The other day a Facebook friend was questioning his decision to pursue science as his profession, stating that perhaps firefighting would have been an easier, saner choice.
No surprise there -- firefighter and scientist are great career favorites of the under-eight XY crowd. Probably "Transformer" and "King of the Galaxy" as well.
This made me think of a little kids' book I wrote a few years ago, entitled I Want to Be a Scientist Like Stephen Hawking. Two prior authors had tried and failed to write an acceptable text about Hawking's life, and it was no easy task for me, either. You see, the challenge in selling Prof. Hawking's story to kiddies as inspirational tripe is that 1) he was an enormous slacker who was scared into diligence by a debilitating disease and that 2) no one would be writing books about him if he were an amazing cosmologist without full-body paralysis and a spooky computer-generated voice. On the cover of the book you see his slack-jawed grin and the backdrop of his wheelchair and the subtext seems to be "and if you don't have the spine to make your dreams happen, little child, there's always the WRATH OF GOD...."
I'm all for scaring the kiddies into line.*
* To quote Laurie Anderson: "For when love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom...."
This made me think of a little kids' book I wrote a few years ago, entitled I Want to Be a Scientist Like Stephen Hawking. Two prior authors had tried and failed to write an acceptable text about Hawking's life, and it was no easy task for me, either. You see, the challenge in selling Prof. Hawking's story to kiddies as inspirational tripe is that 1) he was an enormous slacker who was scared into diligence by a debilitating disease and that 2) no one would be writing books about him if he were an amazing cosmologist without full-body paralysis and a spooky computer-generated voice. On the cover of the book you see his slack-jawed grin and the backdrop of his wheelchair and the subtext seems to be "and if you don't have the spine to make your dreams happen, little child, there's always the WRATH OF GOD...."
I'm all for scaring the kiddies into line.*
* To quote Laurie Anderson: "For when love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom...."
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6 comments:
...you amuse me...
...if things don't work out at your current job, well, um....maybe only keep children's book writing as a hobby...
Does this book really exist?? As in...I can read it?! Oh I hope so! You are so wonderfully interesting....
Yes, my one attempt at kids' lit has made me wonder how many of the inspirational "true" stories I read as a kid were more than 5% true. In some school districts the book is part of a mandatory reading/science program, but it's the last book in the series of readers, so hopefully most classes never get to it before the school year ends....
Oh my gosh! You are quasi-famous! I would totally invite you into my class (if I were a teacher...) so they could meet a real author. I really do sincerely want to read it. That is cool.
I should clarify -- the book was not untrue. I was just very selective about what truth I presented and in the process it makes him seem way more motivated than he actually was. As for quasi-famous: I WISH. However, I won't deny it -- seeing your name on a book, however obscure, is a lot of fun. And the illustrator they assigned to the project was fantastic.
Do you have a copy I could look at for a day or 2?
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