The text is unflinching: "Wars are always brutal. No matter who starts one, innocent people die even children like Shin."
Fifty years later it is still hard to tell children the story of the US bombing of Hiroshima.
This restrained and heartfelt picture book can help adults begin that task. A beautiful, arresting cover provides a key to the content: In the foreground a small boy scoots along on the back of red tricycle; he travels through the heavens and into a flock of doves; in the background a chillingly familiar mushroom cloud rises from the city. Kodama, in a text suffused with sadness and painful memory, relates the true story of Nobuo Tetsutani's son, three- year-old Shin, who, along with two sisters and his best friend, died on August 6, 1945. Told in the first-person voice of a grieving father, the story tells how the boy wanted a tricycle, scarce during the war, and was still gripping its handle when he was dug from the rubble of the blast. Forty years after that, Shin's father and mother find among the white bones of their children's graves the tricycle, which they had forgotten completely. A brief author's note appears with photographs of the real Shin and the charred, half-melted tricycle now on display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum. The text and, notably, the expertly rendered, polished paintings are far from sentimental. Readers are given a vivid impression of the blast, light, heat, fire, ash, and darkness. Yes, this is strong stuff, impossibly sad, and no one will get through a reading of it unmoved.
The text is unflinching: "Wars are always brutal. No matter who starts one, innocent people die even children like Shin." (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-8027-8375-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
The author of Cod’s Tale (2001) again demonstrates a dab hand at recasting his adult work for a younger audience. Here the topic is salt, “the only rock eaten by human beings,” and, as he engrossingly demonstrates, “the object of wars and revolutions” throughout recorded history and before. Between his opening disquisition on its chemical composition and a closing timeline, he explores salt’s sources and methods of extraction, its worldwide economic influences from prehistoric domestication of animals to Gandhi’s Salt March, its many uses as a preservative and industrial product, its culinary and even, as the source for words like “salary” and “salad,” its linguistic history. Along with lucid maps and diagrams, Schindler supplies detailed, sometimes fanciful scenes to go along, finishing with a view of young folk chowing down on orders of French fries as ghostly figures from history look on. Some of Kurlansky’s claims are exaggerated (the Erie and other canals were built to transport more than just salt, for instance), and there are no leads to further resources, but this salutary (in more ways than one) micro-history will have young readers lifting their shakers in tribute. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-23998-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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