An inspired and stirring tale to share at Hanukkah—or any time of year.
The story of the White House’s first menorah, narrated by a wooden beam salvaged after the presidential residence was renovated in 1948.
Though reluctant to leave, Harry S. Truman agrees that the crumbling mansion requires a major overhaul; the first family moves out, and work begins. As the White House’s interior is razed and rebuilt, our narrator reflects on “a deeper level of destruction” it once witnessed. In 1943, hundreds of rabbis visited President Franklin Roosevelt to implore him to offer Eastern European Jews safe haven in the United States; Roosevelt refused, and millions of Jewish people subsequently perished in the Holocaust. (An author’s note in the book’s first printing erroneously references Theodore Roosevelt.) “I was supposed to be destroyed,” the beam repeats in a poignant refrain. Yet through it all, the narrator is somehow rescued. It sits in a storage warehouse for years until 2022, when woodworkers transform it into a menorah and President Biden introduces it as the “first Jewish artifact ever added to the White House’s permanent collection.” Previous administrations lit menorahs that were only temporarily on loan, but, as the beam-turned-menorah tells readers, “I can never be removed.” In this moving account, the humble menorah symbolizes the ancient miracle of salvation, as well as Jewish resilience and “strength for generations to come.” The muted, dignified illustrations echo the solemnity of the text, effectively capturing historical details and settings.
An inspired and stirring tale to share at Hanukkah—or any time of year. (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780593698174
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Rocky Pond Books/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Shot through with vague generalities and paired to a mix of equally generic period images and static new art, this overview remorselessly sucks all the juice from its topic.
This survey of the growth of industries in this country from the Colonial period to the post–World War II era is written in the driest of textbook-ese: “Factories needed good transportation so that materials could reach them and so that materials could reach buyers”; “The metal iron is obtained by heating iron ore”; “In 1860, the North said that free men, not slaves, should do the work.” This text is supplemented by a jumble of narrative-overview blocks, boxed side observations and terse captions on each thematic spread. The design is packed with overlapping, misleadingly seamless and rarely differentiated mixes of small, heavily trimmed contemporary prints or (later) photos and drab reconstructions of workshop or factory scenes, along with pictures of significant inventions and technological innovations (which are, in several cases, reduced to background design elements). The single, tiny map has no identifying labels. Other new entries in the All About America series deal similarly with Explorers, Trappers, and Pioneers, A Nation of Immigrants and Stagecoaches and Railroads. Utilitarian, at best—but more likely to dim reader interest than kindle it. (index, timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6670-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.
Ehrlich renders an admiring portrait of Cather, focusing on the relationship between her writing and the places she lived and visited.
Willa and family followed her grandparents from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Willa was lonely, but she had a pony and freedom to roam. When her father traded farming for real estate, the family moved to Red Cloud. She read keenly, enjoying adult friends, who "were more interesting than children and...talked to Willa in a serious and cultured way." During her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an essay’s publication changed Willa's path from doctor to writer. Cather worked at magazines in Pittsburgh and New York. The writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to focus on her own writing. Journeys to Europe, the American Southwest, back to Nebraska and Virginia—all resonated in her accomplished fiction. Ehrlich writes with little inflection, sometimes adopting Cather's viewpoint. The Civil War and slavery are briefly treated. (Cather's maternal grandparents were slaveholders.) Native Americans receive only incidental mentions: that Red Cloud is named for the Oglala Lakota chief and that, as children, Willa and her brothers had "imagined themselves in Indian country in the Southwest desert. What adventures they would have!" Minor's watercolor-and-gouache pictures depict bucolic prairie scenes and town and city life; meadowlarks appear frequently.
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject. (timeline, thumbnail biographies of American women writers of Cather's time, bibliography) (Biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-689-86573-2
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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