A facile portrait that substitutes positivity and platitudes for real insight.
A quickie profile of a “daddy’s girl” who has only ever wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps while “remaining her own person.”
Opening and closing with strong hints that she may try to follow her father into the Oval Office too in a few years, Doeden retraces Trump’s course from childhood and the Marla Maples scandal through schooling, modeling, marriage, and starting a family along with various business enterprises. He salutes her intelligence and work ethic, suggests that she joined her father’s campaign more out of family loyalty than agreement with his stated platform, and claims that working in the White House “will give her a chance to help drive policies about which she is passionate, including childcare reform.” Readers hoping for insight into her character, values, or specifics of those “policies” will find no more than bland generalities here. Color photos show her looking glossy and glamorous while posing at podiums, with her children, her father, and (possibly former) “close friend” Chelsea Clinton.
A facile portrait that substitutes positivity and platitudes for real insight. (source notes, timeline, print and web resources, index) (Biography. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5124-8624-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Lerner
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Noncanonical entries make this a natural companion or follow-up for Kathleen Krull’s essential Lives of the Artists,...
For budding artists, here’s a heartening reminder that 17 unconventional greats—not to mention all the rest—started out as children too.
The pseudonymous Stabler (Robert Schnakenberg in real life) adopts a liberal admissions policy for his latest gathering of anecdotal profiles (Kid Presidents, 2014, etc.). In a chapter on the influence of nature and wildlife on early artistic visions, Leonardo da Vinci and the young Vincent van Gogh rub shoulders with Beatrix Potter and Emily Carr; in another focusing on overcoming shyness or other personal, social, or economic obstacles, Jackson Pollock hangs out with Charles Schulz, Yoko Ono, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In a third chapter that highlights the importance of a supportive parent, teacher, or other cheerleader, fathers do for prodigious young Pablo Picasso and polio-stricken Frida Kahlo, his mother for Andy Warhol, art instructors for Jacob Lawrence and Keith Haring. The author owns an easy, readable style, and though he leaves out quite a lot—Diego Rivera goes unmentioned in the Kahlo entry, nor do van Gogh’s suicide, Basquiat’s heroin addiction, or anyone’s sexual orientation come up—he’s chosen his subjects with an eye toward diversity of background, upbringing, and, eventually, style and media. Horner lightens the overall tone further with cartoon vignettes of caricatured but recognizable figures.
Noncanonical entries make this a natural companion or follow-up for Kathleen Krull’s essential Lives of the Artists, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt (1995). (bibliography) (Collective biography. 10-13)Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59474-896-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Chortleworthy at first glance, disturbingly superficial at second and subsequent ones.
Six presidents of our Holocene epoch pair up with prehistoric predecessors, from George Washingdonyx to Franklin D. Rex.
Following the format of The Prehistoric Masters of Literature (2016), Lacey matches a dino-bio that comes with an attached booklet containing further details to a profile of a historical chief executive from the (considerably) more recent past. Though millions of years separate the administrations of each couple, there are remarkable parallels: Thomas Jeffersaurus drafted a “Declaration of In-dino-pendence,” and Franklin D. Rex crafted a New Deal for those afflicted by the Great Ice Age. It’s a clever premise—but the author’s efforts to accentuate the positive for each president lead her into some troublesome territory. She trumpets Andrew Jaxceratops/Jackson’s “passion for democracy” while staying silent about his treatment of Native Americans, for instance, and makes no mention of slavery either until noting that (in an infelicitous choice of words) Abraham Lincolnator “freed millions of creatures.” The Winning of the West may not be the best choice to represent Theodore Rexevelt’s publications either, considering that work’s rabid cultural imperialism. For all that they’re uniformly green of skin, the dignitaries in Isik’s cartoon portraits generally resemble their modern white (mostly) counterparts, except in a gallery of additional proto-presidents where “Obamasaurus” has thick lips (wrong in more ways than one).
Chortleworthy at first glance, disturbingly superficial at second and subsequent ones. (list of presidents) (Informational novelty. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63322-109-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Walter Foster Jr.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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