About the Author:
JILL JONNES, who holds a Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Eiffel's Tower, Conquering Gotham, Empires of Light, and South Bronx Rising. Founder of the nonprofit Baltimore Tree Trust, she is leading the Baltimore City Forestry Board's new initiative, Baltimore's Flowering Tree Trails. As a staff member of the 2010 Presidential National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, she wrote the first chapter of the report Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling. In the fall of 2011, she was a scholar studying Trees as Green Infrastructure at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Jonnes was also named a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar and has received several grants from the Ford Foundation.
REBECCA STEFOFF has devoted her career to writing nonfiction books for young readers. Her publications include histories, literary biographies, an encyclopedia of maps, and numerous books on science and environmental issues. She has also adapted a number of landmark works in history and science, including Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, and Charles C. Mann's bestselling 1493.
From School Library Journal:
Gr 7 Up-Paris is synonymous with the Eiffel Tower, but who was Eiffel? And when did his iconic tower appear in Paris? Jonnes takes readers back to 1884, when railroad and bridge builder Gustave Eiffel proposed his 1000 ft. tower to the government of France as the pièce de résistance to the 1889 World's Fair. The Eiffel Tower would be the tallest human-made structure in the world. The author follows Eiffel and his contemporaries through their triumphs and defeats, from the planning of the World's Fair through its end six months later and beyond. The lives of William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Annie Oakley, Thomas Edison, Vincent Van Gogh and more intersected to create a showcase of technology, art, drama, history, and innovation in Paris. Jonnes weaves these stories into a fascinating biography of Gustave Eiffel, the man, and Eiffel, the tower. The presentation includes a helpful list of characters and numerous photographs to give readers context. Eiffel's engineering feat, today a symbol of the city of Paris, was met with criticism, skepticism, disbelief, and more-but Eiffel persevered and what resulted still stands today. VERDICT Recommended for middle and high school and public library collections.-Lia Carruthers, Gill St. Bernard's School, Gladstone, NJα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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