Bringing history to life for young readers is no easy task. Providing a clear outline of events and offering plentiful resources for further study is a good start. Whether young readers will really grasp Webster’s enormous accomplishments remains in question. Webster earned a Master’s degree from Yale; he also studied law and a remarkable number of languages. He wrote textbooks, influenced the development of the new nation, created the first comprehensive dictionary of the American language and worked to improve educational opportunities and practices. Shea’s straightforward text describes Webster’s life from childhood on his parents’ farm through studying, writing and teaching, extensive travel and his long, full family life. She does her best to put his achievements into context and includes quotations from Webster’s own writing. Vachula’s realistic oil paintings likewise endeavor to offer a glimpse of life during Revolutionary times. Ultimately, the sheer breadth of Webster’s life and achievement just can’t be adequately covered in such brisk fashion, making this an intriguing introduction but far from the last word on this innovative thinker. (chronology, bibliography, index) (Picture book/biography. 8-10)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59078-441-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
The author of Cod’s Tale (2001) again demonstrates a dab hand at recasting his adult work for a younger audience. Here the topic is salt, “the only rock eaten by human beings,” and, as he engrossingly demonstrates, “the object of wars and revolutions” throughout recorded history and before. Between his opening disquisition on its chemical composition and a closing timeline, he explores salt’s sources and methods of extraction, its worldwide economic influences from prehistoric domestication of animals to Gandhi’s Salt March, its many uses as a preservative and industrial product, its culinary and even, as the source for words like “salary” and “salad,” its linguistic history. Along with lucid maps and diagrams, Schindler supplies detailed, sometimes fanciful scenes to go along, finishing with a view of young folk chowing down on orders of French fries as ghostly figures from history look on. Some of Kurlansky’s claims are exaggerated (the Erie and other canals were built to transport more than just salt, for instance), and there are no leads to further resources, but this salutary (in more ways than one) micro-history will have young readers lifting their shakers in tribute. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-23998-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
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