A positive but not blindly adulatory introduction.
Profile of a president who turned out—in some ways, at least—to be the right man at the right time.
Taking middle graders approximately as far as Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson has gotten to date, Quirk follows the 36th president from birth and early days in the Texas Hill Country to the time when, in the shockwave caused by the televised racial violence in Selma and elsewhere, he delivered “the best speech of his life” while ramming through the Voting Rights Act and other landmark Great Society legislation. She rightly notes that he had never been known previously as a civil rights firebrand. Instead, she paints him as a workaholic who, motivated by both a will to power and the idealistic belief that people are fundamentally decent and have a right to a fair shake, saw his moment and seized it—while recognizing all along that when it came to civil rights, the overcoming was a long way from over. “Johnson wanted his speech to reach you,” the author writes, and in earnest of that she closes with a cogent if abbreviated and lamentably behind-the-times epilogue on challenges to voting rights sparked by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision. The famously “tremendous” presidential ears are on display from infancy to last public appearance in a sparse assortment of photos. An early one depicts the White future president with the Mexican American students he taught in Cotulla, Texas.
A positive but not blindly adulatory introduction. (timeline, bibliography, endnotes, activities) (Biography. 11-13)Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-01554-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Logically pointing out that the American cowboy archetype didn’t spring up from nowhere, Sandler, author of Cowboys (1994) and other volumes in the superficial, if luxuriously illustrated, “Library of Congress Book” series, looks back over 400 years of cattle tending in North America. His coverage ranges from the livestock carried on Columbus’s second voyage to today’s herding-by-helicopter operations. Here, too, the generous array of dramatic early prints, paintings, and photos are more likely to capture readers’ imaginations than the generality-ridden text. But among his vague comments about the characters, values, and culture passed by Mexican vaqueros to later arrivals from the Eastern US, Sadler intersperses nods to the gauchos, llaneros, and other South American “cowmen,” plus the paniolos of Hawaii, and the renowned African-American cowboys. He also decries the role film and popular literature have played in suppressing the vaqueros’ place in the history of the American West. He tackles an uncommon topic, and will broaden the historical perspective of many young cowboy fans, but his glance at modern vaqueros seems to stop at this country’s borders. Young readers will get a far more detailed, vivid picture of vaquero life and work from the cowboy classics in his annotated bibliography. (Notes, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6019-7
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
The life of Manjiro Nakahama, also known as John Mung, makes an amazing story: shipwrecked as a young fisherman for months on a remote island, rescued by an American whaler, he became the first Japanese resident of the US. Then, after further adventures at sea and in the California gold fields, he returned to Japan where his first-hand knowledge of America and its people earned him a central role in the modernization of his country after its centuries of peaceful isolation had ended. Expanding a passage from her Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun (1985, Newbery Honor), Blumberg not only delivers an absorbing tale of severe hardships and startling accomplishments, but also takes side excursions to give readers vivid pictures of life in mid-19th-century Japan, aboard a whaler, and amidst the California Gold Rush. The illustrations, a generous mix of contemporary photos and prints with Manjiro’s own simple, expressive drawings interspersed, are at least as revealing. Seeing a photo of Commodore Perry side by side with a Japanese artist’s painted portrait, or strange renditions of a New England town and a steam train, based solely on Manjiro’s verbal descriptions, not only captures the unique flavor of Japanese art, but points up just how high were the self-imposed barriers that separated Japan from the rest of the world. Once again, Blumberg shows her ability to combine high adventure with vivid historical detail to open a window onto the past. (source note) (Biography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17484-1
Page Count: 80
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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