The Book of Whys - by Gianni Rodari (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Factual as well as whimsical, and humorously illustrated, this is the first English-language publication of the answers given by one of Italy's greatest and most beloved children's authors to children's questions about animals, nature, technology, and culture.

Winner of the 2023 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs's English Translation Prize!

Gianni Rodari is widely regarded as the father of modern Italian children's literature. A firm believer in the great intelligence of children, he worked both as a teacher and a journalist. For a number of years, children across Italy sent their questions to his weekly newspaper column--questions Rodari answered, most inventively, with rhymes and little poems. Why didn't he reply with facts alone? Because he wanted to provoke children into thinking about questions, norms, and language itself. The Book of Whys collects a selection of these questions--from "Why does an elephant have a trunk?" to "Why does a car need fuel?" to "Why are we born?"--along with Rodari's answers, which beautifully serve to highlight the complexities, simplicities, and absurdities of our world.

With a fresh translation from Antony Shugaar, who also translated Rodari's Telephone Tales (the 2021 Batchelder Award winner), and playful illustrations in colored pencils from artist JooHee Yoon (Beastly Verse; The Tiger Who Would Be King, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2015; Inside Out and Upside Down), The Book of Whys is a playful, surprising, and poetically informative book for all those who are curious about the world and ready to play with the ways things are.

Review Quotes

One of Betsy Bird's Top 4 Translations for Older Readers of 2024! "Rodari is a big name in the Italian children's book scene... This particular book is a series of questions from kids that he would answer in his newspaper column. But the true star of this show is Antony Shugaar who has the impossible task of having to not only translate into rhyme for many of these poems, but to make the jokes work (even the puns!), too... Well done, sir!!"--Betsy Bird, A Fuse 8 Production (A School Library Journal blog)

"A wild amalgamation of poetry, philosophy, science, and stellar art, this is a book just as eclectic, wild, and whimsical as its creator. It's honestly not like anything out there... The unsung hero of this story is, in fact, translator Antony Shugaar... Shugaar is as good as he is at not simply translating a poem but getting it to rhyme AND be funny in the same way it would be funny in Italian... Yoon's art serves as a rather perfect accompaniment... I get the feeling that she's having fun experimenting. One moment she might be shading hyper-realistic eggs on a page. The next, it's wordless two page spreads that simply show an older sister and younger brother entering a forest of towering trees... Unabashedly, unapologetically Italian, lacking in any easily-slotted categories, and filled with funny, sometimes brilliant, translations and poems, The Book of Whys is an oddity. In a sea of samey samey children's books, it sticks out like a sore thumb. That isn't a criticism... A strangely moving, beautifully illustrated, odd as heck little book."--Betsy Bird, A Fuse 8 Production (A School Library Journal blog)

"Based on columns that Rodari wrote for Italian daily newspaper l'Unità from 1955 to 1958 in which he addressed wide-ranging topics from young readers, this quixotic collection of poems provides comical answers for each query. Evergreen wonderings such as 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?' and 'Why do your eyes sting when you chop an onion?' prompt playful yet scientific responses rendered in rhyme that paint witty stories infused with vivacious word play. Kindness radiates... The compassionate and educational replies are enhanced by midcentury-modern-style color pencil illustrations by Yoon, who depicts worshipped Egyptian cats, figures of varying skin tones engaging in myriad activities, and whimsy galore, making for a simultaneously thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud work that tackles questions regarding flights of fancy and contemporary existence."--Publishers Weekly

"He [Rodari] has been compared to Lewis Carroll in regards to his style of using 'logic and illogic' to shape his responses. He aimed to help children make sense of their world. Each question and their answers are paired with Yoon's beautiful illustrations, which are as charmingly eccentric as the answers. They are done in a fantastic colored pencil style, and vary from a small corner or page border to entire spreads."--School Library Journal

"Rodari (1920-80), his country's most celebrated 20th-century writer for children, took questions sent in by young readers over the course of several years to l'Unità, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party. A selection of these entries, smoothly translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated with zest and humor by JooHee Yoon, appears in The Book of Whys, a beguiling volume suited for sampling rather than for reading straight through... Rodari tackles all these questions with respect for the innocence and curiosity of his unseen interlocutors but without pandering or (mostly) showing his politics... His answers usually had two parts: one chatty and factual, the other jocose and poetic. Addressing the question of why river water is murky, Rodari writes that 'as rivers descend from mountains, ... they load themselves up with mud and debris, which they release into the sea.' To accompany this very sensible explanation, he offers a ditty about all the famous rivers (the Thames, the Tiber, the Indus and others) meeting in the middle, as it were, and becoming subsumed and anonymous as their waters 'swirl waves of brine.'"--Wall Street Journal

"This witty, irreverent poetry collection grew out of Rodari's 1950s newspaper-column responses to Italian children who took him up on his offer: 'Everything has a reason why: just ask me and I'II reply.'"--New York Times

"Translated questions from kids, answered by renowned Italian children's writer Rodari in his 1950s newspaper columns... His ethos shines through in this work; respect for his child audience mingles with his pro-labor, anti-authoritarian outlook. He often appends mini-parables and rhyming ditties to his answers. Throughout, Rodari excoriates proverbs for their fusty, contradictory didacticism... Rodari provides pithy answers to basic queries about rainbows, light bulbs, and auto engines... His riff on the secret to lifelong happiness is lovely and affirmative: 'You learn it from life.' Depicting diverse children and adults, Yoon's whimsical illustrations further enliven the text. Welcome insights from a celebrated author."--Kirkus

About the Author

Italian author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century's greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari's works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari's writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.

JooHee Yoon is an artist and educator whose practice spans illustration, design, and printmaking. Much of her work is influenced by her time experimenting with traditional printmaking techniques. Her drawings can often be seen in publications such as the New York Times, and she has exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad. In 2015 her first picture book, a contemporary take on the James Thurber classic The Tiger Who Would Be King, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books. Currently she teaches in the illustration department at RISD, along with working on publishing projects.

Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator, working out of Italian and French. He once interviewed the creator of Topo Gigio.