Barnum received a wonderful review online yesterday from the Washington Post! Here's the review:
Like the circus showman he was named for, Barnum Brown (1873-1963) was raised to think big — in his case, dinosaur big.
He dug far and wide and deep, discovering more dinosaur bones than
anyone else ever has. And in the badlands near Hell Creek, Mont., he was
the first to find the king of them all, Tyrannosaurus rex. In this
engaging picture-book biography,
Tracey Fern and illustrator Boris Kulikov supply many distinctive
details about Brown, including the spiffy wardrobe he favored and the
dancing talents he would occasionally unleash. But they focus on the
excitement of fossil hunting. Barnum evidently felt this enthusiasm
early on, following his father’s plow to collect the small, ancient
treasures it unearthed. His mentor at New York City’s Museum of Natural
History thought Barnum “must be able to smell fossils,” but he
apparently relished the work involved on and off the digging site.
Kulikov’s inventive, playfully skewed illustrations capture Barnum’s
ardent curiosity and forceful presence — he often appears larger than
life, as when he’s diving off of “Cuba” (seemingly just a few yards
wide) to retrieve a fossil. On the last spread, the scale seems about
right, but the concept is truly wild: Barnum Brown riding a
very-much-alive T. rex through Central Park. He’s so cool he doesn’t
need a saddle.
— Abby McGanney Nolan
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