A new children’s book is out that includes the Borden murders. <\/p>\n
The American Story by Jennifer Armstrong (Knopf, hardcover, 368 pages, $46.95)<\/p>\n
This is a book for kids, but most adults could brush up on their history, traditional and otherwise, by reading along. Subtitled “100 True Tales From American History,” it begins in 1565 with the founding of St. Augustine, Fla., the oldest European city in the United States, and ends in our new millennium with a rollicking description of the circuslike presidential election of 2000. Among the stories in between: the 1626 purchase of Manhattan by Dutch settlers for 60 guilders, or $24; Benjamin Franklin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kite-flying adventure of 1752; an 1835 New York newspaper report that a scientist had looked at the moon through a “newfangled telescope” and seen herds of lunar bison, blue unicorns, upright beavers living in crude huts and human beings (“man-bats”) with fur and wings (the story was a hoax, but the city was in a tizzy); Lizzie Borden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1893 acquittal in the murders of her father and stepmother; the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; and Pac-Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s introduction to America in 1981. Illustrations are by Roger Roth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n