Engaging and relevant, this attractively designed book will inspire further exploration.
Technology, science, culture, and art collide in this friendly introduction to the way humans make and experience music.
Nowadays people have instant access to millions of songs thanks to streaming services, but that could never have been made possible without the technological advances in music-making and listening that have taken place over thousands of years. This eye-catching introduction provides a chronological evolution of music and technology interspersed with explorations of neurological, psychological, and physiological responses to music. The book wraps up with a few pages devoted to pondering the impact of future technological advances on the way people (and robots!) make, listen to, and interact with music. Each double-page spread tackles a different topic, presenting easy-to-digest chunks of information and fun facts supported by clean visuals. Some pages feature diagrams that show how technology works, such as how a CD stores binary code that is translated into sound, while others include pictures of famous musicians, singers, or composers. Finally, each section includes a playlist with a trio of songs to seek out for further exploration. Inspired by a museum exhibit made by the book’s creators, this book is best read from cover to cover, rather than browsed, due to the way each section builds upon the last.
Engaging and relevant, this attractively designed book will inspire further exploration. (timeline, glossary, selected sources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77138-787-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Hot on the heels of the well-received Leonardo da Vinci (2005) comes another agreeably chatty entry in the Giants of Science series. Here the pioneering physicist is revealed as undeniably brilliant, but also cantankerous, mean-spirited, paranoid and possibly depressive. Newton’s youth and annus mirabilis receive respectful treatment, the solitude enforced by family estrangement and then the plague seen as critical to the development of his thoughtful, methodical approach. His subsequent squabbles with the rest of the scientific community—he refrained from publishing one treatise until his rival was dead—further support the image of Newton as a scientific lone wolf. Krull’s colloquial treatment sketches Newton’s advances in clearly understandable terms without bogging the text down with detailed explanations. A final chapter on “His Impact” places him squarely in the pantheon of great thinkers, arguing that both his insistence on the scientific method and his theories of physics have informed all subsequent scientific thought. A bibliography, web site and index round out the volume; the lack of detail on the use of sources is regrettable in an otherwise solid offering for middle-grade students. (Biography. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-05921-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
Entomophobes will find all of this horrifyingly informative.
This junior edition of Stewart’s lurid 2011 portrait gallery of the same name (though much less gleeful subtitle) loses none of its capacity for leaving readers squicked-out.
The author drops a few entries, notably the one on insect sexual practices, and rearranges toned-down versions of the rest into roughly topical sections. Beginning with the same cogent observation—“We are seriously outnumbered”—she follows general practice in thrillers of this ilk by defining “bug” broadly enough to include all-too-detailed descriptions of the life cycles and revolting or deadly effects of scorpions and spiders, ticks, lice, and, in a chapter evocatively titled “The Enemy Within,” such internal guests as guinea worms and tapeworms. Mosquitoes, bedbugs, the ubiquitous “Filth Fly,” and like usual suspects mingle with more-exotic threats, from the tongue-eating louse and a “yak-killer hornet” (just imagine) to the aggressive screw-worm fly that, in one cited case, flew up a man’s nose and laid hundreds of eggs…that…hatched. Morrow-Cribbs’ close-up full-color drawings don’t offer the visceral thrills of the photos in, for instance, Rebecca L. Johnson’s Zombie Makers (2012) but are accurate and finely detailed enough to please even the fussiest young entomologists.
Entomophobes will find all of this horrifyingly informative. (index, glossary, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-755-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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