While this book gets the job done, here’s hoping livelier titles on this fascinating personality will appear soon.
This simple biography of African American NASA computer Dorothy Vaughan contrasts her intelligence and initiative with the nonsensical rules of segregation in her time.
Vaughan is introduced as a woman who worked as a human computer during the 1940s and 1950s. Her “unusual” accomplishment of attending college as an African American woman was followed by a job teaching in segregated schools, which didn’t pay much. When she saw that the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory was hiring human computers, she applied and got the job. At Langley, the engineers who were testing airplanes were mostly men (depicted as white in the illustrations), and they needed the help of human computers, who were mostly women. In the middle of the story, segregation is introduced as “one thing that didn’t make sense” at Langley and throughout Vaughan’s life. But “Dorothy didn’t let this stop her. She worked hard. She worked smart.” After becoming a supervisor, she decided to learn about the new mechanical computer. She became an expert in computer code and taught others. Vaughan’s accomplishments are truly impressive, and this is one of the first picture books to focus on this mathematician, one of those featured in Hidden Figures. Unfortunately, the text relates her story as a recitation of facts, and the pictures lack variety and appear static. This book is one of four introducing young readers to women in STEM; simultaneously publishing are Fossil Huntress (about paleontologist Mary Leakey), Human Computer (about engineer Mary Jackson), and Space Adventurer (about astronaut Bonnie Dunbar).
While this book gets the job done, here’s hoping livelier titles on this fascinating personality will appear soon. (activities, timeline, glossary) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61930-556-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Nomad Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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