SuperHeroBooks - Women Daredevils
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List Price: $17.99
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Manufacturer: Dutton Juvenile
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.0922
EAN: 9780525479482
ISBN: 0525479481
Label: Dutton Juvenile
Manufacturer: Dutton Juvenile
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 48
Publication Date: 2008-01-24
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Studio: Dutton Juvenile
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children
Comment: This book's ten fascinating narratives tell us about the accomplishments, characteristics, and backgrounds of a group of women who risked their lives during the late 1800s and early 1900s to entertain the public with daredevil stunts. From Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go down Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive, to Zazel, the first person to perform as a human cannonball in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, these women collectively set a series of unprecedented benchmarks in the world of performance sports and stunts. While knowledge of some of these women's feats may have faded, their endeavors garnered much attention during their days, particularly at a time when there were fewer options for leisure activities and the general public turned to live performances as an important source of amusement.
Woven throughout these interesting stories of courage and danger are an interesting set of economics lessons about why these women took on such risky endeavors and the social norms at the time about women's roles in the public sphere. According to the author, Annie tried to use the fame she garnered from going down Niagara Falls in order to escape poverty; Isabelle Butler performed aerial somersaults in an automobile for the Barnum & Bailey Circus and earned $100 per second of the actual stunt; and Mabel Stark's education and first job centered on nursing despite her love of animal training because women were excluded from the few available job openings for wild animal trainers. To emphasize these lessons, the end of the book provides a historical timeline that highlights these daredevils' feats within a broader context of women's accomplishments in the labor market, politics, sports, and science. These lessons about gender equality, combined with the exciting biographies and unique poster-like illustrations, make this book a valuable addition to any picture book collection that is rich in social studies content.
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Summary: Fell short of offering excitement to the reader
Comment: Reviewed by Anne Marie Medema (age 12) for Reader Views (7/08)
Julie Cummins, author of "Women Daredevils," is a fair writer. Cummins has researched the events in many famous women's lives. Then these findings were condensed into an assortment of brief biographies. Each biography is limited and only offers a glimpse into their life. Cummins uses simple and easy-to-read words. There is little depth to her writing. The book moves slowly when read. The author's original idea of writing a book about many women is good. But the way she wrote it lacks excitement and does not hold the readers interest. The illustrations were created by Cheryl Harness; although they are colorful, they add little to the storyline.
"Women Daredevils" is a book consisting of thirteen biographies of women daredevils. The first biography is Zazel a human cannonball. She began her career in Europe. When P.T. Barnum circus hired her she started the cannonball act wearing pink tights.
The second woman is Annie Edson Taylor who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She is called Queen of the Mist. It took Taylor seventeen minutes to go over the falls in a barrel. The third woman is Mlle D'Zizi who performed a fast bicycle act. D'Zizi jumped out of a bicycle jump and over six elephants. Some thought D'Zizi was a man. Gertrude Breton also jumped over huge spaces on a bicycle. Her act only lasted four seconds.
Isabelle Butler did the dip of death. She drove a car loop upside down that lasted four seconds. For every second Butler was paid $100. Butler performed her act twice a day so she could earn money in the circus. Soon the La Rague Sisters did the same act but at the same time. It had to be timed precisely at three tenths of a second.
May Wirth performed tricks on horses bareback. She rode an untamed bull named King Jess. While riding the bull Wirth would cried out "I win, I'll ride your bull any day, Jess for fun." President Wilson loved her daring act. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick would parachute and test items her father invented, like parachutes. Another woman, Mabel Stark trained tigers. Stark had so many scars on her body there was not a part of her body without one. Gladys Roy and Gladys Ingle both did daring stunts on the wings of planes. Sonora Carver did a high dive act on a horse. Redlips was the name of her horse. On one dive Redlips twisted Carver which caused her to be blinded when she hit the water.
"Women Daredevils" by Julie Cummins is an easy-read book for young girls. The book I received did not come with a binding which I found to be awkward. I did not enjoy reading this book. I found it did not hold my interest and frankly was boring. I was wishing the author would tell me more about each woman daredevil. The idea of compiling a book about women daredevils was a good idea. Unfortunately, "Women Daredevils" fell short of offering excitement to the reader.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fear factor
Comment: If there's one thing I know about human beings it is this: They're much more likely to pay attention to you if they think you're about to get hurt. That's sort of the basis behind everything from the success of Harry Houdini to the extreme sports you run across on daytime TV. Basically, if someone thinks that you are mere moments from an untimely demise, they are MUCH more inclined to give you their money. Men have been doing stuff along those lines for years, but less lauded in today's Fear Factor age are the women who also willingly, repeatedly, placed themselves in harms way. I'm talking about the girls that threw themselves into Niagara Falls, walked on planes, or dove with horses. Now, Julie Cummins has compiled a book giving props to the more than thirteen ladies between the years of 1880 to 1929 that made names for themselves by doing the impossible over and over and over again.
One hundred years ago if you were an average woman living in America your career choices pretty much began and ended with marriage and childbirth. One hundred years ago if you were an extra-ordinary woman living in America your career choices pretty much began with getting shot out of cannons and riding horses bareback, or ended with taming tigers and doing plane stunts. Welcome to the world of women stunt performers. In this book, author Julie Cummins has compiled a list of various high stunting dames, risking their lives over and over to give their audiences the requisite amount of thrills desired. You'll see the LaRague Sisters doing a dangerous one-car somersault act in 1908. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick jumping out of planes to test aerial life preservers. Or Mlle. D'Zizi leaping over elephants on a bike traveling at "a terrific clip". Collected here for our contemporary amusement and edification are a group of women that looked death right at the eye on a regular basis and achieved a modicum amount of fame in the process.
I don't consider myself an uninformed individual, but of all these women in this book the only one that I had heard of before was Sonora Webster Carver. And to be perfectly truthful, the only reason I'd even known her story was because it was turned into a live action Disney movie in 1991 called Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. So it is a pretty good guess that this book will cover characters the like of which your kids, students, and patrons have never known. Maybe you'll encounter the stray child familiar with the Robert Redford film The Great Waldo Pepper who knows what a wingwalker is, but don't get your hopes up. Plus I enjoyed the fact that lots of little facts in this book ended up explaining things I'd never even thought to consider. Why were pilots sometimes called "barnstormers"? Cummings speculates that "some showoff pilot may have actually flown through a barn, christening the Barnstorming Era." Sounds like as good an explanation as any I could come up with.
The end of the book contains a Chronology of the events listed as well as a section dedicated to Sources and Acknowledgments. I would have preferred a straight out Bibliography, but the ways in which Cummins got her information made this impossible. Listing her Sources also allows Cummins to detail how difficult it was to get some of this information. "Only two women had books written about them." That meant finding sources elsewhere. "The early period proved to be the biggest challenge: in many cases the only resources were archival files, newspaper clippings (often so fragile the paper crumbled in your hand), and tidbits in out-of-print books." The rest of the page details how she found her information, the places she had to go, and the people and historical societies that provided her with her facts. It makes for fascinating reading in and of itself.
Cheryl Harness has provided the illustrations in this book and she is certainly an interesting choice. In almost every case, Harness employs two different styles on each person. When they're first introduced we get a realistic, often exciting view of the woman. Many of these images may have been based on photos, and if so then I'm pleased with how they've been rendered here. Then, as we read more about that woman, cartoonish sketches accompany her history, fans, and tricks. I enjoyed the mix of styles and the fact that every single page has an image on it so as to keep the eye moving and the reading kid-friendly. This is one well-designed pup.
A lot of librarians get kids excited about reading by doing "booktalks" where they make the book in hand sound like the coolest thing since sliced bread. The problem with booktalking, though, is that you always want to have a non-fiction selection to promote alongside your three fiction titles. And finding the right kind of non-fiction title with the requisite inherent interest can be a daunting task. So, as it stands, "Women Daredevils" is going to be the answer to many a librarian's prayers. For that matter, it will fill many a kid's needs as well. Any child inclined to know more about women athletes or women who dared to cheat death is going to find at least some of the stories here fascinating. I can guarantee that there's nothing like it in your library right now. Fun, heady stuff you never knew you needed to know.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Annie Edson Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Mabel Stark wrestled with tigers. Sonora Webster Carver plummeted forty feet on horseback into a tank of water. These and the eleven other women profiled in this book performed between 1880 and 1929, when females were expected to stay home and raise families, not entertain crowds with acts of derring-do. Their bravado, equal to that of any male thrill-seeker, made them inspiring at a time when women were testing the waters of equality and freedom. Julie Cummins’s conversational text and Cheryl Harness’s posterlike illustrations bring a colorful era in history to life.
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