Superficial at best.
Readers are introduced to 10 notable expeditions through history and challenged to identify anachronisms in as many tableaux.
From Marco Polo’s 13th-century trek to China to Apollo 11, each journey is presented in two double-page spreads. The first is an expansive cartoon scene that imagines the principal players and is glossed by a short paragraph. Planted in each of these are 20 anachronisms. Two children, one white and one black, act as guides and drop the occasional hint: “What’s that Viking doing here?” says one in a scene introducing Zheng He’s 15th-century treasure fleet. The subsequent spread offers a guide to the goofs, explaining what’s out of place and briefly discussing what might have been there instead. A steel-drum band welcomes Columbus to Hispaniola, for instance, but readers are told that actual 15th-century “Taino would have used simple drums fashioned from wood and leather.” Some planted errors are obvious, such as Capt. Cook’s “I [heart] NY” T-shirt, but other elements may not jump out at readers, such as the red and white club held by a Maori chief—readers must peruse the key to discover it’s an aluminum baseball bat and not an authentic carved and painted artifact. The repeated use of a Plains Indian in feathered headdress reinforces stereotypes and could well fuel confusion, as when he appears in the Missouri River encounter between the Lewis and Clark expedition and unidentified Native Americans.
Superficial at best. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78603-130-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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