Barnum in The New York Times

Barnum got a wonderful review in The New York Times.  Here's the review, written by Pamela Paul and published May 23, 2012:

I Found a T. Rex!

‘Barnum’s Bones,’ by Tracey Fern

As a child, Barnum Brown collected fossils — so many that when he filled the front parlor with boxes of them, his mother moved them out to the laundry house. Like so many young boys, Brown became obsessed with dinosaurs. But unlike other boys, he grew up to become one of the nation’s foremost paleontologists and, among other things, discovered the first fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex. 

Tracey Fern (“Buffalo Music,” “Pippo the Fool”) turns a slice of a scientist’s biography into an American adventure tale, describing how Brown and his rivals at other museums raced to find the best fossils and to discover new species. The moment when Brown unearths the first bones belonging to a T. rex is genuinely exciting, though on the next page we learn he couldn’t make it back to the digging site in the badlands of Montana until a few seasons later. How could he be “too busy”?! Fern doesn’t explain. But when he returns, we eagerly take up the story again. 

The illustrations, by Boris Kulikov — who illustrated the wonderful “Max’s Words” and “Max’s Castle,” both by Kate Banks — lends a delightfully comic, almost cartoonish, touch to material that might have been stimulating even as literal illustration-as-exposition. Instead, as in the Max books, Kulikov amplifies the text with glorious depictions of a human being’s wildest imaginings.  

For example, describing Barnum’s realization that a rock brought to him by a friend is actually the horn of a Triceratops, he paints Brown perching the fossilized horn on the snout of a Triceratops outline, drawn like a map in his office, its shape extending beyond the room’s walls into a wild, outdoor landscape. A memorable image shows the dapper Brown (he often prospected in fur coat and bowler hat) dancing with an imaginary dinosaur, his newly discovered T. rex skull aglow in the moonlight behind him.

And of course, there’s the true-fairy-tale ending, with Brown astride a T. rex, lumbering across Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History alight in the distance. As an author’s note explains, when Brown first arrived at the museum, in 1897, the institution didn’t have a single dinosaur specimen in its collection. By the time he died, in 1963, it had the largest collection in the world, most of it assembled by Brown. He has probably made as many children happy as did old P.T. himself.