Women Daredevils: Thrills, Chills, and Frills Hardcover – January 24, 2008

My heading pretty much sums it up. No actual photographs, just the briefest of biographical information. The illustration on the book's cover is typical if not better than what's in the book. A book for 10 year olds at best.

This book is great for younger kids. It tells them about women who did daring things. I enjoyed it even if I'm not a kid!

I enjoyed reading this and will give it to my 8 years niece.

If there's one thing I know about human beings it is this: They're much more likely to pay attention to you if they think you're about to get hurt. That's sort of the basis behind everything from the success of Harry Houdini to the extreme sports you run across on daytime TV. Basically, if someone thinks that you are mere moments from an untimely demise, they are MUCH more inclined to give you their money. Men have been doing stuff along those lines for years, but less lauded in today's Fear Factor age are the women who also willingly, repeatedly, placed themselves in harms way. I'm talking about the girls that threw themselves into Niagara Falls, walked on planes, or dove with horses. Now, Julie Cummins has compiled a book giving props to the more than thirteen ladies between the years of 1880 to 1929 that made names for themselves by doing the impossible over and over and over again.One hundred years ago if you were an average woman living in America your career choices pretty much began and ended with marriage and childbirth. One hundred years ago if you were an extra-ordinary woman living in America your career choices pretty much began with getting shot out of cannons and riding horses bareback, or ended with taming tigers and doing plane stunts. Welcome to the world of women stunt performers. In this book, author Julie Cummins has compiled a list of various high stunting dames, risking their lives over and over to give their audiences the requisite amount of thrills desired. You'll see the LaRague Sisters doing a dangerous one-car somersault act in 1908. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick jumping out of planes to test aerial life preservers. Or Mlle. D'Zizi leaping over elephants on a bike traveling at "a terrific clip". Collected here for our contemporary amusement and edification are a group of women that looked death right at the eye on a regular basis and achieved a modicum amount of fame in the process.I don't consider myself an uninformed individual, but of all these women in this book the only one that I had heard of before was Sonora Webster Carver. And to be perfectly truthful, the only reason I'd even known her story was because it was turned into a live action Disney movie in 1991 called  Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken . So it is a pretty good guess that this book will cover characters the like of which your kids, students, and patrons have never known. Maybe you'll encounter the stray child familiar with the Robert Redford film  The Great Waldo Pepper  who knows what a wingwalker is, but don't get your hopes up. Plus I enjoyed the fact that lots of little facts in this book ended up explaining things I'd never even thought to consider. Why were pilots sometimes called "barnstormers"? Cummings speculates that "some showoff pilot may have actually flown through a barn, christening the Barnstorming Era." Sounds like as good an explanation as any I could come up with.The end of the book contains a Chronology of the events listed as well as a section dedicated to Sources and Acknowledgments. I would have preferred a straight out Bibliography, but the ways in which Cummins got her information made this impossible. Listing her Sources also allows Cummins to detail how difficult it was to get some of this information. "Only two women had books written about them." That meant finding sources elsewhere. "The early period proved to be the biggest challenge: in many cases the only resources were archival files, newspaper clippings (often so fragile the paper crumbled in your hand), and tidbits in out-of-print books." The rest of the page details how she found her information, the places she had to go, and the people and historical societies that provided her with her facts. It makes for fascinating reading in and of itself.Cheryl Harness has provided the illustrations in this book and she is certainly an interesting choice. In almost every case, Harness employs two different styles on each person. When they're first introduced we get a realistic, often exciting view of the woman. Many of these images may have been based on photos, and if so then I'm pleased with how they've been rendered here. Then, as we read more about that woman, cartoonish sketches accompany her history, fans, and tricks. I enjoyed the mix of styles and the fact that every single page has an image on it so as to keep the eye moving and the reading kid-friendly. This is one well-designed pup.A lot of librarians get kids excited about reading by doing "booktalks" where they make the book in hand sound like the coolest thing since sliced bread. The problem with booktalking, though, is that you always want to have a non-fiction selection to promote alongside your three fiction titles. And finding the right kind of non-fiction title with the requisite inherent interest can be a daunting task. So, as it stands, "Women Daredevils" is going to be the answer to many a librarian's prayers. For that matter, it will fill many a kid's needs as well. Any child inclined to know more about women athletes or women who dared to cheat death is going to find at least some of the stories here fascinating. I can guarantee that there's nothing like it in your library right now. Fun, heady stuff you never knew you needed to know.

This book's ten fascinating narratives tell us about the accomplishments, characteristics, and backgrounds of a group of women who risked their lives during the late 1800s and early 1900s to entertain the public with daredevil stunts. From Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go down Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive, to Zazel, the first person to perform as a human cannonball in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, these women collectively set a series of unprecedented benchmarks in the world of performance sports and stunts. While knowledge of some of these women's feats may have faded, their endeavors garnered much attention during their days, particularly at a time when there were fewer options for leisure activities and the general public turned to live performances as an important source of amusement.Woven throughout these interesting stories of courage and danger are an interesting set of economics lessons about why these women took on such risky endeavors and the social norms at the time about women's roles in the public sphere. According to the author, Annie tried to use the fame she garnered from going down Niagara Falls in order to escape poverty; Isabelle Butler performed aerial somersaults in an automobile for the Barnum & Bailey Circus and earned $100 per second of the actual stunt; and Mabel Stark's education and first job centered on nursing despite her love of animal training because women were excluded from the few available job openings for wild animal trainers. To emphasize these lessons, the end of the book provides a historical timeline that highlights these daredevils' feats within a broader context of women's accomplishments in the labor market, politics, sports, and science. These lessons about gender equality, combined with the exciting biographies and unique poster-like illustrations, make this book a valuable addition to any picture book collection that is rich in social studies content.