This well-intentioned but incomplete biographical exploration looks at Stonewall Jackson’s years as a teacher with a strong humanitarian side, rather than his better-known years as a successful Confederate general. Jackson was a professor at Virginia Military Institute prior to the Civil War, but he also served as a teacher and the first superintendent of a Sunday school for African-American children, even though such instruction was illegal in that era in Virginia. The story is told in a straightforward and interesting style, but the text blocks are crowded into pages filled with large illustrations and are difficult to read. Hosegood’s loose, naïve-styled watercolor illustrations are the most successful aspect of the book. Concluding pages include a timeline of Jackson’s life, an additional list of facts about the general and the words to a well-known song of the era celebrating his life. Both the text and the timeline neglect to mention Jackson’s second wife and his daughter or that Jackson and his wife were slaveholders themselves. No historical reference sources are cited. (Picture book/biography. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58980-713-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Pelican
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
FRêDêRIC Chopin (24 pp.; $19.93; Nov. 3; 1-5705-248-2): This short entry in the Tell Me About series, illustrated with full-color and black-and-white photographs and reproductions, covers the life of composer FRêDêRIC Chopin, who began creating music at the age of eight. Dineen artfully recounts how Chopin’s music lives on in many works based on Polish dances. The volume is accessible even to first-time researchers. (chronology, glossary, index) (Biography. 5-8)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1998
ISBN: 1-57505-248-2
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
Less prettified than Alan Schroeder's recent Satchmo's Blues (1996), the story of how Louis Armstrong got his first horn. As Orgill tells it in her first book for children, Armstrong himself gave conflicting accounts of how he came by his first horn; here, his first instrument was actually a bugle that he played in reform school, where he was sent after being arrested for shooting a .38 in the street on New Year's Eve. Later the school's band director entrusted him with a battered cornet, and Louis went on to lead the band in a triumphant parade through his old New Orleans neighborhood. The dark, edgy, mixed-media paintings, with lurid yellow highlights, give an almost palpable sense of the rough poverty and swirling nightlife of Armstrong's early environment. It's not a book that can stand on its own; readers will need to have this fragment of Armstrong's life put into context in order to understand where sheer talent, determination, and luck eventually brought him. Orgill's telling has immediacy, however, and it has moments (e.g., when Louis snags himself a nickname) that are electric. (Picture book/biography. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-75919-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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