Using historical photographs from various sources, Dabba Smith offers an ungrounded profile of a German woman who helped people oppressed by Nazis during WWII. Elsie brought food and blankets to Ukrainian women forced into slave labor at her father’s factory, and she risked her life trying to arrange the escape of a German Jew across the Swiss border. Caught and imprisoned by the Gestapo, Elsie spent time in jail away from her children and father before a bribe facilitated her release. While stories of Germans who helped the Nazis’ victims are rare, this piece is so episodic that it isn’t cohesive. The confusing lack of context—about the greater war, horrors, concentration camps, and other pockets of resistance—leaves Elsie looking like an isolated hero. Bits of fictionalization belong to an earlier era of children’s nonfiction. Inoffensive as an addition to a broader curriculum, but—unlike Dabba Smith’s stunningly powerful My Secret Camera—mediocre on its own. (introduction, postscript) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-84507-006-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasing new picture book looks at George Washington’s career through an agricultural lens. Sprinkling excerpts from his letters and diaries throughout to allow its subject to speak in his own voice, the narrative makes a convincing case for Washington’s place as the nation’s First Farmer. His innovations, in addition to applying the scientific method to compost, include a combination plow-tiller-harrow, the popularization of the mule and a two-level barn that put horses to work at threshing grain in any weather. Thomas integrates Washington’s military and political adventures into her account, making clear that it was his frustration as a farmer that caused him to join the revolutionary cause. Lane’s oil illustrations, while sometimes stiff, appropriately portray a man who was happiest when working the land. Backmatter includes a timeline, author’s notes on both Mount Vernon and Washington the slaveholder, resources for further exploration and a bibliography. (Picture book/biography. 8-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59078-460-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of Cod’s Tale (2001) again demonstrates a dab hand at recasting his adult work for a younger audience. Here the topic is salt, “the only rock eaten by human beings,” and, as he engrossingly demonstrates, “the object of wars and revolutions” throughout recorded history and before. Between his opening disquisition on its chemical composition and a closing timeline, he explores salt’s sources and methods of extraction, its worldwide economic influences from prehistoric domestication of animals to Gandhi’s Salt March, its many uses as a preservative and industrial product, its culinary and even, as the source for words like “salary” and “salad,” its linguistic history. Along with lucid maps and diagrams, Schindler supplies detailed, sometimes fanciful scenes to go along, finishing with a view of young folk chowing down on orders of French fries as ghostly figures from history look on. Some of Kurlansky’s claims are exaggerated (the Erie and other canals were built to transport more than just salt, for instance), and there are no leads to further resources, but this salutary (in more ways than one) micro-history will have young readers lifting their shakers in tribute. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-23998-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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