B Is for Battle Cry by Patricia Bauer

Bauer, Patricia B Is for Battle Cry : A Civil War Alphabet, illustrated by David Geister. Sleeping Bear Press, 2009. PICTURE BOOK. Content - G.
For each letter, Bauer has written a four-line stanza that introduces a topic related to the Civil War and also would work as a verse in Stephen Foster’s Civil War-era song “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The more significant portion of the text fills the outer third of each page and provides explanatory information about each of the 26 topics. Accompanied with beautiful paintings, this text is a very satisfactory introduction to the Civil War. The actual stanzas, however, are too choppy and forced to work well as poems, and without a copy of Foster’s song, it is impossible to see how well they might work as a song. Contains glossary.
EL – ESSENTIAL; MS – OPTIONAL. PKFoster, MS teacher-librarian.