Gary L. Blackwood turns the familiar "write what you know" dictum on its head: having never traveled to England, and surely having never experienced the highs and lows of sixteenth-century English life, he has produced two successful volumes recounting the adventures of Widge, an Elizabethan boy in Shakespearean England. His highly popular The Shakespeare Stealer and its sequel, Shakespeare's Scribe, both prove that young readers do care about events more distant than last week's game or tomorrow's party. Additionally, Blackwood, a playwright as well as novelist, has penned juvenile novels in genres as diverse as outdoor survival to science fiction, as well as realistic fiction set during the Great Depression. His interests have also led him to nonfiction, in which he has produced books about famous Americans, such as Teddy Roosevelt the Rough Rider, or American history, as in his Life on the Oregon Trail, as well as...