Quibbles aside, this will find a receptive audience with trivia buffs, tourists, and residents of all ages.
As with Ben Franklin (2011) and Abe Lincoln (2015), Schroeder and O’Brien employ the alphabet to pair lesser-known tidbits with humorous ink-and-watercolor caricatures to, in this case, present some of the people, places, and politics associated with the nation’s capital.
Although each letter has multiple entries, some are relegated to a half page while others are assigned two. There are interesting choices for “X,” such as the panda Mei Xiang, and the X-1 and X-15 planes in the Air and Space Museum. Humans include Benjamin Banneker, the African-American surveyor of the district’s boundaries, and Glenn Sundby, the white acrobat who descended the Washington Monument steps on his hands. A claw-footed, Capitol-shaped bathtub whimsically highlights 1860 amenities in the dusty building’s basement. Some details are summarized to the point of misleading; for instance, the statement that when black contralto Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall, she “simply changed the venue” is not accurate. (Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband intervened to procure the Lincoln Memorial.) Also, it is not possible to verify the rumor that underground tunnels stretch from the Capitol to the White House, as O’Brien depicts them. Quotes from figures as diverse as Shirley Chisholm, Groucho Marx, and Dan Quayle provide additional perspectives.
Quibbles aside, this will find a receptive audience with trivia buffs, tourists, and residents of all ages. (Informational picture book. 6-12)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3678-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
An incredible connector text for young readers eager to graduate to weighty conversations about our yesterday, our now, and...
Past and present are quilted together in this innovative overview of black Americans’ triumphs and challenges in the United States.
Alexander’s poetry possesses a straightforward, sophisticated, steady rhythm that, paired with Nelson’s detail-oriented oil paintings, carries readers through generations chronicling “the unforgettable,” “the undeniable,” “the unflappable,” and “the righteous marching ones,” alongside “the unspeakable” events that shape the history of black Americans. The illustrator layers images of black creators, martyrs, athletes, and neighbors onto blank white pages, patterns pages with the bodies of slaves stolen and traded, and extends a memorial to victims of police brutality like Sandra Bland and Michael Brown past the very edges of a double-page spread. Each movement of Alexander’s poem is a tribute to the ingenuity and resilience of black people in the U.S., with textual references to the writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X dotting stanzas in explicit recognition and grateful admiration. The book ends with a glossary of the figures acknowledged in the book and an afterword by the author that imprints the refrain “Black. Lives. Matter” into the collective soul of readers, encouraging them, like the cranes present throughout the book, to “keep rising.”
An incredible connector text for young readers eager to graduate to weighty conversations about our yesterday, our now, and our tomorrow. (Picture book/poetry. 6-12)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-78096-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Versify/HMH
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Essential.
A measured corrective to pervasive myths about what is often referred to as the “first Thanksgiving.”
Contextualizing them within a Native perspective, Newell (Passamaquoddy) touches on the all-too-familiar elements of the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving and its origins and the history of English colonization in the territory now known as New England. In addition to the voyage and landfall of the Mayflower, readers learn about the Doctrine of Discovery that arrogated the lands of non-Christian peoples to European settlers; earlier encounters between the Indigenous peoples of the region and Europeans; and the Great Dying of 1616-1619, which emptied the village of Patuxet by 1620. Short, two- to six-page chapters alternate between the story of the English settlers and exploring the complex political makeup of the region and the culture, agriculture, and technology of the Wampanoag—all before covering the evolution of the holiday. Refreshingly, the lens Newell offers is a Native one, describing how the Wampanoag and other Native peoples received the English rather than the other way around. Key words ranging from estuary to discover are printed in boldface in the narrative and defined in a closing glossary. Nelson (a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Chippewa) contributes soft line-and-color illustrations of the proceedings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Essential. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-72637-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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