by Alan Schroeder ; illustrated by John O'Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018
Quibbles aside, this will find a receptive audience with trivia buffs, tourists, and residents of all ages.
As with Ben Franklin (2011) and Abe Lincoln (2015), Schroeder and O’Brien employ the alphabet to pair lesser-known tidbits with humorous ink-and-watercolor caricatures to, in this case, present some of the people, places, and politics associated with the nation’s capital.
Although each letter has multiple entries, some are relegated to a half page while others are assigned two. There are interesting choices for “X,” such as the panda Mei Xiang, and the X-1 and X-15 planes in the Air and Space Museum. Humans include Benjamin Banneker, the African-American surveyor of the district’s boundaries, and Glenn Sundby, the white acrobat who descended the Washington Monument steps on his hands. A claw-footed, Capitol-shaped bathtub whimsically highlights 1860 amenities in the dusty building’s basement. Some details are summarized to the point of misleading; for instance, the statement that when black contralto Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall, she “simply changed the venue” is not accurate. (Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband intervened to procure the Lincoln Memorial.) Also, it is not possible to verify the rumor that underground tunnels stretch from the Capitol to the White House, as O’Brien depicts them. Quotes from figures as diverse as Shirley Chisholm, Groucho Marx, and Dan Quayle provide additional perspectives.
Quibbles aside, this will find a receptive audience with trivia buffs, tourists, and residents of all ages. (Informational picture book. 6-12)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3678-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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by Kwame Alexander ; illustrated by Kadir Nelson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
An incredible connector text for young readers eager to graduate to weighty conversations about our yesterday, our now, and...
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Past and present are quilted together in this innovative overview of black Americans’ triumphs and challenges in the United States.
Alexander’s poetry possesses a straightforward, sophisticated, steady rhythm that, paired with Nelson’s detail-oriented oil paintings, carries readers through generations chronicling “the unforgettable,” “the undeniable,” “the unflappable,” and “the righteous marching ones,” alongside “the unspeakable” events that shape the history of black Americans. The illustrator layers images of black creators, martyrs, athletes, and neighbors onto blank white pages, patterns pages with the bodies of slaves stolen and traded, and extends a memorial to victims of police brutality like Sandra Bland and Michael Brown past the very edges of a double-page spread. Each movement of Alexander’s poem is a tribute to the ingenuity and resilience of black people in the U.S., with textual references to the writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X dotting stanzas in explicit recognition and grateful admiration. The book ends with a glossary of the figures acknowledged in the book and an afterword by the author that imprints the refrain “Black. Lives. Matter” into the collective soul of readers, encouraging them, like the cranes present throughout the book, to “keep rising.”
An incredible connector text for young readers eager to graduate to weighty conversations about our yesterday, our now, and our tomorrow. (Picture book/poetry. 6-12)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-78096-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Versify/HMH
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Idan Ben-Barak ; illustrated by Julian Frost with photographed by Linnea Rundgren ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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