A Spoonerville, Texas, Little League team, sponsored by the local toilet-tissue company, opens the season with a collection of misfits coached by a nuclear physicist—completely ignorant of baseball—and his hotshot niece Kristy, visiting from New York because ``The parental units are doing the Europe thing this summer, so I'm chilling out down here with my main man....'' Kristy goes quickly to work, pushing the team into line with sharp talk (``Tsupwitchoor bat, bro'? Does it have bad breath, so all the baseballs won't go near it?''), simple psychology, and the threat of a certain locker-room photo (``What a day to wear my bunny rabbit underwear!'' moans one player). After a series of hilarious misadventures, the Feather-Soft Tigers finish, naturally, on top. Once again, Korman whips up a broad-humored farce, driven by a colorful cast and salted with satire—more-or-less gentle fun with plenty of unconventional (to say the least) baseball action. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46230-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
The first title in Lerner's new ``Runestone'' imprint is an only slightly revised reprint of a 1971 publication—a fact mentioned nowhere in the book—with more readable layout but mostly recycled b&w illustrations (except for a photo of demonstrators protesting the Rodney King verdict). This sweeping survey of the Arab and European slave trade, sandwiched between brief accounts of slavery in the ancient world and the abolition of trade in African captives (at least to the Americas) is written largely in generalities (``The Underground Railroad was risky but full of adventure''). Wide-ranging and usable but drab, especially compared to Meltzer's All Times, All Peoples (1980) or Hamilton's Many Thousand Gone (p. 147). Index. (Nonfiction. 11- 13)
Pub Date: June 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-8225-3150-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Lerner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
Cohen adds to his corpus of corpses (Ghostly Tales of Love and Revenge, 1992, etc.) with an assortment of European and American nautical apparitions—some widely known (the Flying Dutchman; hammering aboard the Great Eastern, frequently presaging misfortune), others of local interest, including several tales of Cornish ghosts from 19th-century collector William Bottrell. Most of the incidents follow typical patterns: an admiral who goes down with his ship in the Mediterranean appears that evening at a London reception; a drowned woman haunts a Bahamian beach calling for her child; the faces of two sailors buried at sea ``follow'' their ship. The ghosts are mostly friendly or passive, but readers will still find cause for an occasional shudder (in one tale, a hotel guest wakes to find himself sharing a bed with a dead sailor), while Cohen's unsensational reportage adds, as usual, an air of credibility. The author closes with a chapter on the Constellation and the Queen Mary, both haunted ships that can be visited. No source notes. (Nonfiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-22435-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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