Faerie Maven-Pralou reads from William Pène du Bois’ 1947
children’s classic, The Twenty-one Balloons, a Newbery Medal book in this week when the 2018 Newbery honors will be announced.
A steamship en route across the North
Atlantic comes across the strange wreckage of twenty deflated gas
balloons and rescue, much to their surprise, a lone man – one Professor William
Waterman Sherman.
The professor had last been seen some three weeks
previously, departing San Francisco
aboard a giant balloon, determined to spend a year aloft and drifting on his
own.
Now, as word spreads that the professor has been found alive
and well – and in completely the wrong ocean to the one he had last been seen
flying towards – the world awaits the story of how he came to circumnavigate
the globe in record time, only to be fished from the wreckage of twenty
balloons when he had started with just the one. When he has sufficiently rested
and recovered after receiving a hero’s welcome on his homecoming, the good
professor tells a tale most fantastic…
The events and ideas are based both on scientific fact and
imagination, and the descriptions are accompanied by illustrations by du Bois.
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