Nonfiction Monday

Nonfiction Monday was started by Anastasia Suen and is hosted today at her Booktalking site today./ Hop over there to see a list of many great nonfiction book reviews!





Lasky, Kathryn. Silk and Venom: Searching for a Dangerous Spider.

Nominated for the 2011 Cybils by Jone MacCulloch.

Scientist Greta Binford studies spiders, and is especially interested in the highly poisonous Loxosceles, or Brown Recluse spider. She travels all over to find a sizeable population of them to study, searching through abandoned houses, in trees and bushes, and eventually finds some in the Dominican Republic. This book follows her investigation, and provides a lot of facts about spiders and the study of spiders along the way, illustrating this information with fantastic close-up photographs.

Strengths: Spiders are a topic that my nonfiction lovers frequently will pick up, but many of my books are so long that they look at the pictures more than read the text. This presents the information within the context of the story of Binford's search, which makes it much more interesting. Definitely will add this, which will be a good companion to the Scientists in the Field series.

Weaknesses: Again, the horizontal rather than vertical format makes it seem like a book for younger students, and there is a slightly strange "golly gee!", simplistic feel to the writing, which surprised me greatly, since Lasky writes so much for middle grades.

Moore, Christopher. From Then to Now: A Short History of the World.

Nominated for the 2011 Cybils by Betsy Bird.

Sure enough, this book starts with prehistoric hunter-gatherers and over 182 pages works its way to the present day. It goes at breakneck speed, covering the highlights of all of history, in the same way that I used to give one lecture a year on all of Roman history-- fifty minutes of holding on to your hat! While this book is slightly Euro/Amerocentric, it does cover the history of other parts of the world, and that is very helpful in putting into context what happened in history. When I took history in school, World History and US History were two separate subjects, and I've always struggled with creating a world history timeline in my head. This was very helpful in that respect. In fact, I only have two objections to this book; the illustrations immediately took me back to the Scott Foresman Wide Horizons and Open Roads basal readers that we had in elementary school, and I am not sure how many students will want to pick this book up, in part because of the cover illustration. (The illustrator is Polish, and in the 1960s, when the basal readers were produced, there was an influx of illustrators from Poland. Any connection? )

Must admit that we are on spring break this week and I have been a complete and total sloth. I read four books over the weekend, two of which were NOT middle grade. Before I got so sucked into blogging, I generally used breaks to read vast quantities of Nora Roberts' books. I try to be a little better now! The main problem this weekend was that none of the children had shoes, and I spent much more time cleaning things than I wanted to.

People ask how I have time to read so much. The answer is simple-- I let the housework slide as much as humanly possible. And I don't cook much. And the four teenagers know I am always here if they need me but normally spend most of their time sleeping! And, as I tell my students, I don't have time to watch t.v.!

Nonfiction Monday- Biographies

Krull, Kathleen. Sigmund Freud (2006)

Discovered an odd thing while reading this: I didn't want to critique the book as much as I wanted to critique Freud's life! Krull always does an excellent job with biographies, like the one on Marie Curie, but I wasn't nearly as interested in Freud. The style was the same, with nice discussions in a sort of conversational, lecture format, but Curie's life was so much more exciting. The more interesting parts of Freud's life, such as how his dog Jofi was "trained" to get up after an hour, I just didn't believe. Isn't it more likely that he gave his dog a signal? I love biographies, having read all of the Childhood of Famous Americans books I could find in elementary school, but I think I'll pass on this one for my library. The inclusion of actual pictures of Freud would have made it more valuable to my collection.

Bertozzi, Nick. Lewis and Clark.

The note at the beginning of this book helped a lot: what the author want to do was to communicate "the experience of that remarkable expedition". This the book does very well. The graphic novel format made it hard for me to follow some of the history, leaving me to want to read a standard biography or nonfiction book on the topic, but this was a good way to impart the highlights (or lowlights as they were!) of the expedition. The book starts when the president gives the commission and ends with Lewis' problems afterwards, and his suicide.

Strengths: I can see this being used by social studies teachers to recount some of the more interesting portions of the journey or to entice students to read further. It is well-researched and the drawings are comparable to other graphic novels.

Weaknesses: As previously stated, understanding the details is sometimes difficult without the support of a lot of text. The one formatting issue I would have changed is that sometimes the drawings are contained on one page, and sometimes it is necessary to read across the entire two page spread to read things in order. Perhaps this is not a struggle for those used to graphic novels, but I had to reread several pages because of the confusion this caused.