Grade 2-4-In 13 double-page chapters, 16 people are brought to light. One incident from each person's life is re-created, giving a quick, snapshot-style view of the individual's contribution to the world. Arranged in chronological order, the profiles begin with Tisquantum, known also as Squanto, and close with Sherman Alexie, a Navajo poet and novelist born in 1966. Students might be familiar with a few subjects (Maria Tallchief, Wilma Mankiller, Sacajawea, Jim Thorpe), but most will be new. The text is large, and sentences are accessible to emerging readers. Each section is uniform-a colorful painting depicting the scene takes up a little over half of the spread, with the narrative beside it. There is some fictionalizing-Ko-watsi'tsi‚-ni's "-knees trembled as she walked toward the door"-but it is limited and does not detract from the overall worth of the title. The biographies are too short for reports but will spark children's interest. This title is perfect for Native American units.
Anne Chapman Callaghan, Racine Public Library, WI
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
K-Gr. 3. From Tisquantum and the Pilgrims to a Navaho code-breaker in WW II to contemporary writer Sherman Alexie, this collective biography introduces 13 famous Native Americans from several nations. For each profile, there is a page of brief text opposite a handsome watercolor painting. Although the author and artists provide full notes about their research and discuss the difficulty of finding facts without written records and photographs, their solution of "recreating one moment" from each person's life often blurs fact and fiction and is decidedly unsatisfactory as a model for kids' own research and critical thinking. The imagined episodes are most useful when there is direct information available, as in the description of Maria Tallchief's performance of the Nutcracker. But then why not just use direct facts and quotes for people like Tallchief and the Cherokee leader Wilma Mankiller, who have written first-person accounts? After each imagined moment, there is a very brief biographical note; that and the source notes and Web sites to further research, as well as the fine illustrations, will make this useful, especially since there is so little else available on the subject for this age group. Hazel Rochman
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