Lyrical notes add wonder to a bright mix of creative arts and scientific fact.
How the hues that bring art and fabrics to life are made and used.
“BEFORE COLORS, blue gum trees swelter in the sun. Someone strips off leaves and boils them. She is making…ORANGE.” Sticking largely to colors produced from natural sources—with nods to a few manufactured hues such as mauve and the recently discovered “Vantablack”—Pimentel deftly describes how each in turn is derived, usually from multiple plants native to diverse regions of the world, from minerals, animal products, or other materials, like ground-up mummies for “mummy brown.” She enriches each entry with specific examples of its uses, with notes on topics from mordants to Vincent van Gogh’s fondness for various shades of yellow and the work of modern Indonesian artist Iwan Tirta in reviving batik. She mixes in more general considerations of the science of vision, too, such as how direct light rays and reflected ones produce different “primary” colors and how colors are differently perceived and classified in different cultures. Along with precisely drawn botanical and mineralogical vignettes, Safer underscores the author’s global perspective with frequent full-page scenes of artists and dyers, mostly women and often with children in attendance, linked by dress or surroundings to a broad range of times and cultures.
Lyrical notes add wonder to a bright mix of creative arts and scientific fact. (activities, quotation sources, selected sources) (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781419757068
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Jump, hop, or pounce on this winning, informative title.
An engaging and comprehensive exploration of the physics of animal movement.
A grappling hook and a caterpillar, a pendulum and a gibbon, or lever and a turtle—these are just a few examples of tools used to demonstrate the biomechanics of animal movement. Whether it is walking, running, hopping, crawling, climbing, or gliding, thorough explanations of how animals fight or use the forces of gravity, lift, drag, and thrust to travel on land, water, or air are contextualized in ways young readers can easily comprehend. Through text and illustration, information is expertly presented, with each double-page spread focusing on one kind of movement. These are broken down into various steps that create an overall narrative, but each nugget of text is also a complete concept that takes into account a variety of nonfiction reading styles, including those that like to cherry-pick little bits of information. A conclusion sparks curiosity and inquiry by asking readers to pay attention to the animals around them and think about how they are moving and how movements differ from animal to animal, bridging a connection to their daily worlds while also tying the study of animal biomechanics to innovative pursuits such as making better prosthetics, robots, and swimsuits.
Jump, hop, or pounce on this winning, informative title. (table of contents, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77321-369-9
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Late, lubberly, unlikely to survive fitter treatments.
Long retraces the courses of both Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle and the growth of his epochal insight into evolution’s driving mechanism.
Trailing a flotilla of publications over the past decade celebrating the 200th anniversary of the naturalist’s birth and the 150th of his magnum opus, this unexceptional account sails a course that has been more ably navigated—most recently, for example, in Fabien Grolleau’s graphic Darwin: Voyage of the Beagle (2019) and annotated, illustrated adaptations of On the Origin of Species by Rebecca Stefoff (2018) and Sabina Radeva (2019). Notable here is how the influential role that John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved taxidermist from Guyana, played in shaping the young Darwin’s interests and skills is highlighted in both the narrative and with a full-page portrait by Kalda (who also adds staid views of modern students of various ethnicities, including one wearing a hijab, into the closing summary). Many other important predecessors and colleagues are relegated to an appendix, however. The author also tries to sail too close to the wind with blanket claims that before Darwin scientists reckoned Earth’s age in just thousands of years (not all of them) and that Origin actually kicked off the “long-running battle between science and religion” (Galileo, among others, might disagree). Stick with more seaworthy vessels.
Late, lubberly, unlikely to survive fitter treatments. (glossary, timeline) (Illustrated biography. 9-11)Pub Date: July 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4968-4
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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