A fresh gander at the beginnings of dino-mania.
Colleagues become bitter rivals in this tale of scientific discovery set during paleontology’s heady early days.
Rightly judging that Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh would be less remembered for their achievements than their feud, Noyes highlights the latter, which resulted in a vicious “Scientific Smackdown” rabid enough to become a public spectacle. She sets it amid a wide-angled account of how rich fossil discoveries in the 19th century, particularly in the American West, fueled sometimes-unscrupulous races to find more even as natural science was undergoing some revolutionary growing pains. With liberal use of period illustrations and side essays, she tells a tale in which Buffalo Bill Cody and Red Cloud figure as prominently as Mary Anning and Charles Darwin, featuring Indiana Jones–style expeditions into rugged country at a time when the buffalo still roamed (if not for long) and the Battle of Little Bighorn was fresh news. Young readers interested in the intrepid exploits of the early fossil hunters have plenty of choices, from Kathryn Lasky’s Bone Wars (1988) on, but it’s a grand yarn nonetheless and, in this iteration, offers illuminating sidelights and updated lists of print and web resources.
A fresh gander at the beginnings of dino-mania. (index, timeline, endnotes) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-28984-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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