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Summary
Summary
A powerfully moving, authentic portrait of the Statue of Liberty, told through the eyes of those who created her and illustrated in glorious detail.
"Soon America will be one hundred years old. I share my dream of a birthday gift."
It begins in 1865 as a romantic idea, but ten years later Édouard Laboulaye's dream catches fire and takes shape. Sculptor Auguste Bartholdi gives the dream the form of a lady, holding a torch to "enlighten the world." Engineers, plasterers, carpenters, coppersmiths -- many of them immigrants -- work together to turn the lady into a monument over 100 feet tall. Joseph Pulitzer calls on readers to help fund a pedestal, and hundreds send in nickels, dimes, and even roosters for the cause. Doreen Rappaport's historically accurate, poetic vignettes and Matt Tavares's magnificent images remind us of the true origins of a national symbol -- and show that it took a lot of people to make the Lady.
Back matter includes statue dimensions, a time line, an author note, an illustrator note, sources, and suggestions for further reading.
Author Notes
Doreen Rappaport has written many books for young readers, including an acclaimed trilogy about the African-American experience: N o More! , Free at Last! , and Nobody Gonna Turn Me 'Round , all illustrated by Shane W. Evans. She is also the author of Martin's Big Words: the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , illustrated by Bryan Collier. She lives in Copake Falls, New York.
Matt Tavares is the illustrator of Iron Hans: A Grimms' Fairy Tale , retold by Stephen Mitchell; Jack and the Beanstalk , retold by E. Nesbit; and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas . He has also written and illustrated three books inspired by baseball: Mudball , Oliver's Game , and Zachary's Ball . Matt Tavares lives in Ogunquit, Maine.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tracing the Statue of Liberty's path to completion, Rappaport (Nobody Gonna to Turn Me 'Round) lets those responsible for its creation tell the story of the project that spanned 20 years and two continents. Based on primary sources, their often lyrical, present-tense musings surge with the emotions behind the American symbol. "I listen to the people talk as they watch/ her skin being riveted onto her skeleton./ She inspires them. She inspires me," structural engineer Gustave Eiffel declares. Jumping from one historical figure to the next (for example, from Eiffel to poet Emma Lazarus) is both energizing and discomfiting, as readers must settle into a new voice with each spread. Tavares's (Iron Hans) realistic illustrations are at their best in the sweeping, angled perspectives of the construction and easily justify the book's large trim size. The full-bleed spreads culminate in a vertical gatefold of the copper icon sans weathered patina, instantly whisking readers to the triumphant moment of Liberty's unveiling in 1886. Ages 5-9. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Primary, Intermediate) Rappaport's "biography" of the Statue of Liberty consists of fictional first-person accounts representing the voices of people who assisted in the design, building, financing, and transport of the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in the late nineteenth century. These include the French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, the American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the poet Emma Lazarus, and Florence de Foreest, a ten-year-old New Jersey girl who donated her two roosters to the fundraising efforts. The accounts, arranged chronologically, together convey a vivid sense of the ingenuity, politics, and hardships involved in making the statue a reality. Rappaport writes with clear passion for her subject (she opens with a personal story in which she recounts how her young immigrant grandfather cried when he first saw the statue), yet the writing never becomes jingoistic or overly sentimental. She doesn't shy away from the less romantic aspects of the story, whether mentioning the antipathy of prominent individuals toward the project or describing the arduous sixteen-hour work days of Italian immigrant laborers. Tavares's watercolor, pencil, and ink images complement each account precisely, emphasizing the intimacy of Rappaport's vignettes with either dramatic close-ups of the speaking characters or representations of smaller scenes from the text. The back matter to this poignant and captivating portrait includes "Statue of Liberty Dimensions," a chronology of important events, author's and illustrator's notes, and selected sources. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The noble face of the Statue of Liberty graces this biography, which presents the story of its conception and construction in France, the efforts to raise funds on both sides of the Atlantic, preparations for her arrival in New York, and the celebration culminating in her unveiling in 1886. Rappaport tells the story in a series of free-verse poems representing the reflections of individuals, from Bartholdi, who designed the statue, to Lazarus, who wrote the words on her base, to Pulitzer, who raised significant funds in America, to Florence de Foreest, a little girl who donated her roosters to be sold for the cause, to Rappaport herself, who imagines her immigrant grandfather's first sight of Liberty. The first-person narratives effectively convey the personal significance the statue has had for many people. Large in scale and monumental in effect, the watercolor, ink, and pencil illustrations, including a dramatic vertical foldout page showing Lady Liberty at her unveiling, offer often beautiful views of her many-faceted story. A source bibliography and a recommended reading list are appended. With its intimate narratives and handsome artwork, this large-format book offers a unique portrayal of an iconic statue.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE question of how long or how short the text should be hangs over the author of a picture book in a way that a writer in no other form has to face. First there is the question of attention span: both of the child listening and of the parent reading. Then there is the more fundamental question of how the words and the pictures work together. As Maurice Sendak says in Selma Lanes's book about him, "An illustration is an enlargement, an interpretation of the text." Later he adds, "It's a funny kind of juggling act, which takes a lot of technique and experience to keep the rhythm going." One of the books considered here, "Building Manhattan," by Laura Vila, aspires to this back-and-forth relationship between short text and illustrations. The other, "Lady Liberty," by Doreen Rappaport, has a much longer narrative that essentially parallels the pictures. In this case the book with the longer text is more successful. Rappaport uses a literary device that gives the writing a satisfying emotional immediacy: after an introduction about her immigrant grandfather, she tells the story of the statue's conception and construction entirely through the imagined voices of the principal actors. The visionary Édouard de Laboulaye, for instance, not only explains the beginnings of his idea to make the monument a gift to the people of America, but also suggests the early skepticism of the historian Henri Martin. In five short paragraphs, in a conversational voice, Rappaport has given us the simple facts as well as an insight into the personalities of two men who were involved in the statue's beginnings. It is historical teaching in a smoothly disguised form that should appeal to the curious 7- or 8-year-old, who would be the ideal reader for this book. Rappaport includes all the expected figures - Auguste Bartholdi, Gustave Eiffel, Emma Lazarus and Joseph Pulitzer - but she chooses some unknown citizens as well, like Florence de Foreest, a little girl from Metuchen, N.J., who contributed two roosters to the campaign to raise money for building the statue's base. The story of digging the foundation for that base is told by Charles P. Stone, the construction supervisor, in the words of someone who is down in the mud with his workers. These modest voices enlarge the narrative and, at the same time, make it more intimate. The book also provides several pages of facts about the statue and its history: important events, selected sources, an author's note and an illustrator's note. This added material seems totally appropriate for the smart, practical kid I can imagine poring over this volume. In Matt Tavares, Rappaport has been matched with a wonderfully sympathetic illustrator. Where she gives the reader a first-person description of Lady Liberty's making, Tavares creates images with a pageantlike grandeur. He achieves this by arranging the figures in classically simple compositions and through his use of light. When we first encounter the statue, for instance, it is backlighted against the sun, turning it into a near silhouette. Later the statue is shrouded in haze; at another point it is theatrically lighted by the first rays of dawn. Eventually, in a lift-up flap, the statue emerges triumphantly out of the fog. Tavares's talent for depicting physical operations is particularly evident in the pictures dealing with the sawing, nailing, pounding and shaping that went into making the 151-foot copper statue. There is one particularly beautiful picture showing the wooden armature for the hand holding the torch: Tavares has lovingly delineated each of the laths as they turn in space to form the shape, and he has painted the workers bending so benevolently to attend to this huge hand that they could be monks at a religious ceremony. An image of the workers digging the foundation achieves a muralistic monumentality, their simplified brown bodies almost merging with the earth their shovels have carved. IN "Building Manhattan," Laura Vila uses words and pictures to cover the history of the island from primeval times to the present. A text that travels that much territory in 30 pages is going to be a lightly skipping rock over a vast ocean of fact, but perhaps this kind of extreme abbreviation is all a younger child is ready to hear. (There is, at the end of the book, a timeline that expands slightly on the main text.) With a "just the facts, ma'am," brevity, Vila boils the Dutch entry into Manhattan down to the following: "The Dutch came searching for land and riches. They made maps of every place they explored." It will be up to the parent to explain what happened to the Native Americans who inhabited the two previous pages. In other spreads she introduces quirky details to enliven the sentences and the illustrations. In describing the Lower East Side at the time of Eastern European immigration, she writes, "These people built skinny row houses on skinny roads with funny names." This gives her the opportunity to make a picture with a view looking down a narrow alley at foreshortened houses and signs that name, among others, Lispenard and Desbrosses Streets. The reader is treated to more unconventional perspectives: an eagle's-eye view of Dutch forts at one moment, and then the sightline from a sailing ship's crow's nest as British explorers see the island for the first time. Later, the frame shifts to an angle looking straight up at 20th-century towers, perhaps from the vantage point of a city mouse. There are dizzying helicopter-height views of careening cars and intermingling expressway interchanges, and an up-close perspective from behind the luggage of a tourist. These drastic changes are an ingenious way to suggest the acceleration of human activity and are the most successful aspect of the illustrations. While Vila's paintings are many-hued, color is not used consistently, either to establish space in the pictures or to define shapes in one-dimensional patterns. In the book's early landscapes, the color is controlled effectively, but then Vila introduces flat flags and symbols that sit uneasily in pictures that are otherwise rendered with a soft realism. Some of her human figures, too, vacillate between heads rendered more or less realistically and bodies delineated with arcs that aspire to the geometric and have a weak connection to anatomy. The overall effect is of stylistic wavering in the execution of an ambitious idea. These two books about aspects of Manhattan plumb the subject from very different perspectives and will appeal to different children. Despite my reservations about the art in "Building Manhattan," it is, nevertheless, a cheery, colorful book that a parent could read with some pleasure to introduce a child to the basic history of the island. "Lady Liberty" provides a slightly older child with a richer and more imaginative reading experience and is a book that could be revisited numerous times. James McMullan is the author, with Kate McMullan, of "I Stink," "I'm Dirty" and, most recently, "I'm Bad."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-8-This handsome, thoroughly researched picture book tells the story of the statue from conception to dedication from the points of view of the many different players in Liberty's dramatic life. Beginning with the author imagining how her Latvian grandfather felt when he first spied "her," the presentation ends with several quotes from other European immigrants, describing their thoughts as "The Lady" welcomed them to America. The book's unique structure enables Rappaport to pack a wealth of background and detail into the text in an interesting, engaging way. Each spread features a one-and-a-half-page illustration, rendered in watercolor, ink, and pencil, accompanied by a framed narrative poem. Children meet Edouard de Laboulaye, the French law professor who conceived of the statue, and sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, with whom he collaborated. Assistant Marie Simon outlines the intensive mathematical process of turning the original four-foot clay model into the copper "Colossus" she would become. Other voices include Charles P. Stone, a construction supervisor on Bedloe's Island, and Joseph Pulitzer, whose moving editorials inspired 100,000 Americans to donate money when Congress and the Mayor of New York would not. Tavares's evocative paintings bring each perspective to life, from images of an immigrant's outstretched arms to the countless workers measuring, building, and digging. A beautiful, innovative volume.-Barbara Auerbach, New York City Public Schools (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
"She will be massive but elegant, / as grand as any one of the / Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." Tributes to the Statue of Liberty abound, but this one stands out for its unusual approach and powerful illustrations. Rappaport traces the statue's history in a series of stately free-verse poems in the voices of those who became involved in its creation: from Edouard de Laboulaye, who first proposed it, and sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, his assistant, to young Florence De Foreest, who sent her two pet roosters to help pay for the base; and Jos Mart", Cuban exile and journalist. Generally viewed from low angles, all of the solid, serious human figures in Tavares's three-quarter-spread paintings bulk larger than life--and lead up to a spectacular climactic foldout view of the monument towering into cloudy skies on the rainy day of her unveiling. Closing with heartfelt comments from several immigrants or their children, this adds up to a stirring reminder of what Lady Liberty stands for. (author's and illustrator's notes, statistics, timeline, sources) (Poetry. 9-11, adult) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.