Description: "A fascinating and stirring picture book biography about Vivien Thomas, the pioneer of children's heart surgery and trailblazer for Black men in STEM"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Joan Schoettler is a children's author and professor of children's literature and storytelling at California State University, Fresno. Her book The Honey Jar won the Gold Medal for Juvenile Books at the 2024 California Book Awards and was a 2024 Bank Street College Best Children's Book of the Year. Joan lives in central California with her husband. Visit her at JoanSchoettler.com.
Review Quotes: A tribute to a pioneering African American cardiac surgeon. Growing up in the South as the sort of person who "loved solving problems and figuring things out," Vivien Thomas never enrolled in college but worked his way up as a white medical researcher's lab assistant to become an expert on the malady known as "blue baby syndrome." Breaking the color bar, he joined a team of white surgeons at Johns Hopkins that in 1944 used techniques that Thomas developed on dogs to perform the first successful open-heart surgery on a child. Thomas then went on to perform and teach the procedure there for many years while, Schoettler points out, being so underpaid that he had to tend bar and work other jobs to make ends meet. He was not, she goes on pointedly, even awarded a doctoral degree until 1976, when he was 65 years old, or given proper credit in the procedure's formal name until 2023. Still, the author tells his story in positive tones overall, reserving further specifics about the discrimination he faced to her afterword. Walthall's illustrations add helpful details of the surgery to views of the sober Thomas hard at work, later surrounded by increasingly diverse groups of his patients and students. A sympathetic profile of an achiever well worth knowing better.--Kirkus "March 1, 2026"