With characteristic horror vacui, Harness packs verbal and visual information into each teeming, full-bleed spread, sending a young museum-goer and his eccentric great aunt on a quick trip back to Ancient Egypt for tours of the Step and Great Pyramid, plus glimpses of city and rural life, writing, religion, and embalmers at work. Above a running timeline that names nearly all of the Pharaohs from Scorpion to the last Ptolemy (then fast-forwards to the Muslim conquest, and concludes with a worldwide map/chronology), she places explanatory captions near, next to, or often directly atop jumbles of small painted scenes or figures. Despite some spreads with number keys, the resulting super-dense, multilayered presentation may bewilder readers accustomed to linear exposition—but will reward browsers, lingerers, and flippers back-and-forth with a mother lode of facts and history. The thin plot line adds at least a sense of forward momentum to this flashy interest-builder. (bibliography) (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-689-83478-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
PLB 0-06-027821-8 For Aliki (Marianthe’s Story, 1998, etc.), the story of the Globe Theatre is a tale of two men: Shakespeare, who made it famous, and Sam Wanamaker, the driving force behind its modern rebuilding. Decorating margins with verbal and floral garlands, Aliki creates a cascade of landscapes, crowd scenes, diminutive portraits, and sequential views, all done with her trademark warmth and delicacy of line, allowing viewers to glimpse Elizabethan life and theater, historical sites that still stand, and the raising of the new Globe near the ashes of the old. She finishes with a play list, and a generous helping of Shakespearean coinages. Though the level of information doesn’t reach that of Diane Stanley’s Bard of Avon (1992), this makes a serviceable introduction to Shakespeare’s times while creating a link between those times and the present; further tempt young readers for whom the play’s the thing with Marcia Williams’s Tales From Shakespeare (1998). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-027820-X
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Leedy (Measuring Penny, 1998, etc.), so deft in making hard facts memorable and setting information into a context that makes sense to children, selects a hodge-podge of details and miscellany to convey a sense of what every state is about, as either a political entity or a place. Into lively, effulgent illustrations she plants a monotonous, forgettable list of items to distinguish every state: a map, the state flower and bird, a whiff of landscape, a glimpse of industry. There’s little about such a list—e.g., wheat, pronghorn, western meadowlark, prairie rose, Sitting Bull—to shout, in that example, “North Dakota” to children. The alphabetical listing—Alaska through Wyoming, four states a spread, with room for the US territories and Washington, D.C.—will help researchers, although it necessarily separates states that have natural geographic or historic connections, such as Vermont and New Hampshire, or West Virginia and Virginia, divided during the Civil War. Readers gain a good, first-line resource, with all the enthusiasm Leedy has made her trademark, but without much chance that they’ll adopt the excitement. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8234-1431-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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