Your Friday Awesome: Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

I'm not much for far-away sentiment in the wake of a disaster - it seems to make it about you rather than the actual victims and survivors - but today I noticed a trend in my RSS feed: multiple posts about one of my favorite children's books in response to the devastation in Japan.

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, touched me more deeply than any other book I read as a child. Creativity and hope in the midst of loss - caused by the reader's own country - is a pretty deep subject for a kid, but that book left a lasting impression on many young readers. In my case, it hit even closer. My grandparents met while working at Los Alamos.

But it seems I'm not the only one who folded paper crane after paper crane out of binder paper throughout elementary school, attempting to make smaller and smaller ones as you created squares out of rectangles. And it seems that you never forget how. I made that tiny one from a small post-it.

So here is to the awesome power of children's books.