A truly inspiring tribute to a seemingly larger-than-life U.S. president.
U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt certainly dared mighty things, and this lavish picture-book biography deftly captures the legendary man’s bold, exuberant nature.
Young “Teedie” Roosevelt wanted to be fearless like Daniel Boone and the Valley Forge soldiers he read about, but he was a sickly child. A dramatic full-bleed spread shows the quilt-wrapped Teedie reading in a big chair, visions of polar bears and eagles dancing in his head—an apt reflection of the boy who would go on to keep a giant tortoise in his room at Harvard and then to help protect America’s wildlife. Roosevelt’s private joys and sorrows as well as professional highlights from his Rough Rider days in Cuba to his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize are chronicled here in colorful, accessible prose, punctuated by character-illuminating quotations. This is a portrait of a passionate man who wanted to make a difference and did, as police commissioner or author, cattle rancher or U.S. president. Payne’s expressive, muted paintings—quite grand when showcasing America’s majestic landscapes—are full of warmth and humor befitting the joyful man who declared “No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way.”
A truly inspiring tribute to a seemingly larger-than-life U.S. president. (timeline, selected research sources, bibliography, websites, acknowledgments) (Picture book/biography. 7-12)Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4231-2488-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
A lot of information is packed into this picture-book biography. Sojourner, originally named Isabella, was a Dutch-speaking child born into slavery. Details about her life in slavery, when she was purchased by an English-speaking master, her marriage to a man selected by her master, the birth and loss of her children, and the events leading up to her transformation to an advocate for freedom, are recounted with passion. Rockwell (Career Day, p. 720, etc.) adds an author’s note explaining her motivation for writing this biography and cites Sojourner’s autobiography as her most helpful source. Additional information includes data about the subject’s life beyond the events chronicled and a timeline. The book is written in serial style, with a cliffhanger phrase at the end of each page. Coretta Scott King Honor Award winner Christie’s (The Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African American Children, 1996) primitive-style illustrations are striking. Oversized, mask-like heads, often fierce and foreboding, dominate many of the drawings. Earth-toned colors predominate in the stark depiction of Sojourner’s early life and the slave owners who mistreated her, but her strength shines through in all the illustrations. An excellent addition to the biography shelf as a compelling story of an extraordinary woman, as well as for its pertinence to school assignments. (Picture book/biography. 7-10)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-89186-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Neither a story with a plot nor a full-blown memoir, this brief look at a town suspended in time resonates with happiness...
Intriguing pictures full of small details bring alive the sights, smells, sounds, tastes and textures of a small Sardinian town in the 1950s.
Nivola traveled to Orani during many summers of her childhood, when it was still a traditional village, albeit one that was growing more prosperous than the home her father left behind in 1926. She remembers in words and pictures first arriving by boat, then riding by car and finally sitting with her cousins “[u]nder a fig tree, beside the laundry, among the chickens” to discuss the differences between America and Orani. She goes on to recount the daily adventures of seeing a newborn baby, watching the tailor make velvet jackets for the shepherds and finding “a fledgling fallen from its nest.” Drinking in the carefully delineated, naive watercolors and sensory prose, young readers attend three-day weddings and funerals for old men, buried in their holiday clothes. They experience the Corpus Christi holidays, with a horse race through the narrow streets of the village, and the family meals with “cheese from someone’s cow, the honey from someone’s bees.”
Neither a story with a plot nor a full-blown memoir, this brief look at a town suspended in time resonates with happiness and could spark some children to reflect on their own idyllic summers in a new way. (map, author’s note) (Picture book/memoir. 7-10)Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-35657-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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