https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/us/politics/donald-trump-childrens-books.html After an election cycle whose divisive effect on voters is still being felt, publishing books for classroom use has been unusually perilous. For Ms. Sutinis, the difficulty went beyond the time crunch to finding concise quotations from Mr. Trump’s campaign appearances that didn’t include contentious remarks. Ms. Sutinis’s updated edition outlines Mr. Trump’s business and television career and his campaign. “He made controversial remarks about several groups of people, including Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans and women,” the book reads. “This led many, including some Republican officials, to back away from him.” It goes on: “But Trump continued to receive wide support and thousands of people attended his rallies.” One page features a “Did You Know?” fact: “Donald Trump is the first person elected to the presidency without experience in either the government or the military.” ... Some publishers are holding off on Trump biographies altogether. “We feel it’s too soon,” said Jane O’Connor, the creator of the “Who Was?” series from Penguin Young Readers ...
I guess I can see some of the problem, but I can't help but wonder why these books are being written right now in the first place. I certainly think it's important for kids (and people of all ages) to understand current events, but I can't recall ever having super up-to-date books as a student. Many were 10 or more years out of date, and some of the maps we used were especially laughable, but we still managed to learn the most current information just fine I think the only time we had true "current" information was my AP US History class in high school. That text book was over 1,000 pages and included a couple paragraphs on the first year or two of the then-current President, who was on his 6th year in office. We did current events from that day's headlines in that class, but nobody relied on the text book for semi-recent information The big takeaway from that class was that history is "change over time". Knowing individual kernels of information (like a strategy for a specific battle) wasn't terribly useful if it couldn't be linked to the bigger picture of what was going on and why it was changing. Writing text about a politician who has only been in office for a couple months is always going to look silly, since you don't have a chance to determine what the impact will be As with most things, this seems like a scenario where it would be helpful to step back, take a deep breath, and wait a minute before trying to get a book published. Similar to all the breathlessly positive things shortly after Obama's election, I'm sure that whatever gets written about Trump right now (regardless of how easy/hard it is on him) will look silly in a few years. I understand the rush to get published to turn a profit, but I just can't imagine that they're writing anything worthwhile at the moment
I agree that there should be no rush. I just hope that no matter what happens over the next few years; they will tell the truth. And that includes any good that may happen to spite my personal wishes that he goes down in history as a total flop.
