History with a hilarious spin and a cinch to provoke vigorous debates aplenty.
From Pelé to “Doc Soc” Socrates, Mother Teresa to Pythagoras, movers and shakers from the past face off in this split-page, mix-and-match fight card.
For anyone who has ever wondered whether George Washington could have schooled Leonardo da Vinci in pingpong, whether Harriet Tubman pwned Ernest Hemingway in the Hunger Games, or Boudica trumped “Class Act” (get it?) Carolus Linnaeus as a game-show host, Swartz brings the data and lets readers call the outcomes. Endowed with a set of identifying memes—“Marie Curie: Madame Radioactive, Chemist, Physicist, Biohazard”—and a quick, mostly admiring, but solidly factual biography, each contestant strikes a tough pose in a stylized but recognizable cartoon portrait, glaring across the card-stock page’s jaggedly cut divide. Swartz also rates each, 1-10, in seven personal categories (“Leadership,” “Intelligence,” “Wealth,” etc.). In a center section that is likewise mix or match, he supplies 50 competitive challenges (only a few actual conflicts), along with discussion questions: escaping Alcatraz? “Who’s the better schemer?” Living in 10,000 B.C.E.? “Who’s more outdoorsy?” As nearly a third of the contestants are women and over a quarter people of color, the author has plainly made an effort to diversify his cast’s origins as well as their walks of life. He also puts some lesser-known figures on the bill, like Empress Myeongseong of Korea and Zulu king Cetewayo.
History with a hilarious spin and a cinch to provoke vigorous debates aplenty. (Informational novelty. 10-13)Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7611-8544-4
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Workman
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
In this companion to Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their Work (1998), Sullivan presents an album of the prominent ships and men who fought on both sides, matched to an engrossing account of the war's progress: at sea, on the Mississippi, and along the South's well-defended coastline. In his view, the issue never was in doubt, for though the Confederacy fought back with innovative ironclads, sleek blockade runners, well-armed commerce raiders, and sturdy fortifications, from the earliest stages the North was able to seal off, and then take, one major southern port after another. The photos, many of which were made from fragile glass plates whose survival seems near-miraculous, are drawn from private as well as public collections, and some have never been published before. There aren't any action shots, since mid-19th-century photography required very long exposure times, but the author compensates with contemporary prints, plus crisp battle accounts, lucid strategic overviews, and descriptions of the technological developments that, by war's end, gave this country a world-class navy. He also profiles the careers of Matthew Brady and several less well-known photographers, adding another level of interest to a multi-stranded survey. (source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7613-1553-5
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Twenty-First Century/Millbrook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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