Brilliantly colored photos and a lively text explore the human body from the outside in: muscles, bones, inner organs, eyes, ears, and much more. ``Your skin is like a stretchy bodysuit just your size,'' and ``Your blood is a kind of cell soup...''—just enough information is presented to pique the curiosity. The author concludes, ``There's a great body inside this book—yours! Take good care of it.'' Many of the photos are color-enhanced and enlarged; body parts have never looked so good, though it would have been helpful if degrees of magnification had been included. A beautiful book with special pizzazz. Glossary; index. (Nonfiction. 6-10)
Pub Date: May 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05938-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
DePaola is irresistible. In this simply told memoir, aimed directly at the hearts of his young readers, he follows 26 Fairmount Avenue (1999) and Here We All Are (p. 630) with more stories of his childhood. In this volume, his baby sister Maureen contracts pneumonia and has to be hospitalized, he gets a new outfit for the family’s trip to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, and he’s in a tap dance recital. He longs to get Miss Kiniry to be his first-grade teacher, even though she, like the principal, insists on spelling his first name “Tommy.” Other remembrances include a family outing to the beach, a “Tiny Tot” wedding, and getting his first library card. DePaola spins out these recollections with pitch-perfect intensity, warmth, energy, and a precise sense of how it felt to be a kid. Almost a primer on how to write with emotional directness for young people, this will also teach its readers a little on how to tell their own stories. Best of all it gives value to the comings and goings that make up a life, even one as unique as dePaola’s. Abundantly illustrated with wonderful vignettes and spot drawings of the cast of characters that includes all his friends and relations, it begs to be continued. More please. (Biography. 7-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-23583-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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