Aside from the lack of continuity of the photographs, as an introduction to lacrosse, this book is a score.
An introduction to the sport of lacrosse for beginners.
Sports Illustrated for Kids presents the basic principles and vocabulary of lacrosse, including the equipment, where it is played, and the positions of each player, as well as describing the differences between women’s and men’s lacrosse. The account follows the format of a game, with scoreboard-type boxes that keep track of the time and quarter. Vocabulary words, such as “cradle,” “face-off,” “slashing,” and “offsides,” are written in big block letters to emphasize importance. Collaged-in photographs of real players engaged in particular actions of the game appear on bright, colored backgrounds. These photographs are of players on different teams, so with each turn of the page there is a loss of continuity. Two little cartoon characters—a boy and girl—appear on each page and add silly commentary and comedic actions, like bringing a vacuum into the game to steal the ball. Other thought and speech bubbles are slapped on above the real-life photographs, adding often mindless but humorous commentary. The writing gives detailed explanations of what to expect in the game, but some of the illustrations can be confusing. Most of the players in the photographs appear to be white; the cartoon girl has brown skin, and the cartoon boy is pale.
Aside from the lack of continuity of the photographs, as an introduction to lacrosse, this book is a score. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68330-078-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Liberty Street/Time Inc. Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Engagingly links the jazz saxophone with its European roots.
This collaboration spotlights the saxophone’s European birth and wide adoption by American jazz musicians.
Adolphe Sax, a 19th-century Belgian instrument maker’s son, both plays and invents instruments. Searching for a new sound—softer than a trumpet, louder than a clarinet—Adolphe tinkers and reassembles until his masterpiece is ready. Belgium’s arbiters reject the new instrument, and Adolphe moves to Paris. While French tastemakers initially pan it, the composer Hector Berlioz champions “le saxophon,” opining, “It cries, sighs, and dreams.” After hard-won integration into French military bands, other European nations adopt it, too. Napoleon III loses France’s war in Mexico accompanied by the instrument’s wails. Florencio Ramos, a musician in a Mexican cavalry band, obtains a sax and settles in New Orleans in 1884. The signature sound of the rechristened “saxophone” spreads there and beyond, inseparable from jazz’s early permutations. (Cline-Ransome avers that after Sidney Bechet picks up the sax, he forsakes his clarinet.) A final spread summarizes jazz’s singular predisposition to musical contagion: “Coleman Hawkins heard Sidney play. / And Lester Young heard Coleman play. / And Charlie Parker heard Lester play.” While the anecdotal narrative adroitly portrays Sax’s perseverance as an innovator, the segue to American jazz gets shorter shrift. Cline-Ransome admirably amends this: Endpapers, a jacket poster, and spot illustrations celebrate over 20 diverse saxophone greats. Rich, sepia-toned spreads showcase the saxophone’s shining complexity.
Engagingly links the jazz saxophone with its European roots. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3702-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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