Mathew B. Brady was already a famous photographer by the time the Civil War began. But the war gave Brady something The chance to make a RECORD OF A WAR—this war—in a way that had never been done WITH TRUE-TO-LIFE PICTURES INSTEAD OF JUST WORDS. He hired field photographers to travel with the troops, equipped them with cameras and wagons filled with supplies, and sent them out with the directive to make a visual record of the war and to show people scenes they could have only read about before. The pictures the field photographers sent back were HAUNTING, BEAUTIFUL, DEVASTATING, AND TOTALLY UNFORGETTABLE. And thousands of them included the notation "Photo by Brady." Though Brady didn't actually take the photographs, he was the genius behind them. His vision and foresight gave the country images that not only touched the people at the time, but have gone on to leave an indelible mark on the collective memory of this country. And the name of Mathew Brady will always be remembered with them. In Photo By Brady, Jennifer Armstrong tells the story of the Civil War as seen through the lenses of its recorders. It is a moving and elegant look at the brutal and deadly time.
Author
Jennifer Armstrong learned to read and write in Switzerland, in a small school for English speaking children on the shores of Lake Zurich. The school library had no librarian and no catalog – just shelves of interesting books. She selected books on her own, read what she could, and made up the rest. It was perfect. As a result, she made her career choice – to become an author – in first grade. When she and her family returned to the U.S. she discovered that not all children wrote stories and read books, and that not all teachers thought reading real books was important. Nevertheless, she was undaunted. Within a year of leaving college she was a free-lance ghost writer for a popular juvenile book series, and before long published her first trade novel, Steal Away, which won her a Golden Kite Honor for fiction. More than fifty additional novels and picture books followed, and before long she also tried her hand at nonfiction, winning an Orbis Pictus Award and a Horn Book Honor for her first nonfiction book, Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World. In late 2003 she will travel to the South Pole with the National Science Foundation to do research for a book on ice.
