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AUSCHWITZ

Name: AUSCHWITZ
Author: Clive A. Lawton
ISBN: 0-7636-1595-1

THE STORY OF A NAZI DEATH CAMP

by Clive A. Lawton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2002

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The name of Auschwitz has become synonymous with the Holocaust and so it is fitting that an entire volume be devoted to describing what happened there. Scrupulously documented, this is short, but packs a lot of information. For this subject, a picture really is worth a thousand words and Lawton carefully lays out the evidence as if with an eye towards the deniers, about which a chapter is included. He uses only the most conservative estimates for the number of people killed at Auschwitz and explains how it is that estimates can be made when the bodies of the victims were burned to smoke and ash and the Germans took such pains to destroy the evidence. Each two-page spread has its own chapter heading, among them “The Transports,” “The Gas Chambers,” and “Burning the Bodies.” A well laid-out combination of text, archival photographs, maps, diagrams of the camp, and survivor testimony provides a many-faceted perspective. Lawton succeeds in conveying the single-minded, machine-like efficiency with which the Germans approached the “final solution” for the “Jewish problem.” Disturbing photographs are included—as they must be if the truth is to be told—of piles of dead bodies, a skeletal girl who was a victim of medical experimentation, naked, emaciated men whose private parts are hidden by text, and an inmate who threw himself against the electric fence, a suicide. The jacket-cover text notes that ordinary people helped carry out the evil perpetrated at Auschwitz and asks: “How did it happen?” While Auschwitz doesn’t answer the question of how this could happen, it certainly captures the horror of what did happen. Gut-wrenching, this will be invaluable to anyone seeking to educate children and young adults. (Nonfiction. 12+)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-7636-1595-1

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

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WOMEN IN ANCIENT EGYPT

by Fiona Macdonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 1999

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In glossy textbook style, this latest entry in The Other Half of History series (Women of Ancient Greece, p. 1746, etc.) illuminates the days and lives of wealthy, middle-class, and poor women who lived thousands of years ago in Egypt. The large-scale format of the book allows elaborate full-color photographs to appear on every page, often accompanied by sidebars with brief quotations from ancient Egyptian writers. These provide the book’s main source of interest; Macdonald resorts to a textbook writing style, with deliberately short, declarative sentences that make the material sound more somber than it is. Nevertheless, this book provides a useful tracing of the role of women in history, and would be a good companion reference to Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s classic Mara, Daughter of the Nile (1953) or Sonia Levitin’s Escape from Egypt (1994). (maps, glossary, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999

ISBN: 0-87226-567-6

Page Count: 48

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
by Fiona Macdonald

- BOOK REVIEW
A CHILD'S EYE VIEW OF HISTORY
by Fiona Macdonald

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRST FACTS ABOUT THE ANCIENT ROMANS
by Fiona Macdonald & illustrated by John James & Gerald Wood

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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

WHITE SHIPS/BLACK CARGO

by Tom Feelings ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995

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"Illustrated books are a natural extension of [the] African oral tradition'' of storytelling, writes Caldecott Award–winning artist Tom Feelings. Here, in 64 powerful black-and-white paintings—some of them harshly realistic, others nightmarishly phantasmagoric—this noted artist tells a neglected part of the story of African-American slavery: the cruel journey known as "the middle passage,'' in which millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Africans died before ever reaching American shores. The soft edges of Feelings's art, the blended grays of his palette, do nothing to mute the violence that permeates these images: the bowed bodies of captured Africans being led away under the whip; rows and rows and rows of bodies crammed side by side, shackled together, in dark, filthy holds beneath deck; the agony of a man remembering a baby viciously murdered. Feelings's purpose here, however, is not vengeful but cathartic. Through remembering and understanding the sources of their continuing pain, he believes that Africans can turn the chains of bondage into "spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future... whether living inside or outside of the continent of Africa.''