A particularly engaging survey, both for its variety and its unusually expert perspectives.
A trained structural engineer offers an insider’s view on how renowned skyscrapers and other large constructions on seven continents were designed and built.
In the wake of 2018’s Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures, Agrawal, whose background includes work on London’s Shard, presents younger audiences with specific and clearly explained issues and techniques associated with more than a dozen projects—from preserving Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, which was built over a former lake and is sinking both unevenly and at the rate of 2-to-3 inches a year, to the challenges of creating a sewer system for London, a movable natural grass soccer pitch for the Sapporo Dome, and foundations in deep salt water for Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge. The author also offers a look at Antarctica’s Halley VI research station, which is jointed and built on skis, and explains how New Zealand’s Te Matau ā Pohe bridge was inspired by Maori legends. Along with galleries of modern skyscrapers and types of bridges, Agrawal pays tribute to traditional materials like bricks and reinforced concrete as well as more modern ones such as aluminum foam and carbon nanotubes, adds side features on elevators and cranes, and, with a particular focus on women and people of color, directs appreciative nods to select colleagues of past and present. Hickey mixes informally drawn portraits and occasional fanciful images with aerial and underwater views, simplified but revealing cutaway diagrams, and small illustrations for the occasional hands-on demonstrations the author suggests.
A particularly engaging survey, both for its variety and its unusually expert perspectives. (glossary) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0929-1
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere.
This book is buzzing with trivia.
Follow a swarm of bees as they leave a beekeeper’s apiary in search of a new home. As the scout bees traverse the fields, readers are provided with a potpourri of facts and statements about bees. The information is scattered—much like the scout bees—and as a result, both the nominal plot and informational content are tissue-thin. There are some interesting facts throughout the book, but many pieces of trivia are too, well trivial, to prove useful. For example, as the bees travel, readers learn that “onion flowers are round and fluffy” and “fennel is a plant that is used in cooking.” Other facts are oversimplified and as a result are not accurate. For example, monofloral honey is defined as “made by bees who visit just one kind of flower” with no acknowledgment of the fact that bees may range widely, and swarm activity is described as a springtime event, when it can also occur in summer and early fall. The information in the book, such as species identification and measurement units, is directed toward British readers. The flat, thin-lined artwork does little to enhance the story, but an “I spy” game challenging readers to find a specific bee throughout is amusing.
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere. (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-500-65265-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quick flight but a blast from first to last.
A charged-up roundup of astro-facts.
Having previously explored everything awesome about both dinosaurs (2019) and sharks (2020), Lowery now heads out along a well-traveled route, taking readers from the Big Bang through a planet-by-planet tour of the solar system and then through a selection of space-exploration highlights. The survey isn’t unique, but Lowery does pour on the gosh-wow by filling each hand-lettered, poster-style spread with emphatic colors and graphics. He also goes for the awesome in his selection of facts—so that readers get nothing about Newton’s laws of motion, for instance, but will come away knowing that just 65 years separate the Wright brothers’ flight and the first moon landing. They’ll also learn that space is silent but smells like burned steak (according to astronaut Chris Hadfield), that thanks to microgravity no one snores on the International Space Station, and that Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the moon…to use the bathroom. And, along with a set of forgettable space jokes (OK, one: “Why did the carnivore eat the shooting star?” “Because it was meteor”), the backmatter features drawing instructions for budding space artists and a short but choice reading list. Nods to Katherine Johnson and NASA’s other African American “computers” as well as astronomer Vera Rubin give women a solid presence in the otherwise male and largely White cast of humans. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A quick flight but a blast from first to last. (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-35974-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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