Whitney Stewart (The 14th Dalai Lama: Spiritual Leader of Tibet; Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha) once wrote an article for the since discontinued literary journal Five Owls, called Understanding Cultures, Fostering Peace. The piece was essentially a profile of author Suzanne Fisher Staples (Shabanu; Haveli; Under the Persimmon Tree) and of her work, which often tells the tales of the Muslim people she got to know and admire while doing research on literacy for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In her article, Stewart has much praise for Staples’ work and its power to promote peace and understanding. She talks about how her novels show us “that the worlds of Islam and Hinduism are as diverse as the worlds of Christianity and Judaism”; how she knows and respects the worlds she uncover; how “she finds her own humanness in the humanness of her characters.”

As it turns out, Stewart’s words say a lot about the humanity of both of them and confirm the idea that in order to encourage children to embrace, not fear, the diversity that makes up our world, we must help them understand the richness and interconnectedness of our peoples and cultures. “Until we stop judging people who are different from us as inferior,” cautions Staples, as quoted in the article, “our prospects for peace look very dim. What we need are empathy and compassion—not judgment and stereotyping.” Stewart concurs: “Children look to adults for confirmation of their reaction to differences. When children see someone ‘odd,’ they ask adults why it is so. If the adult confirms the strangeness, discrimination is born in the child. However, if the adult confirms the beauty of many ways of being, of living, then the child accepts the beauty and is perhaps drawn to that which once seemed different. In her novels, Staples confirms such beauty.”

Through their writing, both authors, in fact, convey a belief in young people’s ability to understand and embrace the complex beauty of our world. And perhaps because they appeal to children’s higher sentiments, their work always meets with a response.

I hope 2010 and years to come will bring us more children’s books by courageous and compassionate writers like them.

For more on Whitney Stewart’s work, check out this blog post, Inspiration for Books on Inspiration, where she talks about her desire to help children learn “to listen to their inner wisdom.”

We’re happy to report that Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma has been re-issued with updated material. Originally published in 1997 by Lerner, this inspiring young adult biography by New Orleans writer Whitney Stewart is available again thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Robert Fuller, who taught Aung San Suu Kyi at Methodist English High School in Rangoon in the early 1960’s. Dr. Fuller, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska, was a resource for Whitney when she was writing her book.

The new edition features a preface by Dr. Sein Win, the Prime Minister of the democratic government of Burma in exile (the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma); an epilogue by Dr. Angelene Naw, biographer of both General Aung San, the father of Burma’s independence, and of Aung San Suu Kyi; and a timeline of events in Burma since 1997 by Dr. Ni Ni Swe, M.D., whose mother was a personal friend of Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother. Twenty new photographs are also included. For more information on the new edition, click here.

For more about Whitney’s interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, click here. For more about Whitney and her books (including her account of being rescued during Hurricane Katrina), check the following blog posts.

And a personal update: Whitney and her family evacuated to Shreveport, Louisiana, before Hurricane Gustav’s arrival earlier this week. They are home again now, having seen much wind and water damage in northern Louisiana en route. A fallen telephone pole missed their house by inches and they are now busy cleaning up fallen trees, “happy and grateful to be home.”

Whitney’s forthcoming children’s books are Marshall: A Nantucket Rescue (Soundprints), Mr. Lincoln’s Gift (Hildene), and Who Was Walt Disney? (Penguin).

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!

As librarian at San Francisco Friends School, Chad Stephenson naturally thinks a lot about spiritual books for children. In addition to Becoming Buddha, which he earlier recommended to us, and his suggestions of books about Diwali for our November website update, Chad also offers the following annotations on favorite books to inspire and nurture spiritual development in young readers:

• Wolf Brother (fantasy/adventure) by Michelle Paver – The tale of a boy discovering his connection to the natural world through a spiritually demonic bear who he must confront
• Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back by Shel Silverstein – A great laugh-out-loud story about power and consumerism with a non-moral ending. (1963)
• The Golden Compass [known in the U.K. as Northern Lights] by Philip Pullman – Meant for the older, advanced readers from 9 and up, this first book in the trilogy brings a fantasy twist to the Christian story of Adam and Eve, though cloaked in an exceptionally creative fantasy world. (Now out as a film as well)
• Stories from the Bible by Lisbeth Zwerger – Meant for older kids (ages 9-11), who are familiar with the Bible and enjoy longer, more elaborate versions. Zwerger’s exquisite illustrations accompany the King James version text.

We look forward to more of Chad’s suggestions and contributions to PaperTigers. His outlook and perspective are much appreciated!

One of Australian illustrator Sally Rippin’s recent children’s books (published in 2005 in Australia, 2007 in the U.S.) opens upwards rather than outwards. I asked Sally how she and author Whitney Stewart decided on the format for Becoming Buddha. Here’s her reply:

“Whitney suggested working together on a picture book, and I approached my publisher at the time with her ideas. They agreed to publish our book, and it was then left up to me to illustrate Whitney’s text. I decided to have Becoming Buddha open so the illustration reads vertically on the double page to represent an ancient manuscript, or a thangka. From what I know about Buddhism, I believe opening the book in this way makes you more conscious of your actions. Fortunately, the publisher agreed to this format.

“Painting the face of Siddhartha was quite challenging, because I knew there were certain rules about how the Buddha could be represented in art, and I also wanted to make the paintings my own representations of Siddhartha, the man, before he became enlightened. Again fortunately, Whitney was able to have a representative of the Dalai Lama approve the artwork before it went to press, so that gave me confidence.”

Melbourne poet and blogger Kris Helmsley had some interesting observations about the layout and Buddhism when he introduced Sally and Becoming Buddha at a book launch in June 2007; read his comments here.

Another vertically read book with an equally conscious layout is Caldecott Medal winner Ed Young’s Beyond the Great Mountains. Its cascading-style pages, illustrating Chinese characters and landscapes, also create a special physical awareness for young readers.

Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha, by Whitney Stewart, is one of the top five spiritual books for kids on San Francisco Friends School librarian Chad Stephenson’s current favorites list. A practicing Quaker, Chad has also worked in Catholic and Waldorf schools. He looks for books that “equip kids spiritually for the incongruities of life” and are “not obnoxiously preachy.”

Chad describes Becoming Buddha as “a simple retelling of the Buddha’s life through a uniquely formatted book which also includes Sanskrit and even some ‘dark’ sides of the Buddha’s experiences; best for ages 8 and up.”

Along with further details on the appealing format of Becoming Buddha, Whitney Stewart’s website includes a page of information on Buddhism; scroll down for an annotated list of other books on Buddhism for children. Australian Sally Rippin, an illustrator with a widely international background, created the beautiful images. Becoming Buddha includes an introduction to meditation practice for children. Stewart’s earlier books include biographies of the Dalai Lama and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

We’ll have more of Chad’s thoughts and recommendations on spiritual books for children in future posts.