Slapdash social history that’s too superficial to nail down the chosen topic.
A historical overview of changing types of housing in North America.
With an eye to social milestones like the 19th-century Industrial Revolution as well as architectural developments, Lawrence surveys housing from caves to smart homes. She focuses, as the title fails to note, largely on this continent’s indigenous and imported styles and couches her discourse in sweeping claims that, for instance “our earliest ancestors slept in caves” and that now “most things that people need are in the buildings where they live.” Even her attempts at specificity fall prey to bland, decontextualized generalities, such as the suggestion that “Southeastern tribes built” open-sided chickees with no reference to how today’s Indigenous people might live. The illustrations are light on fine structural details, but aside from one scene of uniformly shirtless plains Indians with feathers in their hair, Kang does make an effort to depict human figures with cultural or era-appropriate dress and, in modern group scenes, racial diversity. Though more international in scope, the co-published Transportation, illustrated by Ran Zheng, is just as careless with generalities (“Horseback riding was mainly used for transportation, but men also enjoyed riding on their estates”). Along with more scenes featuring mostly shirtless and/or feather-sporting Native Americans, it presents viewers with a figure in an Arabic keffiyeh astride a two-humped Bactrian camel from eastern Asia and a Wright brothers flyer with no engine. Both volumes end with perfunctory glossaries; neither includes leads to further resources.
Slapdash social history that’s too superficial to nail down the chosen topic. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8075-3365-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
An engaging and informative true story of perseverance and discovery.
Fern and Kulikov, collaborators on the picture-book biographies Barnum’s Bones (2012) and W is for Webster (2015), bring the self-taught archaeologist who discovered King Tut’s tomb to life.
Howard Carter’s obsession with mummies began when he was a boy in England and visited a nearby mansion filled with ancient Egyptian artifacts. Carter dreamed of discovering a mummy himself. At 17, he took a job copying ancient art for the Egypt Exploration Fund. Awed by the art and architecture he sketched and copied, Carter was eager to make discoveries of his own. He taught himself the methodologies of archaeology, Arabic, geology, Egyptian history, and how to read hieroglyphics. As an antiquities inspector for the Egyptian government, Carter excavated several tombs only to find they had been looted. Undaunted, Carter devised a plan to excavate every unsearched inch in the Valley of the Kings. His dogged persistence paid off in 1922 when he discovered the treasure-filled tomb of Tutankhamun. Quoting from Carter’s own account, Fern infuses her story with excitement. She describes Carter as having a “funky personality” with a “stubborn attitude and worse table manners”; Kulikov’s exaggerated illustrations energetically capture Carter’s ambition and fascination with his subject.
An engaging and informative true story of perseverance and discovery. (author’s note, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-30305-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
A tad rough around the edges but, visually, at least, a keeper.
A planet's-eye view of some recent visitors from Earth—one in particular.
In measured, deceptively solemn prose, the narrator (Mars itself, as eventually revealed) gets off to a shaky start, observing that the rover rolls on and on, making straight tracks that confusingly become a tangle on the next page. Things settle down thereafter: “It observes. Measures. Collects. It is always looking for water. Maybe it is thirsty.” Roy matches the tone with a set of broad, rugged, achingly remote-looking Mars-scapes that culminate in a wildly swirling dust storm followed by a huge double gatefold: “Everything is… / RED as far as the eye can see. But it is beautiful.” Curiosity itself she depicts with almost clinical precision (though its wheels look different from different angles), adding a schematic view at the end with select parts and instruments labeled. Following playful nods to other rovers along the way (Spirit and Opportunity “had a spirit of adventure and seized every opportunity to explore”), a substantial quantity of backmatter includes more information about each one—including the next one up, Mars 2020—as well as about the fourth planet itself. For audience appeal it’s hard to beat Markus Motum’s cheerfully anthropomorphic Curiosity: The Story of a Mars Rover (2018), but the art here, in adding a certain grandeur and mystery to the red planet, has an appeal of its own.
A tad rough around the edges but, visually, at least, a keeper. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19833-4
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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