History comes alive in this moving story of the heroic Danes who defied the Nazis during the occupation of Denmark. Levine (A Fence Away From Freedom, 1995, etc.) weaves a historical narrative into the real-life experiences of 21 Danes who were young in 1940. She puts the account of a very small country that managed to save nearly all of its Jewish citizens from German concentration camps in context by asking how this could have happened. Citing Edmund Burke—“The one condition necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”—Levine makes her point that the Danish people refused to do exactly that. Beginning with the Nazi invasion of Denmark on April 9, 1940, Levine depicts the Nazi occupation from 1940–43. Then she takes the reader back in time to understand the migration of the Jewish people to Denmark; the freedom of religion they enjoyed there; and the history of ghettoization and anti-Semitism in other countries. She picks up the story again to describe the resistance movement and the events leading up to the hiding and ferrying of Jews out of the country to Sweden. The photographs, from the dramatic cover to the portraits of the interviewees, are dramatic and effective. Source notes, biographical sketches of the people interviewed, a chronology, and an author’s explanation of her research technique are both interesting and useful as research tools. A fascinating blend of historical background and the impact of events on real people. (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8234-1447-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
A fascinating twin narrative, though not quite the story the title suggests.
In 1946, The Adventures of Superman radio show took on the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to teach young listeners lessons about tolerance and standing up to bigotry.
The first episode of the 16-part “Clan of the Fiery Cross” aired on June 10, 1946, to “dramatiz[e] the realities of the Ku Klux Klan to a generation of young radio listeners.” From the beginning, Superman had a social conscience, and one thread of this narrative traces the origins of Superman and his rise to stardom as a comic-book and radio hero. The other thread examines the history and mid-20th-century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. But it’s not until late in the volume that the collision between Superman and the KKK occurs, making it seem like a work that isn’t quite sure of what it wants to be, or for whom it was written. With sentences such as, “Brown even got inside a secret subunit of the Kavalier Klub that called itself the Ass-Tearers and printed on its calling card the image of a corkscrew—its implement of choice for torturing and disemboweling its victims,” this often reads more like journalism than children’s literature.
A fascinating twin narrative, though not quite the story the title suggests. (bibliography, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4263-0915-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will be eyewitnesses to history in this story of one fateful chapter in the Civil Rights Movement, if they can get...
The intersection of the 1968 Memphis garbage strike, the Poor People’s Campaign and the last days of Martin Luther King Jr. is brought to vivid life in a fine work of history writing.
Who knew that the story of garbage in Memphis, Tenn., could be so interesting, and so important? By 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.’s work had expanded beyond the social reforms of integration and voting rights to speaking out for economic justice and against the war in Vietnam. King, along with with a young activist named Marian Wright and others, was planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington of the nation’s poor. The garbage workers in Memphis “represented exactly the sort of poor people his effort sought to help,” so off he went. This is history from the ground up, and Bausum makes good use of oral histories, newspapers, pamphlets, letters and photographs to tell her tale. Unfortunately, the fine historical narrative is undercut by the distracting design of the volume, cluttered with huge orange quotation marks throughout and photographs tinted blue, green and orange. The well-chosen photographs left untouched and the excellent writing would have sufficed for a topnotch nonfiction work.
Readers will be eyewitnesses to history in this story of one fateful chapter in the Civil Rights Movement, if they can get past the design. (research notes, resource guide, bibliography, citations) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4263-0939-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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