This lovely, child-friendly biography evokes and celebrates this fabulous naif.
A charming, affecting picture-book life of France’s most celebrated naive painter—Henri Rousseau.
Around 1884, when he was in his 40s, Rousseau determined that he needed to transcend his life as a customs officer and began to recreate himself as an artist. Though he had no formal training and few financial resources, he persevered and created countless canvases that showcased his unique, almost magical personal visions, visions that continue to resonate with young and old alike. Rousseau was ridiculed repeatedly by critics and artists, yet he continued to create his exotic, seemingly unsophisticated paintings. His lush tropical scenes were fueled by visits to the botanic gardens; his exotic animals were inspired by visits to the zoo. Though he remained a perpetual outsider, the Parisian avant-garde eventually embraced the visionary Rousseau, honoring him at a 1908 banquet (organized by Picasso himself). Markel’s simple, poetic text (“tropical plants fruit and flower into garlands, rockets, and rosettes of color”) is matched with Hall’s vivid, venturesome illustrations. The bright watercolor-and-acrylic paintings have an impressive vitality and wonderfully channel Rosseau’s fantastic motifs and his characteristic use of flattened shapes and perspectives.
This lovely, child-friendly biography evokes and celebrates this fabulous naif. (author and illustrator notes) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5364-6
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures.
Abraham Lincoln’s ascent to the presidency is recounted in a fluid, easy-to-read biography for early readers.
Simple, direct sentences stress Lincoln’s humble upbringing, his honesty, and his devotion to acting with moral conviction. “Lincoln didn’t seem like a man who would be president one day. But he studied hard and became a lawyer. He cared about people and about justice.” Slavery and Lincoln’s signature achievement of emancipation are explained in broad yet defined, understandable analogies. “At that time, in the South, the law let white people own black people, just as they owned a house or a horse.” Readers are clearly given the president’s perspective through some documented memorable quotes from his own letters. “Lincoln did not like slavery. ‘If slavery is not wrong,’ he wrote to a friend ‘nothing is wrong.’ ” (The text does not clarify that this letter was written in 1865 and not before he ascended to the presidency, as implied by the book.) As the war goes on and Lincoln makes his decision to free the slaves in the “Southern states”—“a bold move”—Lincoln’s own words describe his thinking: “ ‘If my name ever goes into history,’ Lincoln said, ‘it will be for this act.’ ” A very basic timeline, which mentions the assassination unaddressed in the text, is followed by backmatter providing photographs, slightly more detailed historical information, and legacy. It’s a pity that the text is accompanied by unremarkable, rudimentary opaque paintings.
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures. (Informational early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243256-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)
“There’s nothing I can’t be,” young Maya thinks, and then shows, in this profile for newly independent readers, imported from Spain.
The inspirational message is conveyed through a fine skein of biographical details. It begins with her birth in St. Louis and the prejudice she experienced growing up in a small Arkansas town and closes with her reading of a poem “about her favorite thing: hope” at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. In between, it mentions the (unspecified) “attack” by her mother’s boyfriend and subsequent elective muteness she experienced as a child, as well as some of the varied pursuits that preceded her eventual decision to become a writer. Kaiser goes on in a closing spread to recap Angelou’s life and career, with dates, beneath a quartet of portrait photos. Salaberria’s simple illustrations, filled with brown-skinned figures, are more idealized than photorealistic, but, though only in the cover image do they make direct contact with readers’, Angelou’s huge eyes are an effective focal point in each scene. The message is similar in the co-published Amelia Earhart, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara (and also translated by Pitt), but the pictures are more fanciful as illustrator Mariadiamantes endows the aviator with a mane of incandescent orange hair and sends her flying westward (in contradiction of the text and history) on her final around-the-world flight.
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84780-889-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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