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
Pretty but insubstantial.
Zommer surveys various bird species from around the world in this oversized (almost 14 inches tall tall) volume.
While exuberantly presented, the information is not uniformly expressed from bird to bird, which in the best cases will lead readers to seek out additional information and in the worst cases will lead to frustration. For example, on spreads that feature multiple species, the birds are not labeled. This happens again later when the author presents facts about eggs: Readers learn about camouflaged eggs, but the specific eggs are not identified, making further study extremely difficult. Other facts are misleading: A spread on “city birds” informs readers that “peregrine falcons nest on skyscrapers in New York City”—but they also nest in other large cities. In a sexist note, a peahen is identified as “unlucky” because she “has drab brown feathers” instead of flashy ones like the peacock’s. Illustrations are colorful and mostly identifiable but stylized; Zommer depicts his birds with both eyes visible at all times, even when the bird is in profile. The primary audience for the book appears to be British, as some spreads focus on European birds over their North American counterparts, such as the mute swan versus the trumpeter swan and the European robin versus the American robin. The backmatter, a seven-word glossary and an index, doesn’t provide readers with much support.
Pretty but insubstantial. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-500-65151-3
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
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