Denenberg constructs the tragedy of Elvis Presley’s life in a series of chapters that take their titles from rock and rockabilly songs. Part I covers 1935–58, from Elvis’s birth and hardscrabble childhood (“Tupelo Honey” to “Graceland”) to the long strange descent, (“Ain’t Got You” to “Trying to Get to Heaven”) masterminded mostly by the craven “Colonel” Tom Parker, 1959–77. Elvis’s family was genuine white trash and his feckless father and smothering mom set the stage for his complete failure at personal relationships for the rest of his life. His brilliant musical gifts, which shone so brightly in the Sun Studio recordings of Sam Phillips, were utterly dissipated as Parker manipulated him into bad music and worse movies in the name of almighty money. The genius of Denenberg’s approach is his use of language, a youthful-sounding echo of how Elvis himself might have told the story. The result is an extremely accessible account, filled not only with the details of a life (page after fascinating page), but the psychology of it as well. Young readers who only know the bloated caricature will come to understand how it was that he captured a generation, changed the history of music, and lost himself in a world of excess. (chronology, bibliography, videography, discography, filmography, index, photo credits, song credits) (Biography. 11-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-439-09504-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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