Advice for what the author has called “the Greta generation” but no answers.
Human actions have damaged animal habitats; what can we do to avoid another mass extinction?
Experts on talking about climate change, especially with young people, emphasize making personal connections, staying hopeful, and focusing on solutions. This British import does just the reverse. It’s a litany of examples of the ways the natural world is changing. Prolific nature writer de la Bédoyère has had plenty of experience presenting animal facts to young readers, but in this case, the sad, scary examples far outnumber the hopeful ones. Her opening chapter introduces the concepts of animal habitats, overpopulation, climate change, pollution, and mass-extinction events. “We haven’t cared enough about the harm we’ve been doing” to animal homes, she writes. Subsequent chapters are organized by habitats: forests, grasslands, oceans, and mountains and poles (dealt with together). Within each chapter each spread serves as a subsection: open oceans, coasts, coral reefs, the ocean floor, and plastic pollution in the marine section, for example. The text, barely more than infobits, is set in boxes decorated with photographs which themselves are set on larger photographs. There are also charts and maps, more boxes with useful suggestions for “What You Can Do,” and quizzes with choices that are “Totally True or Foolishly False?” (Answers in the back of the book.)
Advice for what the author has called “the Greta generation” but no answers. (glossary, suggested websites) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78312-652-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Welbeck Children's
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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