ABOUT TIME

Mechanically minded children willing to follow Koscielniak through this quick history of calendars and clocks will find the time well spent. Though he begins with the sun, seasons, and solar and lunar calendars (not ancient American ones, however), he focuses most closely on how clocks have used shadows and sand, water, weights, springs, electricity, and, finally, atomic vibrations, to measure out increasingly finer gradations. Of what, he declines to discuss, aside from passing references to Ancient Greeks, St. Augustine, Einstein, and unspecified modern ideas. His watercolor depictions of various clockworks are unusually lucid, though, and well-explained, making this an adequate alternative to Anita Ganeri’s Story of Time and Clocks (1997) or Trent Duffy’s The Clock (2000). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)