Trippy, creative, and thoughtful, this vocabulary book should awaken imaginations.
An ABC book for all ages features the artist/author’s illustrations of unusual words in unexpected combinations, from “apperceptive achatina” to “zooid zeppelin’s zygote.”
Stabin, an illustrator with a long career whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, has designed nine U.S. postage stamps. His work has been displayed in the National Portrait Gallery. In creating ABC illustrations for his young daughters, the author kept finding “fascinating words” in the dictionary that he “couldn’t wait to illustrate.” In 26 alliterative phrases from A to Z, this debut book explains uncommon vocabulary with dictionary definitions and pronunciations, example sentences, and loopy, surreal drawings. These are mostly in black and white, but some include pops of color as well as photographed images. Under K, for example, the capital letter seems to be composed of some alien tubas, feather dusters, and a stepladder (readers can concoct their own interpretations as part of the fun). The phrase for K is “kaonic karakul”; “kaonic” involves certain subatomic particles, and a “karakul” is a kind of sheep. The main illustration depicts spheres and orbital paths, among which some sheep are jumping; one is bubbly, as if covered with atomic particles. The accompanying sentence reads “Kaonic karakuls are the subatomic sheep that physicists count to go to sleep.” As this example shows, the vocabulary can be challenging even for adults, yet the book’s witty playfulness invites readers in, as do the dynamic, spiky/swooping lines of the artwork. Some pages fold out for larger display, giving the book a generous feel. Kids will enjoy finding the acorns on every page except for F (because “fig fauns only like figs,” naturally). There are a few missteps; for example, “nucivorous” means nut-eating, not nut-bearing; and why not include a note about Daedalus under the entry for “daedal,” especially because Daedalus is mentioned in passing later under “minotaur”? The book’s second edition includes a FAQ, curriculum guidance for the classroom, and examples of student work.
Trippy, creative, and thoughtful, this vocabulary book should awaken imaginations.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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