From the ugly duckling to the emperor’s new clothes, Denmark’s 19th-century talespinner has brought us some of the most enduring stories and vibrant metaphors in Western culture. Yolen works hard at making his unlovely and often unhappy life comprehensible for younger readers. She concentrates on his early days: desperate poverty, weird personal habits, and physical unattractiveness combined with an early patchwork education and a later desperate push for theater experience. In the end, though, with the stories learned at his illiterate mother’s knee and his own idiosyncratic reading and drama experience, he was famous indeed, the title’s description coming from Strindberg. Nolen creates wonderful textured illustrations in grayed colors heightened with white, like master drawings on sepia-toned backgrounds. Each spread displays a full-page image, an oval vignette, and a deliciously apt quotation from one of Andersen’s stories, often a lesser-known one. Very well-imagined and -integrated. (Picture book/biography. 7-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-46955-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Carlson celebrates the crowning (so to speak) achievement of John Batterson Stetson, a Philadelphia hatmaker who went West for his health in the 1850s and invented the emblematic piece of cowboy gear still identified with him, heavy enough to keep off the rain, wide enough to block the sun, tough enough to stand years of abuse—or, as some said, ``you can smell it across a room, but you just can't wear it out.'' Meade surrounds this lively odyssey with a kaleidoscope of brightly painted collage cowboy scenes, taking her ruddy-bearded artisan from his boyhood home in New Jersey to the gold fields of Pikes Peak, then back East where he found his fortune at last. Carlson closes her account with a biographical note while a cowboy poet's heartfelt tribute appears on the back of the jacket. Steer readers who want to know more about Stetson, or about western fashion in general, to M. Jean Greenlaw's Ranch Dressing (1993). (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7894-2479-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
In 1893, when she was 34, Wellesley English professor Katharine Lee Bates took a train trip from Boston to Colorado Springs to teach summer school. She kept a diary, as she had since she was nine, and wrote down odds and ends of observation and poetry when she could. She saw Niagara Falls, stopped off to visit a friend and see the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she marveled at Mr. Ferris’s Wheel and the gleaming white buildings. While in Colorado, she briefly glimpsed the top of Pike’s Peak, and the beginning of poem began to form. Combined with her other jottings, it would become “America the Beautiful,” set to a hymn by Samuel Ward. Using original sources, Younger makes a living character out of Bates, whose quirks and full-bodied charm gracefully flow from the letters and diary excerpts. Schuett’s illustrations, with their slightly exaggerated forms and saturated colors, capture not only the “fruited plains” and “alabaster cities” but vistas of Bates’s hometown of Falmouth, and intimate scenes of her cozy bedside table and the parlor where she welcomed guests. A wonderful historical endnote will be appreciated by those who think they are too old for picture books, or those working on school reports. Put this on display near Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius (1982) and Michael Bedard’s Emily (1992). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-45653-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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