Thanks to Alyson Beecher's Non-Fiction Picture Book Challenge at Kidlit Frenzy, everyone shares wonderful non-fiction picture books.
A little late posting, but wanted to share these two books, one just out, one a few years old, but am so glad to have read it! History is filled with interesting and poignant stories and we are lucky to have them told in beautiful picture books!
After reading this story, I am amazed that anyone achieved the finish of this first Olympic Marathon. The temperature was 90 degrees in humid St. Louis, Missouri. the roads were dirt, and dusty. And people followed the runners in their cars, raising dust clouds so bad that runners could not see ahead and struggled breaking. Some runners immediately fell apart; one began vomiting. Another was chased by an angry dog, ran a mile out of the way, and still finished! One runner was refused water and given doses of strychnine, thought to help his strength! One runner ran in his work shoes and long pants. What a story of a race that no one seemed to understand. Many had run marathons, yet this particular race seemed to be filled with smaller mishaps, ones no one predicted. Meghan McCathy tells the story as runners run, illustrating the pages with cartoon-like drawings of both the runners and the spectators set amidst the scenes of dust and turmoil. There is additional information and a timeline at the back. The end pages are filled with wonderful postcards sent from the World's Fair.