I got behind on writing up what I've been reading last week, so I thought I'd do it all this week. But now I'm running behind again, so I'm breaking this up into two parts. Reading is more fun than reflecting!
High School Nonfiction
Into the Deep, Christy Peterson. The ocean is an unexplored frontier that scientists are trying to get a grip on. Peterson takes into the water for looks at the different ecosystems at different levels, the currents and features that affect the planet around them, and how scientists are figuring out how it all fits together. Each chapter will have some featured scientists in their own box, describing their career and current research. Some work for universities, others for foundations or for companies, and all are very enthusiastic about their work.
Later chapters look into how humanity has affected the ocean and what that might mean for our future, which is actually rather grim. There's global warming of course, with higher sea levels and temperatures, but also the effects of the slaughter of so many whales, which affects a lot more than I had known. There's a lot to learn, but the prose was more trying to be invisible than to be gripping. The book assumes the reader is already interested rather than sparking a new fascination.
Jane Against the World, Karen Blumenthal. This was hard for me to read, because I'm so tired of reading about how important it is to so many people that women suffer. I like that it starts and remembers the Janes of Chicago, who created a network providing women of all incomes with access to health care, especially abortions. It covers a lot of the history of reproductive law, and then follows along the path of Roe Vs Wade (and the Georgia case that ran alongside it). Blumenthal clearly thinks that women should be accepted as people, but she strives to be fair to all sides. Groups such as Catholics who believe earnestly that women should not be considered fully human with control over their bodies (she doesn't phrase it like that, but really that's what it comes down to) are reported on fairly as they marshall efforts to ensure that more women suffer and die. Argh!
Unlike Blumenthal, I find it hard to be even-handed with regard to this topic. It feels like pointing out how many of the Nazis really thought they were doing the right thing. Many Americans today are still very dedicated to reducing women to lesser creatures, or at least making them suffer and die for wanting to be people. That's what being "Pro-Life" means to me. This book does not sound like that -- she manages to stay calm. Anyway, this is a great book that looks at the history of reproductive law in America, which doesn't hide how hard the legal process fights to keep from noticing that women are actually involved in it. It's well organized and paced, with black and white photographs of many of the key people involved.
The back matter includes a medical and legal glossary, a timeline showing important court cases, quick bios of the supreme court justices involved with Roe v Wade, and a good bibliography and index.
Middle Grade Nonfiction
History Smashers: The Mayflower, Kate Messner. The hook for the History Smasher series is that a lot of what we think we know is wrong, so let's have some fun looking for what really happened. Of course, this is aimed at kids, many of which knew nothing, so I find the approach a bit funny. But they will be around a lot of adults who may know the popular stories, so reading this book is a great way to build up your "Well, ACTUALLY" credentials.
I liked how Messner shares the details of her research. She explicitly talks about primary vs secondary sources and the problems with each, how historians try to piece together a story from various information (she has a lot of fun with wills that list complete inventories of households), how biases affect both historians and readers, and why various stories were amplified despite having no evidence or being openly invented. She's also willing to take the points of view of Native Americans, something the early European settlers had great difficulty with. So when the Pilgrims (they didn't call themselves that) are raiding stores the find when exploring, she points out that theft was their introduction to the people living there. There are frequent illustrations of various styles, small boxes pulled out for some details, and a conversational tone that keeps things interesting. It was fun to read this right before Thanksgiving, even though I didn't manage to produce an authentic eel dish to present at our meal. OK, I wasn't going to try for authentic, but maybe next year I'll pick up some sushi for an appetizer.
Sky Gazing: A Guide to the Moon, Sun, Planets, Stars, Eclipses and Constellations, Meg Thatcher. This is definitely a how-to book, but also a why-to. Each chapter describes something in the sky, what it is and how we can observe it, including some ideas for specific activities. The author is very keen on making a sky journal to observe stuff, but I did wonder if maybe there were apps to record this data. All the better for producing lovely graphs at the end, I mean! But with the variety of observations and experiments possible, each identified by difficulty level, there is something for almost every kid, family or class to try.
Along the way Thatcher works hard to make thing comprehensible. I liked the scale model of the solar system running along the bottom of the pages, from the Sun at the start to Neptune at the very last page. There's a good index in the backmatter. The size is large but easy to hold, and the layout and text work well together.
More Than Marmalade: Michael Bond and the Story of Paddington Bear, Rosanne Tolin. My family was too old for the movie, and before that Paddington was a bit of a fringe thing for me. I read a handful of them (and a few Olga de Polgas, which I preferred) because I liked English kidlit from an early age, but they weren't that popular among my peers. The English humor made them clearly different from American books. Tolin looks harder, showing Michael Bond's childhood with literary parents, a love of reading, and a strong dislike of school. He dropped out to work for the BBC (and to fight in WWII) and worked as a cameraman for Blue Peter (the show that the author of Wild Girl worked on), but he always wanted to be a writer. There's a great anecdote about the inspiration of Paddington Bear; Bond had writer's block and when he confessed to his agent he had no ideas, he was told to look around the room and describe what he saw. When he spied the bear he had bought for his wife, a star was born.
Bond drew inspiration from memories of the Kindertransport children his parents had fostered when he was a child, and deliberately made Paddington a refugee. This makes complete sense to me now, but went completely over the head of child me. Tolin has lots of other details, from parallels from Bond's life to stories of how toys were designed in keeping with the popularity of the books; the signature rain boots were necessary because without them the stuffed bears wouldn't stand up. Apparently Bond became a bit of a work-a-holic, neglecting his family in attempts to keep up with fan mail and more stories. No hard feelings though; his daughter appreciated Paddington's importance to the world.
This is a fun little book but probably of more interest to active Paddington fans. Maybe the recent movie means there are lots of those?
History Smashers: Women's Right to Vote, Kate Messner. Another entry in Messner's series about how wrong common knowledge history is. In the case, apparently most people think that a while in the past, people suddenly noticed that women couldn't vote. Whoops, they said, we should fix that, and so the 19th Amendment was passed. In reality, it took an awful lot of women making an awful lot of noise, and America (and the world) had to be mostly dragged kicking and screaming into a world where it's a little bit harder to pretend women aren't people. Messner follows American Suffrage from the Seneca Falls (well, a bit earlier) and profiles many of the key players. She's also not hesitant to discuss the racism the movement displayed, especially around the 15th Amendment. Admittedly, that was a nasty ploy by men to explicitly cut women out of the vote, but it was also the only game left standing. Even if women didn't want to support it, the vitriolic racism displayed by many is not pretty. Messner does a good job with that, and with profile women outside the white mainstream that aren't as famous. In fact several times she does a round up at the end of a chapter of women who made contributions, and most of them were new to me.
I liked this cheerful and breezy book. Messner once again is happy to share the details of how she learns things as well as the facts themselves, so it's a book about how history is made as much as the history itself. I'm still not convinced children need as much smashed, but they will enjoy testing adults to see if they have fallen for some of the mistakes.
My Name is Tani ... And I Believe in Miracles, Tanitoluwa Adewumi. A chess story! Tani is a refugee who lives in a homeless shelter in New York and goes to a school with a chess club. His parents can't pay the fees, but the coaches are impressed with his enthusiasm and let him in anyway, and he excitedly starts going to tournaments. The co-writer lets his voice come through, so things are narrated from his point of view. We hear about the dangers they face in Nigeria and the decision to come to America, but Tani doesn't know the details of their status or the state of their asylum request; he's only a kid. He sees his parents working hard and being cheerful in the face of hardship, so that's how he behaves as well.
I really liked the chapter on the state tournament, where he takes us through each game, happy for his successes and worried for his tougher matches. I have a kid who played chess in high school, and I know it's not always interesting to hear about a chess game. I tried to watch a few matches and almost fell out of my chair in boredom. So well done making these events gripping, and I especially like the story of the final, where he realizes that he made a huge blunder that could cost him the match. However, he knows that he only needs a draw to win the tournament, so he puts on a serious face and offers his opponent his hand for a draw. I hope that poor kid never reads this book... It's a good story of a child learning to succeed in his passion, but also to attack life with equal joy.
This Is Your Brain on Stereotypes: How Science Is Tackling Unconscious Bias, Tanya Lloyd Kyi. This is a sharp and concise discussion of how people are drawn to quick judgements and generalizations from a biological and sociological viewpoint. It draws on studies and experiments and how that plays out in the world today. It's not looking to cast blame but does have a clear stance that racism and prejudice are wrong and harmful and that therefore people will want to minimize them. The writing is good if not stellar, and the pages are broken up with illustrations often enough to keep the book inviting.
The last chapter has ideas for personal action the reader can take on a personal and wider level to combat prejudice in themselves and the world, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography for anyone wanting to check the studies, and a good index.
Elementary Nonfiction
She Leads, June Smalls. This is my favorite format for picture book nonfiction -- great illustrations, large clear statements that are written to be read aloud with relish, and smaller font for the expanded explanation of the concept of the page. That way the book works for less sophisticated readers or large groups, but has deeper options for kids who are into it and able to stay still. The subject is interesting as well -- elephant society and socialization, how they work together and adapt to their environment. It's a bit anthropomorphic, but that's common in how science looks at the world.
Earth Shattering Events, Robin Jacobs. Lovely and fun book about the more exciting aspects of geology, with cheerful illustrations showing the science and the effects. Behind it all is a sense of compassion and care -- the loss of life isn't minimalized, the greater effects on the poor are understood, and there's no attempt to pretend humanity doesn't have an effect on climate. It's large enough to have clear pictures and large text but not unwieldy. This book is right on the border between elementary and middle grade reading; it's a text heavy picture book and a simply written middle grade science book.
Amphibian Acrobats, Leslie Bulion. Poetry book that uses amphibians as the subject matter to show off a variety of poetic types. It did feel a bit as if the main purpose was to demonstrate the poems, not explain the creatures; I rarely felt that the shape of the poem had implications for the information delivered. Since I'm here for the science, I found myself digging my heels in when reading the poems. I wanted more than a good sound or a haiku image; I wanted to learn about the creature. I think this probably works better if you go in looking for poems and think of any facts as garnish.
Dinosaur Lady, Linda Skeers. A biography of the discoverer of many of the formative fossils that helped scientists recognize dinosaurs and the history of creatures on earth. But since she was a working class woman, the English scientific establishment refused to take her work seriously -- after all, she kept wanting to get paid for it! I liked the balance of historical details and recognition of how modern people find most of what she faced injust, and the illustrations kept the story moving.
Crossings, Katy S. Duffield. A lovely book that looks at the development of animal crossings in many roadways and other manmade hazards to examine how animals fit into their ecosystems and how humanity often blithely attacks those ecosystems without even noticing. I liked the illustrations, the large print summaries and the extended explanations. The pictures have warm colors and a lot of detail, and the layout of the illustrations helps to convey the information presented in the text. The book punches above its weight; it's both a enticing picture book and a primer on ecology and technology; it encourages the understanding of an entire ecosystem and how changing one part has reverbrations throughout the web, and also looks at how people can look at data, form ideas, test them and implement them. It's a book to appeal to budding artists, scientists, and engineers.
The Story of Civil War Hero Robert Smalls, Janet Halfmann. Robert Smalls put on the captain's hat and steered a confederate warship out of the harbor, stopping to pick up his family and the families of his crew, and bluffed his way past the guns guarding the way by correctly signaling at the correct times as he had learned from observing the white officers who had confidently left slaves on guard after a hard days work committing treason against America. He delivered the boat, its weapons, and his people to a Union fort, and then served in the Union Navy for the rest of the war, despite more racism that kept putting incompetent white men in charge while letting him do all the work.
We see Smalls from childhood, where his nice owners don't beat him much. This does not reconcile him to slavery, and he spends much of his youth working to save up to free himself and his wife, but the war interrupted the plans. I like reading about active Black heroes who make their own stands to navigate their world, and Robert Smalls is a great choice. The escape itself is a stressful chapter, as the men use darkness and shadows to convince the cannons they sail past that there's a white officer on the bridge.
Your Place in the Universe, Jason Chin. A book of relative sizes, which builds up from a child's body to the universe itself. It's not a new concept, but this book does it really well, going from children actively studying the world to showing them standing on each others head to measure against a giraffe, giraffes next to trees and buildings, buildings next to mountains. In each case the book builds from the known to the new so that the size of the bigger thing is comprehensible. Of course, this falls apart a bit when we go into space, but by then the confidence is there. I hadn't heard about galaxy clusters, or known that our galaxy seems to be in a void!
This is a fun picture book, and it even has the postcard address where you specify your place in the galaxy and beyond. And the conclusion at the end as it comes back to the children again felt satisfying.
A Voice Named Aretha, Katheryn Russell-Brown. This biography of Aretha Franklin celebrates her as the Queen of Soul. The text traces her life from singing with her charismatic family in churches through her professional career and how she exerted her control over her professional life. The colors of the illustrations are rich in gold and purple, chosen by the illustrator to reinforce her title as Queen (there are even some crowns hidden in the pages). The end notes are interesting; there's an essay giving more details on Franklin's life and personal statements from author and illustrator on why they made the book and how the music of Aretha Franklin has influenced their lives.
Backmatter also includes sources for the quotations and a bibliography.
Hello Neighbor! The Kind and Caring World of Mr Rogers, Matthew Cordell. A sweet story with delicate, gentle illustrations matching the tone of homage to a caring man who worked hard to make a show about kindness and emotional literacy for small children. It starts with the making of a TV show and goes back to look at how Fred Rogers grew up both to want to make a show like that and how he learned how to do it, and why this kind of children's programming was innovative, important, and imitated.
There's a small surge in books and movies about Mr Rogers, and I'm not sure how they play for children, who don't have the nostalgia of having the show in their own childhood. It's an interesting book anyway, but I think it's more for an adult to share with a kid than something they'd seek out on their own.
The backmatter includes photos and details, how the author feels about Mr Rogers, and a glossary showing the care that went into details of the show and places to go for more information, including an archive of the shows themselves.
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