Check out the children’s title How You Got Your Name and the nonfiction title On Tyranny in this first set of reviews for 2025.
How You Got Your Name
by Trey Kennedy, illustrated by Jesus Lopez
Concept: Origins of our names can be a fun story for children. The young boy asks his parents how they chose his name. The parents then take him on a tour of the various activities before his birth that inspired name choices from the park to the grocery store. Each place adds names like Seesaw, Yogurt, Doop-Doop, Piano, Sunshine, etc. The story includes prompts for a young reader to brainstorm names based on a place, sounds, feelings, etc., to participate with the story.
My Take: I enjoyed the silly names they added to the list and the reader participation prompts. The final message is that the right name chose him. It’s how he sees himself and how God sees him too.
Recommendation: This book is great for a family to read and incorporates a Christian message at the end. I did not find reviews in my normal review sources, SLJ, Kirkus, Horn Book, etc. Reviews were primarily from Goodreads. This book was a prize giveaway from Tommy Nelson Books on TheStorygraph.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder
Concept: Timothy Snyder examines the lessons that the twentieth century should have taught us about recognizing and resisting authoritarian takeovers of our democratic institutions. This brief text is set up as twenty lessons or rules to follow in the present time to be aware of challenges to freedoms and how we safeguard our freedoms. Snyder’s On Freedom is in my TBR stack and in the audiobook lineup.
“As they [the Founding Fathers] knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.” (Snyder 9-10)
My Take: As a history buff, I’ve always seen the study of history as a way to avoid the same mistakes in the present. Snyder’s short text (only 126 pages) reviews the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism in the early twentieth century that led to a world war and oppression of millions and how current events through its 2017 publication show history ready to repeat itself. This was an audiobook selection for me that reminded me of my own studies of World War II and the Cold War in college. This is a book I’ve already shared with others who read about history and politics.
Recommendation: I would add this book to my nonfiction bookshelf in a high school classroom. My selections for nonfiction cover many genres and varied authors. I’ve kept both more conservative and more liberal nonfiction writers on my bookshelf. I can’t encourage civil discourse with my students if my bookshelf only shows one set of perspectives. The current restrictive atmosphere about books in some public school classrooms endangers the educational goal of critically thinking about different points of view to prepare our students to be members of a diverse, pluralistic society. Challenges to the inclusion of books like this would be removing a book simply because some disagree with the ideas.
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