Storytelling: Art and Technique
This title has been a standard professional reference work for nearly half a century, and with good reason. Covering a panoply of subjects of interest to would-be storytellers, and especially pertinent for children's librarians, it's been the go-to volume for good advice on planning and presenting successful programs. That said, it needed a serious update, and this fourth edition is a worthy successor to the previous three. As in the past, the history of the oral tradition, the value of the art, selection of stories, techniques for learning and telling, audience preparation, telling to children with special needs, teaching children and young adults to tell stories, and a vastly expanded and revised list of resources for storytellers are included. One of the major differences between this edition and its 1996 incarnation is the acknowledgment that some audiences we'd been accustomed to thinking of as insupportably challenging benefit greatly from hearing stories, rhymes, and songs and from having books read to them and, so, are worthy of our best efforts to reach them. These include infants, toddlers, and special-needs children. Greene and Del Negro devote many pages to explaining the benefits of storytelling to these populations, incorporating scientific and anecdotal evidence in their practical discussion of programming for them. Essays about storytelling in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and China are an interesting addition. Every public and school library will benefit from having this volume and consulting it should be often.Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY© Copyright 2010.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.  No redistribution permitted.