Hurley,
Michael. World’s Greatest Olympians. Capstone Publishers, 2012. 32p. $29.00 ISBN 978-1-4109-4122-0 elem VG-BNes
Exciting
biographical information, a vivid layout, and outstanding photographs combine to create
a winning book about international record-breaking Olympic stars. Readers
of all ages will enjoy this book! It has
so many great features that the reader will turn each page eagerly. These
features include highlights of the Olympic stars’
achievements (presented in the colors bold sky blue and warm orange), Olympic fact files
about each star in grass green, and photograph captions in white on a black
background. The layout is without a
doubt one of the strengths of this book!
Another strength is the quality of the photographs, which show tremendous features of the Olympic
stars down to the musculature, posture and determination of athletes like
swimmer Michael Phelps and marathon runner Abebe Bikila. Olympic viewers will never forget the
remarkable win by Abebe, despite a setback in the form of a surgery six weeks before the
1964 Olympics. The controversial 1988
Olympics brought victory to Carl Lewis when Ben Johnson tested positive for
performance-enhancing drugs. Everyone
watched as Ben Johnson became a world-renowned hero when he won the 200-meter and 400-meter running events
in 1996. Other famous Olympians who are highlighted in
this book include Jesse Owens, the American who showed Hitler that German
athletes were not the best in the world, Fanny Blankers-Koen, Dutch high-jumper and runner who
showed the world what a housewife could do, and Steve Redgrave, a British rower who was
knighted by the Queen of England for his achievements. One slight drawback is that the reader will
wish the author had included more biographical data about each Olympian, but
since his
purpose is simply to introduce the reader to each star, he has achieved his
goal. New vocabulary words appear in bold type, and there is a
helpful glossary at the end of the book that is preceded by a list of interesting facts
about winners of the Winter Olympics as well as Paralympics. A
list of web sites and an index conclude the book.
The Olympics is a series that includes a variety of topics, including great
moments in Olympic history, the 2012 London Olympics, the World of Olympics, and high-tech
Olympics. Each book includes a page
of data, action photographs and short snippets of Olympic fact, along with the necessary charts of records, and anecdotal
information about variety of stars
Subject: Olympics
Martha Squaresky
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