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WHO NEEDS A STATUE?

Name: WHO NEEDS A STATUE?
Author: Eve LaPlante
ISBN: 9780884489511

by Eve LaPlante & Margy Burns Knight ; illustrated by Alix Delinois ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2024

Deserving but less prominent luminaries shine more brightly here.

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A gallery of intrepid American groundbreakers, pathfinders, and activists who have earned commemorative statues.

Starting at the U.S. Capitol and ranging as far afield as an airport in Austin, Texas, and a park in Napa, California, the book covers more than a dozen figures—all either women, people of color, or both—who have been immortalized in stone or bronze. Many of the names will likely be unfamiliar to young readers. Beginning with Thocmetony Sarah Winnemucca, the first published Native American woman author, and continuing on past the inspirational likes of Anne Hutchinson (who was banished from colonial Massachusetts for illegally teaching men), comet discoverer Maria Mitchell, and Olympians and activists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each entry features a brief but sonorous initial annotation and a more detailed one in the backmatter that identifies the statues’ sculptors. Delinois’ painterly images don’t always capture the individual style or character of the monuments the way photos would have, but he does take advantage of his medium to add homey or historical flourishes, such as a view of Deborah Sampson—who dressed in men’s clothes in order to fight in the American Revolution—blasting away at a group of redcoats and an image of a child in a wheelchair seated next to a chatty effigy of Everglades advocate Marjory Stoneman Douglas in a garden near Miami. An oblique closing reference to commemorative statues being removed or replaced in many localities ends this powerful recitation on a cogent note.

Deserving but less prominent luminaries shine more brightly here. (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024

ISBN: 9780884489511

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Tilbury House

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

From the All About America series

by Hilarie N. Staton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2012

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

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WILLA

THE STORY OF WILLA CATHER, AN AMERICAN WRITER

by Amy Ehrlich illustrated by Wendell Minor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2016

A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.

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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)