Veteran author Nixon (Gus and Gertie and the Missing Pearls, 2001, etc.) offers a lighthearted biography, with each chapter connected to something she’s loved or learned about writing. She grew up in Los Angeles in a duplex occupied by her grandparents as well as her own parents and siblings, and evokes an idyllic childhood. She loved words from a very early age, recounting her mother’s story that before she could even read or write, she would come to her mother and say, “I have a poem, Mama. Write it down.” She loved hearing family stories and radio dramas, learning pacing and dialogue, and did puppet shows for neighborhood children using her mother’s scripts and the portable stage built by her father. In high school in the ’40s, she and her friends wrote many letters to servicemen in the war, most of them barely older than she was. She tells, with exquisite timing, how she got her first payment for something she wrote, and how it felt. Young readers (and would-be writers) might be most interested in the last chapter, her Top Ten Tips for Writers, which includes such basic advice as “Read!”; “Show, don’t tell”; and “Trust your characters.” It’s a bit preachy in spots, and even her large fan base might not be completely engaged, but it is a nicely focused take on something about the author. (Biography. 10-12)
Pub Date: May 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-73000-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Prose poems celebrate the feats of young heroines, some of them famous, and some not as well-known. Paul (Hello Toes! Hello Feet!, 1998, etc.) recounts moments in the lives of women such as Rachel Carson, Amelia Earhart, and Wilma Rudolph; these moments don’t necessarily reflect what made them famous as much as they are pivotal events in their youth that influenced the direction of their lives. For Earhart, it was sliding down the roof of the tool shed in a home-made roller coaster: “It’s like flying!” For Rudolph, it was the struggle to learn to walk without her foot brace. Other women, such as Violet Sheehy, who rescued her family from a fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, or Harriet Hanson, a union supporter in the fabric mills of Massachusetts, are celebrated for their brave decisions made under extreme duress. Steirnagle’s sweeping paintings powerfully exude the strength of character exhibited by these young women. A commemorative book, that honors both quiet and noisy acts of heroism. (Picture book/poetry. 6-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201477-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ringgold’s biography of Rosa Parks packs substantial material into a few pages, but with a light touch, and with the ring of authenticity that gives her act of weary resistance all the respect it deserves. Narrating the book is the bus that Parks took that morning 45 years ago; it recounts the signal events in Parks’s life to a young girl who boarded it to go to school. A decent amount of the material will probably be new to children, for Parks is so intimately associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her work with the NAACP before the bus incident is often overlooked, as is her later role as a community activist in Detroit with Congressman John Conyers. Ringgold, through the bus, also informs readers of Parks’s youth in rural Alabama, where Klansmen and nightriders struck fear into the lives of African-Americans. These experiences make her refusal to release her seat all the more courageous, for the consequences of resistance were not gentle. All the events are depicted in emotive naive artwork that underscores their truth; Ringgold delivers Parks’s story without hyperbole, but rather as a life lived with pride, conviction, and consequence. (Picture book/biography. 5-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-81892-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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