This America at Work entry features cartoon illustrations of a smiling family on a trip “out east” to a Junior Miners’ hockey tournament. The mother works in a molybdenum mine, the father works in a steel mill, and parental offers to take their twins to work meet with great approval. Even readers unfamiliar with the series may surmise, rightly, that this is going to be a wordy ride through material that may or may not be useful in writing school reports. Cutaway charts intended to support the hackneyed premise do little to clarify the goings on in an underground mine; two miners in hard hats who are “making the roof safe,” for example, shore up a shaft with what appear to be automatic weapons with tiny flying buttresses set on the shaft’s floor. The topic-driven trip includes visits to a steel mill, an airplane ride, an oil well, a toxic dump, a picnic in a park that was once a coal pit, and ends in a hockey arena, with the kids asking all the right questions to keep the facts flowing. They count things made from steel or oil in an “interactivity” befitting the automaton-like nature of progeny who actually let their mother get away with lecturing, “At a smelter, the bits of molybdenum ore are heated and refined to form a powder of pure molybdenum.” (index) (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55074-508-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
PLB 0-531-33140-7 Ketcham’s first book is based on an allegedly true story of a childhood incident in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. It starts with a couple of pages regaling the Bach home and all the Johanns in the family, who made their fame through music. After his father’s death, Johann Sebastian goes to live with his brother, Johann Christoph, where he boasts that he is the best organist in the world. Johann Christoph contradicts him: “Old Adam Reincken is the best.” So Johann Sebastian sets out to hear the master himself. In fact, he is humbled to tears, but there is hope that he will be the world’s best organist one day. Johann Sebastian emerges as little more than a brat, Reincken as more of a suggestion than a character. Bush’s illustrations are most transporting when offering details of the landscape, but his protagonist is too impish to give the story much authority. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30140-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Adler (also with Widener, Lou Gehrig, 1997, etc.) sets his fictional story during the week of July 14, 1932, in the Bronx, when the news items that figure in this tale happened. A boy gets a dime for his birthday, instead of the bicycle he longs for, because it is the Great Depression, and everyone who lives in his neighborhood is poor. While helping his friend Jacob sell newspapers, he discovers that his own father, who leaves the house with a briefcase each day, is selling apples on Webster Avenue along with the other unemployed folk. Jacob takes the narrator to Yankee Stadium with the papers, and people don’t want to hear about the Coney Island fire or the boy who stole so he could get something to eat in jail. They want to hear about Babe Ruth and his 25th homer. As days pass, the narrator keeps selling papers, until the astonishing day when Ruth himself buys a paper from the boy with a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change. The acrylic paintings bask in the glow of a storied time, where even row houses and the elevated train have a warm, solid presence. The stadium and Webster Avenue are monuments of memory rather than reality in a style that echoes Thomas Hart Benton’s strong color and exaggerated figures. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201378-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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