Tantalizing glimpses of a composer who challenged the very definition of music.
The story of a composer and performer who didn’t just push musical envelopes…he shredded them.
Rogers presents the bad boy of 20th-century art music as an inveterate experimenter who was, from childhood on, hyperaware of the ambient urban sounds all around him and dedicated himself to finding new ways to make and use them. In this he might sound a lot like Charles Ives in Mordecai Gerstein’s What Charlie Heard (2002), but Cage ventured much further than Ives into weirdness—by tucking random junk into piano strings, for instance. Whether accidentally setting himself on fire, as he did once (commenting “Isn’t that marvelous?”), writing music that resulted in alienated audiences walking out midway through a performance, or offering a piece consisting entirely of over four and a half minutes of silence, he “was serious,” the author argues, “about asking people to accept new ideas, recognize music in everyday life, and be still enough to hear sounds in silence.” Na incorporates a self-developed vocabulary of dots, squiggles, and slashing lines, assembled in a labeled glossary at the end, into evocatively vivid and jumbled scenes of city streets, explosions of color creeping into drably hued rooms, and images of concert halls filled with racially diverse, stunned-looking audiences and musicians. Young readers may not be attracted to Cage’s music but will come away with a strong sense of his liberating open-mindedness. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Tantalizing glimpses of a composer who challenged the very definition of music. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, quotation sources, selected sources) (Picture-book biography. 6-9)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593646625
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Anne Schwartz/Random
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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