Fifty Famous People

Fifty short lives for young readers: Lincoln stopping on his way to court to put fledglings back in their nest, Franklin and his whistle, the midnight ride, the shepherd-boy who became a painter, Solomon and the bees. Baldwin was an American schoolmaster who wrote readers used in half the schools of his country, and he tells each story in a page and a half. Some of the anecdotes are legends and he says so; the book is where most English-speaking children first met them. Thirty-three paintings, from Menzel's moonlit Berlin canal to Bierstadt's western falls, give these old anecdotes the wide world they came from.