PictureBook4




		The Man Who Walked Between the Towers By Mordecai Gerstein Roaring Brook Press Brookfield, Connecticut, 2002 ISBN 0-7613-2868-8 Ages 5-8

			This is the story of Philippe Petit's death-defying cable-wire walk between New York City's World Trade Center twin towers back in 1974. Petit was a young French street performer who did everything from juggling and riding a unicycle to walking and dancing on a rope tied between two trees. He had walked on a wire between the steeples of Notre Dame, and in New York City, he decided he could do the same between the two towers. It meant stretching a cable 140 feet between the two buildings a quarter of a mile above the ground. He performed for an hour on the wire before giving himself up to police to be arrested. As his punishment, the judge sentenced him to perform in the park for the children. How fitting! Illustrations The book received the 2004 Caldecott Award for Illustrations. That surprised me, because the artwork looks more like quickly drawn practice pages for developing a picture book rather than the finished product. Maybe it was the bird's eye perspectives from the top of the tower and lack of perfection in the drawings that appealed to those who chose the Caldecott Award. Or maybe it was the sentimental connection to the twin towers, now gone after September 11th, that influenced the award. A Child's Response I read the story to my 4 year old granddaughter, and she kept asking why he was doing that. She just couldn't understand why someone needed to do that, and it was hard for me to explain why someone would. I fear heights, and doing something like that is completely insane to me. But to Petit, he seemed to feel most alive when he was walking a tightrope. The School Libary Journal review sees things differently than I did, but again, so much of judging art is subjective and based on the viewer's likes and dislikes, sometimes with good reason, and sometimes not.

School Libary Journal: ... The pacing of the narrative is as masterful as the placement and quality of the oil-and-ink paintings. The interplay of a single sentence or view with a sequence of thoughts or panels builds to a riveting climax. A small, framed close-up of Petit's foot on the wire yields to two three-page foldouts of the walk. One captures his progress from above, the other from the perspective of a pedestrian. The vertiginous views paint the New York skyline in twinkling starlight and at breathtaking sunrise. Gerstein captures his subject's incredible determination, profound skill, and sheer joy. The final scene depicts transparent, cloud-filled skyscrapers, a man in their midst. With its graceful majesty and mythic overtones, this unique and uplifting book is at once a portrait of a larger-than-life individual and a memorial to the towers and the lives associated with them. --Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library, Copyright 2003, Reed Business Information, Inc. Accessed online from Amazon.com


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