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THE KREMLIN COUP

Name: THE KREMLIN COUP
Author: Laurie Nadel
ISBN: 1-56294-170-4

by Laurie Nadel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1992

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An exciting, fairly well balanced account of the August 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union. After outlining the coup's chronology, Nadel provides background information on Soviet history, the KGB, Stalin, Gorbachev and Yeltsin and presents the coup's after effects, including the Soviet Union's collapse; she also touches on some problems the new government faces with the end of the Cold War. The present tense effectively conveys the dramatic uncertainty of the coup's first few days; shifting to past and future tenses returns the text to a more insightful mode. Direct quotes give a strong sense of the emotions of the time. The illustrations (primarily color photos) are well reproduced and keyed to the text; the design is clear and effective. Though future events may call for follow-up volumes, this documents its topic well and will serve the need for up-to- date information on the former Soviet Union—at least until more major changes occur. Chronology; brief bibliography; index. (Nonfiction. 11-16)

Pub Date: April 1, 1992

ISBN: 1-56294-170-4

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Millbrook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

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CHILDREN'S HISTORY

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TORN THREAD

by Ann Isaacs ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)

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In 1943, motherless 12-year-old Eva, her sickly older sister Rachel, and their Papa are forced by the Germans, who have

occupied their Polish town, Bezdin, to live in the Jewish ghetto. Papa knows their lives are in danger and worries what will happen to his girls if he is killed or sent to a death camp. Then one day, as Rachel is walking to their aunt’s apartment for a visit, the soldiers raid the ghetto and carry her off. Weeks pass, and Papa finally hears that she is alive in a labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Since conditions in the ghetto worsen daily and the raids increase in frequency, Papa begs the Nazi official for whom he works to send Eva to join Rachel in Parschnitz; miraculously, his request is granted. At the camp, conditions are terrible—there is little water and practically no food, and the inmates are forced to work 18 hours a day at jobs that are not only difficult but extremely dangerous. Eva, for example, works on spinning machines, where she must keep lint from clogging the machinery by reaching into the moving mechanism. The girls grow weaker by the day, and their worries are compounded by two things: their uncertainty about the fate of Papa the ever-present chance that they will be chosen to board the trains that leave each day for the death camps. While the book is fiction, the author has based it on the life of her own mother-in-law, who survived in the camps even as her sister did. Every word of this radical change for Isaacs (Swamp Angel, 1994, etc.) rings as true as any first-person story told by an actual survivor, giving young readers another powerful testament to the horrors of the

Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)

Pub Date: April 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-590-60363-9

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Scholastic

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

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CIVIL WAR ARTIST

by Taylor Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

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It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)