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Rating: 
Summary: Another great book in this series
Review: Author Mike Venezia does a great job explaining biographies to children in a way that is both understandable and interesting. The writing style is not dumbed down or patronizing in tone. This is book is one in a series, others are about other musical composers and artists. The first few pages explain what the musical climate was like in Mozart's life and explains how people used music for entertainment purposes. This is brief and a very good opening to put Mozart's life in perspective. The rest of the book is a full span of Mozart's life. Unlike other books for children about Mozart, the fact that Mozart was a boy genius is not the main content of the book. Oddly, Mozart's children are never mentioned. Mozart's marriage is briefly mentioned as is Mozart's death. I have mixed feelings about the illustrations. I appreciated that the illustrations documented the various time periods of Mozart's life. I loved the illustrations that were photographs, fine drawings, or copies of fine paintings of the places Mozart visited, of Mozart and his family, and scenes of his operas. I did not at all like the eight cartoons whose illustrations and accompanying text were sarcastic and silly. These eight cartoons were completely out of character with the text of the book and I didn't appreciate them at all. My children and I have enjoyed other books by this author that did not have dumb cartoons and jokes. My children, aged 4 and 6 haven't needed these silly and sometimes insulting jokes to make the subject matter enjoyable. The interesting biography's text and other illustrations are high quality and are better off without these cartoons. The cartoons downgrade my rating to a 4. I recommend this book and others by Mike Venezia to teach young children about important people in history.
Rating:
Summary: Mozart's life story told with Venezia's funny cartoons
Review: When I discovered that Mike Venezia was following up his successful Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series with Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers, it was obviously going to be the volume on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that was going to be the one I would most be interested in reading. In terms of his cartoons illustrating in comic ways some of the key developments in Mozart's life from child prodigy performing with his older sister as their father toured them throughout Europe, Venezia certainly delivers. There are also historic paintings and other illustrations of Mozart from throughout his life. But while this volume is an adequate juvenile biography of the great musician, it is a less than satisfactory musical biography. Granted, this is an inherent disadvantage for the Composers series over the Artists series, given that at least in the latter you could reproduce the greatest paintings of the greatest composers, but Venezia refrains from mentioning specific works by Mozart until the final pages of the book. Given my inherent position that a young reader should read this volume while listening to a decent collection of Mozart's "hits," it would be useful not only if more works were specifically mentioned but if they were more specific than entire operas. The only way to appreciate great music is to listen to it and in all of these volumes telling of great composers from George Handel to George Gershwin I think that Venezia clearly has a great opportunity to direct his readers to some prime examples. This is what Venezia did in his volume in this series on Johann Sebastian Bach and it should be a standard part of every volume in the series. Still, young readers will get a much better sense for Mozart's entire life than they will from watching "Amadeus," but the film will do a better job of getting them to fall in love with his music.
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