Touch and Go - Travels of a Children's Book Illustrator (Hardcover, illustrated edition)

"This book grew out of an itch I've always had to see the world, an itch I started scratching some thirty years ago. Since then my wife, Betsy, and I have traveled to Australia, India, Nepal, Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Morocco, Egypt, Brazil, Ecuador, the Galdpagos Islands, the Caribbean, Ireland, England, France, Germany, Italy, Lapland, Canada, the western United States, Alaska, the Pribilof Islands, and Baja, Mexico. These travels have provided the inspiration for many of my picture books, but often some of my most memorable travel moments -- my brief acquaintances with people along the way -- don't fit into a thirty-two-page picture book story. Here, then, are some of those people, people who have touched me briefly but powerfully before I've had to move on."

From the old man who takes in orphaned animals in the middle of the Amazon rain forest to the director of a polar bear jail in Manitoba to the Nepalese holy boy seated silently amidst flowers and incense, these portraits of people the world around will sometimes make you laugh, sometimes pull at your heartstrings, and always fill you with the itch to travel. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, "Lewin's prodigious talent is to make readers feel that they've been therebetter yet, that they must go there."

"I don't know when I'm happiest," says Ted Lewin, "traveling, or at home in my studio reliving it all in my paintings." Ted is the illustrator of some thirty-one picture books, twelve of which he also wrote. Among them are Peppe the Lamplighter, by Elisa Bartone, which won him a 1994 Caldecott Honor Award, and Market!, which was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and a Smithsonian Magazine Notable Book. He is also the author of the acclaimed, autobiographical I Was a Teenage Professional Wrestler.