The Tower of Life (2022)

 The Tower of Life: how Yaffa Eliach rebuilt her town in stories and photographs by Chana Stiefel (2022) is a true story. At the beginning of the book, we meet Yaffa as a young girl living in a small Jewish town called a shtetl. Life is good. Yaffa’s grandmother is one of the town photographers who took photographic portraits of many residents. “And on the eve of each Jewish New Year, people from all over Eishyshok would mail their treasured photographs to their families around the world with greetings for good health and happiness.” Then the German tanks and motorcycles arrived. Yaffa and her family escaped. Eventually, she married and moved to America where President Jimmy Carter asked her to help build a memorial for the Holocaust. Yaffa traveled the world searching for photographs of the former residents of her town. At back of the book is an illustration of Yaffa’s “Tower of Life “ in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum with references. Susan Gal’s illustrations present Yaffa’s story in somber colors that capture the seriousness of history. 

Where Do I Look: A Child's Search for the Grand Canyon (1983)

 I love the layout of Where Do I Look? by Jacque Franklin. This is a large, rectangular paperback with loads of white space on each page. On one page is a huge capital letter to begin a small amount of text. This letter is decorated with gold drawings of plants or features of wildlife. On the opposite page is a black and white photograph by George Huey of wildlife. The goal of this book is to highlight the grand canyon: "squirrels and the pinyon nuts, the deer and the prairie grass, the yucca with its roots in the soil..." 

This story is copyrighted by the Grand Canyoin Natural History Association.