An excellent starting point for understanding the Vietnam War, presented as a conflict that commenced with French colonial...
A balance of narrative and pictures paints the broad strokes of the Vietnam War.
Considerable effort is made here by McNab to depict the Vietnam War in its many hues. The narrative has both chronological and episodic pacing, giving capsule summaries of key battles as well as yearslong military operations. He also provides big-picture context about the superpower conflict in the background, which is given texture by the more subtle elements at play: “Kennedy believed that he would never be re-elected if he lost Vietnam to the communists.” McNab’s storytelling has pepper and a pleasing absence of gloss: this was a nasty piece of business, from the Phoenix Program, which sought to convert Viet Cong and killed them if unsuccessful, to napalm and defoliants, drugs used by soldiers to cope, and the massacre at My Lai. The style of presentation—pungent squibs accompanying archival photographs and helpful cartography—makes for a history of the hot spots yet still manages to yield an overview of what became a conflict of global reach. Readers will be affected by photographs of American troops confronting homefront protesters with rifles, while the shootings at Kent State are remembered; so, too, the prison at Tuol Sleng, where tens of thousands of Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
An excellent starting point for understanding the Vietnam War, presented as a conflict that commenced with French colonial occupation and continues even today. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60992-961-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: QEB Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Essential.
A measured corrective to pervasive myths about what is often referred to as the “first Thanksgiving.”
Contextualizing them within a Native perspective, Newell (Passamaquoddy) touches on the all-too-familiar elements of the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving and its origins and the history of English colonization in the territory now known as New England. In addition to the voyage and landfall of the Mayflower, readers learn about the Doctrine of Discovery that arrogated the lands of non-Christian peoples to European settlers; earlier encounters between the Indigenous peoples of the region and Europeans; and the Great Dying of 1616-1619, which emptied the village of Patuxet by 1620. Short, two- to six-page chapters alternate between the story of the English settlers and exploring the complex political makeup of the region and the culture, agriculture, and technology of the Wampanoag—all before covering the evolution of the holiday. Refreshingly, the lens Newell offers is a Native one, describing how the Wampanoag and other Native peoples received the English rather than the other way around. Key words ranging from estuary to discover are printed in boldface in the narrative and defined in a closing glossary. Nelson (a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Chippewa) contributes soft line-and-color illustrations of the proceedings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Essential. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-72637-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
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