The book of choice for middle-grade readers embarking on the topic, this fills the gap between Peter Spier's illustrated song- text (The Erie Canal, Doubleday, 1970) and the factual detail of R. Conrad Stein's The Story of the Erie Canal (Childrens, 1985). The pages work hard. One spread encompasses a map of the canal chronicling its construction; four portraits; captioned vignettes of Niagara Falls, stairstep locks, a huge stump-pulling machine, and an aqueduct; a four-part drawing of the locks; a cross-section of the canal with towpath and bridge; and two paragraphs of the main text. Harness (Young John Quincy, 1994, etc.) is so skilled that no page appears cluttered or confusing, and with much of the information presented visually, the conception and construction of the canal are covered in eight pages. The remainder of the book is devoted to the triumphant ten-day parade of boats from Buffalo to New York City that marked the canal's completion in 1825. Intensely colored watercolor, gouache, and pencil illustrations show the canal day and night, in town and country, from vantage points high and low; more maps, diagrams, and vignettes are worked into the corners of these densely packed pages, in the author's most notable, accessible work thus far. (bibliography, music) (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-742641-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
The author of Cod’s Tale (2001) again demonstrates a dab hand at recasting his adult work for a younger audience. Here the topic is salt, “the only rock eaten by human beings,” and, as he engrossingly demonstrates, “the object of wars and revolutions” throughout recorded history and before. Between his opening disquisition on its chemical composition and a closing timeline, he explores salt’s sources and methods of extraction, its worldwide economic influences from prehistoric domestication of animals to Gandhi’s Salt March, its many uses as a preservative and industrial product, its culinary and even, as the source for words like “salary” and “salad,” its linguistic history. Along with lucid maps and diagrams, Schindler supplies detailed, sometimes fanciful scenes to go along, finishing with a view of young folk chowing down on orders of French fries as ghostly figures from history look on. Some of Kurlansky’s claims are exaggerated (the Erie and other canals were built to transport more than just salt, for instance), and there are no leads to further resources, but this salutary (in more ways than one) micro-history will have young readers lifting their shakers in tribute. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-23998-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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