Start your engines and get ready to take off for an amazing read.
Cars that fly? Only in stories like Harry Potter or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or fantasy films, right? Nope, flying cars have been in existence since the beginning of the 1900s. Who knew?
Author-illustrator Glass departs from the world of picture books (The Wondrous Whirligig, 2003, etc.) to apply his hand to long-form nonfiction. And what a high-flying job he has done. He devotes a chapter to each of 14 visionary men who believed they could prove that cars and planes could be fused into one flying machine. First was Gustave Whitehead, who designed a bird-shaped glider named the Condor in 1901; the last was Daniel Zuck, who predicted squadrons of commuters in Plane-Mobiles. The names of their machines were as imaginative as their inventions: Henry Ford’s Sky Flivver, Harold Pitcairn’s Autogiro, and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car are just a sampling. The fascinating details of the dangers and difficulties each man faced read smoothly and engagingly. Glass’ research is extensive and impeccable, and the archival black-and-white photos provide visual context. All in all, it’s a tremendous narrative-nonfiction debut for a creator who’s long been associated with the 32-page format.
Start your engines and get ready to take off for an amazing read. (author’s note, glossary, source notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-618-98482-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Awash in mighty squalls, tales of heroism and melodramatic chapter headings like “The Lady Elgin: Death in the Darkness,” these marine yarns recount the violent ends of nine of the more than 6,000 ships that have “left the bottoms of Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior…littered with their wreckage and the bones of the people who sailed on them” over the past four centuries. For added value, Butts heads each shipwreck chapter with a photo or image of the unfortunate vessel. He then closes with so many Great Lakes monster sightings that they take on an aura of authenticity just by their very number, an effect aided and abetted by his liberal use of primary sources. Younger readers who might get bogged down in Michael Varhola’s more thorough Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures: Great Lakes (2008)—or turned off by its invented dialogue and embroidered details—will find these robust historical accounts more digestible and at least as engrossing. The bibliography is dominated by Canadian sources, as befitting the book’s origin, but there's plenty here to interest American readers. (Nonfiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-77049-206-6
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
"A human is a pretty wild thing," argues the author of this collection of curious facts and intriguing studies about human behavior. With a breezy text supported by a lively design, the author of Gross Universe (2004) again presents science in a way certain to attract middle-grade and middle-school readers. Chapters on the senses, emotions, communication and interactions with other human beings cover a variety of topics, each on headlined double-page spreads. Each chapter includes a description of “a cool study” organized into appropriate sections: question, observation, experiment (illustrated with step by step cartoons), results and summary. “Are you an animal?” sidebars describe comparable animal behavior. From dirty diapers to canned laughter to body language, he finds topics that both appeal and enlighten. Directly addressing readers, he invites participation by asking questions—“How are you sitting right now?” “Does smell affect your dreams?” “Does your heart race when….?”—and draws them in further with do-it-yourself experiments. A section on good manners even includes guidelines for behavior at a concert—differentiating between classical and rock. The digital art includes bits of photographs, line drawings, the use of color and shapes to help organize the print and plenty of symbols. No specific sources are cited, but an extensive list of experts is acknowledged. Popular science through and through, you can’t help enjoying this. (index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-926818-07-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Maple Tree Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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