Wednesday, January 07, 2009

January 7 Birthdays: Millard Fillmore, Zora N. Hurston and Sadako Sasaki

Millard Fillmore, U.S. President
Jan. 7, 1800-March 8, 1874

Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt (Harcourt, 1998)

Krull's one paragraph description of President Number 13 notes that he had no bad habits!

Fillmore’s White House biography is available on the Whitehouse.gov site.


Zora N. Hurston, author
Jan. 7, 1891-Jan. 28, 1060

Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World by
Cynthia Chin-Lee
, illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy (Charlesbridge, 2005)

Z is for Zora in this tribute to famous women. An African-American writer during the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was also a folklorist and anthropologist.

A page about Zora Neale Hurston is available at the VG: Voices from the Gaps Women Artists and Writers of Color, An International Website. It offers information about Hurston’s life and times, writings, and criticism.


Sadako Sasaki, peacemaker
Jan. 7, 1943-Oct. 25, 1955

Sadako by Eleanor Coerr, illustrated by Ed Young (Putnam, 1993)

This is an adaptation of Eleanor Coerr’s classic novel, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. In this story, Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl stricken with “atom bomb disease” holds fast to the legend that if a person who is ill folds a thousand origami paper cranes, the wish to be well again will be granted. Though Sadako fell shy of her goal, her friends and classmates rallied behind her cause and saw that she was buried with one thousand cranes. Three years after her death, a statue of this great peacemaker was erected in Hiroshima Peace Park.

From the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum homepage, click the Kids Peace Station button to read The Sadako Story, Sadado and the Atomic Bombing. Letters to Sadako, Peace Studies Presentation Room, the Question Box and Kids Links.