All Americans

“O beautiful for spacious skies.� . . . The words, the first five of Katherine Lee Bates’ immortal anthem, “America the Beautiful,� are sweetly familiar--but in editor Sara Jane Boyers’ version, O Beautiful for Spacious Skies (Chronicle: $13.95), their setting is intriguingly unfamiliar and yet gloriously right. Boyers has searched the body of contemporary artist Wayne Thiebaud’s work to find images which, in the variety of their media and subject, celebrate the very diversity of America while illuminating, in sometimes engagingly quirky ways, the spacious largeness of Bates’ personal vision.

That American largeness is also captured in the legends that enrich its spacious culture--stories of bigger-than-life heroes such as that steel-drivin’ man, John Henry (Dial: $16.99). This traditional tale is given sprightly new life by author Julius Lester and illustrator Jerry Pinkney, whose beautifully realistic style lends authenticity to legend and whose colors are, appropriately, borrowed from the rocks and earth. Lester’s retelling was inspired by the connection he perceives between John Henry and Martin Luther King: “to have the courage to hammer until our hearts break and to leave our mourners smiling in their tears.�

The Wave of the Sea-Wolf (Clarion: $16.95) is a less familiar tale, borrowed by author-illustrator David Wisniewski from the Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest. Wisniewski’s breathtakingly elaborate cut-paper pictures bring their own magic to this dramatic myth about a princess who brings unexpected gifts to her people.

America is also a large-spirited land of opportunity for those who come in search of a new life or religious freedom. Josepha (Chronicle: $11.95) by Jim McGugan tells the haunting story of a turn-of-the-century immigrant boy who discovers not only a new life but the gift of new friendship on the endless prairie. Murray Kimber’s painterly pictures, like Pinckney’s, celebrate the American earth in the richness of their coloration.

Author Mary Lyn Ray also sets her story Shaker Boy (Browndeer: $15.95) in the past to tell us what happens to a lad named Caleb Whitcher who, following his father’s death in the Civil War, is sent to live with the Shakers in New Hampshire. Ray celebrates a religion and way of life foreign to most modern Americans, while illustrator Jeanette Winter employs primitive art to give sturdy expression to the simplicity of that life and the purity of its adherents’ reverence.

America is a large-hearted land, too. Witness The Greatest Table (Harcourt: $18.95), edited by Michael J. Rosen. Subtitled “A Banquet to Fight Against Hunger,� this accordion-book is 12-feet long when fully extended. The original art gracing each fold is provided by a pride of America’s leading children’s book illustrators, who have donated their work so that all proceeds from the book’s sales may go to the hunger-relief organization Share Our Strength.

America has provided abundant opportunity to picture book creators and if you’re bewildered by the plethora of their product, you’ll be glad to have They’re Never Too Young for Books (Prometheus: $14.95), a reliable, annotated guide to more than 1,550 titles provided by two local authorities, Edythe M. McGovern and Helen D. Muller.