Capped by a climactic 1897 at-bat against the New York Giants’ fireballer Amos Rusie, this short profile highlights the achievements of the first verifiable Native American to play in the Major Leagues. Farnsworth imparts a strong sense of character and period by posing his slender, dignified, smooth-skinned athlete in old-time uniforms against hazy historical settings, but Wise covers a general lack of specific detail with probable inventions—“On the baseball diamond Louis felt like a king.” “With a heavy heart, Louis made his decision.”—and describes how Sockalexis overcame family and racial prejudice in such a heavily earnest tone that he becomes more of a figurehead than a human being. An illuminating afterword—that explains how Sockalexis not only influenced his team’s name change from the Cleveland Spiders to the Indians, but more importantly, helped to pave the way for both other Native American players and, later on, African-American ones too—doesn’t bring him any closer to readers, but definitely justifies knowing about him. (source notes) (Picture book/biography. 8-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58430-269-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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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Ringgold’s biography of Rosa Parks packs substantial material into a few pages, but with a light touch, and with the ring of authenticity that gives her act of weary resistance all the respect it deserves. Narrating the book is the bus that Parks took that morning 45 years ago; it recounts the signal events in Parks’s life to a young girl who boarded it to go to school. A decent amount of the material will probably be new to children, for Parks is so intimately associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her work with the NAACP before the bus incident is often overlooked, as is her later role as a community activist in Detroit with Congressman John Conyers. Ringgold, through the bus, also informs readers of Parks’s youth in rural Alabama, where Klansmen and nightriders struck fear into the lives of African-Americans. These experiences make her refusal to release her seat all the more courageous, for the consequences of resistance were not gentle. All the events are depicted in emotive naive artwork that underscores their truth; Ringgold delivers Parks’s story without hyperbole, but rather as a life lived with pride, conviction, and consequence. (Picture book/biography. 5-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-81892-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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