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EVERGLADES

BUFFALO TIGER AND THE RIVER OF GRASS

Exploring the everglades, the author describes landforms and wildlife and recalls the past history of the enormous slow-moving swamp that runs hundreds of miles from Florida's Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico. While still home to exotic wildlife, pollution and overdevelopment are threatening this unique biome. Lourie interweaves ecology, history, and a current true-life adventure. Buffalo Tiger, the guide for this journey, is a former chief of the Miccosukee Indians, who have farmed and fished the swamp since the 1820s when they were driven out of Northern Florida. Buffalo Tiger no longer poles the shallow swamp in a cypress dugout or lives in a thatched-roof, open-air chi-kee, but he does try to keep the legends and traditions alive for young Miccosukees who travel by air boat and live in modern houses in Miami. The author provides both contemporary color photos and black and white photos from the 1920s. While less compelling than the author's Yukon River: Adventure to the Gold Fields of the Klondike (1992), this will be appreciated by nature enthusiasts. (Nonfiction. 10-12)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-878093-91-6

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Boyds Mills

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

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THE CENTURY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Just in time for the millennium comes this adaptation of Jennings and Brewster’s The Century (1998). Still a browsable, coffee-table edition, the book divides the last 100 years more or less by decade, with such chapter headings as “Shell Shock,” “Global Nightmare,” and “Machine Dreams.” A sweeping array of predominantly black-and-white photographs documents the story in pictures—from Theodore Roosevelt to O.J., the Panama Canal to the crumbling Berlin Wall, the dawn of radio to the rise of Microsoft—along with plenty of captions and brief capsules of historical events. Setting this volume apart, and making it more than just a glossy textbook overview of mega-events, are blue sidebars that chronicle the thoughts, actions, and attitudes of ordinary men, women, and children whose names did not appear in the news. These feature-news style interviews feature Milt Hinton on the Great Migration, Betty Broyles on a first automobile ride, Sharpe James on the effect of Jackie Robinson’s success on his life, Clara Hancox on growing up in the Depression, Marnie Mueller on life as an early Peace Corps volunteer, and more. The authors define the American century by “the inevitability of change,” a theme reflected in the selection of photographs and interviews throughout wartime and peacetime, at home and abroad. While global events are included only in terms of their impact on Americans, this portfolio of the century is right for leafing through or for total immersion. (index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-385-32708-0

Page Count: 245

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999

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CIVIL WAR ARTIST

It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-91426-4

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999

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