For young readers who don’t fancy becoming President (2000) or an Inventor (2002), St. George offers another career path—actually, several dozen paths, as under the aegis of “explorer” she includes not only such familiar figures as Columbus, Mary Kingsley, Amelia Earhart and Yuri Gagarin, but also a lengthy roster that includes the likes of test pilot Chuck Yeager, human genome mappers Francis Collins and Craig Venter, and David Kunst, who walked around the world. Readers will come away with a clear idea of what these and their fellow travelers accomplished, and when—and, more important, a sense of the courage, curiosity and other personal qualities that impelled them. She writes in an exuberant style—“Explorers tackle a quest with gusto. ‘Great’ wasn’t added to Alexander’s name for nothing. . . . ”—that Small’s larger than life, extravagantly wrought caricatures echo perfectly. First-class inspirational reading: funny, fluent and on target. (biographical “glossary”) (Nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-23868-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
PLB 0-06-027821-8 For Aliki (Marianthe’s Story, 1998, etc.), the story of the Globe Theatre is a tale of two men: Shakespeare, who made it famous, and Sam Wanamaker, the driving force behind its modern rebuilding. Decorating margins with verbal and floral garlands, Aliki creates a cascade of landscapes, crowd scenes, diminutive portraits, and sequential views, all done with her trademark warmth and delicacy of line, allowing viewers to glimpse Elizabethan life and theater, historical sites that still stand, and the raising of the new Globe near the ashes of the old. She finishes with a play list, and a generous helping of Shakespearean coinages. Though the level of information doesn’t reach that of Diane Stanley’s Bard of Avon (1992), this makes a serviceable introduction to Shakespeare’s times while creating a link between those times and the present; further tempt young readers for whom the play’s the thing with Marcia Williams’s Tales From Shakespeare (1998). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-027820-X
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Leedy (Measuring Penny, 1998, etc.), so deft in making hard facts memorable and setting information into a context that makes sense to children, selects a hodge-podge of details and miscellany to convey a sense of what every state is about, as either a political entity or a place. Into lively, effulgent illustrations she plants a monotonous, forgettable list of items to distinguish every state: a map, the state flower and bird, a whiff of landscape, a glimpse of industry. There’s little about such a list—e.g., wheat, pronghorn, western meadowlark, prairie rose, Sitting Bull—to shout, in that example, “North Dakota” to children. The alphabetical listing—Alaska through Wyoming, four states a spread, with room for the US territories and Washington, D.C.—will help researchers, although it necessarily separates states that have natural geographic or historic connections, such as Vermont and New Hampshire, or West Virginia and Virginia, divided during the Civil War. Readers gain a good, first-line resource, with all the enthusiasm Leedy has made her trademark, but without much chance that they’ll adopt the excitement. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8234-1431-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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