Make Way for Ducklings - 75th Anniversary Edition by Robert McCloskey

One of the unexpected benefits I discovered when working in downtown Boston was being able to take lunch breaks in the nearby Public Garden, with its curving paths, wide-spreading trees, and dreamy lagoon plied by Swan Boats. Looking around this landscape on a fine New England summer day, it’s easy to see how it beckoned to the little feathered family who star in the 1941 children’s book Make Way for Ducklings (and who are now commemorated with their own statues in the park). McCloskey’s Boston was very different from the one I came to know more than 50 years later, but his book remains timeless in its depictions of the Public Garden, the State House, Beacon Hill, and the Longfellow Bridge, as well as in the hope it offers that we can all find our little oasis in the big wide world.     —Jenn Johnson, Yankee senior managing editor