Review: Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers

Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



What made me enjoy this was the 'slice of history' approach. Unlike the Tuskegee Airmen, these soldiers never saw overseas combat duty during WWII. As such, the story doesn't have the Hollywood drama you get with fighter pilots over Italy. But it may be a better story about integration in the military, because the story arc shows how racist decision-making remained a military standard through the end of the war.

The long-form picture book was similar in format and design to [b:Emancipation Proclamation|13591146|Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty|Tonya Bolden|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1344718824s/13591146.jpg|19179179] by Tonya Bolden. But this book did not get color printing. All the visuals were b/w photos and the design features were minimal. No designer credit? This was unusual for Candlewick for an obviously expensive book. Clean easy to read design, but no obvious hand of a known graphic designer--maybe their in-house designers really wanted the project? Anyway, high-quality hard cover, paper, and dust jacket were signs Candlewick did put money behind the project.

Editors also spared no expense on the back matter pages (source notes, bibliography, timeline, index), including Stone's special section on her historical research methods! (More books need this feature!!) Stone actually did give staff designer Sherry Fatla an acknowledgement in the end matter with her editors, but did not call her out as the designer. Here's a good interview with Fatla by one of her past authors.

The voice and power in the writing was not as strong as Bolden's in Emancipation. But then, Bolden had dozens if not hundreds of existing secondary sources to try to outdo! Stone claims the ground for the first comprehensive historical research on the 555th. Again, it was a pleasure to see a more obscure slice of history with this kind of author attention paired to the high quality production!



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