Retrospective Wednesday #6...The Wall

***Excuse my week-long hiatus from blogging.  We are doing extensive home remodeling and are currently displaced. I'll be back to "normal" soon.

Retrospective Wednesday is a new feature at My Head is Full of Books designed to give bloggers a chance to highlight a book that was published in previous years, in the hope that it will cause others to go back and read it. The featured book must have been published one or more years ago.  Please leave a comment and link back to Headfullofbooks from your blog post. Join in the fun highlighting favorite "old books."

Retrospective Wednesday #6...The Wall by Peter Sis

Peter Sis, the author and illustrator of the marvelous, fascinating, and illuminating book The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain won the Hans Christian Anderson Illustrator Award this past month. Sis who lives in the United States now was born in Czechoslovakia. The Wall is his story of what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain and what it was like when that "wall" was torn down. The story is told mainly through detailed and minute designs. I can look at each diagram for hours and still notice something new every time I look around the page. See the sample page below. In addition I learned so much about what life was really like for average folks in countries with such repressive governments. This book won all kinds of awards for its illustrations when it was published in 2007. Though we often think of books with lots of illustrations as children's books, I think this book would be interesting to anyone who picks it up.  I thumbed through the my library copy again yesterday after I learned about the Hans Christian Anderson Award and I was reminded how completely captivating it is. I highly recommend that you hunt down a copy and check it out yourself.

Sorry, this is not a very clear picture but you get the idea of how detailed his illustrations are. All colors, except red, represent Peter's subversive use of art as his thinking breaks away from all the government control!