While this book gets the job done, here’s hoping livelier titles on this fascinating personality will appear soon.
This simple biography of African American NASA computer Dorothy Vaughan contrasts her intelligence and initiative with the nonsensical rules of segregation in her time.
Vaughan is introduced as a woman who worked as a human computer during the 1940s and 1950s. Her “unusual” accomplishment of attending college as an African American woman was followed by a job teaching in segregated schools, which didn’t pay much. When she saw that the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory was hiring human computers, she applied and got the job. At Langley, the engineers who were testing airplanes were mostly men (depicted as white in the illustrations), and they needed the help of human computers, who were mostly women. In the middle of the story, segregation is introduced as “one thing that didn’t make sense” at Langley and throughout Vaughan’s life. But “Dorothy didn’t let this stop her. She worked hard. She worked smart.” After becoming a supervisor, she decided to learn about the new mechanical computer. She became an expert in computer code and taught others. Vaughan’s accomplishments are truly impressive, and this is one of the first picture books to focus on this mathematician, one of those featured in Hidden Figures. Unfortunately, the text relates her story as a recitation of facts, and the pictures lack variety and appear static. This book is one of four introducing young readers to women in STEM; simultaneously publishing are Fossil Huntress (about paleontologist Mary Leakey), Human Computer (about engineer Mary Jackson), and Space Adventurer (about astronaut Bonnie Dunbar).
While this book gets the job done, here’s hoping livelier titles on this fascinating personality will appear soon. (activities, timeline, glossary) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61930-556-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Nomad Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Natural history from decidedly offbeat angles.
Wielding crayons and broad, inked brushes, a Finnish artist offers freestyle images of 26 wild animals of land and sea.
The free-verse poetic flights (or Jeremiah’s translations) that Järvinen pairs to each of Merz’s animal portraits are technically accurate but sound fanciful: “Here comes the multi-purpose marvel of the jungle, / Elephant and TRUNK!” And: “The bear combs through the ant hill with its big paws / and pops its occupants into his mouth.” Sharing a like disregard for the conventional approach, the art, inspired (as the artist explains) by dim childhood memories rather than actual models, is largely composed of semi-abstract jumbles of geometric shapes and shadowy blobs, disconnected or oddly jointed limbs rendered with a few quick strokes, and scribbles or washes of thin primary hues. The creatures are largely unrecognizable without the printed cues adjacent, but the overall effect is one of lively activity, with occasional surprises, such as a clump of sinuous, scary-looking jellyfish on a vivid blue background—think H.P. Lovecraft à la Henri Matisse—and a trio of polar bears, two of which are pitch black (as polar bears are, beneath their fur), to give viewers pause. Leading questions or suggestions at each poem’s end (“Have you tried walking like a camel?”) will provoke further reactions from fledgling animal lovers. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-24-inch double-page spreads viewed at 52% of actual size.)
Natural history from decidedly offbeat angles. (Picture book/poetry. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63206-268-0
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Yonder
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A pleasant but not necessary addition to the nature shelves.
Silly questions and sensible, sometimes surprising answers show how animals cope with hot temperatures.
In this companion to Do Frogs Drink Hot Chocolate? How Animals Keep Warm (2018), Kaner offers young readers further fascinating facts about animal adaptations. Not all her foolish-seeming questions are answered negatively. Sometimes, there is a “YES!” or a “YES! (sort of),” which is far more likely to engage surprised readers than a straight binary. Ochre sea stars “fill up with cold seawater so they won’t dry out in the sun” if stranded on shore at high tide. So yes, like us, they drink lots of water to stay cool. Musk oxen don’t get haircuts, but they shed a woolly layer every spring. From shovel-snouted lizards to herring gulls, the 13 species portrayed come from around the world. Many will be familiar, even to second graders, from zoos, picture books, and nature documentaries. With its stylized illustrations and clean, colorful design, this would show well in a read-aloud session. But alas, as in the previous title, the designer wasted the opportunity a picture-book page turn provides for engaging listeners in speculation, instead placing question and answer on the same spread. A final page, showing a brown-haired, brown-skinned child floating in a tube and eating a Popsicle, suggests what some lucky humans can do. With no backmatter nor sources this has limited potential beyond its not-inconsiderable entertainment value.
A pleasant but not necessary addition to the nature shelves. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77147-398-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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