Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1226441 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-31
• Released on: 2005-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8–A dozen determined women star in accounts that reveal the hardships and obstacles they persistently overcame to reach their goals. Mountain climber Annie Smith Peck spent several years and made many attempts before becoming the first woman to summit Peru's Mount Huascarán. She continued to climb mountains into her 80s. In 1988, Australian Kay Cottee became the first woman to complete a solo, nonstop voyage around the world in a 37-foot-long sloop. Others such as American Josephine Peary, Hungarian Florence Baker, and French spelunker Elisabeth Casteret, accompanied their husbands into wild and dangerous territories. Simple cartoon-style drawings at the beginning of each tale and some full-page scenes provide respite from uninterrupted pages of text, although they sometimes belie the life-threatening situations recounted here. Only a few of these women are included in similar compilations. Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen's generously illustrated Women of Discovery (Crown, 2001) and Michele B. Slung's Living with Cannibals and Other Women's Adventures (National Geographic, 2000) both present their subjects' tales in a straightforward manner while Atkins creates a realistic narrative complete with conversational exchanges. The bibliography lists primary sources for all but Jeanne Baret and Arnarulunguaq, but it is still likely that many of the conversations are surmised rather than exact. A compilation such as this one is certainly welcome to help complete the picture of human discovery that truly depended on the efforts of both men and women.–Ann G. Brouse, Steele Memorial Library, Elmira, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 5-8. Atkins (Wings and Rockets, 2002) offers another collective biography, this one about women explorers, beginning with Jeanne Baret, an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who, disguised as a boy, became the first woman to sail around the world. Other chapters feature women who explored caves, mountain peaks, the Sahara, and the Nile; the final chapter profiles contemporary Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. Although classified as nonfiction and framed on facts, the stories, illustrated with Petricic's winsome pen-and-ink drawings, are greatly fictionalized, including long stretches of imagined conversation, feelings, thoughts, and scenarios. A bibliography is appended, but there are no notes to help readers distinguish fact from fiction. Given the current debate about clear source notes, Atkins' approach raises plenty of questions, and teachers and librarians may want to caution against using the title for reports. The strongest justifications for purchase are the thrilling adventures and the introductions to daring, accomplished, and, in some cases, nearly forgotten women who changed history. Readers may want to follow this with more thoroughly documented volumes about these groundbreaking explorers. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable Read
HOW HIGH CAN WE CLIMB: THE STORY OF WOMEN EXPLORERS is an enjoyable read on the lives of twelve women explorers over the past 240 years. Seemingly well-researched, HOW HIGH CAN WE CLIMB focuses on women divers, women mountain-climbers, women archaeologists, women cave-explorers, women arctic (and antarctic) explorers, and women sailors. Spanning from the 1760s to the present day, the book examines the lives of these twelve explorers: Jeanne Baret, Florence Baker, Annie Smith Peck, Josephine Peary, Arnarulunguaq, Elisabeth Casteret, Nicole Maxwell, Sylvia Earle, Junko Tabei, Kay Cottee, Sue Hendrickson, and Ann Bancroft. The book also explores the lives of other explorers--male and female--that were contemporaries of these explorers and often worked alongside or influenced these twelve women.

It is an enjoyable and often fascinating read. The book includes a selected bibliography for women explorers as well as selected bibliographies for these women as individuals. A timeline and index are included as well. While I can overlook the "fictionalized" dialogue included in HOW HIGH CAN WE CLIMB and the lack of source notes, I must say that the use of photographs and maps would have been more appealing to me than the black and white sketches of Dusan Petricic. Photographs, source notes, and more direct quoting from primary sources (instead of fictionalized dialogue) would have earned the book five stars instead of four.

Still I must say that I accept the book for what it is instead of rejecting it for what it is not. It is a very ENJOYABLE read. And I learned so much from reading it.