My Grandfather is a Magician
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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My Grandfather is a Magician
Not a fairy tale, but, as the subtitle 'work and wisdom in an African village' reveals, an explanation of the place of traditional herbal medicine in a south east Nigerian village. The book is related from the point of view of a young boy who introduces us to his family and the traditional and modern professions that they follow: baker, potter, smith, teacher, doctor, lawyer and seamstress. But to the narrator the most powerful of all is his grandfather, who spends half the year in the forest, and can use leaves and roots and bark to cure illnesses. This book presents a positive and fascinating account of traditional medicine, and a brief note on the study of ethnobiology which has arisen from it. It is superbly illustrated with the author's own photographs of contemporary Nigerian community life, and of the raw materials of grandfather's trade. This is an unusual and very rewarding book.
