Save your money.
Fashion blogger Sicardi introduces readers to 52 queer heroes from around the world.
The book’s survey of diverse individuals should be applauded. Commendable ranges of ages, ethnicities, genders, professions, and time periods are covered. However, the book’s downfall begins with the sparseness of information offered about each subject. Each entry includes a name, a date range and birthplace, a few scant paragraphs, a stylized portrait, and nothing else. For example, while the joint entry on Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson covers their friendship and work with homeless LGBTQIAP youth in New York City, it makes no mention of Rivera’s historic 1973 speech regarding homophobia and transphobia within the LGBTQIAP community. That was kind of a big deal. Likewise, David Bowie is praised for his music, but mention of his infamous 1983 Rolling Stone article, in which he identified as heterosexual, is absent. (In fairness, the title could refer to heroes of queer people.) The book’s other major deficit is its disorder. The subjects are arranged arbitrarily, without a table of contents or an index. There is no further reading section and no bibliographies for references. A haphazard two-page glossary exists (thankfully in alphabetical order), but that’s it. The book has some merit as a brief introduction to people readers may not have heard of but doesn’t have the follow-through necessary to lead them to further discoveries.
Save your money. (Biography. 9-12)Pub Date: May 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78603-476-2
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
While the historical record is regrettably light on this Shoshone teenager, Berne stitches together a compelling narrative from what is known, taking care to bust myths along the way. Sacagawea had been kidnapped by the Hidatsa and sold or given to Toussaint Charbonneau as a wife before she was 14. Because she knew both the Shoshone and Hidatsa languages, she was seen as an invaluable link for communication to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which hired her French-Canadian trader husband. During the 16-month journey (1805-06), she acted as translator, located edible food and was a visible symbol of peace (no war party would have a woman), all the while carrying and nurturing her baby son, Jean-Baptiste. The author stresses the paucity of information even as she extrapolates what she can; Sacagawea's kindness and resourcefulness are evident from the Lewis and Clark records, for instance. Sidebars and illustrations enrich the account (about Native-American baby care, trade goods, Lewis’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman). Some repetition could have been edited out, but this is still a good addition to this biographical series. (glossary, bibliography, source notes, index) (Biography. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4027-6845-3
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
Hodgman looks back humorously at her 1960s childhood in the Rochester, N.Y., area, recalling incidents that pained her at the time or seem embarrassing in retrospect. There was the way she bragged about her reading before she knew better, the fourth-grade nickname (Hampton Schnoz) bestowed by a classmate she’d asked about her appearance and the total lack of athletic ability that left her at the bottom of the climbing ropes. She includes poems from her “bird sequence,” written in third grade. Not all events are mortifying. Some just reflect what it was like to be young at the time. There is the longed-for Petunia the Climbing Skunk from F.A.O. Schwartz that she didn't get for Christmas, a lovely description of birthday-party entertainments that includes Spiderweb and the Kim Game and the scary school-bus driver who threatened his misbehaving passengers with a rifle. Some anecdotes are very short; others go on for several pages. Occasional photographs of herself and her husband, as well as both their families back to their grandparents, will help readers picture these children from long ago. There is no hint of the larger political turmoil of the time. Rueful, funny and nostalgic, this will ring true to parents and grandparents and may be even more appealing to them than to a child readership—whose impression of the 1960s will be very different. (Memoir. 9-12)
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8705-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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