Anno's USA by Mitsumasa Anno
Anno's USA
by Mitsumasa Anno
I got this book out of the library when I went to borrow Anno's Britain for my mother. I read through it yesterday when I found myself with a little time in the evening. It is fantastic! There's a lot of emphasis on some of the traditional USA images--native americans, settlers, puritans, etc. But you get a great scope of the US from Hawaii to Boston. And you get a whole lot of iconic, unique-to-the-US images that are interesting to both kids and adults. Kids could recognize Paul Bunyon & Babe the Big Blue Ox floats in the Macy's Day Parade (which was fantastic--there was a float for Where the Wild Things are and another of Anno on his horse!). Kids might even recognize the ducklings from Make Way for Ducklings. But they wouldn't necessarily understand the scarlet letter A on one Puritan's chest. They wouldn't get the image of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress that's billowing upward. And they definitely wouldn't get the presence of the woman with short hair holding a pocketwatch chain facing the man who's holding a comb.
The pages are filled with beautiful images, interesting looks at different places around the country and tons of little jokes within the pages. I feel like I could really sit down and spend hours on each of these books and stil discover more.