Grabbing Them by the Imagination

We have all been charmed by the first visible instance of imaginative play in children. We take it as a sign of the beginnings of sophisticated awareness when a two-year-old delicately presses thumb and forefinger together, lifting the hand to the open mouth, in a mime of adult coffee drinking. We are witnessing the early and strong inducement of children to learn more and broaden the limits of their narrow world through fantasy. Another example. It is sometimes disconcerting, but ultimately amusing to staid adults, who have, themselves, long since given up their own protean powers, to see a young child busily absorbed, on hands and knees, pushing a truck along the floor while puffing out his cheeks and letting his breath escape in a fair imitation of the engine's sounds. In the momentary power of his fantasy, he has quite forgotten where the truck ends and his own body begins, for he has become the truck.

As children mature, we see them begin to rely not solely on play, but also on books for the sustenance of their fantasy life—a completely necessary aspect of their healthy development. Adults may object to them, but we must understand children's fascination with super heroes, metaphors for the all-powerful and capable grown-ups in their lives with whom they yearn to identify, while at the same time still perceiving themselves as relatively powerless.

Fortunately, the super heroes give way to other heroes who may be quite miraculous, but are life-sized and live within the realm of the actual. I remember my own son's shift in interest from monstrous dinosaurs to super heroes to baseball players. When he was eight and nine, I was astonished by the avidity with which he gobbled up books about baseball history-when the grass was real and not astroturf—and, of course, about the lives of the great players of the past. I recall he even tried to make me sign a statement to the effect that if a major league club scouted him straight out of high school, I would not force him to go to college. The events he fantasized were, we would all agree, highly improbable, but they did represent, beyond the stage of dinosaurs and super heroes, an advance in the effort to integrate his private world with reality.

What, then, has all this to do with informational books or books of nonfiction? It is ultimately the wish of all healthy adults to help children move from the world of fantasy to the real world. And in aid of this process, we increasingly ply our children with nonfiction books which teach them, broadly speaking, about natural and human history. Yet, those books which are most successful in fixing their attention on the real will be, paradoxically, the ones which most engage their imagination. In other words, older children and teenagers, not to say adults, must still be able to fantasize, to connect imaginatively with the reality these books attempt to describe. If there is no such imaginative tug, the book will fail to open their eyes. Of the two recently published books reviewed here, one unfortunately belongs to the all too real, but deadly, unimaginative category, while the other is, I think, a fine example of the engaging sort.

The Changing Vice-Presidency by Roy Hoopes¹ is Wordsworth's "Shades of the prison-house begin[ning] to close / Upon the growing Boy" or girl with a vengeance. No clouds of glory trailing here. The book is badly written, dry, and filled with unconnected trivia. About the best that can be said for this book is that some ten- or eleven-year old, required to do a report on the office or on an obscure office holder like Hannibal Hamlin, might be happy to come across it in the public library. But the experience of reading it would undoubtedly dampen that original sense of jubilation. A typical example of the inorganic drivel which fills its pages is from a paragraph taken at random on Richard M. Nixon.

Encouraged by Eisenhower, Nixon became a very active...