Readers will be eyewitnesses to history in this story of one fateful chapter in the Civil Rights Movement, if they can get...
The intersection of the 1968 Memphis garbage strike, the Poor People’s Campaign and the last days of Martin Luther King Jr. is brought to vivid life in a fine work of history writing.
Who knew that the story of garbage in Memphis, Tenn., could be so interesting, and so important? By 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.’s work had expanded beyond the social reforms of integration and voting rights to speaking out for economic justice and against the war in Vietnam. King, along with with a young activist named Marian Wright and others, was planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington of the nation’s poor. The garbage workers in Memphis “represented exactly the sort of poor people his effort sought to help,” so off he went. This is history from the ground up, and Bausum makes good use of oral histories, newspapers, pamphlets, letters and photographs to tell her tale. Unfortunately, the fine historical narrative is undercut by the distracting design of the volume, cluttered with huge orange quotation marks throughout and photographs tinted blue, green and orange. The well-chosen photographs left untouched and the excellent writing would have sufficed for a topnotch nonfiction work.
Readers will be eyewitnesses to history in this story of one fateful chapter in the Civil Rights Movement, if they can get past the design. (research notes, resource guide, bibliography, citations) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4263-0939-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
A fascinating twin narrative, though not quite the story the title suggests.
In 1946, The Adventures of Superman radio show took on the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to teach young listeners lessons about tolerance and standing up to bigotry.
The first episode of the 16-part “Clan of the Fiery Cross” aired on June 10, 1946, to “dramatiz[e] the realities of the Ku Klux Klan to a generation of young radio listeners.” From the beginning, Superman had a social conscience, and one thread of this narrative traces the origins of Superman and his rise to stardom as a comic-book and radio hero. The other thread examines the history and mid-20th-century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. But it’s not until late in the volume that the collision between Superman and the KKK occurs, making it seem like a work that isn’t quite sure of what it wants to be, or for whom it was written. With sentences such as, “Brown even got inside a secret subunit of the Kavalier Klub that called itself the Ass-Tearers and printed on its calling card the image of a corkscrew—its implement of choice for torturing and disemboweling its victims,” this often reads more like journalism than children’s literature.
A fascinating twin narrative, though not quite the story the title suggests. (bibliography, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4263-0915-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An excellent and important introduction to a man who went from freedom to slavery and back again.
Most readers know something about the Underground Railroad, when African Americans went from slavery to freedom, but this volume presents the opposite scenario: the enslavement of thousands of free Northern blacks.
Solomon Northup was one of 400,000 free blacks living in the United States in 1841. He was living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and three children, when two white men offered him good money to play violin for the circus they represented. Solomon jumped at the chance and soon found himself captured, beaten and transported to Louisiana, where he suffered a 12-year odyssey as a slave. Brevity, the focus on one man’s story and a lively prose style make this an unusually affecting and important narrative. All of the dialogue and many of the details come from Northup’s own memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853. Photographs, maps and reproductions of a bill of sale and various newspaper images complement the text. Unfortunately, sources are not always provided, as for a Frederick Douglass quotation on the final page, and the meager bibliography offers no sources for young readers, a shame since so many fine sources exist.
An excellent and important introduction to a man who went from freedom to slavery and back again. (afterword, time line, online resources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4263-0937-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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