A page-turning medical mystery that makes a compelling case for following the facts.
Dr. John Snow, “the father of modern epidemiology,” discovers the cause of cholera.
Behind every great scientist is evidence. When cholera broke out in London in 1854, most people blamed the “bad, smelly air” for the rapid spread of the disease. The English physician Dr. John Snow had a “bold hypothesis.” He had noticed that cholera’s symptoms included vomiting and diarrhea, so the cause was likely what the victims had ingested rather than something airborne. All he needed was evidence! With expert pacing, Hopkinson sets up Snow’s story as a medical mystery and a race against time. The doctor follows clues, gathers information about where the deceased people lived, plots his data on maps, notices clusters of disease, interviews local residents, and discovers the one thing the dead had in common: They had drunk from the same water pump. Henderson’s moody, expressionistic art captures Londoners’ confusion and concern, while Dr. Snow’s urgent pace is marked with literal dashes across city maps. Hopkinson nimbly acknowledges when she’s using conjecture—“We can guess the hard questions he must ask”—and makes clear when she’s presenting evidence: “This fact is helpful.” At the story’s climax, Dr. Snow presents his findings at a neighborhood meeting, and in a final, incandescent spread, the water pump’s handle is removed—“a milestone in science, a shining moment in the long fight against epidemics.”
A page-turning medical mystery that makes a compelling case for following the facts. (the case against the Broad Street pump, more information on Dr. Snow, list of major infectious diseases and their causes, internet resources, books on Dr. Snow and on epidemics) (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593426814
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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