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Election selections.

Article Excerpt
The first presidential campaign I can remember with any clarity was the Nixon/Humphrey race in 1968. I was ten years old, so I didn't get a vote. There was one way, though, for kids to show their presidential preference back then. The Woolworth's in our neighborhood sold election-themed bubblegum cigars. For ten cents you could get a green stogie with Richard Nixon's name and photo printed on the cigar band; the yellow one featured Hubert Humphrey. I've often wondered if some political pollster ever tried to ascertain the future voting patterns of America's Youth by determining whether kids were chewing Republican or Democratic in '68. (Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Sometimes, as Freud said, a candy cigar is just a candy cigar.) I do know one thing: if there had been a Pat Paulsen bubblegum cigar that year, my friends and I all would have bought it. Pat Paulsen was a deadpan, droopy-eyed TV comic who staged a run for the White House in 1968. Unlike the two stem, somewhat scary frontrunners, who talked about things we didn't understand--like the Tet Offensive and the Warsaw Pact--Paulsen appeared down-to-earth and approachable and funny. And since he was on a weekly TV series, he seemed like a member of the family. Unfortunately, nobody ever bothered telling us kids that his campaign was a phony. A big joke. I remember being saddened when November rolled around and he didn't win.

Kids are probably savvier these days, what with the Internet, Channel One school news programs, and MTV's Rock the Vote! campaign. And there seem to be more books for children and young adults on topics such as politics and patriotism. (Books reviewed in recent issues of the Horn Book include The Flag Maker [Houghton] by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; Free at Last!: Stories and Songs of Emancipation [Candlewick] by Doreen Rappaport; and Vote for Larry [Holt] by Janet Tashjian.) Let's start where our country started, with the revolution.

George Washington, Spymaster: How the Americans Outspied the British and Won the Revolutionary War (National Geographic) by Thomas B. Allen explores a side of Washington's life not often discussed in schoolbooks. This account of intercepted letters, invisible inks, and possibly poisoned plates of peas provides an intriguing look at historical espionage. (The book also confirms that some things in government never change. A prominent politician of the time is described as having "spent most of his career collecting taxes, not shouldering a musket.") The book is designed to resemble a vintage volume,...

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