An eye-opening catalog of STEM wear.
From muddy waders and ragged work gloves to spacesuits and full-body panda suits, scientists in the field show off their wardrobes.
Starting with Mae Jemison on the cover, Rose puts an unusually diverse gallery of researchers on the figurative runway, full-color photos actually showing them at work studying sea turtles and volcanoes, an eclipse, whale sharks, glaciers, and honeybees…not to mention donning a spacesuit, maneuvering out of a wheelchair to gather tardigrades from a forest canopy, carrying a rescued bald eagle (previously met in the author’s Beauty and the Beak, 2017), and doing brain surgery. So where are the white lab coats, you ask? Meet neuroanatomist Marian Diamond, posing in one with a preserved human brain and the elegant hatbox in which she carries it when visiting classes. The narrative, printed in two fonts, with the smaller offering further detail for older readers, is paired to several color photos, often on gatefolds, that mix full-body views with inset close-ups of specimens or gear. Aside from a few group shots the men and women here are introduced by name, and though everyone is generically dubbed a “scientist” in the primary narrative, each specialty is identified at the end. There the author also places review questions and examples of citizen-scientist projects open to young volunteers.
An eye-opening catalog of STEM wear. (Nonfiction. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943978-48-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Persnickety Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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