A compelling introduction to a passionate and tenacious Chinese researcher.
A picture-book biography about the persistent Chinese researcher whose medical discovery has saved millions of lives.
In 1969 Tu Youyou, a researcher at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, was chosen to be a part of a research group to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria. Spread by mosquitoes, this life-threatening disease was making people sick around the world. Using her subject’s given name, Daemicke describes how Youyou’s dedication to both traditional and modern medicines sprang from a life-changing battle with tuberculosis as a teen. In her search for a malaria cure, her observations and openness to traditional remedies led her to the plant qinghao (sweet wormwood). Many experiments failed, but her 191st experiment was finally successful! Youyou led her team to create the medicine artemisinin, also called qinghaosu in Chinese. Her contribution to the project was obscured for decades, but in 2015 she became the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize. This inspiring picture-book biography provides a much-needed counterpoint to harmful Sinophobic rhetoric around the origins of Covid-19. Brief text focuses completely on the linear story of Youyou’s dedicated search for a malaria cure, with a mention that during her research, male researchers weren’t happy with her lack of results or her leadership. Round shapes and bright colors create inviting illustrations with cartoonish characters. Nearly all characters are depicted as Chinese.
A compelling introduction to a passionate and tenacious Chinese researcher. (bibliography, author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8075-8111-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
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