While I am neither a teacher nor a librarian I was still given a free book. This year, I chose, Heroes For My Son by Brad Meltzer. The author collected the stories and quotes of 50 amazing people into a book for his son to someday read. I was impressed with both the people he chose as heroes for his son, and with the details he chose to include about each.
This is not a long book, and each person is given only a two-page spread with their photograph taking most of one of the two pages. The pages are small and the details are carefully chosen. Mr. Meltzer does a masterful job of encapsulating just what makes a person heroic without overwhelming the reader with information.
For example (and I’m just opening to random pages in the book) Roberto Clemente wasn’t just a great baseball player (12 gold gloves and led the league in hitting four times) but that he died while personally escorting a plane full of earthquake relief to his home in Nicaregua. He had paid for three planes of supplies, but learned that corrupt government officials had seized them. So he personally escorted the fourth plane and died when it crashed into the ocean. Clemente said, If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on Earth.
Harriet Tubman escaped as a slave, but still risked her freedom to make nineteen trips and help over three hundred slaves escape to freedom. She said, Every great dream begins with a dreamer.
The Wright Brothers knew they would fail. Every time they tested a plane, they brought extra supplies to rebuild, because they knew they would crash and crash and crash, until of course, they didn’t. If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.
And that is just three of Meltzer’s heroes chosen at random. They are all amazing stories, well told, and emotionally charged.
This book got me to thinking about who I would want my kids to read about, who are the heroes I want for them. Of course, they will read this book, and they will learn about countless other amazing people who scarified and accomplished great things.
But, at first, I had hard time coming up with specific names. Would they be athletes, writers, politicians, and celebrities?
No. After some thought, I realized that the heroes I want for my kids would be the friends and neighbors in their lives. Their teachers, their ministers, their coaches. Their local newspaper editor. The firefighters, police, EMT’s, doctors and nurses.
One of the reasons I so enjoy raising my family here is because there are heroes everywhere, positive role models around every corner. It might not make for as a good of a book as the people Mr. Meltzer described, but I want to be sure my kids look for and recognize the heroes working with them in their daily lives.
Heroes like the volunteers for our grade school PTO. Due to their heroic efforts I was able to get this book and write this column. Due to their heroic efforts, our school has $2000 in free books. They are just some of the heroes for my kids.
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