Just the ticket for transportation mavens and anyone interested in—or apprehensive about—flying.
Making sure air travel functions smoothly is a big job—here’s how it’s done.
Similar in concept and in graphic style to Lonely Planet’s How Airports Work (2018), this book is aimed at a slightly older audience: twice the pages here, with no flaps to lift. Nine concise chapters that offer a tour of security checkpoints, the cockpit, the control tower, and more are framed as responses to questions—all audience-appropriate and many amusing, like “Can a Body Scanner See Me Naked?” Questions within chapters (“What if I Leave My Bag Behind?” “Can I Take Snakes on a Plane?”) generate brief and reassuring answers. Tiny but clear depictions of vehicles and objects are informatively labeled, alternating aerial views with focused vignettes. Spreads crammed with details have a Richard Scarry or Where’s Waldo vibe. Though the book doesn’t say much about the role of flight attendants, other occupations are covered, from engineers and aircraft marshalers to pilots and air traffic controllers. Fascinating facts are interspersed: Planes don’t have a reverse gear; a child and a raccoon each needed rescue from mazelike luggage carousels at airports in, respectively, Atlanta and Philadelphia; and alligators, hares, seagulls, deer, and turtles are among the animals that have had to be removed from runways. People depicted are diverse.
Just the ticket for transportation mavens and anyone interested in—or apprehensive about—flying. (glossary, index) (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780500653876
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject.
The story of the first attack submarine’s drastically brief career and, nearly a century and a half later, rediscovery.
Even though it was, as the author artlessly puts it, “well-designed and well-crafted in the American spirit of invention,” the H.L. Hunley sank repeatedly in tests and never came back from its first mission in 1864. Rather than go into details about how the submarine worked (sort of), Hawk opts to extend her simply written version of its exploits with tangentially related chapters on the battle of Shiloh, the end of the Civil War, and an undocumented (she admits) legend that romantically links a gold coin found in the wreck with the sub’s captain, George Dixon, and a Southern belle named Queenie Bennet. Likewise, Wyrick’s uncaptioned reconstructions of battle scenes and the submarine underwater (which are not always placed near the actions they describe) don’t serve quite as well as the more informative period views of the vessel and its interior that have been used to illustrate other treatments. The account switches to photos and does go into somewhat more detail when describing how the wreck was found in 1995, raised in 2000, and transported to a lab; in a final chapter, a conservator and an archaeologist describe their still-ongoing restoration work.
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject. (map, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61117-788-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Young Palmetto Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
It may not be epic, but this is certainly one launch that fails to get off the ground.
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try and try and try.
In a series launch bent on showing how failure may be instructive, Thompson and Slader turn the story of the Wright Brothers into an amusing, bite-sized history lesson. History’s early flight fiascos and successes are recounted, culminating in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s. Over the years they would experiment, fail, learn from their mistakes, tinker, fail, and tenaciously pursue their dreams until they succeeded. Alas, troubles dog this well-intentioned series opener. An early statement that “It would seem that before man would learn to fly, he’d have to learn how to fall” prefaces a book that ignores the contributions (and failures) of such early women aeronauts as Sophie Blanchard. In a section on ballooning, a statement that the novel Around the World in Eighty Days was “about circling the globe in a hot air balloon” is incorrect (no ballooning occurs in that book). Attempts to appeal to child readers today yield awkward sentences that describe the brothers as “steampunk hipsters at Comic-Con” wrestling with the controls of the plane “like trying to play a multiplayer computer game with a really bad Internet connection.” Artist Foley renders the text accessible with his lively pen-and-ink drawings, but they are too little, too late.
It may not be epic, but this is certainly one launch that fails to get off the ground. (Nonfiction. 8-10)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-15055-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Flash Point/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
