Will incite sympathy, not to say outrage, along with admiration for these often-underestimated birds.
Highlights from the more than 5,000-year history of the “pigeon post.”
Pigeons were the first birds to be domesticated (about 10,000 years ago) and have been used to carry messages since at least the days of ancient Egypt. Along with being uncanny navigators, they’ve been shown to be intelligent enough to distinguish between the music of Bach and Stravinsky. Wartime episodes, which will horrify readers with an interest in animal welfare, describe how these intelligent birds have been savagely mutilated by enemy gunfire. Asking readers to ponder whether pigeons were “just returning home by instinct” or if they sensed “they had a vital mission to complete,” Goldsmith presents profiles of a series of pigeon heroes. Despite injuries she describes in detail, these birds intrepidly saved lives by delivering crucial field reports or desperate appeals for help. The incidents included mostly occurred during the two World Wars and primarily in Western Europe (though there’s some coverage of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe), and they often led to the birds’ receiving medals and other honors. The accessible text is enlivened by frequent quotations. Interesting archival photos plus frequent sidebar excursions (including some amusing trash talk aimed at U.S. troops that German soldiers sent via captured Allied pigeons) join a particularly rich set of further resources to enhance these tales of animals at war.
Will incite sympathy, not to say outrage, along with admiration for these often-underestimated birds. (glossary, source notes, bibliography, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781728487083
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Twenty-First Century/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Brief yet inspirational, this story will galvanize youth to use their voices for change.
Testa’s connection to and respect for nature compelled her to begin championing animal causes at the age of 10, and this desire to have an impact later propelled her to dedicate her life to fighting plastic pollution. Starting with the history of plastic and how it’s produced, Testa acknowledges the benefits of plastics for humanity but also the many ways it harms our planet. Instead of relying on recycling—which is both insufficient and ineffective—she urges readers to follow two additional R’s: “refuse” and “raise awareness.” Readers are encouraged to do their part, starting with small things like refusing to use plastic straws and water bottles and eventually working up to using their voices to influence business and policy change. In the process, she highlights other youth advocates working toward the same cause. Short chapters include personal examples, such as observations of plastic pollution in Mauritius, her maternal grandparents’ birthplace. Testa makes her case not only against plastic pollution, but also for the work she’s done, resulting in something of a college-admissions–essay tone. Nevertheless, the first-person accounts paired with science will have an impact on readers. Unfortunately, no sources are cited and the lack of backmatter is a missed opportunity.
Brief yet inspirational, this story will galvanize youth to use their voices for change. (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-22333-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a...
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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