The City of Lights was once made bright by the flash of a revolution’s guillotine, and this app provides a glimpse into one of Paris' pivotal backstories.
Interwoven with dramatic string orchestrations, Charlotte Corday guides this walking tour examining key revolution sites surrounding Paris’ Palais Royal. Corday made an infamous name for herself by stabbing radical leader Jean-Paul Marat in the bathtub. Homage to his demise is given with a tongue-in-cheek bloody-dagger icon that leads from one page to the next. A clearly plotted table of contents includes such subjects as "Storm the Bastille" and "Reign of Terror," and classic artwork featuring the likes of Corday, Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette accompanies Corday’s narrative. Peppered among the period-appropriate tableaux are maps to such locales as Marat’s printing press, the royal gardens and the very site where Corday made her fateful cutlery purchase. The maps, conveniently provided in both traditional format and written step-by-step directions, even include visitation hours and public-transportation directions. Subject matter that could be stringently academic is alleviated by lighter factoids (readers will discover how la Révolution is responsible for France’s fine dining reputation) and interactive trivia questions (the correct answer to one such question leads to a discounted meal at the oldest café in Paris). Skipping from or returning to certain sections is made easy by simply revisiting the main menu, and forward/rewind controls easily allow scrolling of the audio. Currently optimized for iPhone, the display can be blown up to iPad-screen proportions with slight loss of image clarity.
An academic overview of la Révolution through the eyes of one if its key players, satisfying both historian and eager tourist. (iPhone informational app. 14 & up)
Pub Date: July 26, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Time Traveler Tours
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
"Illustrated books are a natural extension of [the] African oral tradition'' of storytelling, writes Caldecott Award–winning artist Tom Feelings. Here, in 64 powerful black-and-white paintings—some of them harshly realistic, others nightmarishly phantasmagoric—this noted artist tells a neglected part of the story of African-American slavery: the cruel journey known as "the middle passage,'' in which millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Africans died before ever reaching American shores. The soft edges of Feelings's art, the blended grays of his palette, do nothing to mute the violence that permeates these images: the bowed bodies of captured Africans being led away under the whip; rows and rows and rows of bodies crammed side by side, shackled together, in dark, filthy holds beneath deck; the agony of a man remembering a baby viciously murdered. Feelings's purpose here, however, is not vengeful but cathartic. Through remembering and understanding the sources of their continuing pain, he believes that Africans can turn the chains of bondage into "spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future... whether living inside or outside of the continent of Africa.''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8037-1804-7
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique format for a memoir—Lowry (Stay!, 1997, etc.) offers up quotes from her books, dates, black-and-white photographs, and recollections of each shot, as well as the other memories surrounding it. The technique is charming and often absorbing; readers meet Lowry's grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren in a manner that suggests thumbing through a photo album with her. The tone is friendly, intimate, and melancholy, because living comes with sorrow: her sister died of cancer at age 28, and Lowry's son, a pilot, died when his plane crashed. Her overall message is taken from the last words that son, Grey, radioed: "You're on your own." The format of this volume is accessible and it reflects the way events are remembered—one idea leading to another, one memory jostling another; unlike conventional autobiographies, however, it will leave readers with unanswered questions: Who was her first husband—and father of her children? Why are her surviving children hardly mentioned? Why does it end—but for one entry—in 1995? It's still an original presentation, one to be appreciated on its own merits.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-89543-X
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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