A shoddily constructed, clumsily written biography that does a disservice to its audience.
Kicking off a new series about History’s Worst, a middle-grade survey of Adolf Hitler and World War II.
Buckley covers Hitler’s childhood, youth, service during World War I, takeover of the German Workers’ Party and subsequent transformation to the Nazi Party, seizure of power, World War II, and the Holocaust. Buckley’s overuse of adverbs and reliance on clichés results in such trite statements as “Measuring his failure against his friend’s success, Hitler basically fell off the map” and “World War I had begun and, believe it or not, Hitler was overjoyed.” Discussing the purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” Buckley writes, “If people had not been scared of Hitler before, these actions pushed their fear level off the charts.” His descriptions of historical, ideological, and political complexities are vague and frequently misleading. Readers may well end up believing the Freikorps was a single unit when, in fact, they were multiple, autonomous anti-communist paramilitary units organized during the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf is characterized as “like a to-do list for taking and holding power but with an awful, racist twist.” The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact is described “as if dogs and cats had signed an agreement saying they would never fight again.” Compared to such exemplars as James Cross Giblin’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, this biography, even though for a younger audience, falls far short.
A shoddily constructed, clumsily written biography that does a disservice to its audience. (timeline, source notes) (Biography. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7941-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Young researchers eager to know more about outlaw Belle Starr and adventurer and philanthropist Nellie Cashman might start...
A good idea by a fine author and illustrator goes somewhat awry in this middle-grade collective biography of 15 women of the Old West.
Winter gets in trouble right away with the introduction, in which he tries and fails to define the Wild West, with sentences like “There weren’t too many women in the Wild West, so the few who were there had to be really wild to compete with all those raucous men.” The women chosen are fascinating and often little known: the formerly enslaved Mary Fields, who drove a stagecoach for the U.S. Postal Service and was just its second woman employee; Lola Montez and Lotta Crabtree, wildly popular Gold Rush entertainers; and The-Other-Magpie, a Crow woman warrior. Though no doubt intended to be rollicking and engaging, the prose instead often seems patronizing or flip. Is it important that both Esther Morris, Wyoming suffragist and judge, and Carry Nation, anti-alcohol crusader, were both six feet tall and about 180 pounds? The biography of Santa Fe casino owner "La Tules" ends by saying that Mexico "continues to bring us Mexicans." Guevara notes that all but two of the sepia-and-black–accented watercolor portraits were taken directly from photographs of their subjects.
Young researchers eager to know more about outlaw Belle Starr and adventurer and philanthropist Nellie Cashman might start here, but they will have to move on to more reliable sources. (timeline, map) (Collective biography. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-1601-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Still, what baseball fan won’t thrill at this game that included the likes of the Brown Bomber, Willie “the Devil” Wells and...
Some of the best-ever baseball players face off in 1934 at the second annual Negro League All-Star game in Chicago.
In an era when major league baseball meant white players only, many of the best players played for the Negro Leagues and never got the chance to compete in a larger arena. Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Willie Wells, Satchel Paige and Oscar Charleston are legendary names despite the segregation that kept them from competing in one integrated league for their entire careers. The concept behind this slim volume is excellent—a story in poems told in nine innings, each inning properly divided into the top of the inning and bottom. Graphite illustrations lend an old-timey feel to the text, and various advertisements, fan comments and even a performance by the Jubilee Singers complete the event. The variety of things happening on and off the field offers both frequent changes of pace within the text and a sense of what attending a real game is like. Unfortunately, the text itself presents quite a reading challenge. Long poetic lines, the rhymes occasionally forced, may trip up young readers, where leaner, more muscular lines would have better served the energy of the game being described.
Still, what baseball fan won’t thrill at this game that included the likes of the Brown Bomber, Willie “the Devil” Wells and the Tan Cheetah? (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-689-86638-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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