In the late 13th century, 17-year-old Marco Polo set out for Cathay (China) with his father and uncle. They followed the legendary Silk Road to the palaces of the Kublai Khan, for whom they worked for 17 years before returning to Venice, where Polo later told his story. Markle describes his adventures chronologically for young readers. Most episodes are related on a single page opposite Terrazzini’s attractive, detailed mixed-media illustrations, rendered in dark tones that reflect the dangers of the journey. A separate entry on each page includes information about an animal that Polo might have seen. In spite of the title, as with others in this series the animals are an addendum rather than the focus of the narrative. This attractive introduction to Polo’s famous trip stumbles twice, misnaming the Khan’s summer home and omitting from the map Polo’s travels to India and return home. A fourth volume in the author’s Explorers series, Animals Charles Darwin Saw (ISBN: 978-0-8118-5049-0, illustrated by Zina Saunders), appeared in February 2009 in conjunction with Darwin’s 200th anniversary. (glossary, for more information, index) (Nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8118-5051-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Strong rhythms and occasional full or partial rhymes give this account of P.T. Barnum’s 1884 elephant parade across the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge an incantatory tone. Catching a whiff of public concern about the new bridge’s sturdiness, Barnum seizes the moment: “’I will stage an event / that will calm every fear, erase every worry, / about that remarkable bridge. / My display will amuse, inform / and astound some. / Or else my name isn’t Barnum!’” Using a rich palette of glowing golds and browns, Roca imbues the pachyderms with a calm solidity, sending them ambling past equally solid-looking buildings and over a truly monumental bridge—which soars over a striped Big Top tent in the final scene. A stately rendition of the episode, less exuberant, but also less fictionalized, than Phil Bildner’s Twenty-One Elephants (2004), illustrated by LeUyen Pham. (author’s note, resource list) (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-44887-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
Spinning lively invented details around skimpy historical records, Taylor profiles the 19th-century chef credited with inventing the potato chip. Crum, thought to be of mixed Native-American and African-American ancestry, was a lover of the outdoors, who turned cooking skills learned from a French hunter into a kitchen job at an upscale resort in New York state. As the story goes, he fried up the first batch of chips in a fit of pique after a diner complained that his French fries were cut too thickly. Morrison’s schoolroom, kitchen and restaurant scenes seem a little more integrated than would have been likely in the 1850s, but his sinuous figures slide through them with exaggerated elegance, adding a theatrical energy as delicious as the snack food they celebrate. The author leaves Crum presiding over a restaurant (also integrated) of his own, closes with a note separating fact from fiction and also lists her sources. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58430-255-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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