Robert Coles

George Ford

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

The Story of Ruby Bridges

Robert Coles first met Dorothy Day over thirty-five years ago when, as a medical student, he worked in one of her Catholic Worker soup kitchens. He remained close to this inspiring and controversial woman until her death in 1980. His book, an intellectual and psychological portrait, confronts candidly the central puzzles of her life: the sophisticated Greenwich Village novelist and reporter who converted to Catholicism; the single mother who raised her child in a most unorthodox ”family”; her struggles with sexuality, loneliness, and pride; her devout religious conservatism coupled with radical politics. This intense portrait is based on many years of conversation and correspondence, as well as tape-recorded interviews.

A Radical Devotion

Dorothy Day

Demonstrates how documentary work is a narrative constructed by the observer and meant not only to represent reality but to interpret it, and provokes consideration of how fine a line exists between fact and perception

Doing Documentary Work

Essays, 1987-1992 -- That red wheelbarrow -- Times of surrender.

A Robert Coles Omnibus

Helen Levitt

Marvin Hoshino

Photobook chiefly containing over 100 photos of children's street drawings and messages, taken between 1938 and 1948. Each photograph was selected and arranged by the photographer.

Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-1948

In the Street

Robin Bowman

Presents a collection of interviews and photographs of American teenagers in which they describe their lives.

The American Teenager

It's Complicated

Demonstrates how documentary work is a narrative constructed by the observer and meant not only to represent reality but to interpret it, and provokes consideration of how fine a line exists between fact and perception.

In this book, Coles explores the concept of idealism and why it necessary to the individual and society.

A Witness to Idealism

The Call of Service

""When I recall all those pictures I have seen drawn (and discussed), I am reminded, yet again, how earnestly and strenuously children struggle to comprehend the world, to seek out its beauties and mysteries and terrors."" "For more than three decades, the renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles has investigated the inner lives of children through their expressive words and pictures. His beautiful and revealing new book - his first devoted entirely to children's drawings - distills his insights into the ways children from all over the world disclose their deepest convictions, feelings, and dreams with crayon, paint, and pencil." "The fifty full-color drawings in Their Eyes Meeting the World were created by boys and girls under ten from richly diverse backgrounds. Here is artwork by children urban and rural, Christian and Jewish and Muslim, children from the United States and from various other nations. In the company of Dr. Coles, we meet Helen, a ten-year-old dying of leukemia, and Ruby, the sole black child in a newly desegregated school. These are children who draw with profound seriousness and passion, and from their pictures Dr. Coles sensitively interprets what matters most in their lives, always attentive to the influence of race, class, region, and historical moment. Most important, he uses the visual worlds children represent to gain entry into their moral, religious, and spiritual lives." "It was the poet-physician William Carlos Williams who offered the wisdom that guides Robert Coles's observations of children. "Look at them, looking," he gently advised, "their eyes meeting the world." In place of abstract analysis, Dr. Coles relies on the concreteness of art; he demonstrates with empathy and respect how eloquently children can use color and form to speak from the heart, mind, and soul."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Drawings and Paintings of Children

Their Eyes Meeting the World

Combines prose by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles with full page tritone images spanning 150 years of photography from artists including Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Marion Post Wolcott.

A Photographic Retrospective Of Childhood From The Lib Of Congres

When They Were Young

Children of Crisis: The South goes North

Randy Testa

Michael H. Coles

A multicultural anthology of writing on poverty--including stories, essays, poetry, and biographical excerpts--features the work of Sherman Alexie, Dorothy Allison, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams.

A Literary Anthology

Growing Up Poor

Category: Biography"Please, God, try to forgive those people. Because even if they say those bad things, They don't know what they're doing."This is the true story of an extraordinary 6-year-old who helped shape history when she became the first African-American sent to first grade in an all white school. This moving book captures the courage of a little girl standing alone in the face of racism."Ford's moving watercolor paintings...capture the...warmth of Ruby's family and community, the immense powers against her, and her shining inner strength." --Booklist

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first African American child to integrate a New Orleans school with this paperback reissue! The year is 1960, and six-year-old Ruby Bridges and her family have recently moved from Mississippi to New Orleans in search of a better life. When a judge orders Ruby to attend first grade at William Frantz Elementary, an all-white school, Ruby must face angry mobs of parents who refuse to send their children to school with her. Told with Robert Coles' powerful narrative and dramatically illustrated by George Ford, Ruby's story of courage, faith, and hope is now available in this special 50th anniversary edition with an updated afterword!

George Eliot

Anthony Trollope

George Orwell

Leo Tolstoy

From ancient times to the present day, here are indispensable insights on political power and leadership as expressed in the novels, plays, and poetry of the world’s greatest artists and intellectuals. Adapted from a course taught at Harvard by Pulitzer Prize—winning author Robert Coles, Political Leadership features scenes, stories, and speeches that pierce to the core of how and why some lead and others follow. In Felix Holt, the Radical, George Eliot observes that progressive reformers can be even more self-serving than their conservative counterparts; in The Prime Minister, Anthony Trollope suggests that honest men must cope with the corruption of politics–or leave leadership entirely to the crooked; and the works of Nadine Gordimer and George Orwell reveal that those who overturn tyrants often envy their power and repeat their mistakes. Anyone trying to understand today’s confused and violent world will be both challenged and inspired by this unique and important collection.

Stories of Power and Politics from Literature and Life

Political Leadership

Dorothea Lange

Therese Thau Heyman

Albert LaFarge

A volume of lighthearted literary writings explores the ethical dilemmas posed by the workplace, in a collection that includes John Cheever's descriptions of a businessman who endures a moral crisis after stealing a wallet, Gwendolyn Parker's depiction of an African-American woman's rise through the corporate ranks, and Tolstoy's "Master and Man."

Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now

Minding the Store

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis, a profound examination of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery. As a professor emeritus at Harvard University, a renowned child psychiatrist, and the author of more than forty books, including The Moral Intelligence of Children, Robert Coles knows better than anyone the transformative power of learning and literature on young minds. In this “persuasive” book (The New York Times Book Review), Coles convenes a virtual symposium of college, law, and medical school students to explore the phenomenon of storytelling as a source of values and character. Here are transcriptions of classroom conversations in which Coles and his students discuss the impact of particular works of literature on their moral development. Here also are Coles’s intimate personal reflections on his experiences in the civil rights movement, his child psychiatry practice, and his interactions with his own literary mentors including William Carlos Williams and L.E. Sissman. The life lessons learned from these stories are of special resonance to doctors and teachers looking to apply them in classroom and clinical environments. The rare public intellectual to be honored with a MacArthur Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a National Humanities Medal, Robert Coles is a true national treasure, and The Call of Stories is, in the words of National Book Award winner Walker Percy, “Coles at his wisest and best.”

Teaching and the Moral Imagination

The Call of Stories

Originally published in 1999 Black Writers Abroad puts forward the theory that African American literature was born, partially within the context of a people and its writers who lived, for the most part, in slavery and bondage prior to the Civil War. It is an in-depth study of black American writers who, left the United States as expatriates. The book discusses the people that left, where they went, why they left and why they did or did not return, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. It seeks to explain the impact exile had upon these authors’ literary work and careers, as well as upon African American literary history.

Robert Coles

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