An engaging, visually appealing guide for science buffs, true-crime enthusiasts, and herbalists alike.
An introduction to the seemingly harmless flowers, leaves, and seeds that hold dark potential as unexpected tools for murder and warfare.
Appealing illustrations abound in this collection of facts and cautionary tales about the world’s most poisonous plants. Readers learn about familiar plants, such as tobacco, habanero chili, and poison ivy, along with more mysterious ones, such as henbane, mandrake, and aconite. Each chapter contains harrowing anecdotes about poison victims and subsections relaying scientific information and concludes with a detailed description of the plant’s toxic effects on humans (and sometimes animals, too). Hirsch includes a bulleted list of “Deadly Details” for each plant, providing surprising facts (“People have been poisoned by eating honey made by bees gathering nectar from heartbreak grass flowers”). The striking page design evokes a strong sense of the macabre and is reminiscent of dark academia. Botanical drawings and other images break up the blocks of text. Color photographs of the plants provide a glimpse of how these dangerous species appear in the wild. Bookended by a thoughtful prologue and cautionary epilogue, the contents are organized alphabetically, allowing for quick reference. Source notes, a selected bibliography of high-quality works, a comprehensive glossary, and teen-appropriate further resources (including a quirky blog by a professional horticulturalist) invite readers to continue their education beyond the text.
An engaging, visually appealing guide for science buffs, true-crime enthusiasts, and herbalists alike. (index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798765625248
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Zest Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Though not the most balanced, an enlightening look back for the queer future.
An adaptation for teens of the adult title A Queer History of the United States (2011).
Divided into thematic sections, the text filters LGBTQIA+ history through key figures in each era from the 1500s to the present. Alongside watershed moments like the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the text brings to light less well-known people, places, and events: the 1625 free love colony of Merrymount, transgender Civil War hero Albert D.J. Cashier, and the 1951 founding of the Mattachine Society, to name a few. Throughout, the author and adapter take care to use accurate pronouns and avoid imposing contemporary terminology onto historical figures. In some cases, they quote primary sources to speculate about same-sex relationships while also reminding readers of past cultural differences in expressing strong affection between friends. Black-and-white illustrations or photos augment each chapter. Though it lacks the teen appeal and personable, conversational style of Sarah Prager’s Queer, There, and Everywhere (2017), this textbook-level survey contains a surprising amount of depth. However, the mention of transgender movements and activism—in particular, contemporary issues—runs on the slim side. Whereas chapters are devoted to over 30 ethnically diverse gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer figures, some trans pioneers such as Christine Jorgensen and Holly Woodlawn are reduced to short sidebars.
Though not the most balanced, an enlightening look back for the queer future. (glossary, photo credits, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5612-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a...
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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