Monday, June 25, 2012

Nonfiction Monday

Nonfiction Monday is hosted today by Capstone Connect.

My selection is "Women explorers: perils, pistols, and petticoats" written by Julie Cummins with illustrations by Cheryl Harness. 


Name some famous explorers -- Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark? Nothing wrong with those choices, but what about the ladies?  That's the question asked and answered by Julie Cummins in this Nonfiction Monday selection.
Cummins offers short biographies of ten  remarkable women born before 1900 who took risks and explored their world from the Arctic to the Andes, from the Amazon to Africa.  Lucy Cheesman traveled among cannibals  as she studied insects in the South Pacific.  Freya Stark journeyed through the Middle East.  Violet Cressy-Marcks made eight trips around the world.  As they traveled, these intrepid women documented and photographed their journeys and wrote extensively about their experiences and discoveries thus providing important contributions to the natural and social sciences. 
Cummins has compiled readable, student-friendly biographies that entertain and inform.  She follows the text with a note about ten additional woman explorers and provides a paragraph about each to invite readers to do a bit of discovering of their own.  The book concludes with a selected bibliography and websites for further reading.

Harness' illustrations  compliment the narrative by placing each woman in her geographical context and giving readers a vibrant visual sense of obstacles faced and overcome.

1 comment:

GatheringBooks said...

Oh nice! This looks awesome. It reminded me a little bit of the time when we had our Girl Power theme in March/April! I should have known about this book sooner.

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