An absorbing story of colorful times.
Marathons are commonplace now, but one of the earliest 20th-century long-distance races was the multiday, coast-to-coast Transcontinental Foot Race, little known now but an event that captured the world’s imagination in 1928.
The race began in Los Angeles and finished in New York City, covering 3,423.5 miles. Out of the 199 runners who began on March 4, 1928, only 55 finished 84 days later. Newspapers called it the Bunion Derby. The race was conceived by Oklahoma businessman Cyrus Avery at the height of the Roaring ’20s, a time of optimism and excess. Charles Lindbergh had recently made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. People tried to outdo each other with outrageous stunts. Dance marathoners danced for days, and pole-sitters sat atop flagpoles for weeks to set and break records. Avery teamed up with C.C. Pyle, the “P.T. Barnum of Professional Sports,” to organize the race. The nearly 200 men of all races and nationalities who started the race faced a variety of obstacles—extreme weather, poor food and living conditions, prejudice, and injury. Speno’s detailed, engaging narrative brings the times and the race vividly to today’s readers. Chapters are broken up into topical subsections (on the “Good Roads Movement” and international participation, for instance), and plentiful archival material complements the lively narrative.
An absorbing story of colorful times. (photos, maps, statistics, bibliography, source notes) (Nonfiction. 10-16)Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62979-602-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A handsomely packaged look back at an epochal achievement.
A free-verse ode to the Apollo program, still the high-water mark of this country’s space program.
Like Catherine Thimmesh’s Team Moon (2006), this album is offered in tribute to the massive, collective eight-year effort to send explorers to our closest celestial neighbor and then bring them back. Slade intersperses resumes for the members of each Apollo crew up to Apollo 11 with extended poetic flights that include significant technical details along with dramatic passages: “Explosive fire. Deafening noise. / The rocket blasts off / above an inferno of white-hot flames.” A prose coda offers nods to the major corporations that developed and built the Saturn V rocket and the spacecraft it carried, then an account of the Apollo 11 astronauts’ triumphant reception back on Earth. Gonzalez’s big, kaleidoscopic montages and page-filling close-ups of tense faces likewise highlight the drama and are so realistic as to be sometimes difficult to distinguish from the photos with which they are mixed. One glimpse of brown hands using a slide rule and an African-American woman (unidentified but probably Katherine Johnson) in another montage are the only indications here that the space program wasn’t an all-white enterprise. Still, it makes a grand—if, so many years later, nostalgic—tale about a magnificent effort.
A handsomely packaged look back at an epochal achievement. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, bibliography, sources, index) (Nonfiction/poetry. 10-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68263-013-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
A colorful but superficial ooze of anthropology, with a few drops of biology mixed in.
An irreverent if anemic survey of the red stuff’s roles in human culture, from Galen to the Twilight series.
The information is presented beneath drippy red borders and splattered with both jokey cartoon illustrations and graphic-novel style episodes featuring a hoodie-clad researcher who hooks up with a hot young vampire. Kyi’s report opens with a slashing overview of early medical theories about the circulatory system and closes with superficial speculations about why The Hunger Games and news stories about violent crimes are so popular. In between, it strings together generalities about blood rites in cultures from Matausa to our own Armed Forces and religions from Roman Catholicism to Santeria. The author also takes stabs at blood-based foods, the use of blood (particularly menstrual blood) in magic and modern forensic science, medical bloodletting, hereditary hemophilia in Europe’s ruling class, vampirism, and other topics in the same vein. But readers seeking at least a basic transfusion of information about blood’s physical functions or component elements will come away empty. Moreover, the trickle of specific facts doesn’t extend to, for instance, naming the site of a prehistoric sacrifice stone on which traces of gore have been found or even, despite repeated reference to blood types, actually identifying—much less discussing—them.
A colorful but superficial ooze of anthropology, with a few drops of biology mixed in. (further reading, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-385-7
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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