Review by Booklist Review
This large-format anthology features a diverse set of 15 notable Americans' speeches, including Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Lou Gehrig's "Farewell to Baseball," John F. Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon," Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and Cesar Chavez's address to the Commonwealth Club of California, 1984. Most of the speeches are one or two pages long; after editing, only one of the others extends to five pages. Preceding each selection, Bolden provides a well-researched, informative section that introduces the speaker and places the speech within a meaningful framework by discussing events, attitudes, and social movements of its time. This commentary is vital for the many young readers who lack the historical context needed to understand the speech's importance. Bolden also notes when historians question the accuracy of reported speeches with no verifiable written records, such as Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give me Death" and Sojourner Truth's "I Am a Woman's Rights." Velasquez contributes a series of stately, sometimes dramatic paintings portraying the orators, their audiences, and their times, helping young people connect visually with each historical period. His appended illustrator's note is quite moving. A wide-ranging collection of speeches and a worthwhile resource for students of American history.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Listen then to the people who created this country, kept it from disunion, and brought more of its citizens into the fullness of their rights," invites the foreword (by late journalist Cokie Roberts) of this inspirational collection of speeches. Spanning more than 200 years of U.S. history, from Patrick Henry's 1775 "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" speech to Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1995 "Women's Rights Are Human Rights," most of the orations were fervent pleas for social change and equal rights on behalf of marginalized groups, including African-Americans (Frederick Douglass), women (Sojourner Truth), and migrant farm laborers (César Chavez). Other inclusions, like President Franklin Roosevelt's, aimed to embolden citizens during difficult socioeconomic times. Velasquez (Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library) provides a striking full-color oil portrait of each orator, preceding the compendium's true value: Bolden's (Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl) contextualization. Bordered by colorful concentric speech bubbles and circles, prologues by Bolden anchor each speech within a historical framework and offer biographical details (e.g., Sojourner Truth renamed herself after escaping from enslavement). A wending timeline concludes this resource, which will resonate with its themes of social justice, political discord, and courage. Ages 8--up. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
As the subtitle indicates, 15 landmark American speeches, each preceded by an introduction from Bolden that directly conveys needed history to the under-12 set.This collection treats readers not only to well-known oratory, such as Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream," Frederick Douglass' "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July," and Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" (rendered here in standard English as "I Am a Woman's Rights"), but also to some that are not as famous but still a necessary part of the discourse about what the American experiment meant and still means to different people affected by it. Seneca chief Red Jacket's explanation to white American missionary Jacob Cram that "we do not wish to destroy your religion, or take it from you; we only wish to enjoy our own" is powerfully resonant today, for instance. What separates this collection from other anthologies that celebrate spoken patriotism is the way Bolden gives readers a critical historical contextexplaining, for example, that Patrick Henry was enslaving black people even as he fiercely opposed Britain's enslaving the white colonists with unreasonable taxes. Velasquez contributes luminous oil portraits, rather disappointingly portraying Truth as an angry black woman but otherwise ably giving strong faces to these strong voices. A golden celebration of the multicultural voices who demand that the U.S.and the worlddo better. (author's note, illustrator's note, timeline, sources, permissions) (Nonfiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
