Review: Solar and Lunar Eclipses

Solar and Lunar Eclipses by Ruth Owen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



See my review of this series based on the Quasar title at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/731820598



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Review: Nebulae

Nebulae by Ruth Owen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



See my review of this series based on the Quasar title at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/731820598



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Review: Quasars

Quasars by Ruth Owen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a nicely done series. Ruth Owen's writing is clear and interesting to read, especially for basic definitional writing. She tends to offer powerful descriptions and points of comparison that bring the basic information some livelihood. While these basics and most of the subheaders are available easily on the internet, the large clearly marked diagrams and compiling all the information into one place separate this from what I found on wikipedia. This is generally true of all books in this series (I will post the same review for the other two titles I read). The series hired Kevin Yates as an expert consultant from the National Space Centre, in Leicester UK.

This is the kind of noun-based topical series that libraries will buy to satisfy the need for noun-based topical reports kids research in school. If I were teaching about general topics in astronomy, I would want this series around. Unfortunately, they were only able to put out six titles, which is not a comprehensive view of this larger heading. I wonder if the editors picked specific topics where they found gaps in other series?

For the most part, the illustrations are consistent with the text and provide a corresponding view of what is being discussed. Sometimes the picture is not enough to illustrate what is being written. But the entire book seems to have been done with stock and open domain photography, so well done!

Interestingly, this Windmill Books title was manufactured entirely in the US. I don't remember when was the last time I saw a book that wasn't made in Guangdong, China.



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Review: Bones Never Lie: How Forensics Helps Solve History's Mysteries

Bones Never Lie: How Forensics Helps Solve History's Mysteries by Elizabeth MacLeod

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Focusing solely on heads of state (mostly royalty), Macleod's book should have been titled to match the fact. The existing title would be more apropos of a series.

Text vignettes discussing forensic techniques sometimes did not match the case being discussed in the chapter and made it feel disjointed. And repetitive spot illustrations of a chemist's beaker, an x-ray sheet, a magnifying glass, and a microscope were distracting because they also did not match what was going on on the page. As icons, they should have been used when they were being discussed in the forensics being used to solve the case. A few things like this made me think the book was put together hastily--Kathy Lowinger is credited as editor, and Sheryl Shapiro as designer. No one was given credit as a separate editor for visuals. But the text was well written, and enjoyed being led by Macleod through each of the ideas for each case.

The most interesting was the case of Thai king Rama VIII, which is still unsolved. I always wondered why no one was allowed to talk in public about the royal family, and it sounds like the main reason is to avoid public speculation about the death and the likely conspiracy behind it. Three men executed in 1955 were bizarrely convicted after two had been acquitted. They were freed after the first trial, but then found guilty after the third appealed his guilty verdict (which re-opened the case for all three, I guess). The reason it was an interesting study in forensics is because the scene was so badly compromised before police could investigate that tons of evidence was either unreliable or completely missing. This allowed Macleod to discuss what the police needed and why it was unavailable.



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Review: Spring Blossoms

Spring Blossoms by Carole Gerber

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I enjoyed Evans' lino-cut illustrations a lot (they brought the book up from a 2 to a 3). This is a pile of meticulous work, and block printing (even though it's printing) can be much more involved and time-consuming than painting. So recognizing the technique made me look more closely at the illustrations than I might have otherwise, and to puzzle over exactly what was done with blocks, what was painted on, and what was done digitally. It's really hard to tell what is digital here at all, which is nice and should be expected.

I was less impressed with Gerber's rhyming text. She has a lot of books out in this style, and this is one of three in a seasons series. I just don't find the rhyming text interesting for this material, and was hoping for something more free verse for these illustrations. The text harks back to the old rhyming tradition from the 30s-50s, but doesn't have any power for me. I've also heard it's an immediate turn-off for editors and agents looking at new material.

Authors invariably paint themselves into a corner by needing to rhyme the text in a picturebook, and end up needing rhymes that aren't interesting and feel forced: "...beneath its twigs, as we can see...that grow new cones high on the tree." The 'as we can see' is a filler rhyme, and 'tree' is a far less interesting word than many of the others she worked with in the rhymes.



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Review: Mysteries of the Unexplained

Mysteries of the Unexplained by Reader's Digest Association

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



My brother Eric (yes, Eric Erekson) had a book like this when we were kids. He got it for Christmas one year, and I think I must have read it cover to cover a dozen times. I found this one at Nancy's house not long after we were married, and Karen finally gave it to me in 1993 after seeing me read it so much. It's like an encyclopedia of paranormal events, written in a kind of reportage style. Each text chunk stands on its own, so you can read as little as a fifty-word item about a horned lizard found in a block of stone, or as much as the full-page two-column ghost story of Major Stewardt of Ballechin House.

I know my reviews don't usually tip toward the educational application of books (I prefer to focus on my aesthetic experience), but this is the kind of book needed badly for readers striving to make gains as readers between grades 3-8. These brief 'text shots' are highly engaging and motivating, can stand up to multiple re-readings, but without avoiding difficult vocabulary. Kids who need a breakthrough can 'piece' their way through a small text like this without getting frustrated, and re-readings only increase their confidence and competence.

Also, Lu Benke and I have had several conversations about how these books are cataloged in libraries as non-fiction, and how the writers generally tend to use all the sourcing and text features (index, bibliography, dates, names) we would expect of a journalistic work. The book's intent is to inform--to gather and present reports of incidents as they appeared in historical source material. For many of the items, relevant photos add to this informational tone. These are key rhetorical moves, and when found in bulk in a huge volume like this the effect is to say "these things are real". The book makes no pretense of being science or historiography, but its format is that of a 'fact book'. This, despite the editors' note at the beginning disclaiming it as a simple compendium of reports for which the scientific community has no answers. This is a genre usually gaining wide circulation among young readers, but mostly unaccounted for in discussions of children's book genres.



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Review: Look Up!: Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard

Look Up!: Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard by Annette LeBlanc Cate

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Cate's birding book breaks one of the cardinal rules (sorry I couldn't resist) of informational books: Anthropomorphism. But in this case, she is right and the rule is wrong. That's the thing with trying to come up with tight criteria for selecting informational books. When we focus too tightly on one kind of presentation, we get myopic. This book is not intended to be a scientist's science presentation. It's about being an everyday person getting into birding, and the talking birds are appropriate. The purpose of the book guides the criteria.

I enjoyed Cate's sassy cartoon birds. It's not exactly the same, but the style and tone reminded me of Jared Lee's "Bummers" cartoons from Scholastic's 1974-1992 Dynamite Magazine. The intent is not to make kids think animals have human thoughts and emotions, it's intended to add some jokes to the really basic information on birding.

The best aspect of this book is its depth in both content and graphic formats. It really is a comprehensive guide to amateur birding. The wheel diagram for shades of brown, the rainbow diagram for spectrum of colors of birds, the bubble diagram for taxonomy--it was a brilliant array of appropriate variety in graphic organizers. Several different kinds of comic strips are used throughout, and a large two-page 'fashion runway' was an ingenious way to show off the differences in sparrows. Cate attacks the 'boringness' of the content head-on, and challenges readers to just start looking and drawing.

It was a tough book to read in one sitting, and I imagine it being best read over some time--a week or two to look closely at each few pages. Cate promotes a field guide over her book for actually getting out observing and differentiating birds. It reminded me of our days in Gunnison, when we kept [b:A Field Guide to Western Birds|592023|A Field Guide to Western Birds A Completely New Guide to Field Marks of All Species Found in North America West of the 100th Meridian and North of Mexico|Roger Tory Peterson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347610258s/592023.jpg|1334525] next to the kitchen window that looked out onto our lilacs. We saw dozens of different kinds of birds there every spring and summer, and we'd put a date next to each bird when we saw it. I haven't been able to find that guide book since we moved down from the mountains six years ago...



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