Enjoyable browsing for budding seafarers as well as readers fascinated by all things mechanical.
Learn about the inner workings of working boats as well as the people who live and work on them.
From the tiny Bristol Bay gillnetter to the large National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, 10 boats are explored in this browsable work of nonfiction. The concise text details how each boat is built for a specific job and run by a crew with a set of skills and knowledge. Some boats have sleeping quarters for long stretches on the water, such as the halibut schooner, while others, like the double-ended ferry, are used for quick trips that allow the crew to sleep on land. As in David Macaulay’s classic The Way Things Work (1988), there are spreads that focus on the mechanics and machinery of boats. Cross sections and exploded views abound in the detailed illustrations. Although many ship parts are labeled, readers already familiar with boat anatomy may find this book most accessible. In addition to focusing on the boats themselves, the book includes interspersed sections on, for instance, safety gear, engines, and types of oceanography. The text uses the gendered term fishermen throughout and also refers to guardsmen and crewman. Though most of the humans depicted appear to be light-skinned, several brown-skinned people are portrayed as well. The book lacks source notes or a bibliography.
Enjoyable browsing for budding seafarers as well as readers fascinated by all things mechanical. (glossary) (Nonfiction. 7-11)Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63217-259-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete...
A mouse, a bird, and a junkyard frog assemble a car from the ground up—cluing in readers who may be a bit vague on what’s beneath all those hoods…or at least what used to be.
Enlisting his green buddy Hank to supply the parts and feathered Phoebe to draw up the plans, Eli, “king of crazy ideas,” sees his latest project grow from a frame and some miscellaneous loose parts to a nifty blue convertible with a classic 1950s look. At each stage, Sodomka supplies clearly drawn angled or cutaway views with dozens of major components labeled, from “steering knuckle bracket” to “tie rod” and “ball joint.” The gas tank is labeled but seems to be missing, though, and readers who want to know what a “differential” actually does or the purpose of the “indicator switch” are out of luck. Lacey’s claim that an engine “is like the brain of the car” doesn’t bear close examination, either. Moreover, the finished auto isn’t much like most modern cars, as it has no electronic elements, for instance, and is powered by a three-cylinder engine (misleadingly billed as “regular”) quaintly fed by a long-obsolescent carburetor. With an auto under their belts (and with similar oversimplification), Eli’s “Scrap Pack” goes on to an even more ambitious enterprise in How to Build a Plane. In both volumes, closer looks at selected systems or related topics follow the storyline’s happy conclusion, and each broad trial-and-error step in the construction is recapped at the end.
Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete pictures. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63322-041-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Quarto
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject.
The story of the first attack submarine’s drastically brief career and, nearly a century and a half later, rediscovery.
Even though it was, as the author artlessly puts it, “well-designed and well-crafted in the American spirit of invention,” the H.L. Hunley sank repeatedly in tests and never came back from its first mission in 1864. Rather than go into details about how the submarine worked (sort of), Hawk opts to extend her simply written version of its exploits with tangentially related chapters on the battle of Shiloh, the end of the Civil War, and an undocumented (she admits) legend that romantically links a gold coin found in the wreck with the sub’s captain, George Dixon, and a Southern belle named Queenie Bennet. Likewise, Wyrick’s uncaptioned reconstructions of battle scenes and the submarine underwater (which are not always placed near the actions they describe) don’t serve quite as well as the more informative period views of the vessel and its interior that have been used to illustrate other treatments. The account switches to photos and does go into somewhat more detail when describing how the wreck was found in 1995, raised in 2000, and transported to a lab; in a final chapter, a conservator and an archaeologist describe their still-ongoing restoration work.
A patchwork production, far less seaworthy than, for instance, Sally Walker’s two titles on the subject. (map, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61117-788-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Young Palmetto Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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