“A True Book: President Donald Trump” describes Mr. Trump’s real estate career, as well as public perceptions of his opponent during the election, Hillary Clinton.
On Nov. 10, Beth Sutinis sat at her desk in Brooklyn with a big task looming. As the executive editor for the children’s division of Time Inc. Books, she and her colleagues had worked through the fall to update their book “Presidents of the United States.” They added a spread about Barack Obama, another about the 2016 election and a third about Hillary Clinton, who polls had indicated would be elected the 45th president.
In the days after the election, Ms. Sutinis scrambled to produce a profile of the person who was elected instead. “It was one of the harder things I have had to do in a long career of writing and editing nonfiction for kids,” she said.
Presidential biographies are a staple of children’s book publishing, and of classrooms across the country. Nonfiction for children is a surging category, particularly in light of a Common Core mandate that schools put greater emphasis on it in their curriculum. Publishers like Penguin Young Readers, Scholastic and Time for Kids chronicle stories like the rise of Mr. Obama from Illinois state senator to president, or the political legacy of the Bush family, interspersing those accounts with facts about presidential history. The books hit bookshelves every four years, usually long before historians and writers of nonfiction for adults weigh in.
But the story of Donald J. Trump posed a unique set of challenges.
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.
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.”
A number of publishers have already released books about Mr. Trump, including “Rookie Biographies: President Donald Trump,” from Scholastic, and “Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President,” from Lerner Publications. The president and his relatives will also be the subject of future books for young readers. Lerner, for instance, announced that it would publish “Ivanka Trump: A Brand of Her Own” this fall.
But publishers and editors of children’s books are unaccustomed to weighing issues of partisan division and biased reporting, said Daniel Kraus, the books for youth editor at Booklist magazine in Chicago. Now, adults of different political persuasions are debating the veracity of basic facts. “Publishers are a little nervous about that,” Mr. Kraus said. “Parents can say, ‘This is not the reality I believe.’ It’s a reflection of where we are as a nation right now.”
For a children’s audience, the mandate is to provide unbiased facts with a dusting of the context required to maintain accuracy, said Joanne Mattern, a freelance writer of children’s nonfiction with 250 titles on her résumé.
Ms. Mattern has written about Mr. Trump in two biographies for children and in an update of “The New Big Book of U.S. Presidents,” from Running Press Kids, which begins, “Donald Trump was the most unlikely of presidential candidates.”
Running Press gave Ms. Mattern discretion to include relevant topics about Mr. Trump’s influence. She included “The Apprentice,” and “Trump and the Muslim Community,” writing that he had called for a temporary “shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States.
“This is a big part of Trump’s policies and a big reason he was elected,” Ms. Mattern said. “You couldn’t leave it out.”
Publishers have also addressed the election’s backdrop. “A True Book: President Donald Trump,” released by Scholastic, tells of Mr. Trump’s real estate career, and of public perceptions of his Democratic opponent, Mrs. Clinton. “Clinton was a strong choice for president,” read one paragraph, which concluded, “However, many people did not like Clinton. They felt she was not trustworthy and would not bring enough changes to the government.”
In a prepublication draft of the book, a page titled “Troubling Statements” read, in part: “Some of Trump’s biggest supporters were white nationalists. Their comments and actions during and after the campaign were racist and often dangerous. Trump did little to speak against them.”
Morning Briefing
Get what you need to know to start your day in the United States, Canada and the Americas, delivered to your inbox.
In the finished book, “Troubling Statements” had been changed to “Campaign Statements.” The section about discrimination was modified to read, “Some of Trump’s critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough.”
Joana Costa Knufinke, group editor for nonfiction books in Scholastic’s library publishing division, said, “We make an effort to show both points of view.”
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, a bookstore and book fair fixture offering biographies of historical figures ranging from Pablo Picasso to Steve Jobs. In 2017, a total of 17 “Who Was?”/”Who Is?” books will come out. None will be about Mr. Trump.
The series does not automatically report on every president, Ms. O’Connor said. For instance, there is no “Who Is George W. Bush?” or “Who Is Bill Clinton?”
Mr. Obama was given “Who Is” coverage soon after he was elected, and Ms. O’Connor, under the pseudonym Roberta Edwards, wrote the biography herself. Mr. Obama’s election was historic, she said, because he was the nation’s first African-American president.
The 2016 election was also historic, Ms. O’Connor added, but “I don’t think Trump’s life beforehand is all that interesting. To have a book that is just about him winning the presidency, we think it’s not warranted.”
The conservative publishing company Regnery — it has published children’s books by Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and by Janice Dean, senior meteorologist for Fox News — said it had no immediate plans to publish a biography of Mr. Trump for its young readers.
Some writers say they are also struggling to write about the Trump family. Kathleen Krull worked to get her new book, “A Kids’ Guide to America’s First Ladies,” ready for publication with up-to-date reporting on the spouse of the 2016 election winner, Ms. Krull said. “But the information on Melania Trump was scarce.”
In a chapter titled “Glamour to Spare,” Ms. Krull wrote that Mrs. Trump “is not your traditional first lady. As well as being the wealthiest, she is the only one who is the president’s third wife,” adding that she was also “the first to have been a supermodel.”
“There is not a lot substantial to say about her,” Ms. Krull said. “I did try to be fair.”
In her new book, “Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President,” the author Jill Sherman packed in details about Mr. Trump’s family. But Ms. Sherman, who has written children’s books about the Komodo dragon and the Irish potato famine, said biographical details about Mr. Trump were being denied and debated by some of his supporters. “Everything has its unique challenges, but I would say the Donald Trump biography was overwhelming,” she said.
Among the unusual considerations were how much to include scandals, including those related to Mr. Trump’s three marriages. “Ordinarily with a book like this, I wouldn’t put much of a focus on relationships and marriages, but I thought it was important,” she said. “It was from the marriage to Ivana, and their divorce, that he became a celebrity.”
The entire country is focused on Mr. Trump right now, but he is not the only president with a complicated past, said Ms. Sutinis of Time Inc. When she was reviewing all the entries of “Presidents of the United States,” she noted that the previous edition reported that Thomas Jefferson had grown up in a wealthy family on a plantation. For the new edition, she inserted a paragraph about Mr. Jefferson, the slave owner.
The earlier edition had been published in 2006. “Even in the last 10 years, we have become more honest in how we deal with difficult history,” she said, adding that children today are also far more sophisticated and aware of the news.
Not only do they have access to news online, she said, but they also “have access to us, their parents, and they are with us when we are reading news articles on our phones. We are all consuming news during family time, and we are discussing news in those family settings. They are more exposed to news, and they’re asking more questions.”
No comments:
Post a Comment