A playful but incomplete introduction to the cultural geography of far-flung locations.
A swarm of facts and images about 15 locations spaced all around the globe.
These thronging pages are as busy as a Waldo experience, except the point here is variety. Each location gets a two-page spread highlighting a dozen features that give it character, color, and even whimsy. The locations range from New York to Ulaanbaatar, Alice Springs to Cape Town, Moscow to the Galápagos. Martin’s selection of distinctive features is sure-handed: the doorkeepers of Cairo, the colorful rooftops of Reykjavik, the cheeses and cafes of Paris, the botecos in Rio de Janeiro, the salarymen and ramen noodles of Tokyo. The top-shelf watercolors capture the essence of the thing being described, whether it be Moscow’s stray dogs or New York’s manhole covers (caught in a moody drizzle). Sometimes the short explanations under the name of the object are jokey (“Coffee: Pronounced KAW-fee”), and sometimes they are chock full of information: New Delhi has the “world’s largest fleet of environmentally friendly gas-powered buses”; Arctic terns “travel 44,000 miles every year, the longest migration route of any animal”; and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing is the busiest in the world, with 100,000 pedestrians per hour. What’s covered is covered well, if glancingly; however, it’s a shame there’s no city from Africa’s beltline (where are Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa?), and Rio is the only South American metropolis highlighted.
A playful but incomplete introduction to the cultural geography of far-flung locations. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6514-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit.
The bubble-helmeted feline explains what rockets do and the role they have played in sending people (and animals) into space.
Addressing a somewhat younger audience than in previous outings (Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, 2013, etc.), Astro Cat dispenses with all but a light shower of “factoroids” to describe how rockets work. A highly selective “History of Space Travel” follows—beginning with a crew of fruit flies sent aloft in 1947, later the dog Laika (her dismal fate left unmentioned), and the human Yuri Gagarin. Then it’s on to Apollo 11 in 1969; the space shuttles Discovery, Columbia, and Challenger (the fates of the latter two likewise elided); the promise of NASA’s next-gen Orion and the Space Launch System; and finally vague closing references to other rockets in the works for local tourism and, eventually, interstellar travel. In the illustrations the spacesuited professor, joined by a mouse and cat in similar dress, do little except float in space and point at things. Still, the art has a stylish retro look, and portraits of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford diversify an otherwise all-white, all-male astronaut corps posing heroically or riding blocky, geometric spacecraft across starry reaches.
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-911171-55-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Flying Eye Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A broad, if hardly more than skin-deep, introduction to the topic.
Four double-foldout spreads literally extend this first gander at our body’s insides and outsides—to jumbo, if not quite life, size.
Labels, basic facts, and one-sentence comments surround full-length cartoon images of the skeleton, musculature, and major sections of the body on the foldouts. Selected parts from the brain on down to blood cells are covered on the leaves in between. Lacey dishes out explanations of major body systems and processes in resolutely nontechnical language: “When you eat, food goes on a long twisty journey, zigzagging through tubes and turning into a soupy mush for your body to use.” It’s lightly spiced with observations that, for instance, the “gluteus maximus” is the largest muscle or the spine is made up of “vertebrae.” So light is the once-over, however, that the lymphatic, renal, and most of the endocrine systems escape notice (kidneys, where are you?). Moreover, though printed on durable card stock, the foldouts make for unwieldy handling, and on some pages, images are so scattered that successive stages of various processes require numbering. Still, Web links on the publisher’s page will presumably help to cover the gaps (unavailable for review). An overview of human development from fertilization to adulthood precedes a closing flurry of height extremes and other “Amazing body facts” that provide proper closure for this elementary survey.
A broad, if hardly more than skin-deep, introduction to the topic. (Nonfiction. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7945-3596-4
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Usborne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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