For this penultimate column before a summer hiatus, I chose two special books. Note: In 683 columns since 1992, this is the first time I've used either the word penultimate or the word hiatus. Yup, come July, I'm headed to a place without the internet, cell phone service or - gasp - cable TV. I'm hunkering down in the wilds of Maine to work on my own book.

My choices today for your reading pleasure include a book for children and one for adults, both worthy of wide readership because they are so well crafted and moving. Yes, I said it - moving. It takes a lot to move a tough old Yankee like me. I'm talking lump in the throat, welling in the eyes, and "Now that was a good read" at the end.

First up, Pennies for Elephants by Lita Judge of Peterborough. Judge's first book, One Thousand Tracings, was among my favorites of 2007: "Shine my crystal ball and call me psychic, but One Thousand Tracings will win awards, and plenty of them." Sure enough, the story of shoes collected by Americans and sent to European victims of World War II received the International Reading Association Children's Book Award, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award Honor and was selected as an ALA and NCTE Notable Book.

Pennies for Elephants, which Judge both wrote and illustrated, takes another true story from American history and personalizes it by telling it from the perspective of a little girl named Dorothy. Instead of collecting shoes, this time the children are collecting money. As in her first book, Judge excerpts newspaper articles in the illustrations to create a sense of immediacy and realism.

The story begins with a call to readers from The Boston Post: "Pennies for elephants! Pennies for elephants. Send in your pennies, your nickels, and dimes!"

Mr. and Mrs. William Orford, animal trainers, have expressed their willingness, in retirement, to sell their three elephants, Mollie, Waddy and baby Tony to the zoo. If the children of Boston can collect $6,000 in two months, the elephants will be theirs to enjoy. This is March 1914, so $6,000 amounts to a lot of money. Dorothy and her brother Henry contribute their life savings, $1.14, from their piggy banks.

A circus wants the elephants and so does the London Zoo, so collecting that $6,000 becomes a race against time. Slowly, a nickel at a time, the fund builds. Dorothy and Henry visit the elephants and, of course, fall in love. " 'We can't let the circus take them,' I told Henry. 'We have to do more.' "

Judge's illustrations catch the innocence of childhood as well as the bustle of Boston, which looks like a great place to grow up in the early 1900s. The children of Boston rise to the challenge against great odds. And, in the end . . . well, let's just say, "Every seat was filled, and crowds spilled out onto the field as we marched into Fenway Park. Mollie, Waddy and Tony trumpeted so loudly, they sounded like their own brass band."

Hurrah! Hurrah for elephants and children and Boston and history and, especially, simpler times.

Provocative poetry

Second up, a thin, powerhouse of a book by Martha Andrews Donovan, a poet and professor of writing at New England College in Henniker. Though her poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, this is her first chapbook.

Dress Her in Silk collects Donovan's poems about the beginnings of her mother's life in India and the end of her mother's life on the coast of Maine, with Donovan as caregiver. Loving but unsentimental, Donovan veils nothing. How is a daughter to process the intimate details of her mother's death? How do any of us reconcile the need to hold on with the need to let go? The opening poem "Her Story" summarizes the others - vibrant life, prolonged death, the complex relationship between parent and child when the child becomes caregiver and lifeline.

They were wild trips, those journeys

up the narrow ghats that wrapped around

the mountains of my mother's youth.

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