A lively, luminous account of a lesser-known woman’s ingenious contribution to presidential history.
A detective foils a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
This expertly paced tale ratchets up the tension as readers learn that Lincoln’s life was in danger as he set out by train to Washington, D.C., for his 1861 presidential inauguration. Anderson adeptly plays with dramatic irony: Readers likely already know that he ultimately made it. But how? Enter Kate Warne, “the first female detective in the United States,” who uncovered a plot to kill Lincoln in Baltimore, his only stop in the South. Lincoln “wasn’t welcome” here because of his opposition to slavery. Kate and Allan Pinkerton, head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, needed to convince Lincoln the threat was real. After they initially failed, they concocted a ruse that involved disabling telegraph lines, donning costumes, and keeping Southern spies at bay. Kate, traveling incognito, secured a berth for her “sick brother.” Lincoln boarded the train in disguise, and she kept watch until they arrived in Baltimore and his train car was rerouted. Having successfully safeguarded the president-elect, Kate disappeared into a Baltimore crowd, “hiding in plain sight” to await her next assignment. Organized chronologically, each spread opens like a scrapbook, with pictorial maps of Lincoln’s train route and framed portraits of principal characters and events, all suffused in an ominous, dusky palette. Cleverly, Comport incorporates recurring images of timepieces, matching the sense of suspense layered into Anderson’s text—time is indeed of the essence.
A lively, luminous account of a lesser-known woman’s ingenious contribution to presidential history. (afterword, bibliography, illustrator’s note, archival photographs, picture credits) (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781635928235
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Shot through with vague generalities and paired to a mix of equally generic period images and static new art, this overview remorselessly sucks all the juice from its topic.
This survey of the growth of industries in this country from the Colonial period to the post–World War II era is written in the driest of textbook-ese: “Factories needed good transportation so that materials could reach them and so that materials could reach buyers”; “The metal iron is obtained by heating iron ore”; “In 1860, the North said that free men, not slaves, should do the work.” This text is supplemented by a jumble of narrative-overview blocks, boxed side observations and terse captions on each thematic spread. The design is packed with overlapping, misleadingly seamless and rarely differentiated mixes of small, heavily trimmed contemporary prints or (later) photos and drab reconstructions of workshop or factory scenes, along with pictures of significant inventions and technological innovations (which are, in several cases, reduced to background design elements). The single, tiny map has no identifying labels. Other new entries in the All About America series deal similarly with Explorers, Trappers, and Pioneers, A Nation of Immigrants and Stagecoaches and Railroads. Utilitarian, at best—but more likely to dim reader interest than kindle it. (index, timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6670-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.
Ehrlich renders an admiring portrait of Cather, focusing on the relationship between her writing and the places she lived and visited.
Willa and family followed her grandparents from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Willa was lonely, but she had a pony and freedom to roam. When her father traded farming for real estate, the family moved to Red Cloud. She read keenly, enjoying adult friends, who "were more interesting than children and...talked to Willa in a serious and cultured way." During her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an essay’s publication changed Willa's path from doctor to writer. Cather worked at magazines in Pittsburgh and New York. The writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to focus on her own writing. Journeys to Europe, the American Southwest, back to Nebraska and Virginia—all resonated in her accomplished fiction. Ehrlich writes with little inflection, sometimes adopting Cather's viewpoint. The Civil War and slavery are briefly treated. (Cather's maternal grandparents were slaveholders.) Native Americans receive only incidental mentions: that Red Cloud is named for the Oglala Lakota chief and that, as children, Willa and her brothers had "imagined themselves in Indian country in the Southwest desert. What adventures they would have!" Minor's watercolor-and-gouache pictures depict bucolic prairie scenes and town and city life; meadowlarks appear frequently.
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject. (timeline, thumbnail biographies of American women writers of Cather's time, bibliography) (Biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-689-86573-2
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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