Admiration for a unique talent shines as brightly as her jeweled creations in this biographical homage.
Judith Leiber designed over-the-top jeweled evening bags that have become cherished collector’s items.
She and her family survived World War II and the Holocaust as forced laborers in factories, living in shared apartments with other Jewish families and later hiding in a basement. All the while she kept dreaming of the bags she would make someday. She married an American and moved to New York, where she worked for many handbag companies and then started her own, making her signature bags for the rich and famous. They took the form of animals or food and all kinds of imaginative shapes. Each bag was covered in jewels and crystals in a plethora of shining, gleaming, bright colors. Blumenthal blends biographical facts with glowing, almost breathless descriptions of the unusual, beautiful bags and their celebrated owners. Readers may notice that the chronology is off; they learn that Leiber started her own company in 1963 and then, a few pages later, that Leiber designed Mamie Eisenhower’s bag for the 1953 inaugural balls. D’yans’ softly hued, slightly fuzzy illustrations depict many of the bags noted by the author and seem to shine as brightly as the bags themselves. Dark, muddy hues appropriately limn the Holocaust years.
Admiration for a unique talent shines as brightly as her jeweled creations in this biographical homage. (author’s note, photographs, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4998-0898-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Page Street
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Disappointingly lackadaisical.
Punctuated—unsurprisingly—by explosions, an account of the groundbreaking rocketeer’s childhood and first experiments.
Fueled by an early interest in hands-on science nurtured by his parents and sparked by reading The War of the Worlds, Goddard’s ambition to “build something that would soar to space” led to years of experimentation and failure analysis. Finally, in 1926, a brief but successful flight pointed the way to “every shuttle that has blasted into space, every astronaut who has defied gravity, and every man who has walked on the moon.” Fulton occasionally skimps on scientific details (in one childhood trial Robert “emptied a small vial of hydrogen into a pan”; even in the backmatter, there’s no explanation why, as he notes in his journal, “Hydrogen and oxygen when combined near a flame will ignite”). Still, she highlights the profound curiosity and determined, methodical effort that ultimately earned her subject a well-deserved place in the pantheon of scientists and inventors. Scientific gear in Funck’s cartoon illustrations often looks generic, and in one scene he depicts a rocket that is markedly different from the one described in the adjacent narrative. Moreover, his explosions look like fried eggs, and most come with oddly undersized if all-capped onomatopoeia (“BOOM!”; “POP!”) that underplays both the melodramatic potential and the real danger to which Goddard must have exposed himself. Goddard and his family are white.
Disappointingly lackadaisical. (afterword, list of sources) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6098-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Serviceable as assignment fodder or as a gateway to more searching studies.
A short, occasionally revealing profile of an immigrant who got the job done.
Joining other children’s-book creators attempting to ride the Broadway phenomenon’s coattails, Adler creates a distant, even staid, portrait of Hamilton’s character. Opening and closing with accounts of the Burr duel, he also drops in a few too many names without sufficient context. Still, along with noting his subject’s major public achievements in war and peace and making some references to his private life, he does frankly note in the main narrative that Alexander was born to unmarried parents and in the afterword that he was taken in for a time by a family that may have included a half brother. (The author also makes a revealing if carelessly phrased observation that he helped to run a business in his youth that dealt in “many things,” including “enslaved people.”) Collins’ neatly limned painted scenes lack much sense of movement, but he’s careful with details of historical dress and setting. Most of his figures are light skinned, but there are people of color in early dockside views, in a rank of charging American soldiers, and also (possibly) in a closing parade of mourners. Multichapter biographies abound, but as a first introduction, this entry in Adler’s long-running series won’t bring younger readers to their feet but does fill in around the edges of Don Brown’s Aaron and Alexander: The Most Famous Duel in American History (2015).
Serviceable as assignment fodder or as a gateway to more searching studies. (timeline, bibliography, notes) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3961-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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