For children, “Life Story” is one of the first works of art or science that will attempt to explain natural history, contextualizing the dinosaurs, those megastars of kid-dom, in time and place among the stars and on the planet, and it does so with a humanizing artistic realism the final section, fittingly and comfortingly, zooms in on life as we recognize it. “Life Story,” a Wagnerian opera of a book with a Hansel and Gretel aesthetic, is not as famous, somehow, as “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” or “The Little House.” It can be maddeningly hard to find at average bookstores, but good ones have it and loyal fans value it. In 1962, Virginia Lee Burton, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, writer and illustrator of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” “Katy and the Big Snow,” and the Caldecott Award-winning “The Little House,” among others, published her final picture book, “Life Story,” a hardy, quiet work of genius that starts with the birth of the sun, proceeds through fires and ferns and glaciers, and ends with you, the reader, living your life in the present day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |