The work of picture-book artist Donald Crews is striking in its sharp-edged images of urban life, especially transportation. Informed by his graphics training and experience, he emphasizes picture over story and presents the hand of people upon the urban environment, in buildings, buses, planes, ships, and most of all trains, but often little of the people themselves. Most of his stories are brief, using the pattern of a counting book or an alphabet, for example, listing the elements that he is presenting with a twist to bring the book to an end. In fact, he has exploited the picture-book form, presenting minimalist text and relying upon his visuals to move the book forward, in Caldecott- and ALA-honored books written from the late 1960s like Freight Train (1978), Truck (1980), and Carousel (1982). However, it is only in the 1990s that he has begun to expand and elaborate his texts, broadening his style of drawing and reaching into autobiography, to dramatically describe his African-American childhood, in Bigmamas (1991) and Shortcut (1992). Crews was born in Newark, and much of his education, training, and experience have been in graphics and design, resulting in the sharp line, geometric shapes, primary colors, and poster-like quality of most of his illustrations. He studied at Cooper Union School, where he met his wife, the picture-book artist Ann Jonas. Stationed in Germany while serving in the U.S. Army in the early 1960s, he designed an alphabet book to include in his graphics portfolio for his return to civilian life. After some rejections, this book, We Read: A to Z, was published by Harper in 1967. Unlike most alphabet books, it does not dwell on concrete objects but uses large blocks of color to stress concepts, relationships, and location. For instance: Cc, corner: where the yellow is, Gg, grow: things get bigger, and Ff, few: not many squares. The C page is red with a yellow square in the lower-right-hand corner, while the F page shows three green squares on an otherwise bare white page. We Read was followed the next year by a counting book, Ten Black Dots (1968). Meanwhile, Crews continued his design career, doing magazine work and producing book covers, as well as illustrating others' works. In the books that follow, the strongest motif in Crews's work is transportation, and especially trains. His father worked on the railroad, and as a boy Crews took the train to spend the summer with his grandparents in Cottondale, Florida, the inspiration for his book Bigmamas. Typical of his middle-period book (stretching roughly from 1978 to the early 1990s) are nine books on transportation subjects, including Freight Train, Truck, Harbor (1982), School Bus (1984), and Flying (1986). These utilize bright colors and hard-edged pictures of an urban world and its machines, but few actual people. The artist's graphics background is the dominating feature here: Large blocks of unmodulated color appear with little shading, shadow, or perspective, sometimes tempered or softened with an airbrush. Nevertheless, his visual techniques are innovative for children's books. Freight Train uses static pictures of train cars which are photographically blurred to create motion. This is a technique he has returned to often (notably in Carousel), and a number of his books use photographs for illustrations. Stories tend to be minimal, and the subject of the book is usually educational as well as visual. For example, after presenting a series of watercraft in Harbor, the final page of the book lists Ship Shapes, the identifying silhouettes of thirty ships and boats. Freight Train familiarizes its audience with a generalized train and the primary colors (Red caboose at the back / Orange tank car next / Yellow hopper car, 3-4), but the book contains only 55 words and merely shows the train's passing. Other than day, night, and forward motion, there is no plot development. Of course, one of the cultural lessons of a picture book for a prereader is the forward motion of books, as one must keep moving to the right, turning pages until the book is completed. …