Following up their portrait of Malcolm X (2000), Myers briefly traces Dr. King’s career, and Jenkins adds kaleidoscopic collages that both depict major incidents and figures of the Civil Rights movement, and capture the time’s turmoil. Dr. King certainly doesn’t lack for biographers, but Myers is unusually even-handed, highlighting King’s nonviolent philosophy while viewing the Movement’s angrier, more violent outbursts with a certain degree of—not sympathy, exactly, but understanding. Though Jenkins’s images are sometimes over the top, as when he outfits the four children killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing with angel wings, and Myers frequently slips paraphrased lines from Dr. King’s speeches into his narrative—“He said that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. He knew he might not reach that land . . . ”—the balance of fact and feeling makes this a strong follow-up to Doreen Rappaport’s Martin’s Big Words (2002). (Picture book/biography. 5-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-027703-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
This second early biography of Cousteau in a year echoes Jennifer Berne’s Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau (2008), illustrated by Eric Puybaret, in offering visuals that are more fanciful than informational, but also complements it with a focus less on the early life of the explorer and eco-activist than on his later inventions and achievements. In full-bleed scenes that are often segmented and kaleidoscopic, Yaccarino sets his hook-nosed subject amid shoals of Impressionistic fish and other marine images, rendered in multiple layers of thinly applied, imaginatively colored paint. His customarily sharp, geometric lines take on the wavy translucence of undersea shapes with a little bit of help from the airbrush. Along with tracing Cousteau’s undersea career from his first, life-changing, pair of goggles and the later aqualung to his minisub Sea Flea, the author pays tribute to his revolutionary film and TV work, and his later efforts to call attention to the effects of pollution. Cousteau’s enduring fascination with the sea comes through clearly, and can’t help sparking similar feelings in readers. (chronology, source list) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-85573-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully designed book that will resonate with children and the adults who wisely share it with them.
An inspirational ode to the life of the great South African leader by an award-winning author and illustrator.
Mandela’s has been a monumental life, a fact made clear on the front cover, which features an imposing, full-page portrait. The title is on the rear cover. His family gave him the Xhosa name Rolihlahla, but his schoolteacher called him Nelson. Later, he was sent to study with village elders who told him stories about his beautiful and fertile land, which was conquered by European settlers with more powerful weapons. Then came apartheid, and his protests, rallies and legal work for the cause of racial equality led to nearly 30 years of imprisonment followed at last by freedom for Mandela and for all South Africans. “The ancestors, / The people, / The world, / Celebrated.” Nelson’s writing is spare, poetic, and grounded in empathy and admiration. His oil paintings on birch plywood are muscular and powerful. Dramatic moments are captured in shifting perspectives; a whites-only beach is seen through a wide-angle lens, while faces behind bars and faces beaming in final victory are masterfully portrayed in close-up.
A beautifully designed book that will resonate with children and the adults who wisely share it with them. (author’s note, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-178374-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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