''Brown is a Beautiful Color'' is a
picture book written by
Jean Carey Bond
Jean Carey Bond is an American writer and activist. A member of the Harlem Writers Guild and Black Arts Movement, she has written for both adult and child audiences. She wrote '' Brown is a Beautiful Color'', a children's book that explores a blac ...
and illustrated by
Barbara Zuber
Barbara Zuber (1926 – 2019) was an American painter and illustrator. She was the first African American woman to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University. Her work focused on the daily life of African Americans. She contributed ...
. The book was first published by
Franklin Watts
Grolier was one of the largest American publishers of general encyclopedias, including '' The Book of Knowledge'' (1910), ''The New Book of Knowledge'' (1966), ''The New Book of Popular Science'' (1972), ''Encyclopedia Americana'' (1945), ''Acad ...
in 1969.
Plot
The book tells the story of a young African American child discovering things around him that are the color brown.
Reception
''Brown is a Beautiful Color'' received reviews from publications including ''
Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fic ...
,
'' ''
The Family Coordinator'',
, and ''
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books''.
The book is also cited in early childhood education
curriculums, including those from the
Education Resources Information Center.
''Kirkus Reviews'' stated in a 1969 review that "While black is the rallying cry, brown is the skin color, here noted as it appears in city and country, in chocolate and cookies and rolls...Coming from two involved, aware Negroes, this surprises by its simplicism; but if it matches your needs, you may want to overlook its shortcomings (trite text, undistinguished drawings) as a picture book too."
''The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books'' stated in a 1972 review that "The point of the book is not really that brown is a beautiful color but that A - many objects are brown and B - brown people are beautiful. The illustrations are brisk, vigorous, and often so busily detailed that the tight binding seems to push the pictures together. The rhyming text is not without fault...The idea has merit, the message is worthy, the execution is overextended."
References
{{Reflist
External links
''Brown is a Beautiful Color''at
WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCL ...
1969 children's books
American picture books
African-Americans in literature