This book includes a lengthy training guide from experienced bodyguards, but it may be the emus that children remember most.
It would be easy to say: “This book includes all the information you need to become a bodyguard.” But the real value of the book is that it contains information you don’t need at all.
According to Chapter 1, it was almost impossible to speak to the pharaoh of Egypt. One needed, Butts writes, “to make an appointment to see the priests’ secretary, to make an appointment to see the priests, to make an appointment to see the pharaoh.” Some authors would have ended the story there, but he lets it keep building: “First, the priests made you take a bath—maybe two or three of them.” The best reason to pick up this book is that every story has one more detail than is necessary. Chapter 6 mentions that geese, donkeys and llamas make good early warning systems because of their sensitive hearing. The next sentence points out that ostriches, emus and kangaroos are also effective. The comic strips that appear in each chapter, on the other hand, add nothing of value. They simply repeat facts from the pages around them, and the characters have such limited facial expression that the story is difficult to follow from panel to panel. Aside from ancient Egyptian priests and animals, other types of bodyguards mentioned include, among others, the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, Abraham Lincoln’s tippling police guard and Elvis’ Memphis Mafia.
This book includes a lengthy training guide from experienced bodyguards, but it may be the emus that children remember most. (glossary, chronology, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-437-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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