Nonfiction Monday: Impossible Rescue

Before we get to the reviewing, just a reminder about my other project, YA Reading List, where I post a themed reading list EVERY SINGLE DAY.

The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure Martin W. Sandler

I'm covering the books that were on the 2013 long-list for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. For those who don't know, I was on this committee and I really want to highlight these other titles that we loved.

Off the coast of Alaska, the winter of 1897 came early, trapping eight whaling ships in the ice. There was a small settlement on shore, but between the ships and the settlement, there were not enough provisions to get through the winter, and no way to get more. (One ship managed to not be trapped, and was able to let people know what was going on, but there wasn't enough time to get back via ship for a rescue effort before winter hit full force.) President McKinley had a plan and sent three men to get them food-- they'd travel through the state and buy reindeer herds along the way, and herd the reindeer to where the men were stranded. Meanwhile, at the ships, morale and discipline were running just as low as the food.

Sandler does an excellent job of describing the conditions and tensions that run through this story. From a modern vantage point, the situation is hard to wrap your head around, but Sandler explains it really well and will have you on the edge of your seat, shivering through the Arctic reader with the whalers and their rescuers. There are several photographs and primary sources illustrating the text. It also gets high marks for some truly excellent maps and excellent back matter-- including a comprehensive "what happened next" for the people involved.

Today's Nonfiction Monday is over at Wendie's Wanderings. Be sure to check it out!

Book Provided by... the publisher, for award consideration

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Nonfiction Monday! More Cybils

Tee hee hee! I just won My Friend Amy's giveaway for the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire slayer! SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET.

Anyway, it's Nonfiction Monday and I'm reviewing another short-listed Cybils book.

Lincoln Through the Lens: How Photography Revealed and Shaped an Extraordinary Life Martin W. Sandler

Have you read Russell Freedman's Lincoln: A Photobiography? Good. You don't need to read this.

While the visual design may be more appealing than Freedman's book, Lincoln Through the Lens is the same concept, with less depth. The concept of the role photography played in Lincoln's life and presidency is a great subject for a kid's book. However, it's going to be very, very hard to top the Freedman book.

I mean, I liked this one, just not as much as Freedman. Then I got to the end.

When discussing Lincoln's broader legacy, we get the following passages:

At the time, most of the land in the United States west of the Mississippi, amounting to millions of acres, remained unsettled... By 1900, thanks to the the Homestead Act, more than eighty million acres in the west had been settled and more than 372,000 farms had been created.

In an entire page on Westward expansion, that is the picture given. Vast open stretches of land that we went and settled. Only, of course, that land did have people living on it and the Homestead Act and the westward expansion it created has some severe issue surrounding displacement of Native Americans. It would not have been overly difficult to rewrite the section saying that people saw the land as unsettled and moved West. It couldn't even mention the displacement of Native Americans? Instead, they're just missing entirely--ignored completely. Sad.

Round up is over at Tales from the Rushmore Kid.