Ducking beneath a parade dragon in Chinatown, Ms. Frizzle and three youngsters emerge a thousand years ago and halfway around the world. For her third excursion into the past, she takes advantage of this tailor-made teachable moment to squire her charges from rice fields to the Imperial Palace in Beijing. They hardly pause along the way for looks at silk- and tea-making, Chinese poetry and writing, inventions, the Great Wall (errantly declared to be 30,000 miles long—off by a factor of about 10, depending on what’s measured) and even how to hold chopsticks. Impoverished rice farmers are clean and smiling in Degen’s brightly colored, crisply drawn illustrations, but there are at least hints that not everyone’s a happy camper, and the pictures do add further cultural and historical detail with running panels along the bottom of each spread. Having persuaded the Emperor to lift the taxes on poor farmers, the quartet returns to our time, just in time for a Chinese New Year’s dinner—each dish labeled with its symbolic significance. The learning never stops, nor does the pace. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-590-10822-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A song made famous by a host of singers has become a picture book that well suits the lyric’s eloquent plea for universal peace and understanding. Based on a utopian vision of what the world could and should be like, the intricate folk-art drawings show the earth, first from a great distance, then increasingly closer and more intimately. As the text shifts from describing scenes of harmony and plenty to more ominous images of war and want, the illustrations depict troubled faces in the windows of homes and military activity in the background. The spare text and powerful images work in accord to provide educators and parents with a book that can be used to stimulate discussion of many different issues. (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-45872-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
Through Florrie’s eyes readers experience the despair and hopelessness of talented actors who were forced to leave the stage to find other work when the Lafayette Theatre closed its doors; the golden days of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s have disappeared into the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Florrie’s father, once an actor, toils at the Allnight Bakery. Florrie’s greatest dream is for her father to be able to leave his job and return to the stage, and so she makes a wish on a tree that grows next to the Lafayette Theatre; it has become a symbol of endurance for black actors, a tree of hope. A director, Mr. Welles, arrives when President Roosevelt orders that the doors of the theatre be opened; there is to be a staging of Macbeth, and Florrie’s father gets a part. An author’s note attests to the veracity of events in the story, when Orson Welles directed African-Americans in roles from which they were once excluded. Cooper’s lavish oil-wash, full-page paintings pay mute tribute to the loss of luster and its regeneration in Harlem, in scenes in which the footlights cast a glow, and in which the faces tell a story that hardly needs words. (bibliography) (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-23300-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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