This rogues’ gallery of bottom feeders makes an appealing way to bring reluctant readers to history.
How a disparate bunch of “most-wanted” criminals were tracked down, even if the tracking took days, weeks, or years and years.
Scandiffio brings an unhurried, smooth and just-portentous-enough tone to the brought-to-justice stories of eight criminal characters that most every adult (though maybe not that many children) has heard of, from John Dillinger to Christopher “Dudus” Coke of Jamaica, Manuel Noriega to Osama bin Laden. Each miscreant’s last hours are chronicled, but so is a reasonably significant slice of history, often in boxed asides, lending a sense of immediacy and context to the action. She also pays attention to local color (except she doesn’t mention the “Lady in Red,” certainly local color to the nth degree in the gunning down of John Dillinger). There is an obvious disconnect between someone like Dillinger and the mousy spy Aldrich Ames or Vladimir Levin, a cyberthief at great remove from his loot, but there is also no sense of romanticism here, a suitable choice, as counted in this number are Adolf Eichmann and bin Laden. It is good to have this selection from around the world, not singling out some poor neighborhood or region, and the artwork lends a burly, yeomanly quality of hard work to the captors, just as it details the evolution of tracking through the century.
This rogues’ gallery of bottom feeders makes an appealing way to bring reluctant readers to history. (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55451-621-6
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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