Witty and wide-ranging.
A broad overview of languages and language families, with infographic maps and a separate section on sign languages worldwide.
Going continent by continent, this vivacious linguistic tour offers both leafy, spreading language “trees” and, for geographical reference, big maps packed with language names in different sizes to reflect the number of speakers. Lancashire includes copious notes on hundreds of major and minor tongues—often including a proverb or other expression as a sample and taking due notice of creoles, pidgins, and “isolate” languages with no known relatives. While the author acknowledges the pervasive historical influence of colonialism and slavery on many languages, her observations more often adopt a breezy tone. She aptly characterizes the phrase “quod erat demonstrandum” (or QED) as “a Latin mic drop.” The illustrations have their moments, too; Zemanek represents Latin as a literally dead branch on the ground beneath the Indo-European tree. Though only a fraction of what the author estimates as up to 8,500 of the languages spoken, whistled, or signed on our planet earn mentions, this work richly rewards even casual browsing—whether readers are more intrigued by its glimpses of the big language picture or just want to know the Icelandic term for mansplaining. The human figures in the illustrations are racially and culturally diverse.
Witty and wide-ranging. (language stats and facts, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781419766831
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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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