An essential acknowledgement of an under-sung scientist.
Sommer’s children’s book celebrates Nancy Grace Roman, the first woman executive of NASA, who was responsible for the beginning of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Opening with Roman’s defense of the idea for a telescope placed beyond Earth’s atmosphere, this biography then backtracks to Roman’s childhood. Even early on, as a child in the 1920s and 1930s, young Roman is captivated by the stars. Her family moves frequently, and the stars serve as Roman’s constant whenever she has to leave friends behind. Despite being discouraged from her studies by high school counselors, Roman pursues a career in science, attending Swarthmore College, one of only a few co-ed colleges at the time. After earning a degree in astronomy, she completes a doctorate and successfully publishes articles and pursues research before becoming the Chief of Astronomy for the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration. From this point, the narrative focuses on the mission to create a space telescope and send it into the great beyond. Even after Roman’s retirement from NASA, she remains involved with launching the Hubble into space. (The text remarks, “Is it any wonder her co-workers dubbed her ‘Mother of Hubble?’”) Along with descriptions of Roman’s accomplishments, Sommer weaves in quotes from Roman, written in cursive, about her work. Detailed notes illuminating some of the challenges that Roman and the Hubble faced, along with a full timeline of events in both Roman’s life and the Hubble’s history, are included in the endpapers. Sommer’s descriptive text is plainly delivered, with pacing that focuses on the important, star-centered moments in Roman’s life and the challenges she overcomes. Young feminist scientists are sure to notice the casual disparagement from Swarthmore’s head of the physics department, and to be appreciative that pioneering scientists such as Roman carved a path for others. Cobb’s stylized watercolor illustrations sometimes seem to show Roman looking older than her description, but the gorgeous backgrounds and detailed images of telescopes more than make up for that.
An essential acknowledgement of an under-sung scientist.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781955791519
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Braughler Books LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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