The Morning News

Reading • Our White House: Looking In Looking Out

Book Digest In this current wave of hopeful historiocity (sic) comes a fine new book for children of all ages that splendidly arrays American history. The National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance conceived and curated Our White House: Looking In Looking Out (Candlewick Press), a collection of essays, personal accounts, historical fiction, and poetry that employs the White House as a telescope to view both interesting and important facts (for lack of a better word) about our collective past.

With eloquent simplicity, David McCullough (1776, John Adams) introduces this anthology of more than a hundred artists:
What a splendid thing it is that so charming and lively a book as this captures so much of the story of the White House. Let us hope it will be read and enjoyed far and wide for a very long time to come. It is our White House, after all. It is our story, after all.
From one of my favorite entries:
The great drawing-room, which I have already mentioned, and the other chambers on the ground-floor, were crowded to excess. The company was not, in our sense of the term, select, for it comprehended persons of very many grades and classes; nor was there any great display of costly attire: indeed, some of the costumes may have been, for aught I know, grotesque enough. But the decorum and propriety of behaviour which prevailed, were unbroken by any rude or disagreeable incident; and every man, even among the miscellaneous crowd in the hall who were admitted without any orders or tickets to look on, appeared to feel that he was a part of the Institution, and was responsible for its preserving a becoming character, and appearing to the best advantage.
Which was written by Charles Dickens upon attending an evening event at the White House in 1848.

Yes we did. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 21, 2009
SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Charles Dickens, David McCullough, National Children's Book and Literary Alliance

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