Caldecott Monday: So You Want to Be President?

I have been low-key dreading Judith St. George's So You Want to Be President? ever since I noticed it on the Caldecott list, because I strongly suspected that it would be full of bitter unintended irony at this point in time - which is, indeed, true; there is a part where the book explains that "The President has to be polite to everyone," and, well, yeah.

But it's also full of delightful presidential trivia! I love presidential trivia. Some of it I had heard before - the female reporter who sat on John Quincy Adams' clothes while he was skinny-dipping, say - but some of it was new: did you know that Ulysses S. Grant got arrest for speeding while he was president?

Also, once someone through a cabbage a William Howard Taft while Taft was giving a speech, and he quipped, "I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head." How's that for sangfroid? I aspire to be that cool under pressure.

Anyway. David Small illustrated this book with illustrations in the style of political cartoons, and I at least had great fun trying to pick out who was who, although I definitely did much better with the twentieth century dudes. Who remembers Millard Fillmore these days?