Text of Dave Eggers' "Her Right Foot"

Be sure to buy the book, which has great drawings by Shawn Harris.

You have likely heard of a place called France.
If you have heard of France, you may have heard of the French.
They are the people who live in France.
You may have also heard of something called the Statue of Liberty.
Did you know that the Statue of Liberty comes from France?

This is true.  This is a factual book.


One day a Frenchman named Edouard de Laoulaye had an idea.  The idea was to celebrate the 100 years the United States of America had been around by giving them a giant sculpture.

So he convinced another Frenchman, a Frenchman wiht an Italian last name, to design the sculpture .  This artist's name was Frederic August Bartholdi.  Bartholdi designed the statue. 

He first made very small models of the sculpture, then larger ones, and finally one that is the one we know, which stands 305 feet above the water.

This final, full-size version was covered with a thin copper skin.  The skin is about as thick as two pennies.  That is not very thick!

Here (Buy book to see pictures) is a rendering of Bartholdi and his team--he had a team; h did not work alone; he did not like working alone--constructing the statue's hand.

Notice that the hand is bigger than these man.  Thus they made the statue in many parts.

These parts were assembled in New York City.

No, wait.  First they were assembled in Paris.  Did you know this?  Ask your friends and even your teachers if they knew that before the Statue of Liberty was assembled in New York, she was first constructed in Paris.  Your friends and teachers will be astounded.  They will be impressed.  They might think you are fibbing.

But you are not fibbing.  This really happened.  The Statues of Liberty stood there, high aabove Paris, for almost a year, in 1884.

After they assembled the statue in Paris, they took it apart.
But we just put it together!  the workers said.  That is absurd, they said.
They said all this in  French, the language of the French, a people who appreciate the absurd.


In 1885, after they took it apart, they put the parts in 214 crates, and put these crates on a boat.  The boat was called the Isere.  The boat traveled over the Atlantic Ocean and made its way to a city called New York, which is in a state also called New York.


Hundreds of workers (perhaps 214 of them)  took the pieces out of the 214 boxes, then began to rivet the pieces together.  Assembling the statue took 17 months, and it all happened on what was then called Bedloe's Island.  (To be continued)