At a time when women were expected to be domestic angels, this spunky history tracks a handful of female risk-takers who dared to do what they loved despite the danger. Cummins profiles 14 women ranging in age from 15 to 63 who, between 1880 and 1929, performed death-defying acts guaranteed to generate thrills and chills and to challenge myths about the proper place of women. Rosa Richter performed as a human cannonball; Annie Taylor survived Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel; Mlle. D’Zizi and Gertrude Breton flew through space on their bicycles; and blindfolded May Wirth perfected a double backward somersault from one galloping horse to another. Mable Stark won raves as a tiger tamer. Gladys Roy and Gladys Ingle danced on biplane wings. Sonora Carver dove 60 feet into a water tank on the back of a horse. Cummins tells the stories of these and other female daredevils with panache, sensitive to their roles as the “extreme sport” reality-show stars of the day. Harness’s action-packed illustrations show each female daredevil performing in period costume and setting. Kudos for bringing to light this hidden slice of female history. (introduction, chronology, sources) (Nonfiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-47948-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
With but a light sprinkling of names and dates, Myers condenses his Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (1993) to picture- book length. Myers takes readers through his subject’s childhood and turbulent career, pausing for significant episodes (such as a white teacher’s suggestion that he’d be better off studying carpentry than law), supplying samples of his vivid rhetoric, and tracing his movement toward visions of a more inclusive, less violent revolution. Placing realistic portraits of X and other icons of the civil rights movement against swirling backdrops of faces and street scenes, Jenkins captures a sense of tumultuous times. What emerges most clearly is a portrait of a complex, compelling spokesman who was growing and changing up to the moment he was cut down. (Picture book/biography. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-027707-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
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