Thursday, May 17, 2018

Albert Lorenz

I wonder sometimes what I will find to blog about when I'm not in the weeds of constant lesson planning. Between all the main lesson blocks I've taught to the mixed ages I'm working with, plus tutoring and after school clubs, it seems like every single book I see is one I want to remember about for an upcoming MLB, or wish I known about for a recently completed lesson. But an author/illustrator I've really become fond of lately is Albert Lorenz.

It all started with House.


House: Showing How People Have Lived Throughout History with Examples Drawn from the Lives of Legendary Men and Women


I bought this book, according to Amazon, on November 18, 2005. That means that Becca was ten months old, Leah had just turned two a few days before, and Natalie was three. WHY, you ask? Because I was determined to be a Waldorf homeschooling mom and someone recommended it on a Yahoo group as being useful for the Housebuilding block.

Fast forward to May 2018. For the first time in thirteen years, I used this book. It has been on my shelf all this time... then I finally got it down for my Housebuilding block and I love it!

So here's what is included (he organizes the book into pairs of houses):

    Sculptor's House, ancient Egyptian workshop
    Sculpted House, the Trojan horse

    Imperial Grandeur, ancient Roman town house
    Modest Beginnings, Jesus of Nazareth

    Southern Explorations, Kon-Tiki raft, South America
    Northern Explorations, Vikings, North America

    Monastic Cell, Martin Luther, Protestant Reformation
    Snow House, Inuit igloo

    Costume Drama, Elizabeth I, execution of Mary Queen of Scots
    A Lively Scene, William Shakespeare, Globe Theater

    Country People, peasant cottage in Flanders mid-sixteenth cent.
    City People, London Bridge

    Dutch Masters, Dutch merchant mid-seventeenth cent.
    Slave Ship, triangle trade

    Hall of Mirrors, King Louis XIV, Versailles
    Starter Home, Puritans in New England

    Longhouse, Iroquois
    Tent, Bedouin tribes, Arabian Desert

    Living in Nature, Amazon rain forest
    Shaping Nature, Japan, bonsai

    Ingenious Edifice, Thomas Jefferson, Monticello
    Palace of Thought, Empress Catherine the Great, Russia

    Bachelors' Lair, Sherlock Holmes, Victorian house
    Warrior's Corral, Zulu kingdom

    Floating Factory, New England whaling voyage
    Houseboat, Chinese junks

    House and Garden, Claude Monet, Giverny
    Room with a View, Frederic E. Church, Hudson River

    Tropical Prison, Devil's Island, French Guiana
    Hotel on Wheels, Orient Express

    Inn Down Under, Australian hotel 1909
    Endurance, Ernest Shackleton, Antarctica

    Artful Apartment House, Antoin Gaudi, Barcelona
    Life in a Trench, World War I bunkers

    Musical Mecca, Harlem, Manhattan Island
    Southern Roots, New Orleans

    Ranches for All, post-World War II suburban housing
    Settling In, State of Israel moshavim

    Outer Space, Mir space station
    Inner Space, child in the womb


Curious to see what else he'd written, I checked out Metropolis. Loved it. Bought it. Again, so useful for so many main lesson blocks!


Metropolis: Ten Cities, Ten Centuries


This is most helpful for Waldorf grades 6, 7, 8. Here's what's included:

    The Middle Ages, grade 6

    Jerusalem, 11th Century
    the First Crusade

    Paris, 12th Century
    the Cathedral of Notre-Dame

    A Mongol Tent City, 12th Century
    Genghis Khan

    Koblenz, 14th Century
    The Black Death / The Plague

    The Age of Discovery, grade 7

    Voyage of Discovery, 15th Century
    Part One: Lisbon
    Part Two: Mozambique
    Vasco da Gama

    Forence, 16th Century
    Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti

    Osaka, 17th Century

    Vienna, 18th Century
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    The Age of Revolution, grade 8

    London, 19th Century
    Industrial Revolution, Victorian England

    New York City, 20th Century


Excited by his work, I continued to check out books. Amazon had very mixed reviews of The Trojan Horse so I checked it out from the library instead of buying it sight-unseen, and I'm really glad I did. (You can read my two star review at Amazon.) But I also discovered he wrote Journey to Cahokia and that was one I decided to buy after checking it out and reading it.


Journey to Cahokia: A Boy's Visit to the Great Mound City


This is a narrative story about a boy named Little Hawk and although Lorenz clearly did his research, he is not as good at writing fiction as he is at straight non-fiction (in my opinion). I would NOT have bought this book if I didn't live in Illinois, where we teach about and visit Cahokia on a regular basis. But it's fun that my kids can see landmarks they recognize on the map in the introduction, it's useful that it gives more of a sense of what it would be like to walk around in that city when it was at its peak (pair with Bonnie Shemie's Mounds of Earth and Shell), and it is definitely a must-own if you're in Illinois or Missouri and teaching grade 4 Local History & Geography.

Our most recent Albert Lorenz purchase arrived on Tuesday and this one I did buy sight-unseen based on the glowing Amazon reviews. It's out of print so you have to get used copies and mine was missing the magnifying glass, so be prepared for that. It's called Buried Blueprints and I could barely get my 14 year old daughter to give it up so that I could write this blog post. She LOVES the detail in the illustrations (thus the magnifying glass).


Buried Blueprints: Maps and Sketches of Lost Worlds and Mysterious Places


She's obsessed with this creative look at history, mystery, and mythology. So here's what's included in the elaborately illustrated fold out sections:

    The Garden of Eden

    Atlantis

    Noah's Ark

    The Tower of Babel

    An Egyptian Chronicle
    Giza, Pharaoh Ramses II, Moses and Aaron, the Exodus

    King Solomon's Mines

    The Odyssey
    "I got the material for this drawing from a blind street singer in Athens named Homer."

    Man Against Woman
    Emperor Titus, Roman gladiators, Colosseum, Pompeii

    The Seven Cities of Gold
    de Vaca, de Coronado, Eldorado

    The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merry Men
    King John, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Crusades

    The Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

    Genghis Khan and the Great Wall of China

    Dracula's Castle

    Dinosaur Island
    Professor George Edward Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World


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2 comments:

Kathy said...

Love these suggestions! Just requested several from the library. Give us a shout if you are going to Cahokia - we would love to meet up with you guys. :)

Renee said...

Yes absolutely!