Book Descriptions
for What Charlie Heard by Mordicai Gerstein
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
"Charles Ives was born with his ears wide open," begins Modicai Gerstein's rousing picture book biography of the singular American composer. The lively narrative is full of the sounds that Charlie heard from his infancy through his boyhood and adulthood to the final years of his life. The text incorporates a catalog of sounds on page after page as the story moves forward with energy and ease ("He heard his father's fiddle and the spring peepers. He heard church bells, fire truck bells, the ice cream's man's bell, and the train's bell and whistle."). The backdrop for the words on each two-page spread is Gerstein's exceptional artwork, in which a cacophony of sounds are incorporated into the images of Ives's life ("Ratattat," "Riinng!" "Whooooooosh"). When Ives's beloved father died, Gerstein writes, "Charlie heard a great silence." The page is silent, too–the absence of "noise" heightening children's understanding of the emotional impact of that event. Although Ives’s music wasn’t initially well-received, he lived long enough to see attitudes begin to change. Gerstein's volume is an invitation to young readers and listeners to open their ears to the world around them, and to Ives's music, too. Honor Book, CCBC Caldecott Award Discussion (Ages 5-9)
CCBC Choices 2003 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2003. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
The extraordinary story of the composer Charles Ives.
"Sometimes little Charlie lay in his crib just listening. He heard
his mother’s long dress as she moved around his room. He heard big clocks and little clocks. He heard wagons and horse hooves. He heard dogs and crickets and the church bell next door."
Charlie listened all through his boyhood, and as he grew into a man, he found he wanted to re-create in music the sounds that he heard every day. But others couldn’t hear what Charlie heard. They didn’t hear it as music – only as noise. In this daring and original book, Mordicai Gerstein graphically translates the audible into the visible – filling his pictures with noise – to tell the story of Charles Ives (1874–1954), a great musical innovator who let neither criticism nor public scorn keep him from composing music that expressed all that he heard in the world. He was finally recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. What Charlie Heard is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
"Sometimes little Charlie lay in his crib just listening. He heard
his mother’s long dress as she moved around his room. He heard big clocks and little clocks. He heard wagons and horse hooves. He heard dogs and crickets and the church bell next door."
Charlie listened all through his boyhood, and as he grew into a man, he found he wanted to re-create in music the sounds that he heard every day. But others couldn’t hear what Charlie heard. They didn’t hear it as music – only as noise. In this daring and original book, Mordicai Gerstein graphically translates the audible into the visible – filling his pictures with noise – to tell the story of Charles Ives (1874–1954), a great musical innovator who let neither criticism nor public scorn keep him from composing music that expressed all that he heard in the world. He was finally recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. What Charlie Heard is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.
