Clever, complex, yet concise and fun: This guide promises to engage language learners and curious readers.
A visual manual employs digital-age symbols to introduce one of the world’s oldest living forms of writing.
Leveraging widely recognizable and pictographic emoticons, this innovative work appeals to humans’ language instinct and innate playfulness, dismantling potential psychological barriers when approaching something that may feel difficult or inaccessible. The colorful and icon-filled design creates explicit connections between Hanzi—Chinese characters—and emoji, enticing readers to browse and explore together with the anthropomorphic porcine narrator, Jiji, whose profile shows the emoji representing his hanmoji name, Snout Snout. Comparing Hanzi with other logographic languages including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian, and Mayan, the contents inform and intrigue regardless of one’s prior knowledge of the Chinese language. How might two tree emojis make the word forest? How many spoken language groups and written forms does Chinese currently have? (Answer: 10 and two, respectively) And what is a tonal language? Using crisp layouts, thoughtful descriptions and examples, and illustrated charts, this comprehensive primer entertains while explicating a high-context language family without overgeneralizing or oversimplifying. It also incorporates Chinese culture and philosophy and educates readers about the history and process of emoji creation, among other topics. Through their broad, comparative approach, the savvy creators also demonstrate the hybridity and constantly evolving nature of languages in general.
Clever, complex, yet concise and fun: This guide promises to engage language learners and curious readers. (bibliography, index, image credits) (Nonfiction. 11-18)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1913-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: MITeen Press/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Necessary for every library, personal or otherwise.
As fresh and funny as ever, a classic compendium of physics in action gets a light but needed makeover.
Most of the “Things” here are still working the way they did back in 1988, 1998, and 2004, when the original and the revised editions dropped—but along with sporting new and spruced-up colors, some of the content, notably the section dubbed “The Digital Domain,” has been brought into the 21st century. Thus, the space shuttle and the VCR are no more, the workings of the telephone have been replaced by those of smartphones and telephone networks, and the jump jet has given way to the quadcopter and other types of drones. But the details that made the earlier editions delightful as well as edifying remain. In the illustrations, flights of tiny angels move the “first whoopee cushion” into place, discombobulated woolly mammoths get caught up in silly side business while helping to demonstrate scientific principles, and best of all, Macaulay’s brilliantly designed, engagingly informal diagrams and cutaways bring within the grasp of even casual viewers a greater understanding of the technological wonders of both past and present.
Necessary for every library, personal or otherwise. (index) (Reference. 11-15)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-82438-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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