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
This entry in the What's Their Story? series goes beyond the well-known image of the famously fierce Eric the Red to unveil a driven explorer and founder of a new land. Eric, like his father, became an outlaw due to his hot temper and the killings that were the unfortunate outgrowth of the many skirmishes that arose. His outlaw status and a dearth of farm land inspired Eric to go exploring. During a three-year expedition, Eric and his men saw Greenland; Grant (The Great Atlas of Discovery, 1992), wryly comparing Eric to a travel agent as he promotes the new land, divulges the origins of Greenland's name. "Although it was mostly covered with ice, he called it 'Greenland' because, he said, people are more likely to go to a place if it has an attractive name." The biography offers a good, dense overview of Eric's daring explorations, his leadership, the discoveries of his son, Leif, and the impact of Christianity on the Vikings. Focusing on the accomplishments of the Vikings instead of the bloodlust that has historically characterized their labors, Grant refers without glorification to the violence that was part of a warrior's life. Ambrus's meticulous illustrations vividly portray Eric's times. (maps, index) (Picture book/biography. 6-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-19-521431-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An attractive, heartfelt, but ultimately obscure picture-book tribute to the great American humorist and commentator. Will Rogers is presented as the quintessential Oklahoma boy: “There, on the broad back of his father’s horse, Lummox, and at his mother’s knee, he saw oceans of wheat and dreamed of touching distant skies.” It’s arranged quasi-chronologically, but rather than offering traditional biographical material, Oklahoma Governor Keating chooses instead to home in on Rogers’s character traits, from his love of flying to his ability to make people laugh. Each trait is illustrated by one of Rogers’s aphorisms: Will’s humble beginnings, for instance, lead to the saying, “No man is great if he thinks he is.” Wimmer’s (Summertime, 1999, etc.) luminous paintings also focus on Rogers’s earthy nature; in one, Will appears in a rumpled suit and with five-o’clock shadow on a campaign platform next to Franklin Roosevelt. The design is heavy on nostalgia—the text is printed in a faux-typewriter font over a background of yellowed paper tacked onto a wall. However visually appealing, though, this offering suffers from one fatal flaw: it doesn’t ever tell the reader what Will Rogers actually did in his life. There is no explicit mention of his careers in vaudeville and later in film, no substantive discussion of his writing or radio work, no explanation of his political relationships. Save for one line, “families laughed with him on radio broadcasts, in newspaper columns, and in movies,” this leaves the reader with the vague impression that Will Rogers spent his life being virtuous and dispensing homespun wisdoms—and nothing else. As it stands, without the necessary contextualizing detail to flesh out this most human man, most readers previously unfamiliar with the subject will find themselves no more familiar with him at closing. (Picture book/biography. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-202405-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Silver Whistle/Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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