In impeccably crisp signature-style illustrations, Caldecott Medalist Chin opens this picture book with a series of sweeping, high-altitude images of a whirling hurricane forming over the Atlantic and heading for North Carolina’s Hattaras Island. Then he zooms in on the island’s inhabitants as news spreads: “It’s a Category 1 storm,” one child says to another. As the storm churns toward the island, reportorial text that follows the days of a week explains how forecasters observe satellite photos and measurements to predict the storm’s track and intensity, and how hurricane hunters fly right through the storm to investigate. (Smaller text blocks give more detail.) Meanwhile, the community prepares, an evacuation is ordered, and the islanders cooperate throughout: “My generator won’t start, can you take a look?” one queries into a phone; “Of course” is the response. When the storm hits, steady, minute-by-minute narration confers a sense of comforting predictability despite the chaos: “Branches snap. The power goes out.” After the storm, spreads show the island’s residents working together to tidy and repair, moments that aptly underline growing weather events as opportunities for community care. Characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Back matter includes a rich trove of resources. Ages 4–8. (May)

Insert: “That night they drank whisky. The host became wilder, waved his shotgun around, and told Robert that he was the legendary Cannibal Joe. As the night went on, the atmosphere in the cabin grew terrifying … “

In a ‘New World,’ Comics Are Making a Comeback

The wealthy elite turned it into their playground. Ten miles (16 kilometres) from downtown Los Angles, you pick your way the cactus wildflowers – in Eaton Canyon, we felt we were far from civilization. If you walk downtown to Colorado Ave. past the stores and restaurants, you will end-up at magnificent Norton Simon home to the world’s most impressive private art collections, that of industrialist Norton Simon. There are 2000 varieties of flowers in the San Gabriel and Sana Monica mountains. Welcome to the city of roses. The city was originally known as a resort in the late 1800’s; wealthy Easterners would come for their health, to take advantage of the climate to recover from conditions such as TB.  The city became a haven for the rich. They built museums and universities, and elaborate homes. They organized diversions such as the now legendary annual New Years Day Rose Parade.

Let Freedom Read Day | Banned Books Week

Spending Thanksgiving Day itself, in Old City. Wonder up and down the Grande Alee’. Check-out the restaurant options. Finding a magical place at the Louis -Hébert restaurant. Stepping through an ornate into iron gate into a cobbled courtyard filled with Autumn flowers, a stone path leads to heavy wooden door  creaking with age, stepping into an inviting low-ceilinged room. The stone walls are two feet thick, and wide-planked floor shines  with years of loving care.

Guido di Pietro, a Florentine artist and Dominican friar, gained such a reputation for painting angles that by time he died in 1455, he was known as Fra Angelico (“Brother Angel”) Now, on the 550th anniversary of his death, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is mounting Fra Angelico, the first comprehensive showing of his work in half a century. On view will be his drawings, paintings (including Annunciatory Angel), and manuscript illuminations from collections in Europe and America. A don’t miss for lovers of art (or Angels), this show should prove to nothing less than heavenly. (metmuseum.org) - print -2009.

Early Morning – Florida

Historian Graff, whose book Watergate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, spent an intense year writing The Devil Reached Toward the Sky (Avid Reader, Aug.), about the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the atomic bomb. The bestselling author of 10 books, who also hosts the Long Shadow podcast and writes the popular newsletter Doomsday Scenario, discusses the bomb’s legacy and explains why he likes messy history.

A delight to be seen. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” wrote Shakespeare. The garden offers license to dream, to slip for a moment like the fairy sprites, to another time, another world. Within tiered double rows of hawthorn bright blossoms toss, a sundial marks the hours, a fountain splashes peacefully, and on summer evenings the mixed perfumes of sweet alyssum and nicotiana rise in the growing dusk. Like the dreaming spires of a market town in Elizabethan England. The pink-blossomed Bergenia and the iridescent-petaled fleur-de-Lis, or iris are culled from flowers the poet knew, walked among, gloried in, and spoke of in many of his loveliest passages,” How that a life was but a flower in the springtime” find expression here.

Robert Burns' "Belle of Mauchline" is given a voice in this lyrical and intimate depiction of the life of Jean Armour, known simply as the wife of the infamous poet and mother of nine of his children. Melanie Murray's biographical - Should Auld Acquaintance -  reveals the historical tale of the talented farmer, a forbidden affair, and the tumultuous life of an 18th-century Scottish woman.