Eye candy for both serious and casual dinophiles, with an admixture of facts and fancies.
Two accomplished paleoartists invite armchair paleontologists to go eye to eye with 21 dinosaurs and flying reptiles.
Each chosen dino is presented in a two- to four-page gallery of full-body color portraits supplemented with sepia close-ups of claws and maws. They range from toothy theropods like Carcharodontosaurus saharicus—posed with jaws open, closed, and drenched in gore—and towering sauropod Argentinosaurus huinculensis to Enaliornis barretti, an early bird. All are carefully identified and caught in natural poses with faint shadows but almost no other background detail. Nearly all gaze directly up at viewers with predatory or (if vegetarian) cautionary mien. Their physical details and brightly patterned, scaly hides are worked with fine-lined realism, and colors, particularly in feathers, glow iridescently. Each entry includes a tally of basic information, a select set of descriptive labels, and a scale drawing of the creature next to a (usually much smaller) human figure. Perhaps in an effort to add verisimilitude, though, the authors salt the captions and commentary with unsupported notes on “Temperament” and behavior (“Microraptor emits a high-pitched squawk”), nor do they cite any sources or leads to further information.
Eye candy for both serious and casual dinophiles, with an admixture of facts and fancies. (pronunciation guide) (Nonfiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63322-033-1
Page Count: 115
Publisher: Quarto
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate.
Stepping carefully around the controversies, a former curator at Monticello reconstructs the septuagenarian Jefferson’s active daily round.
Jefferson’s fixed routine begins with a faithful recording of temperature and weather at first rising and ends with a final period of solitary reading by candlelight in his unusual alcove bed. In between, the author describes in often fussy detail the range of his interests and enterprises. There’s not only his “polygraph” and other beloved gadgets, but also meals, family members, visitors, and excursions to Monticello’s diverse gardens, workshops and outbuildings. Like the dialogue, which mixes inventions with historical utterances, the generous suite of visuals includes photos of furnishings and artifacts as well as stodgy full-page tableaux and vignettes painted by Elliott. The “slaves” or “enslaved” workers (the author uses the terms interchangeably) that Jefferson encounters through the day are all historical and named—but Sally Hemings and her Jeffersonian offspring are conspicuously absent (aside from a brief name check buried in the closing timeline). Jefferson adroitly sidesteps a pointed question from his grandson, who accompanies him on his rounds, by pleading his age: “The work of ending slavery is for the young.”
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate. (sidebars, endnotes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0541-0
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
A browser’s delight, despite lowering the bar considerably for publishable poetry.
From Alexander the Great’s steed Bucephalus to Dolly the sheep and the first Shamu, a gallery of animals that have played roles, large or small, in human history.
Modeled on the collaborators’ previous Presidential Pets (2012), each of the chronologically ordered entries features a full-page cartoon caricature opposite a mix of at least marginally relevant facts (“Horses sleep both lying down and standing up”) and observations that feel more like filler than anything else. “Josephine changed her name from Rose because Napoleon didn’t like it,” reads one in the piece on a dog that fished Napoleon Bonaparte out of the Mediterranean; “Leonardo never married or had children,” reads another on Leonardo da Vinci’s propensity for freeing caged birds. Also as in Pets, Moberg introduces each chosen creature in verse that ranges from inane to merely laughably inept: Spotting penguins in South America, “Magellan was surprised / That creatures used to snow / Also liked the sun / And life as Latinos!” Some passages are printed over brightly colored backgrounds and so are hard to read. Furthermore, the author provides no sources whatsoever. Still, fans of Keltie Thomas’ Animals That Changed the World (2010) will find new creatures aplenty here, along with the familiar likes of Balto, Koko and Punxsutawney Phil.
A browser’s delight, despite lowering the bar considerably for publishable poetry. (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62354-048-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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