how i learned geography by uri shulevitz

After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. 4-8)Ĭontinuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long ( The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud.

Signature watercolor illustrations contrast the stark misery of refugee life with the boundless joys of the imagination. In the spare text, Shulevitz pays tribute to his father as he recounts his family’s flight from Warsaw to Turkestan in 1939. Without leaving the room, he journeys to deserts, beaches, mountains, temples, fruit groves and cities. The boy spends hours studying and drawing the map and making rhymes out of exotic place names. But when the father hangs the map, it covers an entire wall, filling the barren room with color. One day the boy’s father comes home from the bazaar with a map instead of bread and the boy is furious. Aliens in a bleak land, the boy and his parents sleep on a dirt floor and are very hungry. A small boy and his parents flee war’s devastation and travel “far, far east to another country,” where summer is hot and winter is cold. A refugee boy learns more than geography from his father in this autobiographical memoir.

How i learned geography by uri shulevitz