A vibrant, if somewhat formalized, tribute.
A short history of the elevated park constructed along an abandoned rail line in New York City.
Showing her background as an architect, Tentler-Krylov tells a tale that is more about structures, purposes, and visionary design features than people—though both leading figures in the still-ongoing enterprise and local residents in the affected neighborhoods do receive due attention, particularly in the substantial afterword. If the resulting narrative may seem a bit abstract to younger readers, it nonetheless documents a real triumph of urban renewal and innovative land use. Readers learn how tracks built to carry trainloads of supplies right into factories on Manhattan’s lower West Side were abandoned to weeds and weather until a group of concerned citizens envisioned a place where “trees and flowers would bloom overhead, and new cafés and art galleries would sprout on the streets below.” (Gentrification is touched on briefly in the narrative and more so in the backmatter.) Saved from demolition and turned section by section into a greenway with places to walk, sit, see art, and look out over the streets below, the High Line has sparked an economic boom for the area and inspired similar reclamatory projects in other large cities. In the bright, stylish watercolors, diverse crowds of figures work and socialize both on bustling city streets and, later, on swooping pathways amid abundant carpets of well-kept wildflowers and grassy swards. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A vibrant, if somewhat formalized, tribute. (timeline, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781419756702
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Shot through with vague generalities and paired to a mix of equally generic period images and static new art, this overview remorselessly sucks all the juice from its topic.
This survey of the growth of industries in this country from the Colonial period to the post–World War II era is written in the driest of textbook-ese: “Factories needed good transportation so that materials could reach them and so that materials could reach buyers”; “The metal iron is obtained by heating iron ore”; “In 1860, the North said that free men, not slaves, should do the work.” This text is supplemented by a jumble of narrative-overview blocks, boxed side observations and terse captions on each thematic spread. The design is packed with overlapping, misleadingly seamless and rarely differentiated mixes of small, heavily trimmed contemporary prints or (later) photos and drab reconstructions of workshop or factory scenes, along with pictures of significant inventions and technological innovations (which are, in several cases, reduced to background design elements). The single, tiny map has no identifying labels. Other new entries in the All About America series deal similarly with Explorers, Trappers, and Pioneers, A Nation of Immigrants and Stagecoaches and Railroads. Utilitarian, at best—but more likely to dim reader interest than kindle it. (index, timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6670-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.
Ehrlich renders an admiring portrait of Cather, focusing on the relationship between her writing and the places she lived and visited.
Willa and family followed her grandparents from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Willa was lonely, but she had a pony and freedom to roam. When her father traded farming for real estate, the family moved to Red Cloud. She read keenly, enjoying adult friends, who "were more interesting than children and...talked to Willa in a serious and cultured way." During her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an essay’s publication changed Willa's path from doctor to writer. Cather worked at magazines in Pittsburgh and New York. The writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to focus on her own writing. Journeys to Europe, the American Southwest, back to Nebraska and Virginia—all resonated in her accomplished fiction. Ehrlich writes with little inflection, sometimes adopting Cather's viewpoint. The Civil War and slavery are briefly treated. (Cather's maternal grandparents were slaveholders.) Native Americans receive only incidental mentions: that Red Cloud is named for the Oglala Lakota chief and that, as children, Willa and her brothers had "imagined themselves in Indian country in the Southwest desert. What adventures they would have!" Minor's watercolor-and-gouache pictures depict bucolic prairie scenes and town and city life; meadowlarks appear frequently.
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject. (timeline, thumbnail biographies of American women writers of Cather's time, bibliography) (Biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-689-86573-2
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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