The post–World War II publication of Anne Frank’s diary made her the icon for all the murdered Jewish children during the Holocaust. In 1958, an Austrian performance of the play based on the diary was disrupted by teenage neo-Nazis who had been taught that the Holocaust was a fraud. Simon Wiesenthal was a Holocaust survivor who gathered information about the whereabouts of Nazis in order to bring them to justice. Called to the theater, he vowed to find the Gestapo officer who had arrested the Frank family, thus proving that the diary was not a fake. This lengthy picture book carefully details the horrors of Wiesenthal’s life, from ghetto to concentration camps to liberation, and emphasizes the phenomenal memory that made possible his determination to “tell what it was really like.” It is a painstaking, long, frustrating piece of detection, hampered by postwar political realities and aided by phone books. Rubin, who has authored other titles on the Holocaust, has crafted another notable contribution. Farnsworth’s full-page paintings in dark hues are stark and haunting. (author’s note, resources, glossary) (Picture book/biography. 10 & up)
Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2109-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
In glossy textbook style, this latest entry in The Other Half of History series (Women of Ancient Greece, p. 1746, etc.) illuminates the days and lives of wealthy, middle-class, and poor women who lived thousands of years ago in Egypt. The large-scale format of the book allows elaborate full-color photographs to appear on every page, often accompanied by sidebars with brief quotations from ancient Egyptian writers. These provide the book’s main source of interest; Macdonald resorts to a textbook writing style, with deliberately short, declarative sentences that make the material sound more somber than it is. Nevertheless, this book provides a useful tracing of the role of women in history, and would be a good companion reference to Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s classic Mara, Daughter of the Nile (1953) or Sonia Levitin’s Escape from Egypt (1994). (maps, glossary, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-87226-567-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A warm tribute to the WPA-funded “book women” (and men) who rode Kentucky’s backwoods in the 1930s and early ’40s, delivering library service to some of this country’s most impoverished citizens. Gathering information from archives, hard-to-find published sources, and interviews, the authors write feelingly of the Pack Horse Library Program’s origins and the obstacles its dedicated employees overcame. These ranged from the chronic scarcity of books and magazines (nearly all of which were donated) to the rigors of riding, generally alone, over rugged terrain in all weathers. Those rigors are made more immediate by a reconstructed account of a rider’s day: rising at 4:30, stopping at isolated hamlets, cabins, and one-room schools to drop off materials and, sometimes, to read aloud, then plodding wearily home through darkness and drizzle. Supported by a generous array of contemporary photos and sturdy lists of sources and Web sites to give interested readers a leg up on further inquiry, this adds unique insights not just to the history of library service, but of Appalachian culture, and of women’s work in general. (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: May 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-029135-4
Page Count: 64
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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