Rewarding fare for browsing, but David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work Now (2016) or National Geographic’s aforementioned...
Revealing looks at the science behind over two dozen vehicles, household appliances, technological gadgets, and recreational challenges.
This arbitrary assemblage of high-interest topics—most but not all tech-related—is more portable than the hefty National Geographic Science of Everything (2013) but also more scattershot. It targets younger enquirers with a combination of loud graphics, eye-catching digital images or composite photos (chortles an elephant on a bicycle suspended in midair: “And Dumbo thought HE got air!”), and mixes of quick facts with longer, reasonably specific explanations of processes and physical principles. Subjects encompass hoverboards and invisibility cloaks in the “Beam Me Up” section, toilets in “Home Is Where the Fridge Is,” as well as the history and physics of erasers and glues, bicycles, tightrope walking, hybrid cars, copiers (only the 2-D kind, though), and bounce houses. Each of the five chapters also includes a profile of a modern scientist or inventor and an easy-to-do or -modify “Try This!” project. Both in the photos and the digital art human figures show an inclusive mix of ages, genders, and pale but varied skin colors.
Rewarding fare for browsing, but David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work Now (2016) or National Geographic’s aforementioned broader compendium will build sturdier foundations. (index, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4263-2555-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This survey of body systems tries too hard for a broad audience, mixing paragraphs of lines like, “Without bones we would just be bags of goop,” printed in slightly larger type, with brief but specific discussions of osteoblasts, myofibrils, peristalsis and like parts and functions. Seven single or double gatefolds allow the many simple, brightly painted illustrations space to range from thumbnail size to forearm-length. Many of the visuals offer inside and outside views of a multicultural cast—of children, by and large, though the sexual organs are shown on headless trunks and the final picture provides a peek inside a pregnant mother. Even if younger readers don’t stumble over the vocabulary while older ones reject the art as babyish, this isn’t going to make the top shelf; information is presented in a scattershot way, the text and pictures don’t consistently correspond—three muscles needed to kick a soccer ball are named but not depicted, for instance, and an entire tongue is labeled “taste bud”—and the closing resource list is both print only and partly adult. (glossary, bibliography, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4027-7091-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
It’s not exactly an untold tale, but this new telling is worth the read.
A solid new entry in Mann’s exemplary tour of the modern world’s architectural wonders (The Taj Mahal, 2008, etc.).
Even sticking to the basic facts, as the author does, the story of how Lady Liberty was conceived, constructed and bestowed makes a compelling tale. Pointing to the disparate long-term outcomes of the American and French revolutions to explain why the U.S. system of government became so admired in France, Mann takes the statue from Edouard Laboulaye’s pie-in-the-sky proposal at a dinner party in 1865 to the massive opening ceremonies in 1886. Along the way, she highlights the techniques that sculptor Bartholdi used to scale up his ambitious model successfully and the long struggle against public indifference and skepticism on both sides of the Atlantic to fund both the monument itself and its base. Witschonke supplements an array of period photos and prints with full-page or larger painted reconstructions of Bartholdi’s studio and workshop, of the statue’s piecemeal creation and finally of the Lady herself, properly copper colored as she initially was, presiding over New York’s crowded harbor. As she still does.
It’s not exactly an untold tale, but this new telling is worth the read. (measurements, bibliography, "The New Colossus") (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-931414-43-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Mikaya Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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