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FIRST FLIGHT

Name: FIRST FLIGHT
Author: George Shea
ISBN: 0-06-024503-4

THE STORY OF TOM TATE AND THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

by George Shea & illustrated by Don Bolognese ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1997

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This is a true tale of a boy who befriended the aviation pioneers and who was the second person to fly in their original glider. No one believes Tom, a Kitty Hawk resident and reputed storyteller, when he claims to have met two men from Ohio who are planning to fly through the air. The scoffing does not subside when Tom truthfully states that he flew the glider. Over the years, the Wright brothers make trips to Kitty Hawk, each time refining their machine, until the successful 1903 flight—and Tom is always there to witness it. This entry in the I Can Read Chapter Book series seems just right for new readers: Tom's presence makes the historical incident more accessible. The tale, with its limited vocabulary, doesn't allow for much character development, but has enough inherent drama to overcome the format. Bolognese's pictures add an old-fashioned touch, with a refreshingly simple palette that warmly evokes the era. (Fiction. 8-10)

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1997

ISBN: 0-06-024503-4

Page Count: 48

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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ICKY, SQUISHY SCIENCE

by Sandra Markle & illustrated by Cecile Schoberle ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 1996

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Few writers have quite the handle Markle (Pioneering Frozen Worlds, p. 138, etc.) does on how kids think about science. For those who want to know why a dead fish floats or whether a warm worm stretches farther than a cold one, she provides brief puzzles, explanations, and simple experiments using household items to help explore these questions and more than 30 other icky science topics. The ideas are more appropriate for casual experimentation than for science fair projects; the explanations are brief, and there are seldom suggested follow-up activities. There's no obvious order to the presentation, and sometimes the text is more teasing than truthful: Children stretch a warm gummy worm, not a real one; ``Blow Up a Marshmallow!'' instructs readers to put a marshmallow in the microwave for 30 seconds and watch—hardly earthshaking. Not an essential purchase, but it has definite child-appeal. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Nonfiction. 8-10)

Pub Date: April 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-7868-1087-4

Page Count: 80

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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CALL THE BEE DOCTOR!
by Sandra Markle

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WHAT IF YOU HAD AN ANIMAL HOME!?
by Sandra Markle ; illustrated by Howard McWilliam

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COULD YOU EVER DINE WITH DINOSAURS!?
by Sandra Markle ; illustrated by Vanessa Morales

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SOUL MADE FLESH

THE DISCOVERY OF THE BRAIN--AND HOW IT CHANGED THE WORLD

by Carl Zimmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2004

Absorbing and thought-provoking.

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Seventeenth-century England forms the tumultuous backdrop for science journalist Zimmer’s account of the handful of thinkers who established that the brain, not the heart, was the seat of the soul.

The author singles out as his hero Thomas Willis, a name best known today among anatomy students for the “circle of Willis,” a ring of blood vessels at the base of the brain. A poor boy educated in medicine at Oxford, Willis eventually removed to London to become a rich and famous society physician. But it was his Oxford days, at the center of a circle of scholars that included Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle that marked the revolution that dethroned Aristotle and Galen. Meticulous autopsies of Willis’s patients and multiple experiments on animals dead and living (PETA would weep) established that it was the brain and the system of nerves carrying “spirits” to and fro that accounted for thoughts, emotions, and actions. Moreover, the dissections were also able to point to brain specialization, linking diseased parts to symptoms suffered by the deceased. Willis and his peers were not ready to surrender all to a mechanistic view. They posited a dual soul: a sensitive, material soul subject to disease and a “rational” soul deep in the brain that was immaterial and immortal. And for all Willis’s acute observations of patients’ signs and symptoms, his treatments stuck to the potions, purges, emetics, and bloodletting that were standard care at the time. Zimmer details all of these developments, along with brief bios of the principals, against the chaos and calamities of the English civil war, the beheading of Charles I, the rise of Cromwell, the Restoration, the Irish rebellion, the devastating plague of 1664–5, the great London fire of 1666, and enough bloody religious battles to satisfy the Taliban. Indeed, the many parallels that can be drawn between politics, religion, science, and human behavior then and now add unexpected dividends to this engaging narrative.

Absorbing and thought-provoking.