This homage to the role of the everyday horse in advancing human culture leaves out how the horse feels about it.
An illustrated history presents the working horse–human relationship through the ages.
With colorful illustrations drawn in a child-friendly style, the book intersperses double-page spreads, spot illustrations, and more than a few simplified maps showing small horse figures cavorting on continents to give an overall informative, if busy, look. Although a few dark-skinned, black-haired people are depicted, the majority of the humans illustrated have the same light beige skin color, including the buckskin-clad, black-haired youth astride an Appaloosa or the person garbed in desert robes riding an Arabian. The text—also visually lively as it intersperses callout boxes, sidebars, and ongoing narration—offers plenty of information that is, unfortunately, somewhat sanitized. Racehorses, for example, were and are often mistreated, and coal ponies certainly didn’t have a great life hauling coal underground in mines, but these issues are glossed over quickly as the story resolutely develops its theme of the importance of the role of the everyday working horse. The backmatter presents a timeline and author’s note, which do mention, more pointedly, the less-happy interactions of humans and horses (such as the 8 million horses killed in World War I), but the overall story would be far more balanced if these darker relationships had been included in the body of the story. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-22.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 24.8% of actual size.)
This homage to the role of the everyday horse in advancing human culture leaves out how the horse feels about it. (Informational picture book. 8-12)Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4945-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Essential.
A measured corrective to pervasive myths about what is often referred to as the “first Thanksgiving.”
Contextualizing them within a Native perspective, Newell (Passamaquoddy) touches on the all-too-familiar elements of the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving and its origins and the history of English colonization in the territory now known as New England. In addition to the voyage and landfall of the Mayflower, readers learn about the Doctrine of Discovery that arrogated the lands of non-Christian peoples to European settlers; earlier encounters between the Indigenous peoples of the region and Europeans; and the Great Dying of 1616-1619, which emptied the village of Patuxet by 1620. Short, two- to six-page chapters alternate between the story of the English settlers and exploring the complex political makeup of the region and the culture, agriculture, and technology of the Wampanoag—all before covering the evolution of the holiday. Refreshingly, the lens Newell offers is a Native one, describing how the Wampanoag and other Native peoples received the English rather than the other way around. Key words ranging from estuary to discover are printed in boldface in the narrative and defined in a closing glossary. Nelson (a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Chippewa) contributes soft line-and-color illustrations of the proceedings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Essential. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-72637-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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