#24 - Tales of Famous Heroes

Tales of Famous Heroes

Written by: Peter and Connie Roop

Illustrated by: Rebecca Zomchek

Scholastic

2010

105 Pages

Nonfiction

            This book is a large collection of the true stories of famous heroes from around the world. Each section begins by introducing the famous person. The introduction contains the name, picture, timeline, and a famous quote from that person. The following pages tell the story of their lives and how they made an impact on the world. Paul Revere, Sacagawea, Fredrick Douglas, Neil Armstrong, and Rosa Parks are only a few of the people with their stories in this book. Each story is told in an exciting way with a lot of extra facts that students will love. The book begins with an index so students can easily navigate the book to find who they want to read about.

            The art in this book is a mix of photographs and digitally rendered pictures. On the introduction page for each story there is a two page spread of a black and white photograph. The photograph is always of a significant setting to that specific man or woman. A cartoonish version of that person is placed in front of the photograph. The cartoon drawings remind me of a bobble head version of each person. Small pictures are used to support the story of each person’s life. They are placed strategically around the text and some have captions to explain them. None of the page backgrounds are white. They are all fun bright colors. 

            I would use this book in an upper elementary classroom. The teacher could pull out this book whenever they needed to introduce an important person. Students could also use this book as a source for their own research projects. This book would also be a great book to talk about text features of nonfiction books because it contains so many different elements.