A delightful volume that deftly and wittily balances learning with humor and approachable perspective.
Human history is told in a series of bite-size, point-of-view cartoons covering lots of ground.
What if the Age of Enlightenment were encapsulated by Isaac Newton's cat, Spithead? What if a Greek vase could talk, providing insight into ancient pottery making? This delightful, informational, and necessarily loopy book tackles history in three parts: “Ancient History,” “The Middle Ages,” and “The Modern Age.” The book goes in strange directions, giving inanimate objects, locations, and animals the same weight as, say, a day in the life of a “movie writer” from 1927 or the queen of England. As with the duo's previous book, A Day in the Life of a Poo, a Gnu and You (2020), pages featuring panels are intercut with “Bigger Picture” spreads, fictional diaries, and “Newsflashes” that detail other events happening around the same time. Those features break up what might otherwise be an exhausting read, not because the energetic, playful writing and versatile drawings aren't entertaining but because there is so much factual material being covered in between Game of Thrones references, talking poop, and on-point critiques of, for instance, Christopher Columbus’ inhumane treatment of Indigenous people. The book is worth returning to again and again for new nuggets of knowledge (“Neolithic humans used flint axes and wedges to work me into shape,” says a Standing Stone from 2100 B.C.E., “Talk about a 'splitting' headache!”). Characters range in skin tone throughout.
A delightful volume that deftly and wittily balances learning with humor and approachable perspective. (glossary, “About Mike and Jess”) (Graphic nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78055-713-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Buster Books
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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