An approachable and well-illustrated introduction to an important moment in science.
This illustrated children’s book explains how a famous experiment used a solar eclipse to prove that light bends around the sun.
In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, head of the Cambridge Observatory, joined Frank Dyson, director of the Greenwich Observatory, for an expedition to Principe Island, off the coast of Africa, to take scientific photographs of the solar eclipse on May 29. Four years previously, Albert Einstein introduced his new theory of general relativity, saying “that the sun’s huge gravity pulled and bent light.” To prove it, astronomers needed to measure the light bending. Usually the sun is too bright, but a solar eclipse would block the sphere enough for scientists to photograph stars around it, measure their positions, and compare them. Eddington and his team took 16 photographic plates, carefully timed using a metronome. A similar team went to Brazil, and although clouds obscured some photos, this body of evidence was valuable in proving Einstein’s claim that light bends with the sun’s gravity. Pattison (The Falconer, 2019, etc.) takes a complicated scientific theory and makes it not just fairly understandable, but entertaining as well. Concepts are explained in simple and, often, more detailed terms. “Eclipse,” for example, is introduced with a pared-down, one-sentence definition (“A solar eclipse is when the moon moves between the earth and the sun”) followed by a more detailed, paragraphlong explanation on the next page. Willis’ (Pollen, 2019) illustrations are a delight, using a collage technique that combines original art with scraps from newspapers and books. People (nearly all white men) are depicted with blocky, rectangular bodies that are clothed in recognizable styles of the time. These characters have doll-like, simplified expressions, but they deftly show personality, such as the surprise on scientists’ faces. Backgrounds are stylized but nicely detailed, often with animals like dogs, cats, and birds. In an appealing additional feature, the upper-right corner of the book can be quickly flipped to show the progress of an eclipse.
An approachable and well-illustrated introduction to an important moment in science.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62944-125-2
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Mims House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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