Inquiry at and in the Margins

Chapter four extends and complicates Gérard Genette’s idea of the peritext—the sidebars, captions, footnotes, introduction, notes for teachers, and other aspects of textual apparatus—to look at how nonfiction employs these devices to centralize debate or push it to the margins

Voice and the Seamless Narrative of Knowledge

Chapter two examines how the voice of a book—in its use of hedges and a visible author as well as its dramatization of debate between sources—can attempt to invite or close off critical engagement

Critical Engagement’s Moral Imperative

The Conclusion anticipates the argument that children are not capable of the critical engagement to which my theory argues that they are being invited. The final pages of Humble Truths offer evidence from across many countries and disciplines that children are more than capable of the kind of nuanced, careful engagement to which contemporary children’s nonfiction increasingly invites them. I end by pointing out how adults—authors, teachers, parents, scholars, and caregivers—can see to it that children’s books invite that sort of engagement, and I make an argument that we should.

The Literary Study of Children’s Nonfiction

Clearly lays out a series of techniques for analysis and then applies and nuances those techniques through extensive close readings and case studies

The Empathy of Critical Engagement

Chapter seven argues that emotional engagement can and has dovetailed with critical engagement. Here, I use feminist theory to index the link between emotion and intellect, between the passion of civic engagement and the objectivity of inquiry.

Beyond Authority

Chapter one explains that the standard definition of nonfiction is that it is a literature of answers, but this chapter argues that the genre and the children for whom it is written are better served if we think of it as a literature of questions.

Seeing Photographs

Chapter five argues that children’s nonfiction has both accepted and resisted an anti-critical inclination that is all but endemic to photography, and it teases out the social construction of childhood reinforced by both positions.

The Pursuit of Reliability in Almost Astronauts

Chapter six applies the observations of the previous chapters to a case study of Almost Astronauts (2009), which won the American Library Association’s highest award for nonfiction in 2010. This reading examines how the pursuit of authority and an understanding of children as vulnerable recipients of data requires the sacrifice of critical engagement and, ironically, results in a less honest book.

Nonfiction’s Unfinished Characters

Chapter three examines places where nonfiction points to the flaws in its characters, the times they have made mistakes, failed, or simply looked foolish. In these instances, as well as moments in which the characters of nonfiction are shown in the process of testing or even finishing one line of inquiry only to find new questions that remain unanswered, the genre demonstrates an ability to convey information while simultaneously making room for critical engagement with the people who produce knowledge