Muhammad Ali remains an interesting, colorful persona long after his amazing boxing career. Here the author tells his story in a manner befitting his strong personality, recalling boyhood experiences as the young Cassius Clay finds his avocation and describing key opponents and matches with excitement enhanced with quotes from some of Ali’s famous boastful verses. She doesn’t merely recreate a play-by-play listing of Ali’s sports achievements, but also emphasizes his fierce determination in all his endeavors. Bolden portrays the whole man, including the controversies and disappointments concerned with his conversion to Islam and his refusal to participate in the draft, as well as the physical disabilities that resulted from too many blows to the head. She accomplishes all of this in language that is clear and concise without being condescending. The text pops with a variety of fonts, print size, color and orientation on the page. Christie’s strongly hued, highly stylized paintings are eye-catching and well integrated with the text. This is picture-book biography at its best. A fascinating introduction to an intriguing person. (notes, source list) (Picture book/biography. 7-10)
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-82401-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Strong rhythms and occasional full or partial rhymes give this account of P.T. Barnum’s 1884 elephant parade across the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge an incantatory tone. Catching a whiff of public concern about the new bridge’s sturdiness, Barnum seizes the moment: “’I will stage an event / that will calm every fear, erase every worry, / about that remarkable bridge. / My display will amuse, inform / and astound some. / Or else my name isn’t Barnum!’” Using a rich palette of glowing golds and browns, Roca imbues the pachyderms with a calm solidity, sending them ambling past equally solid-looking buildings and over a truly monumental bridge—which soars over a striped Big Top tent in the final scene. A stately rendition of the episode, less exuberant, but also less fictionalized, than Phil Bildner’s Twenty-One Elephants (2004), illustrated by LeUyen Pham. (author’s note, resource list) (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-44887-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
Spinning lively invented details around skimpy historical records, Taylor profiles the 19th-century chef credited with inventing the potato chip. Crum, thought to be of mixed Native-American and African-American ancestry, was a lover of the outdoors, who turned cooking skills learned from a French hunter into a kitchen job at an upscale resort in New York state. As the story goes, he fried up the first batch of chips in a fit of pique after a diner complained that his French fries were cut too thickly. Morrison’s schoolroom, kitchen and restaurant scenes seem a little more integrated than would have been likely in the 1850s, but his sinuous figures slide through them with exaggerated elegance, adding a theatrical energy as delicious as the snack food they celebrate. The author leaves Crum presiding over a restaurant (also integrated) of his own, closes with a note separating fact from fiction and also lists her sources. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58430-255-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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