As better pictures are available and the humor is too heavy-handed to add style points, that dismissal can serve for this...
An irreverent introduction to China’s long line of emperors, with sidelong glances at life in the outsized but cloistered imperial palace.
The simply phrased answer to a modern child’s titular question offers a jumble of general observations about forms of address, ceremonial duties, imperial officials and consorts, how members of the imperial family were educated, what they ate, and what emperors were expected to do and be. Readers will likely come away more confused than enlightened. The Forbidden City itself, built about 600 years ago, is neither mapped nor described here in any detail; such terms as “eunuch” and “consort” are defined long after they are first used (if at all); and Chinese expressions are discussed (and in one case translated two different ways) without being actually shown. Thick-lined cartoon figures in traditional dress, many with almost identical features, add a comical flavor. They pose on nearly every page with captions and comments in speech balloons that have, to say the least, an anachronistic ring: an emperor’s whiny “I’m stressed out,” is echoed a few pages later by a trio of “pregnant imperial consorts” racing to produce the first-born child; and the deposed last emperor, Puyi, closes with a casual “See ya!”
As better pictures are available and the humor is too heavy-handed to add style points, that dismissal can serve for this whole sloppy effort. (website) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9893776-6-9
Page Count: 108
Publisher: China Institute in America
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Still, for armchair tourists, a broad if rosy picture of our neighbor to the north.
Arrays of small color photos, cartoons and occasional comic-book pages provide visuals for a young traveler’s lively if superficial account of a quick province-by-province drive across Canada.
Bowers’ travelogue is similar in tone and content but aimed at a younger audience than her Wow Canada (2010) (and proceeds east to west before looping north, rather than the reverse). She takes her 9-year-old narrator to cities, roadside attractions and natural wonders from Cape Spear to Iqaluit. The child's observations are interspersed with side comments (“We walked around the lake until the mosquitoes had sucked all our blood”) and brief info-dumps from tour guides, a fact-loving little cousin and others. Simplification leads to some misinformation (no, the West Edmonton Mall is not the “world’s biggest,” nor is it strictly accurate to claim that Lake Michigan is “the only [great] lake not in Canada”). Ultimately and unfortunately, readers will come away knowing much more about regional foods (“Tried eating haggis. Big mistake”) and other artifacts of European settlement than newer immigrant populations or even, until the chapter on Nunavut, First Nations.
Still, for armchair tourists, a broad if rosy picture of our neighbor to the north. (maps, index) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-77049-255-4
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate.
Stepping carefully around the controversies, a former curator at Monticello reconstructs the septuagenarian Jefferson’s active daily round.
Jefferson’s fixed routine begins with a faithful recording of temperature and weather at first rising and ends with a final period of solitary reading by candlelight in his unusual alcove bed. In between, the author describes in often fussy detail the range of his interests and enterprises. There’s not only his “polygraph” and other beloved gadgets, but also meals, family members, visitors, and excursions to Monticello’s diverse gardens, workshops and outbuildings. Like the dialogue, which mixes inventions with historical utterances, the generous suite of visuals includes photos of furnishings and artifacts as well as stodgy full-page tableaux and vignettes painted by Elliott. The “slaves” or “enslaved” workers (the author uses the terms interchangeably) that Jefferson encounters through the day are all historical and named—but Sally Hemings and her Jeffersonian offspring are conspicuously absent (aside from a brief name check buried in the closing timeline). Jefferson adroitly sidesteps a pointed question from his grandson, who accompanies him on his rounds, by pleading his age: “The work of ending slavery is for the young.”
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate. (sidebars, endnotes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0541-0
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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