Actually, on several islands in the Chesapeake Bay. Mills (Until the Cows Come Home, not reviewed) is a wonderful photographer, and she shows herself to great advantage in this glossy and exciting collection of images. She presents scenes from an island day: fishing, crabbing, watermen preparing their boats in the early morning. She captures the flora and fauna, the various vessels, and the water meeting the sand, in bright daylight and in the glow of sunset. All these images are spectacular; the narrative, however, although poetic, adds little to the otherwise gorgeous presentation. Mills might have been more courageous to leave out the text entirely. Parents won't want to part with this one, which is just as well since it would make a better coffee-table spectacle than picture book. (Nonfiction/Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55858-333-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
This latest addition to the Drawing America series tells the story of Lewis and Clark's young native guide, Sacajawea. When Sacajawea, Shoshoni Indian girl, is captured by raiders, it will be years before she is reunited with her tribe. Her new life with the Minnetaree is that of a slave. She remains in this situation for three years until she is sold to a French-Canadian fur trader. Raphael and Bolognese (Donkey, It's Snowing, 1981, etc.) then write that she is married at 13 to the trader, but not how she responds to these new circumstances. When a group of explorers headed by Lewis and Clark need a Shoshoni translator, they hire Sacajawea. The journey to her village is full of hardship, yet Sacajawea ``did not complain.'' She treats the men's wounds, finds food for them, and mends their clothing—all without a grumble. The eventual meeting between Sacajawea and her tribe is a success. Her brother, now chief, promises to supply the expedition with much-needed horses. Although she has finally come home, Sacajawea will not remain in her village. She decides that there is still the great ocean for her to see. This superficial version of Sacajawea's story is devoid of feeling, although the drawing lesson at the end adds a creative touch that the narrative lacks. (Biography/Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-590-47898-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)
Entertaining, masterful disquisition on the aims, limitations, design, and methods of historiography.
Gaddis (Military and Naval History/Yale; We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 1997) adapts the lectures he gave at Oxford while its George Eastman Visiting Professor (2000–01). Employing a wide range of metaphors (from Cleopatra’s nose to Napoleon’s underwear), displaying an extensive knowledge of current thinking in mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology, alluding frequently to figures as disparate as Lee Harvey Oswald, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Lennon, and John Malkovich, Gaddis guides us on a genial trip into the historical method and the imagination that informs it. He begins by showing the relationship between a cartographer and a historian, asserting that the latter must “interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future.” He also takes us through a set of principles he believes historians must employ and reminds us that the imagination of the historian must always be tethered to reliable sources. He takes on social scientists (especially economists), observing that as they attempt to become more “scientific” (establishing laws, making accurate predictions), they move in the opposite direction of today’s “hard” scientists: “When social scientists are right, they too often confirm the obvious.” Gaddis moves to a discussion of variables (declaring irrelevant the distinction between “independent” and “dependent”: “interdependent,” he says, is the more accurate term), examines chaos theory and explores theories of causation. He ends with an intriguing discussion of the role of the biographer, insisting that historians retain a moral view of events, and with a reminder that they must necessarily distort even as they clarify. Historians, like teachers, he says, both oppress and liberate.
Provocative, polymathic, pleasurable. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-506652-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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