Sibert Informational Book Award, Honorīoston Globe-Horn Book Award, Nonfiction Honor Meticulously researched by both author and artist, Josephine's powerful story of struggle and triumph is an inspiration and a spectacle, just like the legend herself.īook Synopsis Coretta Scott King Book Award, Illustrator, Honor Louis to the grandest stages in the world. You can bet that middle-schoolers will know that the best stuff is on YouTube, and Baker’s banana dance is just a search term away.About the Book A portrait of the passionate performer and civil rights advocate Josephine Baker, the woman who worked her way from the slums of St. Author and illustrator notes are included, as well as quotation sources and a short bibliography. Unlike Jonah Winter’s Jazz Age Josephine (BCCB 2/12), this title brings readers right up to Baker’s bittersweet end, with bills to pay, adopted children to support, and a comeback in her late sixties. While Powell celebrates Baker’s triumph on stage and Robinson matches every superlative with punchy colors and doll-like figures at once slinky and naïve, it is clear that demons of poverty and bigotry impelled much of that on-stage ferocity and that comedy masked great sadness. She wiggled like a serpent, slunk like a panther, and boxed like a kangaroo. Success in America was always hobbled by Jim Crow, but Paris embraced her and she lit up the City of Lights (“The Black Pearl climbed down a palm tree, wearing a skirt of bananas and a necklace of shells. By thirteen she’d hit the road with the Dixie Steppers, getting her big chance to dangle above the stage as Cupid and revel in the audience’s appreciation of her clowning. On comes the spotlight for “The Beginning, 1906-1917,” when little Tumpy was raised in poverty, soaking up her mother’s vaudeville dreams (“I didn’t have any stockings … I danced to keep warm”).
The book positions Baker right where she was happiest-on stage-dividing her life into acts introduced with a few props on the floorboards bordered by a proscenium curtain.
Factual and yet poetic, laced with a sadness and sensuality too sophisticated for most primary graders, and with a text too whimsical for biography report writers, this take on the life of early twentieth-century entertainer Josephine Baker defies convention as boldly as its subject did.
0 kommentar(er)
