DK Biography: Annie Oakley: A Photographic Story of a Life

This is such a colorful biography. She enspired women while still being a lady.

I bought 15 copies of this book for my class. They can pair read it as a whole group. It is well written, has lots of side bars with extra information and accurate photos. It expresses different points of view and is a fantastic example of a biography of an accomplished woman. It's both interesting and didactic, showing many aspects of non-fiction text in an easy to read and absorb context. Only one fault, I can't find it on Accelerated Reader, an on-line reading comprehension program that my school uses to support comprehension and vocabulary skills. What a shame, since it is so well done.

Annie Oakley would probably have liked this little book about her life and career a lot; simply and smoothly written, unpretentious, yet beautifully edited and laid out, telling its story doubly well in its seamless interplay of pictures and prose. It almost seems to bring the museum-piece Annie Oakley of a bygone era back to life, which is really what one is apt to want most of all. Annie Oakley was so utterly unique a performer and personality as to be almost unintelligible to our modern sensibilities, leaving one wondering "Who was that masked sharpshooter anyway?" By the end of this book, vivid as its account is, you almost feel that you know. Annie Oakley was personally unpretentious almost to the point of self-effacement, except for two things; she loved performing before big crowds all her life, and, in that performance, she was the real deal; no trickery, nothing up her sleeve, what you saw was what you got. She really was, as far as it's possible to judge, the best sharpshooter who ever lived, and as such something of a paradox. In person Annie was sweet-natured, soft-spoken and eminently ladylike. With a gun in her hand, on the other hand, no old Western gunslinger of note would have stood a chance against her, a fact which some of them probably knew, since they knew her personally and had seen her shoot. Personally honest to a fault, Annie certainly wasn't the real deal in the sense of how Buffalo Bill's Wild West show promoted her, as a rootin' tootin' shootin' cowgirl of the Golden West, a persona she cheerfully lived up to for show purposes as just part of the ethical cost of doing business and giving the rubes what they want. She was the real deal, on the other hand, in the sense of being an authentic frontierswoman, born and raised in desperate hardscrabble poverty in a log cabin on the Ohio frontier, who taught herself how to shoot as her only road out of her starving family's desperate straits. Taking her dead father's antique cap and ball Kentucky rifle down from the mantel, the barely teenage Annie became a meat hunter. In an age when powder and shot were scarce commodities, Annie couldn't afford to miss, and she didn't, virtually from day one. She got so good in fact, that she was gradually able to pull her family up out of poverty on the game she sold to stores and fancy hotels, and the rest is history. In fact, Annie's life was a complex and fascinating one, and worth studying in more depth than possible here. This slim, very well-made book, however, is an excellent introductory.

Wow was I impressed when I got this book! It is amazing, and the pictures are wonderful for my classroom. I have several from this series and my students just love them.