Light on informational payload but a blast for display or demonstration.
A lunar flyby, with notes on our largest satellite’s origins, phases, and tidal effects enhanced by pop-ups.
As in its predecessor, Pop-Up Earth (2021), paper engineer Charbonnel’s 3-D constructs are showstoppers that make the narrative text and the flat illustrations come off as afterthoughts. Still, though author Jankéliowitch leaves special terms like umbra and penumbra undefined, she does cover lunar basics (including comparisons with select moons orbiting other planets) in simple language. Similarly, if the human faces are White in all but one of illustrator Buxton’s scenes, her maps and diagrammatic views of the moon as it orbits between the sun and Earth are clean and easy to understand. As the final spread on the Apollo missions includes no mention of later developments, readers will come away uninformed of current plans for return visits, which is a shame. Still, after taking ganders at the huge planetary collision at the opening, the astronaut waving through the large clear plastic screen of an antique TV from the moon’s surface at the close, and the spectacular constructs in between, they may well be tempted into the orbit of Elaine Scott’s Our Moon (2016) to find out the full story.
Light on informational payload but a blast for display or demonstration. (Informational pop-up picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-500-65186-5
Page Count: 18
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Not so much high concept as no concept, or no clear one anyway.
An invitation to look up in order to look back down.
In a diffuse series of topical spreads, McGeachin assembles assorted side- and/or ground-level views of select trees, arboreal creatures (mostly Australian), birds and flying insects, aircraft, bird wing design, Himalayan peaks and wildlife, climbing gear, ancient temples, modern skyscrapers, clouds, constellations, and atmospheric layers—all in service to the proposition that high places “have a way of putting things into perspective and our home looks very fragile from up here.” Viewers will mostly have to take her word for it, as her illustrations run to idealized natural settings or schematic galleries of images, aside from one aerial view of some relatively tidy deforestation and a later melodramatic scenario of a smoky world on fire. Also, a nonsensical notion that unless we stop punching holes in the atmosphere all our air will leak out into space and “be lost forever” makes the rest of her valid but vague warnings of the dangers of pollution and habitat destruction seem facile. Rarely seen human figures are stylized or light-skinned.
Not so much high concept as no concept, or no clear one anyway. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 7-9)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781803380469
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Welbeck Children's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
A lively account of a watershed event.
A testament to the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, which helped to spark Earth Day and the environmental movement.
The fire itself was quickly doused and only a minor news story (the Cuyahoga, located in Cleveland, Ohio, having already, the author notes, caught fire 13 times since 1886), but thanks in part to crusading Detroit Mayor Carl Stokes—and, really, the times—it proved a tipping point in the history of environmental legislation and activism. In occasionally imprecise but vivid prose punctuated by incendiary KABOOMs, Wittenstein explains how the river became a “toxic soup of wood, metal, chemicals, oil, and even animal body parts” ripe for combustion, as were rivers in other industrial cities (“They were KABOOMING out of control!”). “People,” he writes, “finally opened their ears and eyes. They were tired of holding their noses.” But despite ending the main narrative with an optimistic observation that the river is clean enough today for fish to survive in it, he closes with an author’s note that offers a strong reminder that pollution and climate change remain deadly challenges: “This is not a movie. This is the world we have created.” Between views of prehistoric mastodons splashing in the unspoiled river and modern picnickers catching and cooking a fish (which is actually legal now), Hartland depicts racially diverse groups of firefighters, officials, marchers with signs in various languages, tourists in boats, and city dwellers in increasingly cleaned-up settings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A lively account of a watershed event. (timeline, source notes, resource and organization lists, photo, map) (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781534480834
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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