This compassionate summary of Joseph Merrick's life shows young readers that people can be "measured by the soul" rather...
Di Fiore colors history with imagined scenes to humanize a man the world knew as the Elephant Man.
Joseph Merrick, introduced mid–freak show in present tense, would rather have made people laugh than scream. Instead, severe disfigurement forced him to perform in freak shows as the Elephant Man, named for the heavy lumps growing on his skin. In past tense, the author simply recounts Merrick's journey through illness and exploitation to self-acceptance, courtesy of the compassionate Dr. Frederick Treves. The author personalizes Merrick's story by imagining his reactions to being ostracized, ogled by onlookers and medical students, and smiled at by a beautiful woman; his plausible sadness, joy, and loneliness promote empathy rather than pity. Hodnefjeld's drawings respect but soften Merrick's figure, in contrast to unflinching archival photographs of his body. The eye-catching blend of photographs and line drawings, including photographed heads on drawn bodies, offers glimpses of both Merrick's time and his life. An afterword explains how Merrick died as well as the probable cause of his deformity: Proteus syndrome. A photo reconstruction suggests what Merrick might have looked like without his disease, recalling a wish he expressed in poetry: "Could I create myself anew / I would not fail in pleasing you."
This compassionate summary of Joseph Merrick's life shows young readers that people can be "measured by the soul" rather than appearances. (bibliography) (Historical fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55451-778-7
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
A powerful, lyrical tribute to the musician whose music is so much a part of our lives.
This moving biography honors the life and work of the legendary folk singer who celebrated the lives of working people all over the US.
Guthrie, born in Oklahoma in 1912, came from a poor family filled with music, but devastated by death and illness. As a youngster, he absorbed the sounds of country living and the traditional music of Oklahoma and Texas. Later, during the Great Depression, he used these memories to become a popular voice for the dust bowl refugees, writing and singing about them and performing on radio in Los Angeles. He spent years moving from place to place in support of the union movement, migrant field workers, and coal miners. Christensen (Moon Over Tennessee, 1999, etc.) writes briefly of his marriages, his children, and his eventual tragic death from Huntington’s disease, but the thrust is his devotion to the cause of downtrodden workers. The words of his signature song “This Land is Your Land” run along the top of each page and are printed in their entirety at the end along with a timeline and Web site citation. (No bibliography or source notes are included.) Christensen’s text is strong and beautiful, as rich in images as her subject’s music. Through them, the reader will get a wonderful sense of the soul of her subject and his times. Read aloud, this could work for younger readers, but the dramatic mixed media, woodcut-like illustrations in a picture-book format will attract older ones as well.
A powerful, lyrical tribute to the musician whose music is so much a part of our lives. ((Biography. 8-10))Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-81113-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
An immensely popular figure in his day, the Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont invented a personal dirigible that he...
So the Wright Brothers were the first to fly? Au contraire, asserts Griffith in this rare portrait of a little-known (in this country, at least) early aviator.
An immensely popular figure in his day, the Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont invented a personal dirigible that he steered around the Eiffel Tower and drove out to run errands. Griffith’s prose isn’t always polished (“If Blériot succeeded to fly first….”), but her narrative makes her subject’s stature clear as she takes him from a luncheon with jeweler Louis Cartier, who invented the wristwatch to help his friend keep track of his time in the air, to his crowning aeronautical achievement in 1906: He beat out both the secretive Wrights and pushy rival Louis Blériot as the first to fly an aircraft that could take off and land on its own power. The author covers his career in more detail in a closing note (with photos), ascribing his eventual suicide in part to remorse that, instead of ushering in an era of peace as he had predicted, aircraft were being used in warfare. Montanari’s genteel pastel-and-chalk pictures of turn-of-the-20th-century Paris and Parisians don’t capture how much larger than life Santos-Dumont was, but they do succeed in helping Griffith bring him to American audiences.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0011-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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