Children - Social Studies, Entertainment & Performing Arts - Biography, Children - Biography

Will Rogers: An American Legend

Name: Will Rogers: An American Legend
Author: Frank Keating
ISBN: 9780152063368

by Frank Keating, Mike Wimmer

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Overview

Will Rogers loved people—and adventure—from the time he was a young boy. As a man, he traveled around the world as a trick roper in a Wild West show and became a favorite radio, vaudeville, and Broadway entertainer. Filled with Will Rogers’s own timeless quotes, this picture book tells the story of a humble man who lived the American dream.

A biography of the man from Oklahoma, known for his wise and witty sayings.

Synopsis

Who says cowboys are all brawn? Will Rogers combined his love of adventure with a thirst for knowledge and a razor-sharp tongue—to become an American legend.

Publishers Weekly

The folksy, adventurous Oklahoma-born newspaper columnist and celebrated wit who never met a man he didn't like takes center stage in this admiring if impressionistic picture book biography. Oklahoma governor Keating emphasizes Rogers's personality in place of much expository information, quoting him on nearly every page ("They may call me a rube and a hick, but I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it"). An evocation of Rogers's childhood in Indian Territory, where he learned "to ride and rope as well as any boy or man" and also to love books, abruptly yields to a scene of Rogers suddenly grown up and traveling by plane "everywhere he could" and "always joking and sharing with others the humor and joy of living." Readers are almost certain to want more of an explanation of Rogers's career, but it does not come. Wimmer (Summertime) makes excellent use of both natural and interior light in his realistic oil paintings, capturing the beauty of Rogers's native state as well as his lively spirit. The book design plays up the homey western theme, with linked horseshoes branding bold W's on the endpapers and the text presented as a series of pages pulled out of an old manual typewriter. Ages 6-9. (Aug.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

About the Author, Frank Keating

FRANK KEATING has held many government positions, including assistant secretary of the Department of the Treasury and associate attorney general of the United States. He is currently the governor of Oklahoma, an office he has held since 1995. Governor Keating lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

MIKE WIMMER has illustrated many heralded books for children, including Home Run, which was called a "grand slam" in a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and Flight: The Journey of Charles Lindbergh, which won the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. He lives in Oklahoma.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

“One of the best picture-book biographies of the year.”—Houston Chronicle“[Captures] the beauty of Rogers’s native state as well as his lively spirit.”—Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

School Library Journal

Gr 2-4-A beautifully illustrated, nicely designed, but flawed book. Wimmer's oil paintings are striking in terms of their realism and their authenticity with regard to time period. In fact, it is only from the pictures that children unfamiliar with (this) Mr. Rogers will know when events take place, as Keating mentions neither dates nor specific occurrences. There are charming touches of whimsicality in the art, such as Will lassoing a puppy's tail. However, there is also a certain lack of sensitivity. In one picture, Will is playing "Cowboys and Indians" with his children, and the youngsters are depicted as stereotypical savages, whooping and attacking with tomahawk and bow and arrow and wearing headbands of feathers. In another instance, the text refers to Will speaking "common sense to common people," accompanied by the only illustration featuring African Americans. Keating's text is confusing and disjointed. Will goes from "ten years or so in school," to flying everywhere he could, and then returning to a previously unmentioned Betty and their four children. The text is littered with oblique statements such as "Will Rogers loved the land.- the land taught him that all men were good-," and is fraught with sentence fragments and questionable grammar and syntax. Although the author quotes liberally from Rogers's own words, the kind of influence the man exerted in his day never emerges, and his most famous appellation of "Good Will Ambassador" is never mentioned. This book does not do justice to this American icon.-Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.