A handsomely packaged look back at an epochal achievement.
A free-verse ode to the Apollo program, still the high-water mark of this country’s space program.
Like Catherine Thimmesh’s Team Moon (2006), this album is offered in tribute to the massive, collective eight-year effort to send explorers to our closest celestial neighbor and then bring them back. Slade intersperses resumes for the members of each Apollo crew up to Apollo 11 with extended poetic flights that include significant technical details along with dramatic passages: “Explosive fire. Deafening noise. / The rocket blasts off / above an inferno of white-hot flames.” A prose coda offers nods to the major corporations that developed and built the Saturn V rocket and the spacecraft it carried, then an account of the Apollo 11 astronauts’ triumphant reception back on Earth. Gonzalez’s big, kaleidoscopic montages and page-filling close-ups of tense faces likewise highlight the drama and are so realistic as to be sometimes difficult to distinguish from the photos with which they are mixed. One glimpse of brown hands using a slide rule and an African-American woman (unidentified but probably Katherine Johnson) in another montage are the only indications here that the space program wasn’t an all-white enterprise. Still, it makes a grand—if, so many years later, nostalgic—tale about a magnificent effort.
A handsomely packaged look back at an epochal achievement. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, bibliography, sources, index) (Nonfiction/poetry. 10-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68263-013-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A colorful but superficial ooze of anthropology, with a few drops of biology mixed in.
An irreverent if anemic survey of the red stuff’s roles in human culture, from Galen to the Twilight series.
The information is presented beneath drippy red borders and splattered with both jokey cartoon illustrations and graphic-novel style episodes featuring a hoodie-clad researcher who hooks up with a hot young vampire. Kyi’s report opens with a slashing overview of early medical theories about the circulatory system and closes with superficial speculations about why The Hunger Games and news stories about violent crimes are so popular. In between, it strings together generalities about blood rites in cultures from Matausa to our own Armed Forces and religions from Roman Catholicism to Santeria. The author also takes stabs at blood-based foods, the use of blood (particularly menstrual blood) in magic and modern forensic science, medical bloodletting, hereditary hemophilia in Europe’s ruling class, vampirism, and other topics in the same vein. But readers seeking at least a basic transfusion of information about blood’s physical functions or component elements will come away empty. Moreover, the trickle of specific facts doesn’t extend to, for instance, naming the site of a prehistoric sacrifice stone on which traces of gore have been found or even, despite repeated reference to blood types, actually identifying—much less discussing—them.
A colorful but superficial ooze of anthropology, with a few drops of biology mixed in. (further reading, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-385-7
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Riveting fodder for casual browsers and budding scientists alike.
From “Zany Zoology” to “Medical Marvels & Mishaps,” the creators of Weird U.S. (2011) scout out wonders—mostly of the astonishing or gross-out sort—from scientific fields.
In haphazard order in each chapter but in enough detail that readers won’t feel as if they’re being barraged by unsubstantiated facts and factoids, Lake and Fairbanks report from “Weird Central” on a dizzying array of topics. These include naked mole rats and giant tube worms (their candidate for “Weirdest Animal Alive”), Mike the Headless Chicken, feuding inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, Silly Putty, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, how to produce both static electricity and X-rays from Scotch tape, the strange fates of Einstein’s brain and Ted Williams’ head, and several dozen related diversions. Though written in a casual “hey, get this!” tone (“Spider senses aren’t all that. Moth and cricket senses are much cooler”), the entries are laced with such need-to-know information as the evaporation temperature of diamond, the common ingredients shared by air and chocolate, and the difference between “ligers” and “tigons.” Photos of the aforementioned head, the bacteria paintings of Alexander Fleming, crop circles, geysering soda bottles, two-headed animals and more add equally memorable visual notes.
Riveting fodder for casual browsers and budding scientists alike. (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: July 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4027-6041-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
