Calling out to history buffs and scientists, this will inspire young inventors.
From an early age “Aleck” (Bell’s family nickname) evinced an interest in sound and hearing, probably due to his father’s profession of speech therapy and his mother’s hearing loss.
Aleck’s childhood experiences, observations, and experiments led to his careers, first as a teacher to the deaf and then as an inventor of the telephone. Aleck was determined to speed up communication and improve on the telegraph, first developed in the 1830s. The book’s accessible text focuses on his life up to and including the invention of the telephone in 1876, when he was 29. His later inventions are described in the backmatter, along with a chronology and an author’s note. The multimedia illustrations use photographic collage elements, friendly, slightly cartoony human figures, and sound effects and dialogue balloons on some pages. Photographic insets and diagrams further explain Bell’s work. This expands the content of the book and makes it appealing to both children looking for the story of Bell’s life and his lifelong curiosity and those more interested in scientific explanations. However, it lacks a bibliography. The front and rear endpapers are of particular note, depicting a photographic history of the telephone from 1876 to 1989 in sepia tone. The author’s note describes Aleck’s interest in photography and her own desire to incorporate photography in different ways in the book’s design.
Calling out to history buffs and scientists, this will inspire young inventors. (Picture book/biography. 6-10)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-58089-721-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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