A well-written, multipurpose war-hero story that’s both entertaining and instructive.
This children’s book celebrates the contributions of Marquis de Lafayette to the American Revolution in rhyming verse.
A quotation from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton serves this book both as an epigraph and a tip of the hat to that production’s engaging, modernized portrayal of Lafayette, “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.” Jensen, who has also written several works of historical fiction for children as well as Christmas stories, provides a similarly fresh take on Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette and his career, beginning when he was a teenager: “Young Lafayette had dinner with the British king’s bro, / Who told him the Americans were ‘good to go.’ ” Here as elsewhere, the information sketched out in the verse is explained more completely in the endnotes. In this case, readers can learn the date, full name of the king’s “bro,” and Lafayette’s recorded reaction to the conversation. The verses go on to describe Lafayette’s career as he made his way to the Colonies and joined the Revolutionary Army. He became a major general, distinguished himself in several battles and missions, was wounded, served and befriended Washington, won support from France, and played a decisive role in the Battle of Yorktown. Jensen’s deft rhymes and meters generally work well throughout, as when describing Lafayette’s voyage to America: “He endured the trip across despite some nasty mal de mer, / And learned a bit of English by the time he landed there.” While enjoyable on its own, the book is a useful resource with its historical paintings, glossary, bibliography, and endnotes. These are clear, informative, and full of intriguing tidbits, such as noting the “extremely close friendship between the fatherless Lafayette and the childless Washington.” The verse also has performance potential for educational events.
A well-written, multipurpose war-hero story that’s both entertaining and instructive.Pub Date: July 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9909408-1-4
Page Count: 63
Publisher: Past Times Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Preaching to the choir, perhaps, but an invigorating sermon all the same.
Zinn-ian conspiracy theories, propounded engagingly and energetically by filmmaker and gadfly Stone and Cold War scholar Kuznick (History/American Univ.).
If you’ve read Howard Zinn—or if, like Jeff Lebowski, the Port Huron Statement is still current news for you—then you’ll have at least some of the outlines of this overstuffed argument. Premise 1: Though the United States may pretend to be a nice, cuddly sort of democracy, it’s the font of much trouble in the world. Premise 2: When, post-9/11, neocons began pondering why it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for the U.S. to become an imperial power, they were missing a train (or Great White Fleet) that had pulled out of the station long ago. Premise 3: We like European fascists better than Asian fascists, as evidenced by propaganda posters depicting our erstwhile Japanese foes as rats and vermin. Premise 4: War is a racket that benefits only the ruling class. Premise 5: JFK knew more than he had a chance to make public, and he was gunned down for his troubles. And so forth. Layered in with these richly provocative (and eminently arguable) theses are historical aperçus and data that don’t figure in most standard texts—e.g., the showdown between Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman (“in a colossal failure of presidential leadership”) that could only lead to a protracted struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for post–World War II dominance. Some familiar villains figure in as well, notably the eminently hissable Henry Kissinger and his pal Augusto Pinochet; the luster of others whom we might want to think of as good guys dims (George H.W. Bush in regard to Gorbachev), while other bad guys (George W. Bush in regard to Saddam Hussein) get worse.
Preaching to the choir, perhaps, but an invigorating sermon all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1351-3
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)
In 1943, motherless 12-year-old Eva, her sickly older sister Rachel, and their Papa are forced by the Germans, who have
occupied their Polish town, Bezdin, to live in the Jewish ghetto. Papa knows their lives are in danger and worries what will happen to his girls if he is killed or sent to a death camp. Then one day, as Rachel is walking to their aunt’s apartment for a visit, the soldiers raid the ghetto and carry her off. Weeks pass, and Papa finally hears that she is alive in a labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Since conditions in the ghetto worsen daily and the raids increase in frequency, Papa begs the Nazi official for whom he works to send Eva to join Rachel in Parschnitz; miraculously, his request is granted. At the camp, conditions are terrible—there is little water and practically no food, and the inmates are forced to work 18 hours a day at jobs that are not only difficult but extremely dangerous. Eva, for example, works on spinning machines, where she must keep lint from clogging the machinery by reaching into the moving mechanism. The girls grow weaker by the day, and their worries are compounded by two things: their uncertainty about the fate of Papa the ever-present chance that they will be chosen to board the trains that leave each day for the death camps. While the book is fiction, the author has based it on the life of her own mother-in-law, who survived in the camps even as her sister did. Every word of this radical change for Isaacs (Swamp Angel, 1994, etc.) rings as true as any first-person story told by an actual survivor, giving young readers another powerful testament to the horrors of the
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-590-60363-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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