Viewing human history from an unusual angle, Hooper and Biesty follow a scrap of gold as it passes through many forms and hands over thousands of years. Fast-forwarding from its origin in a star, the gold begins its journey as part of a pharaoh’s death mask—stolen by robbers and quickly recast into a chalice that winds up in a temple, and so on down the centuries. Hooper creates scenarios for each stage of the journey, often around such historical figures as Nero, Charlemagne and Robert Boyle. Biesty adds typically well-populated, minutely detailed large scenes and insets. The gold, repeatedly divided, is ultimately scattered over much of the world: some disguising counterfeit coins; some as a ring displayed in a museum; some buried in a field; illuminating a manuscript letter; or turned into buttons on an old uniform—one of which a modern New Yorker turns into a necklace. There’s plenty of food for thought here about permanence and change; young historians will enjoy the metal’s long trip, and will come away understanding that it’s never over. (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-340-78858-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Hodder Children’s Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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