Once again, the individual Native Americans are lost in history.
Persecuted by the U.S. government, many Navajo children were forced to give up their language in boarding schools established in the 19th century and designed to eradicate Native American culture.
Ironically this language would be used during World War II as a secret code by American military forces in the Pacific. Although other Native Americans became Code Talkers, the Navajo were the largest in number (about 420). Their unusual achievement was kept a secret until 1968, when new technologies superseded Navajo code-talking and “the heroic story of the People could be told.” This powerfully illustrated large-format informational picture book provides the outline of both that story and the code itself, which used Navajo words to represent Roman letters, employing them as substitutes for English words, such as chay-da-gahi (“tortoise”) to mean “tank.” Illustrated samples are given in the text, but it still may not be enough for all readers to fully understand how the code worked. The somber pastel drawings are striking, and the ironic situation—a language once vilified that becomes an almost magical weapon—is made evident, but it is too bad readers aren’t given glimpses of the men who participated in this endeavor. The only people named are Philip Johnston, “an Anglo missionary’s son who had grown up with the Navajo” and who suggested the idea, and Marine Maj. Howard Connor, a white officer.
Once again, the individual Native Americans are lost in history. (endnotes, artist’s notes, selected bibliography) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56846-295-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Creative Editions/Creative Company
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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