Review: Charles and Emma: the Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman (Jan 2009. A 2010 Printz Honor book and National Book Award Finalist) See more book reviews from this week’s Nonfiction Monday roundup at Geo Librarian. In 1838, when Charles Darwin was 29, his father told him to lie to his future wife. The [...]
Posts Tagged ‘science’
Review: Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman
Posted in Awards, MG books (ages 8-12), Nonfiction, YA books, tagged reviews, science on December 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The Ever-Present Prairie
Posted in Kids books-general, MG books (ages 8-12), tagged fun, inklings, science on October 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Whenever I travel, I like to bring reading material that’s somehow related to my destination. So when I got the chance to visit Nebraska and South Dakota, I brought (what else) Little House on the Prairie. Obviously a lot has changed since Laura’s time–telephone poles and barbed wire fences being the most ubiquitous, along with [...]
Still Life with Birds
Posted in MG books (ages 8-12), tagged reviews, science on March 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole: a review. Just in time for the end of National Wildlife Week, here’s a book about birds…starring a mouse. From the moment you meet Celeste, a hungry, artistic mouse weaving baskets under a sideboard, it’s clear she’s a heroine worth rooting for (Cole’s adorable illustrations help a lot. [...]
All things bats and beautiful
Posted in Awards, MG books (ages 8-12), Nonfiction, tagged reviews, science on March 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
All things bats and beautiful For all the attention they get in the media (vampires!, Batman!, rabid winged rodents!), to say that bats are misunderstood is a massive understatement. Neither menacing nor a pest, these winged creatures-more closely related to primates than to rodents-are integral to our planet’s health. For starters, they were excelling at [...]
Praising the Underdogs
Posted in Awards, Nonfiction, Picture books, Poetry, tagged reviews, science on March 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman (writer) and Beckie Prange (illustrator). It’s hard to like bacteria. They’re smelly and slimy and cause a lot of disease. Sure, some help us digest food, but they don’t exactly inspire poetry…which is why Ubiquitous is so remarkable. Bacteria ancient, tiny teeming, mixing, melding strands curled like ghostly [...]
All Creatures Winged and Furry
Posted in Kids books-general, tagged fun, news, science on March 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Happy National Wildlife Week! Today’s the start of an annual event sponsored by the National Wildlife Fund, celebrating everything from grasshoppers to humpback whales. You can check out their website for lesson plans and fun facts (I’m quite partial to the mallards page. Did you know that females do all the quacking and male ducks [...]
A Closer Dystopia
Posted in Awards, YA books, tagged inklings, reviews, science on February 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Of all the 2011 ALA Youth Media Awards, the highlight for me was Paolo Bacigalupi‘s Ship Breaker winning the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature. I first mentioned the book in my post on most memorable books of 2010. Briefly, Ship Breaker is about Nailer, a teenager who salvages old oil [...]
Quest for the Chiru
Posted in Nonfiction, Picture books, tagged reviews, science on January 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The Chiru of High Tibet by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (writer) and Linda Wingerter (illustrator): a review There is a place so cold, it takes the fleece of five sheep to keep one person warm, so high, with so little rain, the tallest tree is a shrub that would not reach a grown man’s knee. That [...]
