Holiday Gift Guide 2013 (No. 4): Compelling Non-Fiction For the Animal Lover
December 16, 2013 § 1 Comment
Last year around this time (equally last minute), I did a post about “books worth their weight” (great-looking reference books), as well as one about picture books by Steve Jenkins, a.k.a. Children’s Master of All Things Animal. This year, we can kill two birds with one stone when we buy Steve Jenkins’ new, overstuffed, and absolutely phenomenal The Animal Book: A Collection of the Fastest, Fiercest, Toughest, Cleverest, Shyest—and Most Surprising—Animals on Earth (Ages 6-12). Over 300 fascinating animals are presented in sections like Family (chapters include “The Mating Dance” and “Bringing Up Baby”); Defenses (e.g. “Copycats” and “Bodily Fluids”); and The Story of Life (yes, Jenkins tackles evolution and, boy, does he succeed). I’m normally not a big fan of fact-centered non-fiction, preferring a more narrative approach that strengthens children’s attention spans and reading comprehension. But I make a BIG exception for Jenkins, whose presentation is as visually enticing (brilliant paper collages amidst an extraordinary use of white space) as it is factually addictive. I could look at this book for hours. I have looked at this book for hours (yes, I am hoarding it from my kids). I never tire of marveling at each visual masterpiece, from the reticulated python to the two-foot-long tongue of a giant anteater to the brilliantly colored eggs lined up from smallest to largest. Towards the end is a clearly presented timeline of life, spanning a mere 3.5 billion years. And then there are the just-plain-awesome charts, peppered throughout the book: one showing number and types of eyes (at the top with one eye is the copepod, at the bottom with 1000 eyes is the giant clam); another bar graph shows average gestation periods (an African elephant is pregnant for 640 days?!). Even the book’s appendixes are supreme, including an accessible eleven-page guide for children to make their own animal books! Are you sold yet? Even if you don’t buy one for your family, you might consider donating it to your children’s school library!
Speaking of school libraries, one of my greatest thrills is picking out new books for my children’s school, which at only three years old is still building its library from the ground up. Each fall, we hold a fundraiser (at our local independent bookstore), where not only can parents purchase books off the school’s “wish list,” but a percentage of the day’s proceeds go back to the school in the form of store credit. This fall, one of my favorite finds for our school’s “wish list” was two books by wildlife photographer, Steve Bloom: Polar Animals: In Search of Polar Bears, Penguins, Whales and Seals (Ages 5-10) and Big Cats: In Search of Lions, Leopards, Cheetahs and Tigers (Ages 5-10). Pairing National Geographic-esque photographs with animal data is not unique, of course, but what I love about these books (back to my preference for non-fiction that’s presented in a narrative format), is that these read like travel journals. Not unlike the way my son’s elementary class keeps a “work journal” about their activities in the classroom, Polar Animals shows how this technique is used by scientists, in this case tracking Bloom’s voyage from the North to the South Poles and revealing not only what he saw but how he felt. Details about the expeditions range from the team of humpback whales that he surprises (they’re too busy rounding up a school of fish) to the fur-covered toilet he fashions out of ice (“luckily, there’s no one to see me use it”). The captions beside each photograph are concise, engaging, and appropriate for developing readers, and they serve as the perfect introduction to a variety of animals. JP loves bringing his camera with him to the zoo or on a nature walk, and Bloom is just as interested in inspiring kids to take these kinds of photos (he includes ideas in a “photo projects” page at the end), as he is in teaching children about the magnificent creatures they might encounter in the wild.
For the older and more serious Animal Hunter, the Scientists in the Field series has been a game-changer for engaging the upper elementary crowd in natural science. What sets these books apart is the sheer passion with which they are written. One of the newer books in the series (published in 2010 but available to a larger audience in 2013), The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe, by Loree Griffin Burns (Ages 9-14), interrogates bee keepers and bee scientists around the country in an effort to solve the mystery of the dwindling honey bee population. I am pretty sure that I would have been a lot more interested in non-fiction as a kid if the books had been as compelling as this one, whose highly detailed but ever-engaging narrative is broken up with photographs of real scientists doing real work, excerpts from field journals, and microscopic slides. And, of course, it’s rooted in a true story, when 20 million bees first disappeared from one man’s hives in 2006. En route to solving this mystery, we get lessons in honey production, hive organization, and bee dissection—all in an effort to test out various hypotheses for why bees are dying, including pests, viruses, and pesticides. As we hear from various specialists, we are privy to insider jokes (“We beekeepers like to say that whoever invented the hive tool [used to pry up the honey supers] should get a Nobel Prize…it’s that’s useful”); but we also get a holistic picture of honey bee communities as they are being affected by modern farming practices and environmental shifts. At the end of the book, true to many scientific questions, the bee mystery is not completely solved. It will be up to the next generation—our own budding naturalists—to ask more questions, to get their hands dirty in the field and in the lab, and to educate the world about this beautiful and important species.
Other 2013 Non-Fiction Favorites for the Animal Lover:
Flight of the Honey Bee, by Raymond Huber & Brian Lovelock (Ages 5-9)
Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard, by Annette LeBlanc Cate (Ages 7-12)
Scaly Spotted Feathered Frilled: How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Really Looked Like? by Catherine Thimmesh (Ages 8-12)
The Dolphins of Shark Bay (Scientists in the Field series), by Pamela S. Turner (Ages 9-14)
The Tapir Scientist: Saving South America’s Largest Mammal (Scientists in the Field series), by Sy Montgomery & Nic Bishop (Ages 9-14)
Stronger Than Steel: Spider Silk DNA and the Quest for Better Bulletproof Vests, Sutures, and Parachute Rope (Scientists in the Field series), by Bridget Heos & Andy Commins (Ages 10-15)
Holiday Gift Guide 2013 (No. 2): Stories of Perseverance for the Engineer
December 10, 2013 § 1 Comment
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That might be easy to say as a parent, but we have only to remember our own childhoods to know how hard it is to hear. Just the other night, my son was attempting to draw a human profile by following one of those step-by-step guidebooks. Diligently huddled over his paper, he suddenly threw the pencil across the room and yelled, “This isn’t working at all! It doesn’t even look like a person!” Actually, I thought, it does look like a person—just not like the one in the book. Oftentimes, we cannot see our triumphs for what they are. The creative process—its ups, its downs, its just plain hard work—is wonderfully captured in Rosie Revere, Engineer (Ages 5-8), the newest venture by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, the team that created one of my favorite picture books of all time: Iggy Peck Architect. What black-turtleneck-sporting Iggy Peck did for building designs, red-scarf-sporting Rosie Revere (yes, her namesake is Rosie the Riveter) does for engineering. She makes it look—well—cool. Second grader Rosie isn’t only a clever, resourceful inventor—fashioning scraps of trash into hot dog dispensers and hats that chase away snakes—she does it all with a sense of style, including red patent leather shoes and side-swept hair. The only problem is that she doesn’t realize how great she is—and after suffering some humiliation at the hands of a relative, she begins to hide her talents (come on, Rosie, lean in, lean in!). Fortunately, Rosie’s great-great-aunt, a former engineer herself, shows up to inspire Rosie’s greatest invention: a flying machine. With the likes of some spray cheese, a house fan, and the dismembered head of a baby doll, Rosie’s “heli-o-cheese-copter” soars up into the sky before crashing to pieces (nod to another favorite about a girl with dreams of flight, Violet the Pilot). Our despairing heroine is ready to throw in the towel on engineering until she hears: “‘Yes!’ said her great aunt. ‘It crashed. That is true./ But first it did just what it needed to do/…Your brilliant first flop was a raging success!/ Come on, let’s get busy and on to the next!’” The already ultra-hip illustrations (hello, mid-century modern fashion and architecture!) get even sexier when Rosie’s aunt presents her with a journal, containing pages of red graph paper covered with graphite sketches of historic aeronautic achievements by women. Rosie can and should continue to dream big. After all, “the only true failure can come if you quit.”
Speaking of never giving up no matter how crazy you seem to everyone around you, Candace Fleming’s Papa’s Mechanical Fish (Ages 4-8) is an enchanting fictionalized account of an eccentric, real life inventor from the 1950s: a man named Lodner Phillips, who was obsessed with building a submarine in which his family could traverse the bottom of Lake Michigan. Behind every great mind is a muse—and, in Phillips’ case, Fleming imagines this person to be his daughter. With the sinking of each prototype, young Virena casually but coyly drops hints, like “Papa, how do fish move through the water?” (the next model features a motorized fin and tail), and “Papa, how do fish stay dry?” (voilà, waterproof copper!). The exuberant but gentle dialogue between family members is a joy to read aloud, but the real draw here are the illustrations by Boris Kulikov, a prolific Russian=trained artist who excels at expressive faces and dramatic contortions of scale, both perfectly suited to this story about a larger-than-life figure embarking on a larger-than-life “mechanical fish.” “It almost worked,” Papa is fond of repeating throughout the book, and given the intensity in his wide eyes, the joyful anticipation that spreads across his face with each unveiling, his frenzied returns to the studio, and his family’s celebratory dances on the docks, we too can’t help but cheer for him. My son’s favorite page comes toward the end, when the four children, their mother, and their bulldog Rex are standing on various contraptions, trying to see through the newspapered windows of Papa’s garage studio (actually, the dog is cleverly trying to dig underneath the garage). Lest we forget the enormity of the task at hand, Kulikov’s illustrations are augmented with torn pages of Papa’s journal, revealing highly intricate black-and-white sketches of his inventions (very Leonardo da Vinci). After all, the man built submarines in his garage. And you know what? One of them actually worked.
Learning through experimentation gets a delightful dose of humor in Lynne Berry’s new picture book, What Floats in a Moat? (Ages 4-8), an introduction for children to the displacement of water, a discovery first made by the ancient Greek scientist, Archimedes. If that sounds over your child’s head, it isn’t. For starters, you have to love a story about a knighted goat named Archie (the Afterward makes the historic connection) and his sidekick, Skinny the Hen. Then there’s the fantastically absurd premise: en route to deliver three barrels of buttermilk to the Queen’s castle, the two decide to take an unconventional detour “in the name of science!” Why go across the drawbridge when you can go across the moat on a barrel—and test out a few hypotheses along the way? As with any entertaining literary duo, there is a natural-born leader (read: bossy) and a skeptical accomplice (read: sucker), and the dialogue between Archie and Skinny does not disappoint (nor do Matthew Cordell’s whimsical sketches). After the first failed attempt on a full barrel of buttermilk, which quickly sinks to the bottom of the moat, Archie considers a new angle:
“‘Aha! To cross the moat,’ pronounced the goat, ‘an empty barrel might float!’
‘Empty?’ said Skinny.
‘Empty,’ said Archie. ‘Drink, Skinny, drink!’
‘Drink buttermilk?’ asked Skinny.
‘Indeed,’ said Archie. ‘For science!’
‘Ha!’ said Skinny. ‘YOU are the scientist.’
‘Ah,’ said Archie, ‘but YOU are skinny.’”
At this point, my children are already laughing their heads off, but the fun goes on as the now empty barrel spins and rolls around on top of the water, leaving Archie once again at the bottom of the moat. More sketching and hammering and tinkering ensues until the third time proves a charm: a half-full barrel displaces just enough water to float without spinning. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. (Funny how that sounds so much better when it comes from a book!)