Kirkpatrick casts an unusual sidelight on the exploits of Peary and Henson with this profile of Peary’s daughter Marie, who was born in 1893 in a two-room house in northern Greenland, and spent large portions of her youth north of the Arctic Circle. In the sparely written chronicle of her travels and in the healthy suite of accompanying photos, she comes across as a lively sort, as comfortable at sea or on the ice as in her well-to-do grandparents’ household or the Peary’s idyllic Maine island retreat. The photos are atmospherically tinted to look like platinum prints and are about equally divided between shots of Marie in refined city dress and in heavy furs. The author leaves a few questions unanswered—readers will have to look elsewhere for the significance of Marie’s middle name, “Ahnighito,” for instance. Further, she covers the last six decades of her life as a memoirist and children’s author in a few sentences. Still, Kirkpatrick is frank enough to mention Marie’s half-Inuit siblings, introduces a circle of colorful friends and associates and conveys some sense of what it was like to grow up with a famous, but often absent, father. (index, source notes) (Biography. 11-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2007
ISBN: 0-8234-1973-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Prose poems celebrate the feats of young heroines, some of them famous, and some not as well-known. Paul (Hello Toes! Hello Feet!, 1998, etc.) recounts moments in the lives of women such as Rachel Carson, Amelia Earhart, and Wilma Rudolph; these moments don’t necessarily reflect what made them famous as much as they are pivotal events in their youth that influenced the direction of their lives. For Earhart, it was sliding down the roof of the tool shed in a home-made roller coaster: “It’s like flying!” For Rudolph, it was the struggle to learn to walk without her foot brace. Other women, such as Violet Sheehy, who rescued her family from a fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, or Harriet Hanson, a union supporter in the fabric mills of Massachusetts, are celebrated for their brave decisions made under extreme duress. Steirnagle’s sweeping paintings powerfully exude the strength of character exhibited by these young women. A commemorative book, that honors both quiet and noisy acts of heroism. (Picture book/poetry. 6-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201477-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ringgold’s biography of Rosa Parks packs substantial material into a few pages, but with a light touch, and with the ring of authenticity that gives her act of weary resistance all the respect it deserves. Narrating the book is the bus that Parks took that morning 45 years ago; it recounts the signal events in Parks’s life to a young girl who boarded it to go to school. A decent amount of the material will probably be new to children, for Parks is so intimately associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her work with the NAACP before the bus incident is often overlooked, as is her later role as a community activist in Detroit with Congressman John Conyers. Ringgold, through the bus, also informs readers of Parks’s youth in rural Alabama, where Klansmen and nightriders struck fear into the lives of African-Americans. These experiences make her refusal to release her seat all the more courageous, for the consequences of resistance were not gentle. All the events are depicted in emotive naive artwork that underscores their truth; Ringgold delivers Parks’s story without hyperbole, but rather as a life lived with pride, conviction, and consequence. (Picture book/biography. 5-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-81892-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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