A good choice for any young gourmand’s bookshelf.
Learn the history of some of America’s favorite foods in this delicious page-turner.
What’s the connection between hamburgers and horses? French fries and Peru? Ice cream and…George Washington? Foodies, folklorists, and factoid aficionados will all clamor to discover the answers in this finger-lickin’-good study of food history. Told in a breezy, conversational style, the book walks readers through the often surprisingly far-ranging history and folklore of favorite foods from pizza to peanut butter. The tidbits on offer are both entertaining (Eleanor Roosevelt earned opprobrium for serving hot dogs to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) and enlightening (Americans say cookie rather than biscuit because the rebellious colonists rejected the British term and opted for the Dutch word koekjes instead).The book is divided into 10 chapters in total, each focusing on a different food item or meal and including both trivia and a related recipe for those who want to impress their friends with general knowledge and their culinary skills. Occasional two-tone illustrations and callout boxes break up the text, providing light humor and additional info, respectively. Readers who are hungry for more will be able to sample from the select bibliography, which breaks down sources by chapter for easy consumption. The index is stuffed to the brim, making for easy access to facts between reads.
A good choice for any young gourmand’s bookshelf. (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7624-9807-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Running Press Kids
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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