Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans – A Coretta Scott King Award-Winning Picture Book on Integration for Children (Ages 6-10)

What a beautifully illustrated book with images that appear to be so realistic. It really adds to the nature of the text, which provides a valuable overview of United States history and the lives of African Americans from the Revolutionary War era to the present day. This allows the reader to "travel back in time to find out about people, places and events from long ago" (Temple, Martinez, & Yokota, 2011, p. 360). The book is interesting as it gives several inspirational stories from real families and individuals that had an impact in shaping the history. The journey and progress of the African American culture is portrayed in a different nature then how most children learn about history through textbooks, which I think gives this book great appeal! References: Nelson, K. (2011). Heart and soul: The story of America and African Americans. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Temple, C., Martinez, M., & Yokota, J. (2011). Children's books in children's hands: An introduction to their literature. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Kadir Nelson's illustrations are perfection. His art work gives life to the history and contributions of African Americans in America. I purchased 32 copies of this book for members of a Girl Scout tropp ( ages 8 - 12) as a part of their Black History project. The girls loved the book and learned a great deal about some of most important people and events in history. The troop leaders and parents were fascinated with the book and wanted to know where to get addidtional copies. Although Nelson's gives a broad brush approach to three decades of African American history, this beautifully crafted book highlights significant events and is a wonderful introduction to the history African Americans in our country. I highly recommend Heart and Soul: The Story of American and African Americans to teachers, librarians and parents.

Do you remember the kids books that you will simply never forget? For me it was always the pictures. If the pictures weren't good . . . the book wasn't good. Curious George . . . Where the Wild Things Are . . . Dr. Seuss . . . it's the pictures that grab you, then the story that holds you. This whole book is a work of art, without being artsy. The pictures are just astonishing. Really. This book would be worth buying even without words. I can't imagine the time put into it and wonder if some of the illustrations are part of larger exhibits, on a mural somewhere etc. I also like the personal folksy story telling tone - although it sometimes seems to have a southern accent and sometimes doesn't. At 100 pages and 12 chapters it's not a one night bedtime story for young kids . . . But in my mind it is totally deserving of required reading status for say ages 8 through . . . 108?

This is a book to pour over. When you first pick it up, the beautiful portraits command your attention, and you treat it like a gorgeous coffee-table book. Then you read the story,told through the fictional voice of the author's grandmother, and her story takes your attention away from the paintings and then back to them again. African-American faces and voices both famous and unrecorded in history fill the pages as Nelson's tale walks you through almost 400 years of American history. And the cover image, of an American Madonna, links the book to the rest of the world as well. The book's size and the quality of the illustrations make it a wonderful gift for adults as well as for children from fourth grade and older. A distinctive accomplishment of a book - highly recommended.

This is great for homeschooling African American children or educting anyone on American history from the African American perspective. Most homeschool Curriculum do not mention African Americans and if they do it's a very small portion about MLK or slavery being a bad thing of the past. This book is a detailed, wonderful addition to any American history curriculum and could be used as a spine for topics to explore more deeply (source documents, museum trips, documentaries, biographies and library books) before moving to the next chapter.

Homeschool family of 6 kids age 6-15, I'm a white mom with a multi-ethnic family. But every white kid needs to read/listen to this too!!! This book is SO good, illustrations are so pretty, and the narrator on Audible is AMAZING. It feels like a woman is rocking on her front porch as she tells you her family story, it feels so personal. My teenagers felt the same way! I could listen to the audiobook several more times. I think the word "hell" was used once in the book, but considering the context I think it was fine. Great introduction for children.

This is an excellent book, however I would recommend buying the physical copy for more comfortable reading experience and to appreciate the art. It would be helpful if the publisher would allow reading it in landscape orientation on my phone in the Kindle app. I suppose the choice to lock it in portrait mode was due to the illustrations, which I understand is a common thing for publishers to do to deliver what they consider to be the best viewing experience. Unfortunately, it inhibited my ability to read it comfortably because the text was so small, and I hated having to constantly expand it. I spent a lot of time with Amazon to see if there was a way to fix this because this book has an entirely different settings menu than my other Kindle titles. Sadly, there was no option, so I'm leaving this feedback in the hope that future titles won't have this limitation.