A broad, shallow, teeming torrent of facts and marvels: Readers tempted to take a dip will be swept irresistibly along.
A tour of the world’s great rivers, bedizened with hundreds of images and notes on regional geography, history, folklore, culture, and natural history.
Goes proceeds continent by continent in a series of grandly scaled—if, geographically, more impressionistic than precise—maps. They are aswirl with stylized humans (of different races and often in stereotypical garb) and more naturalistic renditions of iconic structures, vehicles, monsters, deities, geophysical features, and flocks of wildlife both marine and terrestrial. These lively, largely monochromatic visuals are glossed in printed blocks that bend as sinuously as the rivers around which they are arranged. The Belgian illustrator lingers longest over Europe, but, along with the usual riverine suspects there and elsewhere, he does map several that are less traveled in U.S. children’s books, such as Papua New Guinea’s Fly River, New Zealand’s Waikato, and the Onyx in Antarctica. Besides describing each river’s course from source to sea and highlighting select features, the author frequently wanders further afield to add factoids, personal opinions (“Belgian fries are the best in the world”), and even bits of fancy, such as the revelation that there is a “secret spot at the South Pole where snowballs winter over,” all via Nagelkerke’s translation from Flemish. Though generally positive in tone, he does mention “gyres” of “plastic soup” in the Pacific, oil spills in the Niger Delta, and that New Orleans was once “the country’s largest slave market.”
A broad, shallow, teeming torrent of facts and marvels: Readers tempted to take a dip will be swept irresistibly along. (Nonfiction. 7-11)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77657-216-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Gecko Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts.
From a Caldecott and Sibert honoree, an invitation to take a mind-expanding journey from the surface of our planet to the furthest reaches of the observable cosmos.
Though Chin’s assumption that we are even capable of understanding the scope of the universe is quixotic at best, he does effectively lead viewers on a journey that captures a sense of its scale. Following the model of Kees Boeke’s classic Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps (1957), he starts with four 8-year-old sky watchers of average height (and different racial presentations). They peer into a telescope and then are comically startled by the sudden arrival of an ostrich that is twice as tall…and then a giraffe that is over twice as tall as that…and going onward and upward, with ellipses at each page turn connecting the stages, past our atmosphere and solar system to the cosmic web of galactic superclusters. As he goes, precisely drawn earthly figures and features in the expansive illustrations give way to ever smaller celestial bodies and finally to glimmering swirls of distant lights against gulfs of deep black before ultimately returning to his starting place. A closing recap adds smaller images and additional details. Accompanying the spare narrative, valuable side notes supply specific lengths or distances and define their units of measure, accurately explain astronomical phenomena, and close with the provocative observation that “the observable universe is centered on us, but we are not in the center of the entire universe.”
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts. (afterword, websites, further reading) (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4623-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An immersive dunk into a vast subject—and on course for shorter attention spans.
In the wake of Everything Awesome About Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Beasts! (2019), Lowery spins out likewise frothy arrays of facts and observations about sharks, whales, giant squid, and smaller but no less extreme (or at least extremely interesting) sea life.
He provides plenty of value-added features, from overviews of oceanic zones and environments to jokes, drawing instructions, and portrait galleries suitable for copying or review. While not one to pass up any opportunity to, for instance, characterize ambergris as “whale vomit perfume” or the clownfish’s protective coating as “snot armor,” he also systematically introduces members of each of the eight orders of sharks, devotes most of a page to the shark’s electroreceptive ampullae of Lorenzini, and even sheds light on the unobvious differences between jellyfish and the Portuguese man-of-war or the reason why the blue octopus is said to have “arms” rather than “tentacles.” He also argues persuasively that sharks have gotten a bad rap (claiming that more people are killed each year by…vending machines) and closes with pleas to be concerned about plastic waste, to get involved in conservation efforts, and (cannily) to get out and explore our planet because (quoting Jacques-Yves Cousteau) “People protect what they love.” Human figures, some with brown skin, pop up occasionally to comment in the saturated color illustrations. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 45% of actual size.)
An immersive dunk into a vast subject—and on course for shorter attention spans. (bibliography, list of organizations) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35973-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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