Lands with a dull thud despite being light on factual mass.
How gravity works on things from apples to planets.
After an incorrect claim that Newton was “the first to describe gravity” (actually a topic of scholarly discussion since ancient times), Adler goes on to explain that mass is not the same as weight and to lay out the effects of distance between two attracting bodies. Expanding into the solar system he presents supposed weights for a 100-pound reader on Jupiter and the sun (omitting the fact that neither body has a surface that said reader could stand on). A confusingly incomplete introduction to orbital mechanics includes the notion of inertia—but never connects the Newtonian dots to explain why planets don’t move in straight lines. “There’s a lot more to gravity,” he vaguely remarks after all this, finishing in the same simplistic vein as he began by defining it as the force “that keeps everything in its place.” In Raff’s sparsely detailed pictures a mouse in a stereotypically schoolmarmish frock conducts two human children, one pale and the other brown-skinned, through various earthly and extraterrestrial scenes, pausing occasionally to let the children demonstrate physical principles or effects with balls, sheets of paper, and like common materials. Along with a richer (and funnier) visual experience, readers who fall into Jason Chin’s Gravity (2014) will ultimately touch down with a clearer understanding of how the phenomenon keeps people and planets in their courses. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 77% of actual size.)
Lands with a dull thud despite being light on factual mass. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4636-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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