Children tend to regard nonfiction books as...

Children tend to regard nonfiction books as spinach or lima beans. They may be good for you, but they’re hard going down.

Too often the children are right. Although the nonfiction written for them may be as full of significant facts as spinach is of vitamins, frequently the books are dry, boring and unappetizing.

In the right hands, though, nonfiction for children can be as riveting and dramatic as any storybook or novel.

Take Aliki’s The King’s Day: Louis XIV of France (Thomas Y. Crowell: $13.95; 32 pp.), a picture book aimed for 7 to 11-year-olds. The author-illustrator examines life in 17th-Century France by following the brilliant and pampered Sun King during a typical day at Versailles. While the facts may be true, the story reads like a fairy tale. “Louis XIV was every inch a king,” begins Aliki. “He wore the curliest wigs, the richest robes, the rarest jewels, and the fanciest shoes in all of France.” The rituals of Louis’ court are as fascinating as the king’s extravagance, which Aliki captures in her charming drawings--full of plumes and buttons and lace. Like all good fairy tales, the book even has an implicit moral: It is better to be a king than a courtier.

The California Gold Rush of 1848-1852 is another historical period in which life was as colorful and mythical as fiction. Rhoda Blumberg, an award-winning author of history books for children, brings this subject to vivid life in The Great American Gold Rush (Bradbury Press: $16.95; 144 pp.). During the Gold Rush, the 19th-Century equivalent of today’s lottery, argonauts dug up a quarter of a billion dollars of gold. Like those who play the lottery, though, most wound up with only hard-luck stories for their efforts.

Blumberg quotes from the letter of one disappointed miner: “Say to all my friends: Stay at home. Tell my enemies to come.” The author describes the many hardships the gold-seekers faced, especially the difficulties of crossing the continent to California, either overland by wagon train, around the Cape Horn by ship, or by ship and mule or canoe in “shortcuts” through Panama and Nicaragua. Blumberg is more interested in the broad sweep of the Gold Rush than she is in individual stories, but she quotes from diaries and letters to give the era color and detail. The book is also richly illustrated with paintings, sketches, and cartoons of the period.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is as romantic a historical event as the California Gold Rush, but one that American history textbooks scarcely mention. Few high school students know that about 3,000 idealistic Americans joined volunteers from around the world to help save the republic of Spain from a Fascist takeover. More than half the American volunteers were killed or seriously wounded in the fight to preserve Spain’s democracy and warn the world of the Nazi danger menacing Europe. Two new books for older children recount this often neglected chapter of our history: Don Lawson’s The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans Fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (Thomas Y. Crowell: $11.95; 160 pp.) and William Loren Katz and Marc Crawford’s The Lincoln Brigade: A Picture History (Atheneum: $14.95; 84 pp.).

In this case words tell the story better than pictures. Lawson not only provides a richer historical context for understanding the Americans’ experience in Spain, but his decision to focus on one American couple who volunteered--Robert Merriman and his wife Marion--makes his book more compelling reading. Merriman, who was killed in the Spanish civil war, was also the model for the fictional Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Merriman’s personal story gives Lawson’s history an intimacy and tension that Katz and Crawford’s book lacks. Their book, however, quotes a broader range of volunteers and is particularly good in describing the racial harmony of the Lincoln Brigade, which was the first fully integrated U.S. Army.

The bravery and idealism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade inspired a generation of young Americans in the ‘30s. A half-century later the brigade still stands as a powerful example of sacrifice and heroism.

The columnist Erma Bombeck and photographer-writer Jill Krementz have found role models of courage closer to home--in children fighting life-threatening diseases. In I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise(Harper & Row: $16.95; 185 pp.), Bombeck writes about children surviving cancer. In How It Feels to Fight for Your Life (Little, Brown: $15.95; 132 pp.), Krementz interviews and photographs children with serious illnesses or disabilities. Both books portray the emotional resilience of children and demonstrate the importance of attitude in fighting sickness and injury.

Bombeck started out writing a pamphlet to show that not every child who gets cancer dies. Two years later she has written a moving book about “children fighting a disease some of them can’t even spell.” Although many people persist in thinking of cancer and death as synonymous, the fact is, today, 40-to-90% of kids with cancer survive. Bombeck set out to find the strength and optimism that enables children to conquer the disease.

She is particularly drawn to the dark humor and zany antics that children employ to cope with their illness: the artificial-limb jokes, the contest to see who can wait the longest to throw up during chemo, the crazy answers to explain what happened to their hair. Bombeck’s breezy style is well suited to conveying the gutsiness of the cancer patients, who deserve, she writes, “better than buckets of tears and public pity.” In her effort to be “upbeat” and “optimistic,” she sometimes slights the pain, fear and bewilderment of the cancer experience, but her interviews, and the many letters she quotes from children and their families, provide real examples of hope and courage.

Krementz’s book has no good jokes or kooky stories, but it is a more balanced book about children facing illness. Ten-to-15% of children in the United States have some form of chronic health impairment. Krementz focuses on 14, with illnesses ranging from asthma and diabetes to epilepsy and cancer. One boy suffers from accidental burns, another from a gunshot wound that severed his spinal cord. Whatever the specifics of their illness or disability, the children have many emotional reactions in common: They talk about feelings of aloneness, helplessness, and hope.

Children suffering from severe or chronic health problems will especially appreciate Krementz’s book, for it captures truths about illness that only young patients can convey. One thoughtful, articulate young girl suffering from cancer emphasizes how important it was for her to meet and talk with another young girl who had just completed chemotherapy treatments. “One of the requirements for a medical degree should be to have had a serious illness,” she comments later. Another 14-year-old boy with congenital heart problems says about his open-heart surgery: “One thing I can say for sure is that now I know how to fight for my life and never give up hope.”

The power of these witnesses is not just their insight and courage, but that they have survived. Inspiration for adults as well as children.