Examining Calder’s childhood and young adulthood, Stone focuses on his interest in craft and machinery. The child of artists, an engineering graduate and a tinkerer from the get-go, Sandy made toys, jewelry and even quick-study wire portraits for friends encountered on Parisian streets. His miniature circus, constructed of wire, cork and other found objects, grew to fill five suitcases that trundled between New York and Paris for engrossing, kinetic performances. The lively text shines with apt details. Quotes peppering the narrative, though unattributed specifically, seem carefully interpolated. “People said: ‘He has discovered, in playing, a new world.’ His art ‘has the force of the ocean.’ ” Kulikov’s mixed-media illustrations anchor black-and-white sketches (portraying Calder’s processes, tools and sources of inspiration) within full-color spreads that playfully celebrate the text. Sandy, shouldering a thick lariat of wire, bicycles through a 1920s Paris teeming with canvas-schlepping artists. His elegant, ever-present laurel-wreathed muse hovers nearby, with a palette (or, in one spread, lugging some of those suitcases). Spritely, noteworthy and nicely timed to Calder’s 110th birthday. (author’s note, source note) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-06268-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
In bouncy rhyme, Spinelli invites younger readers to contemplate the many shapes and uses of headgear throughout history, drawing on specific examples from Abe Lincoln to Carmen Miranda: “John Chapman had a hat. / They say he wore a cooking pot. / Some folks believe that, some do not. / If true—he was a sight indeed— / a pot-topped sower of apple seed. / Do YOU have a hat?” Valério makes his US debut with a set of smiling, fancifully stylized portraits, generally flanked by birds, bugs, or other small companions wearing similar hats. With a line or two of background for each historical figure supplied on the endpapers, this nicely expands the “hats as occupational markers” theme in Ann Morris’s Hats, Hats, Hats (1989), and others. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-689-86253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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