A handsome overview, parochial for all its chronological scope.
Carried along on a broad ribbon of time that winds across oversized spreads, thousands of small images re-enact the human story.
Goes, a Belgian illustrator, begins with the Big Bang, but by the fifth spread, Lucy is peeking from behind a tree as Neanderthals stroll through a torch-lit cave. From there, each page turn offers a panoramic view of a whole civilization up through the Middle Ages, a single century from the 14th to the 19th, decades or half-decades post–World War I, and finally a glimpse of the “2010s” that ends with the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Now and then such diversions as “The Aztecs” or “Space travel” offer pauses in the march. The book is highly selective with both the hordes of stylized but recognizable artifacts and historical figures and the buckets of specific facts and dates scattered throughout. Still, the artist resorts to such extremes of compression that Native American cultures are largely distilled to a cluster of teepees around a totem pole near some buffalo, and one crowd listens to both Jimi Hendrix and “black religious leader” Martin Luther King Jr. while watching JFK motor and singing anti-war songs. It’s an ingenious use of space—but with few exceptions, the world beyond Europe and North America barely figures. The absence of an index makes this a browsing item rather than a resource.
A handsome overview, parochial for all its chronological scope. (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-776570-69-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Gecko Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care.
In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there.
The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book. From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation. Oil is pumped from the Earth “all day long, all night long, / day after day, year after year” in “what had been unspoiled land, home to Native people // and thousands of caribou.” The scale of extraction is huge: There’s “a giant pipeline” leading to “enormous ships.” Then, crash. Rivers of oil gush out over three full-bleed wordless pages. Subsequent scenes show rocks, seabirds, and sea otters covered with oil. Finally, 30 years later, animals have returned to a cheerful scene. “But if you lift a rock… // oil / seeps / up.” For an adult reader, this is heartbreaking. How much more difficult might this be for an animal-loving child?
Like oil itself, this is a book that needs to be handled with special care. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 9-12)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3077-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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