Slender topic, but high enough in interest to keep young basketball players engaged.
A tribute to one of basketball’s most showy and dramatic feats.
Despite the aid of many big, colorful action photos, Doeden struggles to stretch his topic out to book length. Still, young fans may find their appreciation for the game enhanced by the easily digestible doses of historical context, the expansive gallery of renowned dunkers, and even the anatomical diagrams and descriptions of muscle groups that have to work in concert to sink the shot. The author traces the slam dunk’s development from a disparaged and even at times banned move to its status as “a pillar of modern NBA strategy.” Though he highlights many spectacular, if ultimately repetitive-sounding, examples of its use, he doesn’t neglect to mention its hazards to vulnerable bodies and breakable backboards. And, along with shoutouts to such high-flying royalty as Michael “Air” Jordan and LeBron James, he gives women their due, from Georgeann Wells (the first reported dunker in a women’s game, 1984) to Brittney Griner (most prolific WNBA dunker). Whether or not readers readily buy his claim that a slam dunk is “one of the most exciting moments in all of sports,” they’ll have to admit that Doeden has built a feasible case.
Slender topic, but high enough in interest to keep young basketball players engaged. (glossary, source notes, further reading, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798765626801
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate.
Stepping carefully around the controversies, a former curator at Monticello reconstructs the septuagenarian Jefferson’s active daily round.
Jefferson’s fixed routine begins with a faithful recording of temperature and weather at first rising and ends with a final period of solitary reading by candlelight in his unusual alcove bed. In between, the author describes in often fussy detail the range of his interests and enterprises. There’s not only his “polygraph” and other beloved gadgets, but also meals, family members, visitors, and excursions to Monticello’s diverse gardens, workshops and outbuildings. Like the dialogue, which mixes inventions with historical utterances, the generous suite of visuals includes photos of furnishings and artifacts as well as stodgy full-page tableaux and vignettes painted by Elliott. The “slaves” or “enslaved” workers (the author uses the terms interchangeably) that Jefferson encounters through the day are all historical and named—but Sally Hemings and her Jeffersonian offspring are conspicuously absent (aside from a brief name check buried in the closing timeline). Jefferson adroitly sidesteps a pointed question from his grandson, who accompanies him on his rounds, by pleading his age: “The work of ending slavery is for the young.”
Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate. (sidebars, endnotes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0541-0
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
The author of the justly renowned What the Neighbors Thought series digs a little deeper with these equally engaging single...
This brisk and pithy series kickoff highlights Sacagawea’s unique contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Joining her “clueless” French-Canadian husband and so becoming “part of one of the smartest hiring decisions in history,” 16-year-old Sacagawea not only served as translator and diplomat along the way, but proved an expert forager, cool-headed when disaster threatened, and a dedicated morale booster during four gloomy months in winter quarters. She also cast a vote for the location of those quarters, which the author points to as a significant precedent in the history of women’s suffrage. Krull closes with a look at her subject’s less-well-documented later life and the cogent observation that not all Native Americans regard her in a positive light. In Collins’ color paintings, she poses gracefully in fringed buckskins, and her calm, intelligent features shine on nearly every page. The subjects of the three co-published profiles, though depicted by different illustrators, look similarly smart and animated—and behave that way too. Having met her future husband on a “date,” Dolley Madison (illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher) goes on to be a “rock star,” for instance. Long before she becomes a Supreme Court justice with a “ginormous” work load, Sonia Sotomayor (illustrated by Angela Dominguez) is first met giving her little brother a noogie. Though Krull’s gift for artfully compressed narrative results in a misleading implication that the battle of New Orleans won the War of 1812 for the United States, and there is no mention of Forever… in her portrait of “the most banned author in America,” Judy Blume (illustrated by David Leonard), young readers will come away properly inspired by the examples of these admirable rule-breakers.
The author of the justly renowned What the Neighbors Thought series digs a little deeper with these equally engaging single volumes. (source and reading lists, indexes) (Biography. 9-11)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8027-3799-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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