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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607001786170 | Juvenile Fiction | POLACCO | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
When Sheldon Russell Curtis told this story to his daughter, Rosa, she kept every word in her heart and was to retell it many times.
I will tell it in Sheldon's own words as nearly as I can.
He was wounded in a fierce battle and left for dead in a pasture somewhere in Georgia when Pinkus found him. Pinkus' skin was the color of polished mahogany, and he was flying Union colors like the wounded boy, and he picked him up out of the field and brought him to where the black soldier's mother, Moe Moe Bay, lived. She had soft, gentle hands and cared for him and her Pink.
But the two boys were putting her in danger, two Union soldiers in Confederate territory! They had to get back to their outfits. Scared and uncertain, the boys were faced with a hard decision, and then marauding Confederate troops rode in.
In this Civil War story passed from great-grandfather to grandmother, to son, and finally to the author-artist herself, Patricia Polacco once again celebrates the shared humanity of the peoples of this world.
Author Notes
Patricia Polacco was born in Lansing, Michigan on July 11, 1944. She attended Oakland Tech High School in Oakland, California before heading off to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, then Laney Community College in Oakland. She then set off for Monash University, Mulgrave, Australia and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia where she received a Ph.D in Art History, Emphasis on Iconography.
After college, she restored ancient pieces of art for museums. She didn't start writing children's books until she was 41 years old. She began writing down the stories that were in her head, and was then encouraged to join the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. There she learned how to put together a dummy and get a story into the form of a children's picture book. Her mother paid for a trip to New York, where the two visited 16 publishers in one week. She submitted everything she had to more than one house. By the time she returned home the following week, she had sold just about everything.
Polacco has won the 1988 Sydney Taylor Book Award for The Keeping Quilt, and the 1989 International Reading Association Award for Rechenka's Eggs. She was inducted into the Author's Hall of Fame by the Santa Clara Reading Council in 1990, and received the Commonwealth Club of California's Recognition of Excellence that same year for Babushka's Doll, and again in 1992 for Chicken Sunday. She also won the Golden Kite Award for Illustration from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators for Chicken Sunday in 1992, as well as the Boston Area Educators for Social Responsibility Children's Literature and Social Responsibility Award. In 1993, she won the Jane Adams Peace Assoc. and Women's Intl. League for Peace and Freedom Honor award for Mrs. Katz and Tush for its effective contribution to peace and social justice. She has won Parent's Choice Honors for Some Birthday in 1991, the video Dream Keeper in 1997 and Thank You Mr. Falker in 1998. In 1996, she won the Jo Osborne Award for Humor in Children's Literature. Her titles The Art of Miss. Chew and The Blessing Cup made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 5Pink and Say is Patricia Polacco's history-rich, emotion-laden story (Putnam, 1994) about the friendship between two boys who meet while fighting for the Union in the Civil War. In this StoryLesson Video version, the book is presented in an unabridged adaptation, in combination with an original musical score, a scene-setting introduction by Polacco, and ending with a short optional vocabulary lesson. Pinky, a black boy, finds Say, a wounded white boy, and brings him home. Pink's mother nurses Say, and just as the boys prepare to return to war, marauders come to the cabin, killing Pink's mother. The boys are captured several days later by Confederate troops. Say (Polacco's great-grandfather) survivesPink does not. What makes this video extraordinarily powerful is that Polacco narrater her own work, and the scenes cut seamlessly between her lavish illustrations and her Civil War-era home in Union City, MI where the video was filmed. These are bonuses to an already wonderful story, and show how author/illustrator Polacco melds her life into her craft. More than just a book-to-video adaptation, Pink and Say introduces viewers to the author, to storytelling in its finest face-to-face tradition, and to an accounting useful as a literature link to the Civil War, slavery, or Black History Month. School and public libraries would find this a worthy addition to their collections.-Marilyn Hersh, Hillside Elementary School, Farmington Hills, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.