A grandiose title and melodramatic, superhero-style art fail to lift Gifford’s profiles of familiar explorers above the routine. Making only fitful efforts to support his titular premise, the author briefly retraces the routes of European explorers from Marco Polo and Columbus to Richard Burton and Jacques Cousteau, tucking in a chapter on Meriwether Lewis to represent the Americans and briefer sketches at the end of Zheng He and Mary Kingsley to add diversity. The prose reads like a series of uninspired school reports—“On his second voyage, Cook traveled further south than any explorer before him…Giant icebergs and severe storms tormented their journey”—and the author neither cites his sources nor provides leads to more information about his subjects. The steely-eyed, forward-leaning figures in Cousens’s illustrations supply some eye candy, but there’s nothing else here that any adequate library or encyclopedia won’t provide. The simultaneously published Ten Leaders Who Changed The World (ISBN: 978-0-7534-6104-4) is no better, though at least the cast of modern heroes (Gandhi, Mandela) and tyrants (Hitler, Mao Zedong) is more multicultural in scope. (Collective biography. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6103-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Just in time for the millennium comes this adaptation of Jennings and Brewster’s The Century (1998). Still a browsable, coffee-table edition, the book divides the last 100 years more or less by decade, with such chapter headings as “Shell Shock,” “Global Nightmare,” and “Machine Dreams.” A sweeping array of predominantly black-and-white photographs documents the story in pictures—from Theodore Roosevelt to O.J., the Panama Canal to the crumbling Berlin Wall, the dawn of radio to the rise of Microsoft—along with plenty of captions and brief capsules of historical events. Setting this volume apart, and making it more than just a glossy textbook overview of mega-events, are blue sidebars that chronicle the thoughts, actions, and attitudes of ordinary men, women, and children whose names did not appear in the news. These feature-news style interviews feature Milt Hinton on the Great Migration, Betty Broyles on a first automobile ride, Sharpe James on the effect of Jackie Robinson’s success on his life, Clara Hancox on growing up in the Depression, Marnie Mueller on life as an early Peace Corps volunteer, and more. The authors define the American century by “the inevitability of change,” a theme reflected in the selection of photographs and interviews throughout wartime and peacetime, at home and abroad. While global events are included only in terms of their impact on Americans, this portfolio of the century is right for leafing through or for total immersion. (index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32708-0
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-91426-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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