious. But when the father hangs the map, it covers an entire wall, filling the barren room with color. The boy spends hours studying and drawing the map and making rhymes out of exotic place names. He forgets he has no toys or books. Without leaving the room, he journeys to deserts, beaches, mountains, temples, fruit groves and cities. In the spare text, Shulevitz pays tribute to his father as he recounts his family's flight from Warsaw to Turkestan in 1939. Signature watercolor illustrations contrast the stark misery of refugee life with the boundless joys of the imagination. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
