Our fascination with outlaws lives on in this selection of cleverboots and artful dodgers.
Schroeder chronicles eight high-profile criminals or crimes, mostly highbrow, a couple low-down and dirty.
It is difficult to think of these thieves as bad guys, so cunning and audacious were the crimes. A few are full of brio and dash, from the theft of the Mona Lisa to the parachuting hijacker D.B. Cooper, and a couple are solidly in the suave-sophisticated vein, like Willie Sutton and second-story man Arthur Barry. Others are just all business, like the Laguna Niguel heist or England’s Great Train Robbery, or sheer thuggery: Victor Desmarais and Leo Martial’s Canadian robbery fiasco. Schroeder provides enough detail to get readers involved in more than a sensationalist manner, even delving into some strange psychological consequences of a life in thievery, and Simard sprinkles the action with mostly minimalist panels, all in shades of gray, but with a fun geometrical stylization. The narratives are light, yet full of the devilish details that often sink the best-laid plans, but not frivolous or unaware of their larger context. These are crimes, after all, and hardly of the Robin Hood variety: Barry may have targeted the rich, but the poor didn’t benefit. Plus, almost always, guns were involved. Even Sutton, the most benign of highwaymen, quipped, “You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality.”
Our fascination with outlaws lives on in this selection of cleverboots and artful dodgers. (bibliography, index, further reading) (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-441-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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