Schomburg: The Man who Built a Library by Carole Weatherford

Here is another interesting children's biography.  Arturo Schomburg was born just a decade after the end of the civil war.  When he went to school his teachers told him the people of African descent had never done anything important or interesting in history.  Arturo made it his life's mission to prove them wrong.  He studied famous black people such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas, and Benjamin Banneker.  He was also interested in famous people who has some black ancestry, but who had been portrayed as white by Western historians such as James Audubon and Ludwig Von Beethoven.  Since little had been written about African heroes, Arturo spent great time and effort collecting books and original documents about these famous people. When his collection got too big for his house, his wife convinced him to sell it to the New York Public Library where it became the basis of their remarkable African American history collection.  Schomburg worked for many years as the collection's curator.  The book is written in free verse poetry and illustrated with rich oil and watercolor semi-realistic artwork.  The poems are text dense, and though the book could be considered a "picture book biography" it would primarily be of interest to middle grade kids who like learning about diverse achievers. (actually, I listened to the book first on Overdrive, and didn't realize that it was written in "poetry" until I saw actual pages. It just goes to show that often the difference between good prose and good free verse is just the typesetting.) (2017, 48 p.)