OUR LIBERTY BELL

In a narrative that seems tailored for reading aloud to young audiences, Magaziner, former Architectural Historian for the National Parks Service, traces the history of the hard-luck Liberty Bell, from its very badly made first incarnation (1751), through many recastings and repairs to its role as a powerful symbol in the Abolitionist, Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights Movements. The author’s phrasing is sometimes over-fussy—at one time, “Good hotels could not rent rooms” to African Americans (!?!)—but his text is strewn with rhetorical flights and exclamation points, to which O’Brien adds energy and even comic flourishes on nearly every page with hatched-ink drawings of small, gesticulating figures. A good follow-up to Megan McDonald’s Saving the Liberty Bell (2005), clearly explaining how the marred instrument became at least as important an American icon as the flag. (index, glossary) (Nonfiction. 8-10)