A promising start to a new series.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this volume inaugurates a new series that employs a question-and-answer format to convey essential information.
Here, the format works quite well, the questions being the ones that have so fascinated people ever since the tragedy occurred. Why did everyone think the Titanic was unsinkable? How could an iceberg appear out of nowhere? Did the telegraph operator ignore an important message? What happened to the stranded passengers? The answers are written in clear prose full of fascinating details: The ship was “the largest human-made moving object in the world”; “The propellers were as wide as houses”; “Using cheap rivets likely cost 1,500 lives.” Paintings, photographs, maps and a timeline complement the text to offer a fascinating account for young readers who love information. Besides the questions that head each section, there are questions within the answers: Who was at fault? Why was the ship traveling so fast in an ice field? “Why didn’t the lookouts have binoculars?” The format is irresistible, each answer just long enough to provide essential information. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography that could lead readers to other good books on the subject, but overall this will be a sure hit with young readers.
A promising start to a new series. (Nonfiction. 7-11)Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4027-9627-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject.
The story of the first attack submarine’s drastically brief career and, nearly a century and a half later, rediscovery.
Even though it was, as the author artlessly puts it, “well-designed and well-crafted in the American spirit of invention,” the H.L. Hunley sank repeatedly in tests and never came back from its first mission in 1864. Rather than go into details about how the submarine worked (sort of), Hawk opts to extend her simply written version of its exploits with tangentially related chapters on the battle of Shiloh, the end of the Civil War, and an undocumented (she admits) legend that romantically links a gold coin found in the wreck with the sub’s captain, George Dixon, and a Southern belle named Queenie Bennet. Likewise, Wyrick’s uncaptioned reconstructions of battle scenes and the submarine underwater (which are not always placed near the actions they describe) don’t serve quite as well as the more informative period views of the vessel and its interior that have been used to illustrate other treatments. The account switches to photos and does go into somewhat more detail when describing how the wreck was found in 1995, raised in 2000, and transported to a lab; in a final chapter, a conservator and an archaeologist describe their still-ongoing restoration work.
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject. (map, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61117-788-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Young Palmetto Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
It may not be epic, but this is certainly one launch that fails to get off the ground.
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try and try and try.
In a series launch bent on showing how failure may be instructive, Thompson and Slader turn the story of the Wright Brothers into an amusing, bite-sized history lesson. History’s early flight fiascos and successes are recounted, culminating in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s. Over the years they would experiment, fail, learn from their mistakes, tinker, fail, and tenaciously pursue their dreams until they succeeded. Alas, troubles dog this well-intentioned series opener. An early statement that “It would seem that before man would learn to fly, he’d have to learn how to fall” prefaces a book that ignores the contributions (and failures) of such early women aeronauts as Sophie Blanchard. In a section on ballooning, a statement that the novel Around the World in Eighty Days was “about circling the globe in a hot air balloon” is incorrect (no ballooning occurs in that book). Attempts to appeal to child readers today yield awkward sentences that describe the brothers as “steampunk hipsters at Comic-Con” wrestling with the controls of the plane “like trying to play a multiplayer computer game with a really bad Internet connection.” Artist Foley renders the text accessible with his lively pen-and-ink drawings, but they are too little, too late.
It may not be epic, but this is certainly one launch that fails to get off the ground. (Nonfiction. 8-10)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-15055-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Flash Point/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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