W. H. Auden once said that although there are good books that are only for adults, there are no good books that are only for children. And since we have limited space, we'll plunge right in - children's books with plenty of allure for adults.
"Lady Liberty: A Biography" is a generous production, as befits the gigantic inspirational statue that welcomed author Doreen Rappaport's Latvian grandfather to these shores. The story is told in sidebars along every double spread, beginning in 1865, with law professor Edouard de Laboulaye recalling the role the United States and France played in each other's revolution. Laboulaye helps subsidize the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi to see the "colossal natural wonders" of the great New World for himself, and by 1875 Bartholdi is making clay models, planning his massive giantess as "grand as any one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." We watch the copper skin, impervious to the salt air of New York harbor, being fitted onto the gargantuan iron ribbing. Emma Lazarus writes her poem; laborers dig and pour the massive foundation; more money must be raised; and finally the statue rises. French and American flags stretch up and down the Hudson River. Millions of Americans come to watch as bands play and soldiers march. Bartholdi climbs the 354 steps to Liberty's crown; a cord loosens the great tricolor flag. And now there she stands in a double unfolding spread, the torch of liberty held high in her hand.
The sidebar prose is spare and factual, and diverse voices speak in tandem with Matt Tavares's illustrations, which are alternately head on, up close, or far away, and angled in and angled out into flipping perspectives.
"Lady Liberty" is neither a simple nor a pretty book. It's as ambitious and oversize as its subject. It's a book for which adults must slow their reading speed, and with which children may dream their way up the winding stairs into Liberty's very crown, high above the clouds.
