Brown has created a companion piece to his Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries (1999) by profiling yet another fascinating and relatively unknown 19th-century British woman. Mary Kingsley never went to school, had a sickly mother and a mostly absent father, but she read in her father’s library all the while tending to her mother and running the household. When both parents died in 1892, the 30-year-old Kingsley went on the first of several trips to Africa. There, in her proper Victorian attire, she collected insects, scratched a hippo behind the ear with her umbrella, fell into a spike-filled pit (kept from harm by her “good thick skirt”) and went back home to write and lecture about all she had seen and done. Brown manages to get a lot of her story into a few graceful vignettes, and he does the same with his watercolors, using a blue-green and gold-brown palette to evoke London and jungle, desert and heat. The figures are sketched with just enough line to keep them anchored, as we see Kingsley bat a crocodile on the snout, cross a ravine on a slippery log, and bathe in a starlit lake. (Picture book/biography. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-00273-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
From his birth in Ulm—a spread of rooftops with one speech bubble: “Waaaaaa”—to his early adulthood, Einstein’s childhood and youth are humanely and humorously depicted. As the title indicates, the narrative focuses on its subject’s oddness, describing both his outbursts of anger and his capacity for single-minded concentration. Einstein emerges as a singular boy, one whose brilliance was masked by poor performance in school. There is no real attempt to explain Einstein’s theorems, delivering just enough to serve as an introduction for primary graders. Illustrations are mostly classic Brown: loose ink-and-watercolor cartoons in a muted palette emphasize Einstein as a lone, brooding figure. Two remarkable illustrations, however, give the reader a glimpse into Einstein’s brain: first, a tiny Einstein gazes up at a swirling array of geometric shapes—“a wonderwork to him”—and second, Einstein pushes a pram against a surreal backdrop that conceptually joins the structure of the atom to the warping of space and time. Kids won’t need to understand relativity to appreciate Einstein’s passage from lonely oddball to breathtaking genius. An author’s note and bibliography fill out this terrific package. (Picture book/biography. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-49298-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
Stunning illustrations cannot rescue a deeply flawed text that purports to capture Langston Hughes’s excitement upon writing “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and its subsequent publication. Leonard Jenkins’s richly colored multi-media illustrations leap and dance, never standing still on the page. He evokes both Jazz Age Harlem and the great American Midwest with bold brushstrokes and a combination of print and collage, granting the subjects an appropriately mythic quality. But Burleigh’s text, delivered as if in Hughes’s own voice, goes way beyond invented dialogue—it’s an entirely invented stream-of-consciousness that takes readers from Hughes’s first publication party back to the train ride that sparked the great poem. This narration is almost painfully disingenuous, if not downright phony: “I’m on my way—to one of the best days of my young life.” The author’s presumption in appropriating what is unknowable—Hughes’s thoughts at these times—is breathtaking. There are no references whatsoever to sources in the back matter, although there is a brief biographical note, and Hughes’s poem itself is printed in full. Unfortunately, this offering does its subject a grievous injustice. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-35239-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
