An insider’s view of exciting sites and finds, with prehistoric portraits aplenty to match.
Landmark discoveries in paleontology, from multibillion-year-old stromatolites to a woolly mammoth tooth no more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids.
After a general timeline and a rundown of the “big five” extinction events, paleontologist Moore covers the story of prehistoric life in roughly chronological single topic spreads. She focuses mainly on lesser known tales of discovery, such as the Precambrian fossils found by 19th-century schoolchildren in England’s Charnwood Forest, and also highlights spectacular finds at unusually rich sites like Angeac-Charente in France, where 73,000 specimens have been recovered, and Oregon’s Turtle Cove Assemblage. Thorns tucks an occasional light- or dark-skinned human figure in for scale but fills up most pages with an abundance of full-body animal portraits—not always to relative scale but rendered in lifelike poses and with reasonable, usually brightly colored naturalism. Readers curious about the deep history of microbes, plants, and fungi will have to look elsewhere, and our hominin story is limited to three skimpy spreads. Still, along with extinct stars like Titanoboa and Megalodon, special features such as a lineup comparing the very different original and modern concepts of what certain dinosaurs looked like and a gallery of wildly shaped and hued ceratopsian heads will please both fledgling and confirmed dinophiles. And the named and depicted paleontologists here include nearly as many women as men. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An insider’s view of exciting sites and finds, with prehistoric portraits aplenty to match. (index) (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68449-254-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Neon Squid/Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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