This compassionate summary of Joseph Merrick's life shows young readers that people can be "measured by the soul" rather...
Di Fiore colors history with imagined scenes to humanize a man the world knew as the Elephant Man.
Joseph Merrick, introduced mid–freak show in present tense, would rather have made people laugh than scream. Instead, severe disfigurement forced him to perform in freak shows as the Elephant Man, named for the heavy lumps growing on his skin. In past tense, the author simply recounts Merrick's journey through illness and exploitation to self-acceptance, courtesy of the compassionate Dr. Frederick Treves. The author personalizes Merrick's story by imagining his reactions to being ostracized, ogled by onlookers and medical students, and smiled at by a beautiful woman; his plausible sadness, joy, and loneliness promote empathy rather than pity. Hodnefjeld's drawings respect but soften Merrick's figure, in contrast to unflinching archival photographs of his body. The eye-catching blend of photographs and line drawings, including photographed heads on drawn bodies, offers glimpses of both Merrick's time and his life. An afterword explains how Merrick died as well as the probable cause of his deformity: Proteus syndrome. A photo reconstruction suggests what Merrick might have looked like without his disease, recalling a wish he expressed in poetry: "Could I create myself anew / I would not fail in pleasing you."
This compassionate summary of Joseph Merrick's life shows young readers that people can be "measured by the soul" rather than appearances. (bibliography) (Historical fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55451-778-7
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
An immensely popular figure in his day, the Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont invented a personal dirigible that he...
So the Wright Brothers were the first to fly? Au contraire, asserts Griffith in this rare portrait of a little-known (in this country, at least) early aviator.
An immensely popular figure in his day, the Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont invented a personal dirigible that he steered around the Eiffel Tower and drove out to run errands. Griffith’s prose isn’t always polished (“If Blériot succeeded to fly first….”), but her narrative makes her subject’s stature clear as she takes him from a luncheon with jeweler Louis Cartier, who invented the wristwatch to help his friend keep track of his time in the air, to his crowning aeronautical achievement in 1906: He beat out both the secretive Wrights and pushy rival Louis Blériot as the first to fly an aircraft that could take off and land on its own power. The author covers his career in more detail in a closing note (with photos), ascribing his eventual suicide in part to remorse that, instead of ushering in an era of peace as he had predicted, aircraft were being used in warfare. Montanari’s genteel pastel-and-chalk pictures of turn-of-the-20th-century Paris and Parisians don’t capture how much larger than life Santos-Dumont was, but they do succeed in helping Griffith bring him to American audiences.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0011-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Lenticular plates add an appropriately eye-catching gimmick to this quick profile of the 19th-century photographer whose sequential photographs of a horse galloping established that during its stride, all four hooves left the ground.
The four lenticular plates (one of which is duplicated for the cover) are based on Muybridge’s photos and more or less suggest what audiences who viewed the originals through his spinning Zoopraxiscope might have seen. Unfortunately, two are silhouettes, and none can be angled to offer a clean single image. More helpfully, the full sets of stills from which the plates are drawn along with sequences of other characteristic subjects—from the galloping horse that first made him famous to a flying bird and a winsome child picking up a doll—are included too. These, along with Braun’s terse but specific account of Muybridge’s career and achievements offer a clearer sense of why his photos are still worth studying for what they reveal about animal and human movement. Not to mention that they’re entertaining to pore over. As he regularly rates mention in histories of early filmmaking but almost never anywhere else, his work may be new to young readers and viewers, to boot. Low production values notwithstanding, a rare glimpse of a historically significant visual artist who also plainly had a well-developed sense of fun. (chronology, resource list) (Biography. 8-10)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-77085-229-7
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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