Aconcise biography introduces the Chinese-American artist and designer Maya Lin, best known for her architectural plan for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Lin, the child of a ceramic artist and a poet who “had fled China at a time when people were told…how to think,” spends hours as a child playing in the nearby woods and building miniature towns of “paper and scraps.” Lin is in her last year of college when she enters a competition to design a proposed memorial to Vietnam War veterans, to be built on the National Mall. The design had to include the 58,000 names of those soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Lin’s design was chosen in the anonymous competition but was not without controversy when her name was revealed. The illustration of the completed memorial focuses on the wall and Lin’s original concept, built into the earth, rising and falling with the landscape, rather than the compromised result, with statues representing soldiers. Phumiruk’s clean-lined, crisp illustrations, done in Photoshop, and light palette emphasize connections between Lin’s concepts and the strong influences of nature on Lin’s art. The margins of the page containing Harvey’s author’s note about Lin’s work are filled with artists’ and architects’ tools, neatly labeled: ink pens, blueprints, pastels. Harvey provides websites for further information but no specific sources for her work.

Overall, a fine celebration of a renowned woman artist. (Picture book/biography. 4-8)

-Kirkus Review

A very simplified version of the story but does a decent job at getting basic points across. ( )

Meet the visionary artist-architect who as a college student won a national contest to design the Vietnam War Memorial. Includes Author’s Note.

This is an important to book to have in the classroom to highlight diverse people. She is Vietnamese American and has a unique story. It's short an simple, yet inspirational. ( )

I was so pleased to find a book introducing young readers to the architect Maya Lin.

Maya was born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio. Her parents were both artists who encouraged Maya to be whatever she wanted. When Maya was a little girl, she liked to build tiny towns out of paper and scraps. She decided to be an architect, and studied overseas, looking at all the different buildings and learning all she could.

In 1981, her last year of college, she entered a contest to design a memorial honoring the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. She imagined a polished edge covered with names, reflecting the sky, the grass, and the the people who came to see the memorial. The names of the nearly 58,000 American servicemen who died would be listed in chronological order of their loss, etched in a V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunken into the ground.

As she later recalled, while studying at Yale, whenever Maya walked through the university’s Memorial Rotunda, she was so impressed by the engraving of the names of those alumni who died in service of their country: “I think it left a lasting impression on me,” Lin wrote, “the sense of the power of a name.”

As the author tells us, Maya sculpted a model first out of mashed potatoes, then with clay. She sent in sketches for her entry along with an essay explaining her vision. Out of 1,421 entries, Maya’s design was chosen. (Somewhat humorously, since her design only earned her a B in her architecture seminar at Yale, she had no expectations of winning the contest.)

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was the first of her many works. The author writes:

“Each piece is different, but all share Maya’s vision. She wants people to be a part of her art. Look. Touch. Read. Walk around. Sit by. Think about.”

An Author’s Note at the back of the book adds that Maya has received many awards, and in 2005, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The author also provides some website addresses for more information. At Maya Lin’s own website for example (which has incredible design features), you will learn that Maya considers herself not only an artist and designer, but an environmentalist as well: “Her works merge the physical and psychological environment, presenting a new way of seeing the world around us.”

Lovely artwork by Dow Phumiruk features a muted palette and crisp illustrations done by using Photoshop. As a bonus, in the margins around the page containing the Author’s Note, the illustrator has depicted labeled tools of an architect.

Evaluation: I have always been impressed with the Vietnam War Memorial. It seems to me to be the quintessential expression of postmodernism, which posits that knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations. When you look at the monument, you see yourself reflected, along with the names of those who died. It suggests to me we all are responsible for the war, and we are all its victims. ( )