Livelier than the typical history textbook but sillier than the many outstanding works on the Civil War available for young...
Travel with Nathan Hale back to 1861 for the famous Civil War battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, the war’s first ironclad ships.
Unless readers have read Hale’s One Dead Spy (2012) first, they may well wonder why the famous spy Nathan Hale, hanged for espionage in 1776, is telling this future story of naval warfare during the Civil War. It turns out that Nathan Hale—the spy, not the author—was standing at the gallows when he was swallowed by a giant book of American history. He lives to tell about it and, presumably, other tales of America for future volumes of Hazardous Tales. This volume, completed prior to One Dead Spy, is a wild ride of a graphic novel, featuring not only Nathan Hale, but his hangman, a fox representing Gustavus Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the various participants in the battle. Sketched, inked and colored in Photoshop, the two-color, frenetic volume succeeds in presenting the chaos of war. The backmatter is notable for its informative biographies of key players, a timeline, and a small but well-selected bibliography.
Livelier than the typical history textbook but sillier than the many outstanding works on the Civil War available for young readers, this will appeal to both history buffs and graphic-novel enthusiasts. (Graphic historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0395-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Readers are treated to Muir’s life journey—but, artwise, nothing resembles the source of his inspiration.
In graphic-novel style, this supposed autobiography reveals details of John Muir’s life.
The table of contents lists nine chapters, intriguingly titled. The light tone continues on the next two pages, showing four loose-limbed, comical figures under the heading “Key Characters.” Three of these characters are John: “as a child…a young man…an old man”; the fourth, a dog, bears the label “Stickeen.” (More characters do follow.) As John tells his story, the text cleverly intersperses brief quotations from his own writings with phrases that he and the people in his life might reasonably have said. During early childhood in Dunbar, Scotland, the wee lad already relishes the natural world and hates studying indoors. The format accentuates the reactions of John’s schoolmaster and his father, as they “THWOP” and “THWACK” John’s curly head. When he moves to the United States, Muir’s passion for nature accelerates, eventually leading to a “thousand-mile walk” from Indiana to Florida. He assumes the roles of inventor, husband, father, farmer, explorer—and always conservationist, eventually establishing the Sierra Club and lobbying for the first national parks. The art works well for some scenes, such as a harrowing, near-death experience in Alaska. However, it is a major disappointment that Muir’s descriptions of overwhelming natural beauty are illustrated with the same comical style and that readers must peruse closing notes to learn which words are Muir’s and which are Bertagna’s.
Readers are treated to Muir’s life journey—but, artwise, nothing resembles the source of his inspiration. (chronology, glossary, note on parks) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-930238-94-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Yosemite Conservancy
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A frank, often funny appreciation of our space program’s high-water mark.
Brown launches the Big Ideas That Changed the World series with a graphic commemoration of the program that put boots on the moon.
Brown assumes the narrative voice of Rodman Law, a wisecracking professional daredevil who attempted to ride a rocket in 1913 (“Yeah, this oughta work”) and beat the odds by surviving the explosion. He opens with a capsule history of rocketry from ancient China to the Mercury and Gemini programs before recapping the Apollo missions. Keeping the tone light and offering nods as he goes to historical figures including Johann Schmidlap (“rhymes with ‘Fmidlap’ ”), “cranky loner” Robert Goddard, and mathematician Katherine Johnson, he focuses on technological advances that made space travel possible and on the awesome, sustained effort that brought President John F. Kennedy’s “Big Idea” to fruition, ending the narrative with our last visit to the moon. Aside from the numerous huge, raw explosions that punctuate his easy-to-follow sequential panels, the author uses restrained colors and loose, fluid modeling to give his mildly cartoonish depictions of figures and (then) cutting-edge technology an engagingly informal air. He doesn’t gloss over Laika’s sad fate or the ugly fact that Wernher von Braun built rockets for the Nazis with “concentration-camp prisoners.” Occasional interjections and a closing author’s note also signal Brown’s awareness that for this story, at least, his cast had to be almost exclusively white and male.
A frank, often funny appreciation of our space program’s high-water mark. (index, endnotes, resource lists) (Graphic nonfiction. 8-11)Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3404-5
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
