This brief volume offers only a cursory view of places worth a more intense look.
A slim collection of awe-inspiring sites the world over.
The places are all part of the built environment, created by people throughout the ages, including the Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Ankgor Wat, the Taj Mahal, and 20th-century marvels like Sagrada Familia and the Sydney Opera House. Each section starts with a large picture of the exterior of the site with one short descriptive paragraph, then continues with a second double-page spread with several rectangular panels highlighting information about the interior, interesting facts, and equipment needed for the trip or souvenirs to buy. While the initial visuals are attractive, the secondary pages do not provide the in-depth details needed to really understand the beauty of many of these sites. For example, the text for Sagrada Familia mentions the interior, yet there are no illustrations of the inside of the building with its fantastic columns that evoke the natural world. The different exterior facades are mentioned, and again, readers are told about the details of Jesus’ life that are depicted, but the illustrations do no justice to the sculptural stories that exist. Although the places mentioned are from around the world, Africa is ignored except for Egypt. This could be used as a jumping-off place for further exploration, but it doesn’t really do the job it set out to do. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.8-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 56.4% of actual size.)
This brief volume offers only a cursory view of places worth a more intense look. (map, glossary) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64686-067-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Barefoot Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Buoyant if occasionally simplistic, with a distinct lean to the left.
An introduction to the U.S. Constitution, with case studies, commentary, and debate questions to spark rumination and discussion.
Using simplified language, as the original is replete with “old-fashioned terms and some of the loooooongest sentences you will ever see,” the authors go over select parts of each article and amendment in turn. Along with blowing off originalists by characterizing the document as designed “to be reinterpreted and revised over time as our society evolves,” they point to ways racial and gender inequities, beginning with enslavement, have so often been “silently woven between the lines” and caution readers to be wary of historical “whitewashing.” They also profile notable reformers, women who have served in Congress and/or run for president, and hot-button issues such as gun control and abortion rights. Budding political activists are encouraged at the close to get involved: “Power is fun!” Lewis populates the pages with mixes of stylized individual portraits and thoroughly diversified clusters of small figures waving protest signs, marching, or, like a rainbow row of women celebrating the 19th Amendment and the biracial couple raising glasses at Prohibition’s repeal, posing in triumph. Occasional bobbles notwithstanding—the Federalist Party was hardly “the nation’s financial system,” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not “end slavery,” and it’s not 100% true that “police shootings of Black people…continue unchecked”—this view of the foundational document of our national system is both nuanced and reasonably easy to understand.
Buoyant if occasionally simplistic, with a distinct lean to the left. (glossary, index, reading list) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: July 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-5404-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Engagingly informal, more cogent than ever, and rich in rare facts and insights.
A graphic-novel history of the democratic ideal and its slow, difficult progress toward realization in the United States.
Following the practice of the three previous Big Ideas titles, Brown chooses a historical figure to conduct his tour, and he outdoes himself here by picking Abigail Adams—a brilliant, self-educated woman whose famous dictum to her husband, John, to “Remember the Ladies” positions her well to remember Native Americans, immigrants, and people of African descent as she chronicles the long struggle to build a “more Perfect Union,” from the principles of equal rights for all and government through “consent of the governed.” If her opening review of prehistoric linkages between the inventions of agriculture, cities, and governmental systems has been challenged recently, it holds in broad outline and sets up subsequent surveys of empires worldwide, of Athenian democracy, of republics from Rome to the Iroquois Confederacy, and of significant documents about rights such as the 13th-century Manden Charter in West Africa. She addresses the outrageous racist compromises built into our Constitution (“No, I’m not making it up”) and subsequent watermarks both low, like the Dred Scott Decision, and high, up to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of an equitable future. In the loosely drawn panels, dark- and olive-complexioned men and women are steadily present to reinforce the message that, yes, they, too, belong in this aspirational, still unfinished story.
Engagingly informal, more cogent than ever, and rich in rare facts and insights. (timeline, information on Abigail Adams, endnotes, bibliography, author’s note, index) (Graphic nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5738-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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