Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. PresidentPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-12-06 19:49Z by Steven |
Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. President
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Volume 35, Number 4 (Winter 2010)
E-ISSN: 1553-1201 Print ISSN: 0885-0429
pages 334-356
Philip Nel, Professor of English
Kansas State University
In a column published five days after the 2008 election, journalist Jason Whitlock said of the president-elect’s life: “His is a tale that should be read aloud at bedtime in every American neighborhood.” It was already being read aloud in some neighborhoods. Even before Senator Obama had won the election, there were twelve juvenile titles about his life: two picture books, nine chapter books, and one comic book. From the election to the end of his first year in office, another forty-seven books were published: thirty-six more chapter books, seven more picture books, two comic books, one book of poetry, and one board book. And that doesn’t include the Obama Paper Dolls book, coloring and activity books, the titles about Bo the dog, nor the many books about Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.
To have this many children’s books about a candidate—or about a president so soon in his term of office—is unusual. During the campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had seven titles to Obama’s twelve: five chapter books, one comic book, and one picture book (My Dad, John McCain, written by his daughter Meghan McCain). During George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, there were two juvenile titles about him. By the end of the first year of his presidency, add another four. By the end of his eight-year presidency, Bush inspired twenty-nine fewer books than Obama did in his first year—thirty titles in all, and that includes one anti-Bush satire, Dan Piraro’s The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (2004). The marked difference in tone between the Bush book titles and the Obama book titles suggest that publishers and authors see the forty-fourth president quite differently from the forty-third…
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