SMALL WORLDS CLOSE UP

by Lisa & Joseph Gennaro Grillone ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 1978

Familiar objects are revealed in their minute complexity in these black-and-white pictures taken by the authors with a scanning electron microscope. At the top of each page a regular photo shows the object as we see it, then the micrograph reveals the way it's ""seen"" at anything from 40 to 9000 times magnification. The authors proceed from ""minerals"" (the inevitable salt crystals; the point of a hypodermic needle) to vegetables (cotton fibers, boxlike cork cells) to animals (snake fang, bee stinger, the wing of a moth). They show us a pin head at 1200x that ""looks almost like the surface of the moon,"" and later a moon rock at similar magnification that resembles some sort of fungus; and like David Scharf in last year's even more spectacular Magnifications (for adults), Grillone and Gennaro add interest by including closer and closer views of the same objects--a woody stem with its different cell layers; the underside of a leaf with its air-breathing stoma, and different sorts of feathers. For their younger readers they also provide a paragraph or so describing what is seen in each picture--a service which helps to orient the eye and contributes some interesting incidental information, though there is no attempt to present any systematic science lesson.

Pub Date: June 7, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1978

Categories: NONFICTION