What lure could cause thousands of people to quit their jobs, leave their families, sleep in tents, move to the wilderness, and eat wormy bread? This is a detailed, exciting account of how the discovery of gold in the streams of California in 1848 created an international frenzy to head to the American West. Schanzer (How We Crossed the West, 1997) uses direct quotes from journals, letters, and accounts written by the forty-niners themselves, giving her book an immediacy and drama others on the subject lack. She chronicles the influx of people lured by tales of wealth as they traveled across the US. The quotations create a colorful picture of the pan-handling life: what miners ate and wore, how they lived, played, struggled to survive, and how many of the people who truly profited from the gold rush were those who sold goods to the miners. Schanzer’s illustrations are dynamic, and as well-researched as the text. (map) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7922-7303-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
paper 1-895688-87-6 Day uses the prehistoric tale of a young girl coming to terms with her fear of bears to explore the world of cave art. Quennu might be able to handle woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, but cave bears give her the willies. Her clan’s shaman gives her a bear tooth as a talisman to conquer her fear. On the day when the shaman summons all the people to the cave for an ecstatic painting ceremony, Quennu enters the cave after the others have gone on ahead. At one point she is sure she sees the fiery eyes of an enormous cave bear, yet she carries on, the tooth giving her strength. When she finds her clan in the shadowscape of a great chamber, they are singing and dancing and chanting and applying brushes to the cave walls. Quennu joins in, painting the bear, and putting to rest her fears of the creature, but not her respect for it. Day delivers charged, swirling color and smoky imagery in her illustrations, plus the frisson of transportive mystery that may turn children into future history majors. An explanatory page at the end puts the action into context. (Picture book. 7-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-895688-86-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
A memorable tribute to a notably versatile inventor: From his first invention at age 11 to his last, 64 years later, Bell “recorded everything, sketched every idea, documented every experiment.” Clearly, Matthews does not lack for source material, but rather than weigh readers down with a long recitation of accomplishments, he covers some high spots (the telephone, Bell’s work with the deaf, experiments in flight, and his role in the National Geographic Society) on the way to creating a character study, a portrait of a man who both earned and knew how to enjoy success, and who never lost his sense of wonder. The fluent text is matched to an expertly chosen array of photographs, encompassing not only family scenes and closeups of small, complex devices, but such seldom-seen treasures as Mark Twain’s telephone bill, and a choked mass of wires suspended over New York City’s Broadway. So upbeat is the tone that the tragedies and challenges in Bell’s life seem downplayed, but readers will come away with a good sense of who the man was and what he did. (chronology, bibliography, index) (Biography. 9-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7922-7391-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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