by Catherine Barr & Steve Williams ; illustrated by Amy Husband ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
Broad but shallow, best considered as an appetizer for meatier surveys.
The history of technology gets a quick once-over, highlighting 15 milestones.
Skipping blithely past the inventions of stone tools and agriculture, the authors begin with the wheel, (arbitrarily dated to 3,500 B.C.E.), close with nuclear weapons and the internet (“Today”), and in between tick off paper, gunpowder, vaccines, telephones, plastic bottles, and like more or less ubiquitous props for modern civilization. Each gets a spread, usually with a left-to-right progression of approximate time and place of invention followed by early uses, later refinements, and finally modern status. Husband’s informally drawn cartoon scenes offer views of early to late types of technology, a newly electrified city thickly strung with power lines, sea life unhappily wrestling with nets and plastic bags in a garbage-strewn ocean, and world maps festooned with people of diverse dress and color using phones and computers to communicate. The spare, big-picture narrative mentions no inventors by name (“While roads covered the land, only birds crossed the skies. Until one windy day in America when two brothers took off”), but the authors do sound repeated cautionary notes about the environmental effects of pollution, and like the crowd of peace protesters in the nuke entry’s foreground (which at least looks larger than the mushroom cloud in the background), human figures throughout are racially diverse, if not always individualized.
Broad but shallow, best considered as an appetizer for meatier surveys. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4537-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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by Catherine Barr ; illustrated by Christiane Engel
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by Catherine Barr ; illustrated by Anne Wilson
by Catherine Barr & Steve Williams ; illustrated by Amy Husband ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2017
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide.
Barr and Williams present 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, from the Big Bang to the International Space Station and, possibly soon, flights beyond.
The co-authors write with the same enthusiasm and energy they showed in telling The Story of Life (2015) but with less regard for accuracy or internal logic. Following an inherently paradoxical opening claim that “Before the Big Bang there was….[n]o time,” they go on with a sweeping survey of the cosmos. It offers a picture of galaxies “sparkling silently” (wrong on both counts) in “bitterly cold” space (likewise wrong: space has no temperature), with incomplete references to the “freezing” atmospheres of our solar system’s other planets (Venus’ 462 C average temperature goes unmentioned) and the “cold, dusty moon” orbiting Earth (cold only on the side away from the sun). Two space-suited young explorers, one light-skinned, one dark, float through painted illustrations that progress from mighty explosions and swirling starscapes to closely packed planets, fleets of early spacecraft, a cloud of satellites, and, finally, space liners ferrying multicultural tour groups to an orbiting hotel, or maybe Mars.
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78603-003-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Melissa Rooney ; illustrated by Harry Pulver ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017
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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