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If you’re making plans to visit another culture with children, here’s a multi-genre multitude of resources, from guides for family travel to a pre-teen’s memoir of moving to Africa. Books, sites, lists… something to inspire and ease your travel with children and enrich their multicultural upbringing in the best possible way: experiencing new territory for themselves. Happy travels!

David Elliot Cohen’s One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey With Our Children, in the Traveler’s Tales series, provides an ambitious starting point. Annotated travel-related children’s book lists, organized by country, await you at Travel for Kids. Along with books for young travelers, the Goodlittletraveler website suggests helpful advice about traveling with children. The Pennywhistle Traveling with Kids Book offers vehicular orientation for parents and kids traveling by car, plane, train or boat.

In Alison Lester’s Are We There Yet? 8-year-old Gracie narrates a family vacation all around Australia. Headed to the Caribbean? Here’s a book list. Along with many Fodors guides for kids traveling in Europe and U.S., Madallie: A Children’s Travel Store stocks an around-the-world adventure guide. Exploring Chinatown: A Children’s Guide to Chinese Culture is a great guide to any Chinatown, wherever in the world you’re headed. Four Corners Publishing puts out YA novels for and about young travelers, including guides to Sydney, Mexico, and Israel. In Learning to Swim in Swaziland by Nila K. Leigh, an American 11-year-old describes her life in Africa, where she moved when she was 8.

Introducing young children to international art classics in preparation for travel? Art Up Close makes helpful suggestions. And Bob Raczka’s Where in the World? takes Alighiero e Boetti’s tapestry map of the world as starting point for a world tour of great art–good fun for armchair and hit-the-road young travelers alike.

Many children have deep spiritual experiences that adults may not know how to validate (or even, sometimes, acknowledge in themselves). Books can give children a sense that their liminal, fragile, and ignored-by-most-grownups experiences are worthy and precious. I asked Whitney Stewart, author of the picture book biography Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha, to comment on this topic:

“I have a great deal to say on the subject of adults ignoring the ’spiritual’ experiences of children. When I was fourteen, I took a rafting trip with my best friend and her older siblings. We hit a rough patch of white water and the raft flipped. I was on the bow and I got trapped under the raft and in some tangled branches. I started running out of air and panicked for a period. Then suddenly my internal voice said, ‘Oh this is just death,’ and I relaxed completely. I ‘saw’ scenes from my whole life as if in one frame of a movie, and I felt bright light and deep peace. I stopped struggling. And I felt joy.“Then someone pulled me out of the water. I was choking, and I tried to talk about what had happened but no one was interested in listening. We had to portage the raft over rough riverbank.“This was one of several childhood experiences of something beyond myself that I have tried to understand. These ’sensed’ experiences led me to Tibet in 1986 and into Tibetan Buddhism. I chose to meet and write about the Dalai Lama because I wanted to understand his view of universal consciousness.“I now have a strong urge to teach children how to listen to their inner wisdom and connect to universal wisdom as they understand it. To me this connection can happen at any time in any place if the child is ‘listening’ in a full body-mind-heart way. My newest book on meditation shows kids simple ways to make this connection.“I could talk forever on this subject. But this is a start.”

Thank you, Whitney, for your thoughtful perspective. For a preview of Whitney’s book on meditation, including instructions and illustrations to get you (kids and grownups) started, click here. PaperTigers welcomes readers’ book recommendations and comments on the topic of spiritual books for children–and other topics as well, as always. See Whitney’s blog here.

I asked children’s book writer Whitney Stewart to tell us about meeting Aung San Suu Kyi, subject of her young adult biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma. As a mother herself, Whitney reflects on this brave mother’s difficult decision:

On the morning of July 20, 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi (ahng sahn soo chee) woke up in her childhood home in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. “Something is happening,” her cousin told her. “There are lots of soldiers all over the place.”Aung San Suu Kyi knew she was about to be detained for her part in the peaceful democracy movement in Burma. She didn’t try to go past the truckloads of government soldiers barricading her front gate. She calmly told her sons, Alexander and Kim, that she would be put under house arrest and that their father would take them back to their home in England. She would stay in Burma to stand up for her countrymen and women. She went on a hunger strike to ensure decent treatment of the pro-democracy students who were dragged away from her compound. Despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts, Burma’s military government jailed and tortured pro-democracy supporters. It continues to do so today.

In 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was released temporarily from house arrest. I went to Burma to interview her for a young adult biography. I wanted to understand what led a woman to give up her family life to help her country. I wondered how she coped with solitary confinement. Aung San Suu Kyi told me about her daily meditation practice. She said she could not abandon all of Burma’s young sons in order to go back to England and take care of her own two.

I left our interview inspired. But I also realized that I could not do what this Nobel laureate has done. I couldn’t miss out on my child’s life no matter how much I grieved for others. I spent three weeks in Burma dodging the government spy who watched me, and worrying about my three-year-old at home. Burma’s mothers spend a lifetime of worry.

Aung San Suu Kyi has a fortitude that I don’t. “The future is democracy for Burma,” she says. “It is going to happen, and I am going to be here when it happens.”

Events in Burma continue to unfold; Whitney recommends checking here and here for current information and for ways to help. Her biography of Aung San Suu Kyi will be re-issued in June, 2008, with proceeds going to help the Burmese cause.

“Katrina did something to my psyche,” says New Orleans children’s writer Whitney Stewart. Along with her teenage son and her 87-year-old mother-in-law, and with a cast on her own injured ankle, she was rescued by helicopter late at night after five days stranded on the fifth floor of the Tulane Medical School building during the hurricane’s aftermath. It was “a crazy, chaotic, unsettling experience… We’d tried earlier to leave but our rescue boat had been overtaken by people with guns… After Katrina, I needed to do new things. I needed a new paradigm for New Orleans.”

Whitney is now learning to kayak and doing volunteer work with the public schools. On a whim, the former high school actor sent photos of herself, her guitarist son, and her geneticist husband to casting agents; her son landed a role in “Cirque de Freak,” to be filmed in New Orleans this year.

But this writer had an adventurous life long before Katrina. After trekking the Himalaya twenty years ago with her mom, Whitney, who’d discovered her affinity for the biographical form as a Brown undergrad, wrote biographies for children of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and the Buddha. Her love of travel has also led her to write two young adult novels that present kids’ eye views of New Orleans (Jammin’ on the Avenue) and San Francisco (Blues Across the Bay).

A primary concern is getting across the message of subjects like the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. Her biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma, is soon to be re-issued, with proceeds going to a non-profit that benefits the Burmese cause. “I’m amazed that so few people have heard of her,” Whitney told me.  She’ll tell us about meeting this brave Burmese woman in an upcoming guest blog. Stay tuned!

I’ve been blogging about the Place of the Week for nearly two years now, choosing a new location every seven days that I knew little about but had caught my attention or that appeared in the news. In the last year global warming has become much more than another subject debated within academia; in fact its found its way into our language, popular culture, and even our shopping habits. As I thought about this while I tried to pick my first Place of the Year, I kept coming back to the very visible ways the Earth’s landscape has been altered by the phenomena. (more…)

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Coordinates: 71 33 N 1 47 W

Population: 0

Oftentimes surprises make us happy, and these unexpected events or discoveries provoke good feelings. Once in a while however, we are unpleasantly surprised and greeted with a sudden occurrence that comes more as a rude awakening. Greenland’s Warming Island—also known by the less-easily pronounced Uunartoq Qeqertotoq—is a recent geographical example of the latter. (more…)

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Devil’s Island

Coordinates: 5 16 N 52 34 W

Area: 34.6 acres (14 hectares)

Today, urban dwellers may yearn for the occasional retreat to a tropical paradise, but for about a century there were plenty of people who longed to escape from just such a place. Between 1852 and about 1953 this Atlantic island off the coast of French Guiana served as a penal colony intended for prisoners suffering from contagious diseases—leprosy in particular. (more…)

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Pentecost Island, Vanuatu

Coordinates: 15 42 S 168 10 E

Area: 190 square miles (492 sq. km)

Whether or not they should be classified as wholly fascinating or purely frightening, you’ve likely heard of skydiving, bridge jumping, and cliff diving. Less familiar may be the practice of land diving, a ritual performed by the men of Pentecost, one of a chain of about 80 volcanic islands that compose the Republic of Vanuatu. (more…)

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©GingerNielson

by T.A. Barron
illustrated by William Low
Philomel / Penguin 2007

There's no rhyme or reason to the fact that I love anything that has to do with Easter Island. That remote little island with the giant iconic stone heads, be they alien totems in Chariots of the Gods or the idols of a superstitious monolithic culture, I am totally fascinated by it. I may be one of the few people in the world who actually paid to see the movie Rapa Nui and didn't totally hate it. Okay, maybe a little.

If I had any clue to the whereabouts of the originals for a mini comic I once made about "The Bellybutton of the World" I'd dig it out, scan it, and prove just how much I love those stony visages.

Today, however, we are dealing with a picture book about this small island in the Pacific. A boy brings home some food he's speared at the tide pools and when his mother looks up at him she sees, over his shoulder, the sky has gone a shade of green. She's seen this happen once before, long ago, and sends the boy running to the carving pits to retrieve his father and bring him safely to the caves in the cliffs high above the shore.

The boy's father is a long stone cutter, perhaps the last of a vanishing breed, carefully working over the unfinished features of one of the stone giants as it lay in repose. The boy tries to warn his father but is not convinced that he should abandon his work and sends the boy on his way. Half way up to the caves the boy sees a large tidal wave has sucked the water from the shore and a wall of water almost as tall as the island is approaching. He runs back down to the carving pits to save his father.

The wave hits, the boys is caught up in it and he is dragged under, tangled in the seaweed and floating among the stones down near the shore. The water recedes, the boy is alive and found by his father, and life on the island will never be the same. Uh, the end.

There is an afterward that connects some limited Easter Island history with modern tsunamis and an oblique reference to the effects of deforestation and global warming. Essentially, Barron is making a case that what happened on Easter Isle is a controlled-environment version of what is currently happening on planet Earth. That the island was once a lush paradise, full of the largest palm trees on the planet, and is now practically barren speaks to what happens when a culture takes from nature with little regard to the long-term effects. These people used their trees and plants for everything -- timber, fabric, food, rope, and most importantly, for transporting their huge heads around the island -- and when the trees left so did the native birds and cover vegetation. In the end the native peoples may have cursed the gods who abandoned them for not continuing to provide -- as many today will assume that global warming is a sign of god's wrath, if they accept global warming at all -- but in the end the evidence is fairly clear.

The story itself is fine, the idea of a small island community dealing with a tidal wave makes for some pretty interesting stuff, but if you're going to use Easter Island as your base and you're going to follow it up with an authorial afterword about the environmental effects, then that's the story that should have been told. I don't know that the world is going to be clamoring for another picture book about Easter Isle anytime soon, but if so there's a relevant cautionary tale to tell that doesn't involve an act of nature to explain the tragedy of a small piece of the planet and what it portends for the rest of us.

Preachy? Perhaps, but if the author had wanted me to review his book he shouldn't have undercut his own efforts by pointing out the weakness in his own story. As it stands the stones don't really dance, and there is little mention as to why the islanders even care about them. I wonder how much I would have cared if I wasn't predisposed to liking those long-eared, thin-lipped, top-knotted dudes.