by Susan Casey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2018
A compelling and eye-opening story of the interconnected worlds of humans and dolphins that’s full of engaging detail and...
In this middle-grade adaptation of Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (2015), Casey escapes her city life and journeys around the world to better understand how dolphins live, think, and relate to humans.
After experiencing a life-changing swim with dolphins, Casey puts her job on hold and begins researching and writing about cetaceans. The book includes interviews with experts, her experiences traveling the world, and fascinating tidbits, including how dolphins evolved from “mammals that resembled small, hooved wolves.” She encourages readers to delight in the animals’ gifts by highlighting their brain science and complex personalities. With approachable prose and engrossing detail, she describes everything from how a dolphin pod saved a suicidal girl to how their sonar works. Casey is tough on the marine-park industry, poachers, man-made underwater acoustic smog, and humanity’s pollution of the Earth and its waters. She writes explicitly about the slaughter of dolphin populations at the hands of humans, candidly addressing their extermination in Taiji, Japan. The final chapter, on dolphins in Minoan art, is an unsatisfying tangent even though the overall book is a riveting look at the world of dolphins.
A compelling and eye-opening story of the interconnected worlds of humans and dolphins that’s full of engaging detail and vivid language. (acknowledgments, selected bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0085-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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More by Susan Casey
BOOK REVIEW
by Susan Casey
by Kathleen Krull & illustrated by Boris Kulikov ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2006
Hot on the heels of the well-received Leonardo da Vinci (2005) comes another agreeably chatty entry in the Giants of Science series. Here the pioneering physicist is revealed as undeniably brilliant, but also cantankerous, mean-spirited, paranoid and possibly depressive. Newton’s youth and annus mirabilis receive respectful treatment, the solitude enforced by family estrangement and then the plague seen as critical to the development of his thoughtful, methodical approach. His subsequent squabbles with the rest of the scientific community—he refrained from publishing one treatise until his rival was dead—further support the image of Newton as a scientific lone wolf. Krull’s colloquial treatment sketches Newton’s advances in clearly understandable terms without bogging the text down with detailed explanations. A final chapter on “His Impact” places him squarely in the pantheon of great thinkers, arguing that both his insistence on the scientific method and his theories of physics have informed all subsequent scientific thought. A bibliography, web site and index round out the volume; the lack of detail on the use of sources is regrettable in an otherwise solid offering for middle-grade students. (Biography. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-05921-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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More In The Series
by Kathleen Krull & illustrated by Boris Kulikov
by Kathleen Krull & illustrated by Boris Kulikov
More by Kathleen Krull
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathleen Krull & Virginia Loh-Hagan ; illustrated by Aura Lewis
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathleen Krull ; illustrated by Annie Bowler
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathleen Krull & Paul Brewer ; illustrated by Boris Kulikov
by Amy Stewart ; illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017
Entomophobes will find all of this horrifyingly informative.
This junior edition of Stewart’s lurid 2011 portrait gallery of the same name (though much less gleeful subtitle) loses none of its capacity for leaving readers squicked-out.
The author drops a few entries, notably the one on insect sexual practices, and rearranges toned-down versions of the rest into roughly topical sections. Beginning with the same cogent observation—“We are seriously outnumbered”—she follows general practice in thrillers of this ilk by defining “bug” broadly enough to include all-too-detailed descriptions of the life cycles and revolting or deadly effects of scorpions and spiders, ticks, lice, and, in a chapter evocatively titled “The Enemy Within,” such internal guests as guinea worms and tapeworms. Mosquitoes, bedbugs, the ubiquitous “Filth Fly,” and like usual suspects mingle with more-exotic threats, from the tongue-eating louse and a “yak-killer hornet” (just imagine) to the aggressive screw-worm fly that, in one cited case, flew up a man’s nose and laid hundreds of eggs…that…hatched. Morrow-Cribbs’ close-up full-color drawings don’t offer the visceral thrills of the photos in, for instance, Rebecca L. Johnson’s Zombie Makers (2012) but are accurate and finely detailed enough to please even the fussiest young entomologists.
Entomophobes will find all of this horrifyingly informative. (index, glossary, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-755-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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