An underpowered survey.
A visual history of transportation technology, from early wheels to the rover Curiosity.
Readers aren’t going to be carried very far by this ponderous assemblage of staid modern stock images and (here and there) photos paired to perfunctory notes on top speeds, uses, and the like. They are grouped by general type, with occasional changes of pace, such as a quick glance at some varieties of “greener” transport shoehorned in between the trains and aircraft. The pictures—most of them small, depicting vehicles unencumbered by visible drivers or crews, and monotonously pinned to pale, neutral-colored background grids—are laid into their arbitrarily ordered single-topic spreads without regard for relative scale or visual flow. Despite offering looks at a great array of wheeled, airborne, and nautical vehicles of the present as well as the past, the gallery is not only selective and stingy at best with action or cutaway views, but stale to boot. The newest fighter jet (an F-117, 1981 vintage), for example, was superseded in 2008; the latest model of electric auto mentioned outside the closing timeline is a 2010 Nissan Leaf; and the most recent space probe, Cassini-Huygens, was launched in 1997. Moreover, so Eurocentric is the viewpoint that only four of the 23 older types of sailing vessels on display are not European or North American.
An underpowered survey. (timeline, list of records, index) (Reference. 10-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77085-931-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Awash in mighty squalls, tales of heroism and melodramatic chapter headings like “The Lady Elgin: Death in the Darkness,” these marine yarns recount the violent ends of nine of the more than 6,000 ships that have “left the bottoms of Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior…littered with their wreckage and the bones of the people who sailed on them” over the past four centuries. For added value, Butts heads each shipwreck chapter with a photo or image of the unfortunate vessel. He then closes with so many Great Lakes monster sightings that they take on an aura of authenticity just by their very number, an effect aided and abetted by his liberal use of primary sources. Younger readers who might get bogged down in Michael Varhola’s more thorough Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures: Great Lakes (2008)—or turned off by its invented dialogue and embroidered details—will find these robust historical accounts more digestible and at least as engrossing. The bibliography is dominated by Canadian sources, as befitting the book’s origin, but there's plenty here to interest American readers. (Nonfiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-77049-206-6
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sheds plenty of light into dark places, but best for flip-through browsing, as the tunneling goes in arbitrary directions.
A scattershot but revealing dig beneath our planet’s surface, illustrated with a mix of photos and schematic cutaways.
The book opens with a cross-section of the Earth’s crust showing multiple geological processes, from fossil-strewn continental plates sliding together to columns of rising magma (rendered, oddly, in magenta). The tour goes on past subterranean sights from prehistoric and Pompeian remnants to natural caves and cave life, tombs, urban infrastructure and underground cities, and other structures. Price adds introductory paragraphs and explanatory captions to each busy spread. The captions are numbered on some spreads, which compensates, at least in part, for the way the photos are often slapped down over or next to the drawings without much regard for visual unity or logical progression. Topical coverage and level of detail are likewise unsystematic—the naked mole rat gets one full spread while all other burrowing animals are crowded onto another, for instance. Of major city undergrounds, only those of Paris and Tokyo get a look, and a closing spread on the future of building beneath the surface suddenly moves…to Mars.
Sheds plenty of light into dark places, but best for flip-through browsing, as the tunneling goes in arbitrary directions. (index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-894786-89-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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