Review by Booklist Review
Reviewed with Nicholas Harris' How Tall? Gr. 2-4. It's not often one sees a toddler standing next to an emperor penguin, or the world's largest Buddha statue right beside St. Peter's Cathedral. But how fascinating to discover that the penguin towers over the toddler, and the Buddha gives the basilica a run for its money! Blackbirch's How series, devoted to "comparisons of ordinary and extraordinary things," yanks objects and animals out of their usual contexts, groups them by size on separate spreads (How Tall? opens in the thousandths-of-an-inch range, and concludes with Everest at 29,021 feet), and draws them to an appropriate scale. There's a sly relativistic lesson built into the book's telescoping frames of reference, causing the giant of one spread's grouping to appear as the dwarf of the next. A few paragraphs of text provide details on the pictured subjects, some of which, like the nanothermometer, won't be familiar. Replete with cool facts for young trivia hoarders, this series will also prove useful for teachers looking for ways to make abstract measurements more concrete. For more books on the subject of measurements see, "Measure for Measure" bibliography BKL D 1 03. --Jennifer Mattson Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
