Calling on both contemporary travelers' accounts and songs of the griots, the McKissacks reconstruct the history of three West African empires, each of which flourished in turn, only to be nearly buried by time and scholarly prejudice. Supported by trade in gold, salt, and, later, slaves, all three enjoyed long stretches of prosperity and peace between the 6th and 18th centuries AD, practicing religious toleration and giving women enough freedom to shock visiting Muslims. Mansa Kankan Musa I of Mali (d. 1332) ``governed an empire as large as all of Europe, second in size only to the territory at the time ruled by Genghis Khan in Asia.'' Ironically, and typically, the very location of Musa's capital is disputed today. The McKissacks shed light on the area's enduring social structures and family customs as well as its political history; they present different sides of controversies, sometimes supporting one of them (e.g., the contention that an African expedition crossed the Atlantic during Musa's reign). A final chapter, about two 19th-century slaves from West Africa, one of whom eventually returned to his homeland, probably belongs in another book, but it does help to narrow the gap between today's young readers and this glorious, obscured era in African history. Timeline; endnotes; substantial bibliography. Maps and index not seen. (Nonfiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-1670-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)
In 1943, motherless 12-year-old Eva, her sickly older sister Rachel, and their Papa are forced by the Germans, who have
occupied their Polish town, Bezdin, to live in the Jewish ghetto. Papa knows their lives are in danger and worries what will happen to his girls if he is killed or sent to a death camp. Then one day, as Rachel is walking to their aunt’s apartment for a visit, the soldiers raid the ghetto and carry her off. Weeks pass, and Papa finally hears that she is alive in a labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Since conditions in the ghetto worsen daily and the raids increase in frequency, Papa begs the Nazi official for whom he works to send Eva to join Rachel in Parschnitz; miraculously, his request is granted. At the camp, conditions are terrible—there is little water and practically no food, and the inmates are forced to work 18 hours a day at jobs that are not only difficult but extremely dangerous. Eva, for example, works on spinning machines, where she must keep lint from clogging the machinery by reaching into the moving mechanism. The girls grow weaker by the day, and their worries are compounded by two things: their uncertainty about the fate of Papa the ever-present chance that they will be chosen to board the trains that leave each day for the death camps. While the book is fiction, the author has based it on the life of her own mother-in-law, who survived in the camps even as her sister did. Every word of this radical change for Isaacs (Swamp Angel, 1994, etc.) rings as true as any first-person story told by an actual survivor, giving young readers another powerful testament to the horrors of the
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-590-60363-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-91426-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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