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Mount Rushmore
Judith Jango-Cohen

Annotation:
Describes the meaning, history, and creation of the stone monument to four American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.

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Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon
Margret Rey

Annotation:
While visiting Mount Rushmore, Curious George gets into mischief when he takes an unplanned ride on a hot air balloon.

From the Publisher:
While on vacation, George and the man with the yellow hat stop to see Mt. Rushmore. There’s no time to take a helicopter ride for a close-up view - the hot air balloon races are about to start! Whisked up and away at the races, a surprised George gets a close-up view of the presidents after all. The adventures of Curious George continue in an all-new series beginning in fall 1998 with eight new stories. Written and illustrated in the style of Margret and H. A. Rey, the books will appear in paperback (8 x 8") and hardcover editions and will feature the art of Vipah Interactive, the animators of HMI’s Curious George CD-ROMs.

From The Critics:
School Library JournalPreS-Gr 1-These two books take a familiar, favorite character and create an imitation of his curiosity, but without the Reys’ usual spark and attention to detail. In Hot Air Balloon, George is playing with an anchor rope and the balloon takes off with him aboard. It blows quite close to the nose of George Washington at Mt. Rushmore where the monkey unwittingly rescues a worker and becomes a hero. He is rewarded with a helicopter ride around the monument. When Curious George Goes to a Movie, the man with the yellow hat leaves to get popcorn and George goes up to the projection booth where he startles the projectionist, who knocks the reels off the projector. While he untangles the film, George does shadow figures to amuse the audience and again becomes a hero. Both books read like anemic summaries of the original Curious George adventures, but with the lessons eliminated. It is disconcerting that this George never receives so much as a mention of the follies of his curiosity, but is immediately rewarded for a chance good deed, which happens as part of the cover-up for his naughtiness. Both the blandness and the mixed messages make these titles bad advertising for the real Curious George.-Nancy A. Gifford, Schenectady County Public Library, NY

Our Price: $3.95

Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon
Margret Rey

Mount Rushmore
Tomas S. Owens

Annotation:
Relates the conception and execution of the giant monument to four American Presidents carved upon Mount Rushmore.

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Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon
Margret Rey

Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory
Barry Schwartz

From the Publisher:
Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. Drawing on a wide array of materials—painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspaper accounts and oratory—Barry Schwartz aims at this sort of contradiction in his study of the role Lincoln’s reputation and memory has played in American life. Schwartz explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln’s reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions, and how his reputation, over the next four decades, diminished and grew. Schwartz links the vagaries of Lincoln’s image to broad transformations of the nation, arguing that Lincoln’s life symbolized America’s development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and articulated the roles of economic and political reform, military power, and nationalism in the country’s self-conception. Lincoln’s memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp," acting as a reflection of the nation’s concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities. The first part of a study that will continue through the present, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively, but around a real person whose character and achievements symbolized his country’s ideals.

From The Critics:
Publishers WeeklyThere have been many studies of Lincoln’s life and how it has come to be perceived in the minds of Americans, the best being Merrill Peterson’s Abraham Lincoln in American Memory (1994). Schwartz’s scholarly account manages only to be a workman-like job of surveying the power of Lincoln’s image since 1865. Unlike Peterson’s user-friendly book, Schwartz’s volume appears to have been written with an academic readership in mind: a scholarly dryness permeates the prose. Nevertheless, Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, hits all the important points on his way to a larger argument about memory and history. He contends that the common view of Lincoln changed over time alongside changes in national interests and priorities. In the Progressive era, for example, Lincoln was lauded as a common man who rose to the White House despite all obstacles; during the mid-20th-century civil rights struggle, on the other hand, he was known as the Great Emancipator. Lincoln buffs might protest that Schwartz then uses up too much space talking about the sociology of collective memory as represented in the work of scholars like Charles Horton Cooley and Emile Durkheim--but they’d be missing the point. Ultimately, this is not a book about Lincoln as a man or a symbol. It’s a study that uses the American commemoration of Lincoln as a vehicle for studying the whims and whiles of national memory. As such, it is a success. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.| Library JournalIn this work, Schwartz (sociology, Univ. of Georgia; George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol) examines the endless American fascination with Lincoln. This first installment of a projected two-part study chronicles the Great Emancipator’s ever-changing image, from his 1865 assassination to the May 30, 1922, dedication day of his national monument in Washington, DC. The author charts the commemoration of Lincoln’s life through analysis of eulogies and other hagiographies, monuments, shrines, statues, state portraits, historical paintings, prints, and centennial, sesquicentennial, and annual birthday observances. During the industrial and social revolutions of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, the rich complexities of Lincoln’s life served as a unifying beacon to immigrants, Socialists, economic and social conservatives, African Americans, and even white Southerners. Following World War I, Lincoln assumed the mantle of "epic imagery." Schwartz puts it best in this final sentence of this profound study: "Lincoln...became America’s universal man standing beside the people and above the people." Although this highly provocative book is a major contribution to American social and intellectual history, its concentrated academic approach may have little appeal to general readers. Recommended for large public libraries and academic libraries.--John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.- Kirkus ReviewsAn engaging scholarly study of the dynamic links between Lincoln’s image and the rapidly changing American culture during the six decades after his assassination. Sociologist Schwartz (George Washington, not reviewed) wants to test sociological theories with historical evidence and bring history back into his own discipline. Fortunately, he also knows how to tell a good story. One needn’t like sociology (which appears here only at the start and finish and is spread on lightly anyway) to learn much from his engrossing account of the sources of Lincoln’s changing reputation between 1865 and the 1920s. (A forthcoming second volume will bring the story up to date.) Schwartz’s approach differs from Merrill Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (1994), which focused on the contents of Lincoln’s image: Schwartz explores instead how public perception of Lincoln waxed and waned as it did (the 16th President was by no means universally admired during his lifetime). Drawing on a wide variety of sources (art and statuary, schoolbooks and speeches, and the efforts of andquot;reputational entrepreneursandquot;), Schwartz shows that Lincoln came to be revered as he was as much on account of the needs of particular historical moments and groups in the population as because of his own deeds and words. In other words, Americans constructed Lincoln’s image in their own. Such an argument will not surprise historians engaged in the scholarly industry of andquot;memory studies.andquot; But it reminds us of the complex interdependence of fact, memory, and culture. It also fills out our understanding of such specific phenomena as North-South reconciliation, military preparation, andracerelations through the Progressive Era. And true to its sociological foundations, it reveals how images grow more from need than reality, and how reputations are as likely to be imposed as achieved. Anyone who wishes to learn more of Lincoln, the nation he helped govern, and the way memory serves social and cultural functions will gain from this highly illuminating work. (bandw illustrations not seen)

List Price: ~~$$18.00~~ Our Price: $17.10

Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore
John Taliaferro

From the Publisher:
"In Great White Fathers, author John Taliaferro chronicles the heroic struggle to shape the four faces of Rushmore, and then he shows us the warts, too. He reveals the astonishing backstory of America’s "Shrine to Democracy" - how the Black Hills were snatched from the Lakota Sioux; the grueling and perilous task of carving mammoth faces with dynamite and jackhammers while swinging from a five-hundred-foot cliff; the impact of auto tourism and crass commercialism on the land and lifestyles of the Great Plains." "Like so many episodes in the saga of the American West, what began as a personal dream had to be bailed out by the federal government, a compromise that nearly drove Gutzon Borglum over the brink. Nor in the end could Borglum control how his masterpiece would be received by future generations." Great White Fathers is at once the biography of a man and the biography of a place, told through travelogue, interviews, and investigation of the vast records left behind by one of America’s most eccentric, and emblematic, visionaries. It proves that the best American stories are not simple; they are complex and contradictory, at times humorous, at other times tragic.

Synopsis:
The Barnes and Noble Review from Discover Great New WritersIf ever there was a book that could make one long to visit an American landmark, this is it. John Taliaferro’s insightful account of the sculpting of Mount Rushmore is both a telling piece of art history and an enthralling analysis of the cultural, technological, and political forces that helped shape this singular monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The story begins in the mid-19th century, when the promise of gold sent prospectors rushing to the Great Plains, fueling bloody battles between U.S. Army and the Sioux. The irony that this American shrine was built on land wrested from Native Americans (in violation of government treaties) is not lost on Taliaferro. But when the end of World War I brought an economic slump to the region, politicians began wondering if they could boost the flagging economy through tourism. And the budding interstate highway system convinced them that with the right attraction, they could appeal to vacationers traveling by car. Gutzon Borglum, a talented but temperamental sculptor, was chosen to carve Mount Rushmore. Taliaferro tells how Borglum began the project in 1927, and his description of the efforts required to create the images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt into the face of the mountain is breathtaking. The monument was still under construction at the time of Borglum’s death in 1941. Today, Mount Rushmore is considered alternately a symbol of democracy, a desecration of nature, and a tourist trap. But as Taliaferro aptly reveals in this captivating history, it is truly "a mirror of our culture" worth further examination. Winter 2002 Selection

From The Critics:
It takes a skilled writer and reporter to make an old, familiar story fresh, and in his book... Taliaferro excels. Boston Globe - 2002. Taliaferro’s description of how [Mount Rushmore] came to be makes for a surprisingly colorful and entertaining history lesson here and now. New York Times Book ReviewTaliaferro...tells a wide-ranging story...Briskly written, never dull, and it never bogs down. Forbes FYITaliaferro tells that story [of Rushmore’s construction] in clear, colorful terms...Taliaferro’s narrative sparkles whenever [Borglum] is in it. Publishers WeeklyOn page one of this history of Mt. Rushmore, Taliaferro proposes to answer "the questions that any archaeologist would ask": Who are the men represented, how were they chosen, how were they carved, by whom, who visits this shrine? In the end, this overly modest mission statement is the only false note in an impressive work. Like the outsized sculptures blasted out of a granite mountainside, this history, by a former Newsweek editor, is massive, descriptive yet never blandly representational and filled with characters as fully realized as the Mt. Rushmore busts. The central figure is Rushmore’s "father"-sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941), a fascinating study in contradictions: a great talent, but a hopeless businessman; a patriot who was also a bigot; a family man who lied about his parentage and ditched his first, much older wife to marry a younger woman who could bear children. Taliaferro (Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs) also uses the story of a monument as a springboard from which to explore the tensions within the American dream: an empire built on slave labor and on land stolen from the Indians; reverence for the common man combined with an infatuation with larger-than-life heroes; a love of the landscape that often takes a backseat to the quest for profit. Like Borglum, Taliaferro set himself a Sisyphean task and has produced a work that is both inspiring and thought provoking. 8 pages of bandw photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) Read all 6 "From The Critics" andgt;

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Mount Rushmore
Andrew Santella

Annotation:
Relates how the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, known as "The Shrine of Democracy," was conceived, designed, and created.

From the Publisher:
An in depth look at how the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, known as "The Shrine of Democracy, " was conceived, designed, and created.

From The Critics:
School Library JournalGr 4-7-Dealing primarily with the construction process of Mount Rushmore, Santella offers a solid presentation that is both informative and interesting. He writes clearly and keeps his focus squarely on the monument itself. The challenges presented by a project of this magnitude, along with difficulties posed by weather and lack of funding, provide a realistic picture of what Gutzon Borglum and his workers faced. While archival black-and-white and sepia-toned photos are often small and of poor quality, they provide a real sense of the scope and enormity of this grand project. This is a cleaner, more focused treatment than Lynn Curlee’s Rushmore (Scholastic, 1999). While there is some inconsistency in word definitions provided, Winkelman’s presentation of the Panama Canal, from the rationale for its construction through its impact and likely future, is straightforward and well organized. The final pages depict Panamanian struggles to regain control over the canal zone and to reverse the historical discrimination and division that has resulted from its control by non-Panamanians. Relevant photographs, two excellent if simple maps, and a time line add to readers’ understanding as well as to the attractiveness of this package. A balanced and worthy purchase where needed.-Rosie Peasley, Empire Union School District, Modesto, CA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory
Barry Schwartz

Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon
Margret Rey

Monte Rushmore
Lynda Sorensen

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Mount Rushmore
Craig A. Doherty

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Mount Rushmore
Julie Murray

Annotation:
A brief introduction to the construction of the huge sculpture carved into Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, and to the four presidents represented there: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

From The Critics:
School Library JournalGr 2-3-These books feature large type, interesting photographs, and fun facts relating to each site. The vocabulary is advanced for younger readers, but the scope is narrow enough to provide basic information about the background, individuals involved, and construction of the structure or monument for reports. Attractive starting points for assignments.-Krista Tokarz, Cuyahoga County Public Library, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Our Price: $21.35

Mount Rushmore
Judith Jango-Cohen

Annotation:
Describes the meaning, history, and creation of the stone monument to four American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.

Our Price: $22.60

Mount Rushmore: An ICON Reconsidered
Jesse Larner

From the Publisher:
In a narrative combining personal experience in the American West with extensive archival research, Jesse Larner investigates the complicated and ironic history of America’s "Shrine of Democracy" -- one that does not appear in the official histories and guidebooks. General George A. Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1874. In 1877, the government expropriated the Lakota tribal lands in the Black Hills -- the site of Mount Rushmore -- by abrogating a major treaty. This injustice rehearsed the choice of Mount Rushmore’s sculptor and chief ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a high-ranking figure in the Ku Klux Klan, who quickly recast the monument, conceived in the 1920s as a tourist attraction to bolster the faltering South Dakota economy, as a celebration of manifest destiny -- the expansion of European settlement across the American West in fulfillment of white racial identity. Mount Rushmore pursues the connections between and among Custer’s defeat in the Black Hills, subsequent Custer battle commemorations, the killings at Wounded Knee, the Lakota’s dispossession of the Black Hills, and Rushmore itself. Mount Rushmore also traces modern political uses of the monument, from Cold War television broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political campaigns. Larner examines how Rushmore has attained semi-religious status as a shrine for pilgrims of Democracy, and contrasts this understanding of the monument with the government’s political restrictions on the practice of American Indian religions in the Black Hills. By describing the complications in Rushmore’s past, Larner confronts its authorized history head on. It is a history, Larner argues, that has ignored the monument’s message of conquest to present a simplistic narrative of national glory. Moreover, even the tour guides at Rushmore understand little of its real history, or the legal fact that the land from which it rises belongs to somebody else.

From The Critics:
Publishers WeeklyA graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Jesse Larner is a translator in Manhattan. In Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered, he leaps into a full-frontal assault on the four-headed monument, calling it "a work of deliberately racist iconography, designed and engineered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan," perched on land appropriated from Native Americans. The 1920s tourist attraction sent Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint sprawling all over the presidents in the tongue-in-cheek thriller North by Northwest, but none of this wit or enjoyment is for Larner, who alternates between serious-minded first-person travel narrative and livid political invective. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. Library JournalThe land, people, and history framing Mount Rushmore, situated in the Black Hills in South Dakota, not far from where Custer died, prove to be every bit as complex and fundamentally crazy-American as the presidents memorialized there. Larner finds that Sioux and Euro-Americans live out the Rushmore experience in predictably different yet unpredictably specific ways. Larner’s jump-around meditations on Manifest Destiny and its discontents move from 1970s American Indian Movement activism to 1920s Ku Klux Klan backroom campaigning to 1870s gold-rushing. Unhindered by narrative linearity, Larner situates Crazy Horse the never-photographed mystic warrior and Gutzon Borglum the fantastical public sculptor as the ultimate stars of a multiethnic ensemble of the powerful, victimized, and honestly ambivalent and ties it all together with great ideological discipline and briskly paced prose. Appreciative readers of contemporary political-travel journalism can only hope Larner forgoes a career in academia his publisher identifies him as a graduate student in international relations and instead follows the freelancer’s quest. An auspicious debut; recommended for libraries of all types. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Our Price: $24.95

Mount Rushmore: From Mountain to Monument
Luke S. Gabriel

Annotation:
Describes the creation of the huge sculpture carved into Mt. Rushmore in the 1920s under the direction of Gutzon Borglum.

From The Critics:
Children’s Literature - Denise Daley Gutzon Borglum was an American sculptor with vision, determination, and patience. These qualities are exemplified in this informative book that chronicles the creation of Mount Rushmore. In the 1920s, Gutzon spotted a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota and got the idea to carve the faces of the four United States presidents who he felt most helped the United States to grow.Parent Council ReviewsOur family did a joint review of this book since we’ve recently visited Mr. Rushmore for the first time. Relevant interesting photographs and text make this a useful introduction to this beautiful world-renowned monument. Part of the "American History" series. 2000, Child’s World, $15.95. Ages 5 to 10. Reviewer: A. Braga SOURCE: Parent Council Volume 8

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Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era
Albert Boime

From the Publisher:
In The Unveiling of the National Icons, Albert Boime analyzes the creation and reception of several American national monuments as a means of understanding the politics of memory and national icons. In engaging, behind the scenes accounts of several highly visible symbols, such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore, among others, he demonstrates how these icons have been manipulated for patriotic purposes. Examining these symbols as a group for the first time, this book is also the first serious investigation of visual artifacts that are too often taken for granted.

From The Critics:
William E. Leuchtenburg - New York Times Book Review . . .Boime. . .indulges in psychological speculation that not everyone will find credible. . . .These rhetorical excesses are regrettable, for Boime is undeniably correct in saying that national icons often arise from self-interest and are meant to convey political messages. William E. Leuchtenburg. . .Boime. . .indulges in psychological speculation that not everyone will find credible. . . .These rhetorical excesses are regrettable, for Boime is undeniably correct in saying that national icons often arise from self-interest and are meant to convey political messages. -- The New York Times Book Review

List Price: ~~$$95.00~~ Our Price: $90.25

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Mount Rushmore National Memorial - Books