A fresh gander at the beginnings of dino-mania.
Colleagues become bitter rivals in this tale of scientific discovery set during paleontology’s heady early days.
Rightly judging that Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh would be less remembered for their achievements than their feud, Noyes highlights the latter, which resulted in a vicious “Scientific Smackdown” rabid enough to become a public spectacle. She sets it amid a wide-angled account of how rich fossil discoveries in the 19th century, particularly in the American West, fueled sometimes-unscrupulous races to find more even as natural science was undergoing some revolutionary growing pains. With liberal use of period illustrations and side essays, she tells a tale in which Buffalo Bill Cody and Red Cloud figure as prominently as Mary Anning and Charles Darwin, featuring Indiana Jones–style expeditions into rugged country at a time when the buffalo still roamed (if not for long) and the Battle of Little Bighorn was fresh news. Young readers interested in the intrepid exploits of the early fossil hunters have plenty of choices, from Kathryn Lasky’s Bone Wars (1988) on, but it’s a grand yarn nonetheless and, in this iteration, offers illuminating sidelights and updated lists of print and web resources.
A fresh gander at the beginnings of dino-mania. (index, timeline, endnotes) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-28984-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Barnard’s brave effort to cram such an immense subject into 40 pages leads to some debatable claims. He opens with a sweeping history of Muslim expansion (“Early Muslims knew they had a lot of catching up to do to equal or surpass the great civilizations that preceded and surrounded them”) and continues generalizing throughout (“Until the twentieth century, most buildings in most cities owed much of their look to Islam”). Single-topic spreads cover the development of Arabic calligraphy and the mass production of paper, revolutions in mathematics and medicine, artistic and architectural motifs, astronomy and navigation, plus the importation of new foodstuffs, ideas (e.g., marching bands, hospitals) and technology to the West. The array of street scenes, portraits, maps, still-lifes and diagrams add visual appeal but sometimes fall into irrelevancy. Labored stylistic tics stale (the Caliph’s pigeon post was “the email of the day,” the astrolabe was “the GPS device of its day,” the translation of Classical texts was “the Human Genome Project of its day”). The author winds down with a discussion of how the dismissive attitude of Renaissance “Petrarchists” led to a general loss of appreciation for Muslim culture and scholarship, then finishes abruptly with a page of adult-level “Further Reading.” Enthusiastic, yes; judicious and well-organized, not so much. (Nonfiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-84072-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
In a helter-skelter scrapbook format, Cleare, a veteran mountaineer, profiles five of the world’s most renowned mountains—K2, the Eiger, the Matterhorn, Everest and Mount McKinley—and identifies some of the major historical expeditions to their summits. Top-to-bottom views of each peak are provided via single, double or (for Everest) wall-poster-sized triple foldouts. Along with those, dozens of smaller captioned photos, maps, images or realistic reconstructions depict noted climbers of the past, local wildlife, old- and new-style climbing gear, wind and weather patterns, climbers’ camps, glaciers and rugged landscapes. Likewise, each peak receives an introductory passage of dramatic prose (“Mount McKinley is a colossal, icy complex of ridges, spurs, buttresses, and hanging glaciers,” forming “a crucible of particularly evil weather”). This is accompanied by assemblages of captions and commentary in smaller type that detail its challenges and the often-unhappy history of climbers who faced them. The level of detail is specific enough to include views and comparisons of the actual routes up each mountain, and readers are expected to be clear on the difference between a cirque and a serac, or a “technical” and a “nontechnical” climb. Armchair climbers who can weather the random-feeling arrangement of pictures and the overall absence of narrative flow are in for thrills. (Informational browsing item. 11-13)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6573-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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