Bringing complex concepts to kids’ level
As a writer, Madison’s Dean Robbins is having a grand slam kind of year.
By the time 2021 ends, he will have published four children’s books, all historical or biographical nonfiction on American subjects. They include:
“Thank You, Dr. Salk! The Scientist Who Beat Polio and Healed the World” (FSG), illustrated by Mike Dutton.
“The Fastest Girl on Earth! Meet Kitty O’Neil, Daredevil Driver!” (Knopf ), illustrated by Elizabeth Baddeley.
“¡Mambo Mucho Mambo! The Dance That Crossed Color Lines” (Candlewick, out Nov. 16), illustrated by Eric Velasquez.
“You Are a Star, Ruth Bader Ginsburg” (Scholastic, out Dec. 28), illustrated by Sarah Green.
If you’re keeping score, that’s four new books from four different publishers with four different illustrators.
(Also, please note that book industry supply-chain problems have led to publication dates for many books being pushed back on short notice.)
A former editor-in-chief of Madison’s Isthmus alt-weekly, Robbins’ career writing for children began more than a decade ago, and required the same kind of sticktoitiveness that some of his subjects had.
He remembers having a pantheon of heroes as a boy that included Louis Armstrong and Jackie Robinson. Later, he broadened his world of role models to include activists such as Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and Frederick Douglass. When Robbins became a father in his late 30s, he shared their stories with his own son.
Wouldn’t that be fun to do on a grand scale, he thought. So he wrote a book for kids about Babe Ruth and sent it off to a publisher. She accepted it and asked for more. He wrote books about Armstrong and Robinson. Also accepted.
It seemed fun and easy, until that publisher was swallowed by another publisher, who orphaned his books. They never came out.
A little advice from Babe Ruth
After that discouraging turn of events, Robbins could have hung up his pencil. But he held on to a favorite quote from the slugger Ruth: You just can’t beat the person who never gives up. He kept writing, eventually found an agent, and broke through in 2016 with “Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass” (Scholastic, illustrated by Sean Qualls & Selina Alko), an amiable re-imagining of the activists’ tête-à-tête over tea at Anthony’s home in Rochester, New York.
What makes something a Dean Robbins book? Start with his focus on heroes, like Salk, who developed the first vaccine for polio, a disease that terrorized the first half of the 20th century the way COVID-19 has afflicted this one.
His tales find the roots of their heroes’ successes in their experiences as children, when Salk saw the suffering polio caused and vowed to alleviate it; when future daredevil Kitty O’Neil, undaunted by her hearing impairment, declared herself “the fastest girl on Earth”; and when the shy young Ginsburg combined her passion for learning with her hatred of discrimination to choose law as a profession.
Robbins sees his audience as elementary school students between kindergarten and fifth grade. To him, some picture books read like Wikipedia entries in their marshaling of facts. “I do want to make mine more like dramas,” he said, with a beginning, middle and an end.
He also has to make complex concepts or information comprehensible to his audience.
When he interviewed Apollo program computer scientist Margaret Hamilton for his book “Margaret and the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Saved the First Lunar Landing” (2017), Robbins remembers, she talked with enthusiasm about how computer programming and software work. When Robbins looked at his notes, he realized, “I scarcely understood any of it.” So he asked Hamilton if she could explain any of that in a way that would make sense to second-graders. She thought about that and replied, “No, I absolutely can’t do that.”
That encounter helped Robbins grasp that explaining such things was both the challenge and the fun of his role as a writer. In “Thank You, Dr Salk!” he describes how a vaccine is made in a simple way that would be helpful to many people today:
“He grew the three kinds of polio virus in his laboratory.
“Poured in a chemical to make them harmless.
“And mixed them into a vaccine. “Could these harmless polio viruses guard against the dangerous ones?”
Robbins finds story ideas everywhere. On a family trip to Rochester, during a tour of Susan B. Anthony’s house, he perked up when a guide pointed out the parlor as the place where she would have tea with her neighbor, Frederick Douglass. “It was like Batman and Superman being friends,” he thought. Back in Madison, his research concluded that no children’s book had been written about their friendship, so that became his first published book.
His Salk book began after he noticed Mike Dutton’s Google Doodle in 2014, on the 100th anniversary of the scientist’s birthday. “It was a celebratory image of Salk surrounded by all these kids. And of course, kids are the ones who helped him test his vaccine,” Robbins said.
“¡Mambo Mucho Mambo!” came from his lifelong love of jazz. Robbins and illustrator Velasquez capture the mambo craze of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when New York’s Palladium Ballroom disregarded color lines and welcomed people of different races dancing together. Millie and Pedro, the Italian and Puerto Rican dancers at the heart of the story, were a real-life couple on and off the dance floor.
When kids ask Robbins, who enjoys visiting classrooms, for writing advice, “I always say just to read as much as possible, and just follow your passions with reading. And I think the writing flows from that. That’s certainly how it happened with me. I’m just a lifelong bookworm.”
Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins @jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.