The creators of The Librarian Who Measured the Earth (1994) team up again to profile a brilliant, little-known scientist: John Harrison, the 18th-century inventor of the marine chronometer. Spurred by a succession of shipwrecks caused by the inability of navigators to determine longitude, the British Parliament offered a huge prize to anyone who could develop a reliable method. While describing several complex proposals, Lasky traces the career of Harrison, a carpenter with a mania for perfection, who painstakingly built a clock that proved accurate within a second on its test voyage to Lisbon. Not only did Harrison spend the next 37 years refining his design, but it took nearly as long to collect the prize as well. Hawkes reflects the liveliness of Lasky’s account with vividly colored city, country, and shipboard scenes featuring the inventor’s five accurately rendered clocks, along with coteries of wide-eyed onlookers. Younger readers will discover both the historical significance of Harrison’s invention and why he “became the hero not only of clockmakers, but of dreamers and ordinary people everywhere who learned by doing and daring.” (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: April 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-34788-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Melanie Kroupa/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere.
This book is buzzing with trivia.
Follow a swarm of bees as they leave a beekeeper’s apiary in search of a new home. As the scout bees traverse the fields, readers are provided with a potpourri of facts and statements about bees. The information is scattered—much like the scout bees—and as a result, both the nominal plot and informational content are tissue-thin. There are some interesting facts throughout the book, but many pieces of trivia are too, well trivial, to prove useful. For example, as the bees travel, readers learn that “onion flowers are round and fluffy” and “fennel is a plant that is used in cooking.” Other facts are oversimplified and as a result are not accurate. For example, monofloral honey is defined as “made by bees who visit just one kind of flower” with no acknowledgment of the fact that bees may range widely, and swarm activity is described as a springtime event, when it can also occur in summer and early fall. The information in the book, such as species identification and measurement units, is directed toward British readers. The flat, thin-lined artwork does little to enhance the story, but an “I spy” game challenging readers to find a specific bee throughout is amusing.
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere. (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-500-65265-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of Cod’s Tale (2001) again demonstrates a dab hand at recasting his adult work for a younger audience. Here the topic is salt, “the only rock eaten by human beings,” and, as he engrossingly demonstrates, “the object of wars and revolutions” throughout recorded history and before. Between his opening disquisition on its chemical composition and a closing timeline, he explores salt’s sources and methods of extraction, its worldwide economic influences from prehistoric domestication of animals to Gandhi’s Salt March, its many uses as a preservative and industrial product, its culinary and even, as the source for words like “salary” and “salad,” its linguistic history. Along with lucid maps and diagrams, Schindler supplies detailed, sometimes fanciful scenes to go along, finishing with a view of young folk chowing down on orders of French fries as ghostly figures from history look on. Some of Kurlansky’s claims are exaggerated (the Erie and other canals were built to transport more than just salt, for instance), and there are no leads to further resources, but this salutary (in more ways than one) micro-history will have young readers lifting their shakers in tribute. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-23998-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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