Bial follows up his successful Where Lincoln Walked (1997) with a companion volume on the first president’s peregrinations, with significantly less success. The slim offering is necessarily light on the text, painting with broad strokes Washington’s career and offsetting the text with photographs of the places its subject lived and campaigned. The paucity of information on Washington’s youth is ruefully acknowledged and quickly dispatched as the narrative moves on to his military career. Unfortunately, this limitation leaches from this account what was so effective for child readers in the earlier work: the focus on the great man’s childhood. Some of the photographs appear out of sync with the text; the worst instance features photographs of the New York tavern where he bade his officers farewell in 1783 even as the text describes his weary retreat to Mount Vernon in 1797. Furthermore, a reliance on mythmaking paintings does nothing to separate fact from fiction for young readers. Even the backmatter suffers by comparison to the earlier work, omitting as it does the map of its subject’s travels. A disappointment. (bibliography, further reading, places to visit) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-8899-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
A pleasing new picture book looks at George Washington’s career through an agricultural lens. Sprinkling excerpts from his letters and diaries throughout to allow its subject to speak in his own voice, the narrative makes a convincing case for Washington’s place as the nation’s First Farmer. His innovations, in addition to applying the scientific method to compost, include a combination plow-tiller-harrow, the popularization of the mule and a two-level barn that put horses to work at threshing grain in any weather. Thomas integrates Washington’s military and political adventures into her account, making clear that it was his frustration as a farmer that caused him to join the revolutionary cause. Lane’s oil illustrations, while sometimes stiff, appropriately portray a man who was happiest when working the land. Backmatter includes a timeline, author’s notes on both Mount Vernon and Washington the slaveholder, resources for further exploration and a bibliography. (Picture book/biography. 8-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59078-460-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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