At one time, the Lower East Side of New York City was said to have greater population density than any other city on earth. It was here, 97 Orchard Street, a five-story walk-up tenement built by German immigrant Lucas Glockner in 1864, that generations of immigrants settled. The place has been preserved since owners in 1935 closed it down to avoid bringing it up to housing code. Now it is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, open for guided tours, providing glimpses into the crowded and uncomfortable condition of the tenants who came from many nations but all of whom were poor. The lives of those people and the history of the house and the area have been traced by historians working for the museum. Granfield provides necessary backgrounds to introduce each section with lengthy captions accompanying contemporary b&w photographs, as well as archival ones, maps, and portraits of the area creating a picture of the house, its tenants, and its neighborhood. At times, the author imagines conversations between people long gone and who surely left no record of these talks. Identifying dates of photos in the captions would have strengthened this considerably. The reader who needs more information will have to look elsewhere. (For instance, the word “steerage” is poorly explained and there is no mention of who protected the newcomers or that the tenants had to provide their own stoves.) A stronger, more complete text would provide more sympathy and understanding of the difficult lives for poor people, most of whom were newly arrived in the US. But many will find the biographies of their grandparents and great-grandparents in this study. (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-88776-580-7
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-91426-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
paper 1-895688-87-6 Day uses the prehistoric tale of a young girl coming to terms with her fear of bears to explore the world of cave art. Quennu might be able to handle woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, but cave bears give her the willies. Her clan’s shaman gives her a bear tooth as a talisman to conquer her fear. On the day when the shaman summons all the people to the cave for an ecstatic painting ceremony, Quennu enters the cave after the others have gone on ahead. At one point she is sure she sees the fiery eyes of an enormous cave bear, yet she carries on, the tooth giving her strength. When she finds her clan in the shadowscape of a great chamber, they are singing and dancing and chanting and applying brushes to the cave walls. Quennu joins in, painting the bear, and putting to rest her fears of the creature, but not her respect for it. Day delivers charged, swirling color and smoky imagery in her illustrations, plus the frisson of transportive mystery that may turn children into future history majors. An explanatory page at the end puts the action into context. (Picture book. 7-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-895688-86-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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