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
Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete...
A mouse, a bird, and a junkyard frog assemble a car from the ground up—cluing in readers who may be a bit vague on what’s beneath all those hoods…or at least what used to be.
Enlisting his green buddy Hank to supply the parts and feathered Phoebe to draw up the plans, Eli, “king of crazy ideas,” sees his latest project grow from a frame and some miscellaneous loose parts to a nifty blue convertible with a classic 1950s look. At each stage, Sodomka supplies clearly drawn angled or cutaway views with dozens of major components labeled, from “steering knuckle bracket” to “tie rod” and “ball joint.” The gas tank is labeled but seems to be missing, though, and readers who want to know what a “differential” actually does or the purpose of the “indicator switch” are out of luck. Lacey’s claim that an engine “is like the brain of the car” doesn’t bear close examination, either. Moreover, the finished auto isn’t much like most modern cars, as it has no electronic elements, for instance, and is powered by a three-cylinder engine (misleadingly billed as “regular”) quaintly fed by a long-obsolescent carburetor. With an auto under their belts (and with similar oversimplification), Eli’s “Scrap Pack” goes on to an even more ambitious enterprise in How to Build a Plane. In both volumes, closer looks at selected systems or related topics follow the storyline’s happy conclusion, and each broad trial-and-error step in the construction is recapped at the end.
Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete pictures. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63322-041-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Quarto
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sketchy teaser in search of an audience.
A subatomic narrator describes how helium, a nonrenewable resource, is formed deep underground.
The very simple cartoon style of the illustrations suggests a breezier ride than the scientifically challenging content delivers. With much reliance on explanatory endnotes, Rooney sends her zippy narrator—newly freed from a popped balloon (see Eddie the Electron, 2015)—barreling its way past billions of nitrogen and oxygen atoms to the top of the atmosphere. Eddie describes how uranium and thorium trapped in the newly formed planet’s crust self-destructed to leave helium as a stable byproduct. Billions of tedious years later (“I thought I would die of pair annihilation!”) that helium was extracted for a wide variety of industrial uses. Following mentions of Einstein and how Eddie is mysteriously connected to other atoms “in a way that surpasses space and time,” the popeyed purple particle floats off with a plea to cut down on the party balloons to conserve a rare element. Younger readers may find this last notion easier to latch onto than the previous dose of physics, which is seriously marred both by the vague allusions and by Eddie’s identification as a helium atom rather than the free electron that his portrayals in the art, not to mention his moniker, indicate.
A sketchy teaser in search of an audience. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-14-0
Page Count: 27
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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