An important perspective on our changing climate.
Glaciers on this planet are vanishing—learn how we know, why we should care, and what we can do.
The author of Itch (2018) and Rotten (2019), both illustrated by Gilbert Ford, turns her attention to another underappreciated part of the natural world: glaciers. With a foreword by glaciologist Jill Pelto and an introduction laying out the problem, Sanchez prepares her readers for the cold hard truth to come. Chapter by chapter, she explains the important roles glaciers play in our world, how we know they are melting, and why that’s happening—clearly explaining climate change. She shows how ice cores reveal climate history, introduces animals and plants that thrive in glacier country, and describes what the future might bring. Sanchez concludes with suggestions for action, personal and communal. At several points, she brings in Indigenous points of view. The author addresses readers directly with compelling evidence for her thesis that this is yet another manifestation of climate change that will wreak havoc on the world we know. Unfamiliar words are bolded and defined in context as well as in a glossary. Encouraging readers to take action, Sanchez includes in the backmatter a long list of science specialties concerned with glaciers. There are occasional photographs, helpful diagrams, and artistic depictions of glacial scenes throughout, breaking up the text and adding appeal; people depicted in Padula’s illustrations are diverse.
An important perspective on our changing climate. (author’s note, additional resources, select bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5235-0950-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Workman
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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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