Senor Parrot's Perch

Albert Einstein
by Kathleen Krull
Illustrations by Boris Kulikov

Reading books about great scientists can be both fun and inspirational and Kathleen Krull has written a very engaging biography of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was one of the greatest scientists of all time. Einstein’s greatness lay in his revolutionary ideas that sprung from his unique way of seeing the world, and from his confidence that he was right. Revolutionary ideas always face resistance. Confidence is important if you are to keep pressing on to prove your ideas.

Kathleen Krull’s book is perfect for kids in the middle grades, but even older kids would find this clearly written book a good starting point to learn more about Einstein. In fact, I think that many adults would also appreciate her short biography of Albert Einstein, as well.

Albert Einstein’s work is not easy to understand. After all, due to the complexities of his work and the pure genius that lay behind it, the name Einstein has become synonymous with brilliance and the highest level of scientific braininess. But in this neat little biography, Kathleen Krull clearly explains the most extraordinary implications of Einstein’s theories, and his thought processes in developing these. She emphasizes his personal struggles as a student and young scientist, originating in part from his poor social skills and his unwitting actions that  alienated the scientists who might have extended him some crucial support early in his career.

I liked this book a lot and I recommend it. Biographies of scientists are some of my favorite reads. I’m always fascinated by how they think and proceed with their work. Scientists just rock! I’m clearly biased, though. I married a scientist. In no small part her own fascinating research was an important aspect of her life that drew me to her and I can see how her personality is reflected in the topics that interested her and her choices of research.

Kathleen Krull, the author of Albert Einstein, has written a boatload of other biographies for kids, many of them about scientists. On the strength of this book, I want to read more of her books and I’ll probably review them too. You can read more about Kathleen Krull at her website. Also, I’d love to hear of any other favorite science writers and their books that you have.

I enjoyed this MovieWeb interview with children’s book author Cressida Cowell, who wrote the How to Train Your Dragon books. In the interview, she talks about her feelings about having her fantastic book made into an animated movie. She also talks about her unique summers spent on an isolated island with her family that in many ways inspired her writing.

The first time I saw How to Train Your Dragon Book 1 in a bookstore, several years back, I was hooked.  I was eager to see the movie when it came out. I took the family to see it in 3-D at the IMAX. It was too intense for the youngest, but my oldest and I enjoyed it every bit as much as we did the books.

I saw this singing robot at Wired magazine. Watch the video and read the subtitles closely, since much of it is in Japanese. This is Cool Science! A robot diva programmed to mimic a human singer’s facial movements breathing patterns.

Japanese engineers have taken a different tack in their robotic development, working to make more lifelike robots that will integrate well into human society. To do this, they’ve followed some interesting learning curves. I liked how they use maps of mouth movement and even integrating breathing patterns into the robot’s speech.

Did you catch the reference to using hidden Markov technology to train the robot when to breath? What they are referring to is (more…)

Moose and Magpie, by Bettina Restrepo and illustrated by Sherry Rogers is an interesting and entertaining children’s book designed to teach young children about Moose. Moose are not you’re usual topic for a children’s book. I also found it a bit odd in its approach, but my younger daughter loved it, laughing all the way through. Since she’s the better critic, I’m going with her assessment.

Magpie loves a good, funny riddle, and good natured Moose enjoys them, too. The two friends pass through the seasons as Moose grows from a calf to adulthood, and along the way kids learn (more…)

I’m a sucker for books like this. Loving science, married to a scientist, I’m drawn to the lives of these wonderfully fascinating people. Whaling Season: A Year in the Life of an Arctic Whale Scientist by Peter Lourie details the life of John Craighead George, a field biolgist studying bowhead whales, and living with the Inupiaq Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska. Known as “Craig” to everyone around him, he has been studying the whales for most of his adult life, taking careful measurements of every harvested whale, and collecting lore from the Inupiaq over the many years he has lived among them, all the while he keeps his eye out for hungry polar bears as he travels the ice-packed landscape.

Author Peter Lourie has done an excellent job with this book. He portrays the day-to-day life of the scientist, showing how his work is done, the enjoyment and satisfaction he gains, the relationships he builds with the Inupiaq, and the valuable results of all his hard work.

From a family of scientists, it is really no surprise that John Craighead George would become one himself. From early on he loved the outdoors and spent many days in the wilderness. He spent some time when he was a young man working at a scientific station in Alaska, and after earning his Ph.D., he returned to work as a field scientist to study the bowhead whales that live year-round in the frigid arctic waters.

One facet of his work is to monitor the number of whales harvested by the Inupiaq. Each whale that is killed by the Inupiaq must be measured and samples of various parts are taken. Craig is careful to respect the Alaskan natives as they carry on their traditional livelihood. He has also carefully noted all their stories and descriptions of the bowhead whales, discovering the generations of knowledge that they have accumulated (more…)

Each spring My wife fills the deck with flowers. We enjoy their beauty until the fall frosts kill them off. But we’re not the only ones. Bees are everywhere, flying about from flower to flower in the hunt for more pollen. Hundreds of bees. We’ve never been bothered by them and they’ve never seemed bothered by us. It’s a happy coexistence.

Bees, specificly Honey Bees, are the subject of Jay Hosler’s graphic novel Clan Apis. Taking the graphic novel approach, author Jay Hosler encapsulated the life cycle of honey bees within a coming of age story and found an interesting and effective way to teach kids about the ecology of honey bees. Hosler’s approach is to imagine a hive, or clan, of honey bees endowed with human motivations, through them telling the amazing story of the Honey Bee. The illustration is excellent, lively, and entertaining. I’ve included a few panels from the book that I snagged from Hosler’s website for you to see.

It’s surprising how much actual detail and information Hosler conveys through this method, while keeping the interest in the story high. Beginning with a young larva and it’s older sister, Hosler details in clear and interesting detail the growth cycle and social lives of bees. As the young larva, Nyuki, grows into a young bee she absolutely buzzes with questions. Her older sister, Dvorah, is always there explaining to her the ways of bees and their jobs and duties.

Like a child eager to grow up, Nyuki is eager to find her own way, against the advice of her older sister, landing herself in the middle of dangerous straits. This opens the doorway (more…)

Doppelganger is the third of the Bloodwater Mysteries series written by Pete Hautman and Mary Logue. And of the three, Doppelganger is my favorite. Like the previous two books in the Bloodwater Mysteries series, the chemistry between Roni and her sluething friend Brian is as fun as ever. However, in this story, Roni’s unbridled drive to solve every mystery nearly drives a wedge between the two friends.

Always irrepressible, Roni  is looking for a story online. She’s browsing a missing children website when she comes across a missing boy, Korean by birth, who was supposedly kidnapped by his mother at the age of three. Still missing after 10 years, the site includes an age-progressed photograph of the missing boy as he might appear now. Roni can’t believe her eyes. This photo is a dead ringer -a Doppelganger-for her friend Brian, also Korean by birth and adopted, and the age is the same.

She immediately tells Brian about the picture, hinting that maybe the missing child is him. How else could someone look so exactly like him. Brian brushes the insinuation aside, but when he questions his parents about his own adoption and they aren’t forthcoming with the facts, he begins to harbor doubts of his own. His doubts fester more deeply when he thinks back when he was three. The memories he is able to recall are not of his parents, but of two other people and a little dog.

Roni is now in motion, diving headlong into the mystery of the missing boy, almost sure that he is her friend Brian. Speeding around Minnesota and Wisconsin on her faithful Vespa named Hillary -actually speeding is way to grand a word for their putt-putting down the highway- Roni and Brian chase down clues and the people tied to the cold case until they uncover the chilling truth.

I recommend Doppelganger highly. If you haven’t read the previous two books in the Bloodwater Mysteries, get them all and start with Snatched, the first in the series, mostly because it chronicles the meeting between Roni and Brian as they wait outside the principle’s office at school, and it is in this book that the two become friends. It won’t take that much time to read through them, because you won’t want to put them down after you’ve started.

In Snatched, Roni and Brian hunt for a kidnapped teen from their school. The second book in the Bloodwater Mysteries series is Skullduggery; finding the skull of a murdered faculty member of the town college sets the two friends down the trail of another dangerous mystery.

The L.A. Times reports that Scholastic is carefully “screening”, or should we say, bowdlerizing, or more to the point, censoring,  books to be translated into Arabic. By careful they mean no dredels or other symbols of Jewish culture, no magic, no birthdays and no Clifford the Big Red Dog-he’s unclean! And they darkened Heidi’s skin, too. She was just too white, and European. The awful mistake in this translation was that they overlooked painting out a church steeple in one of the illustrations. How sad to miss an opportunity to obliterate vestiges of a Christian world in a book destined for countries where their religious and cultural heritages are founded on just that obliteration of other cultures. Just imagine if a state board of education were to do this very same thing?

The article stresses the incredible revelations into the outside world that these books bring. I’d find some revelations reading these books, too. Other religions? They don’t exist. Heidi’s a dark-skinned Arab? I never knew that either.

I wonder how any attempts to garner this sort of accommodation from a publisher for American Christians would play out? It don’t suppose it would be so pretty. You know, maybe Scholastic and the Hate League of Arab speaking countries have more in common than we think.

Here’s a review of a book by Allan Zullo entitled  Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust. Will we ever see this book translated into Arabic and introduced to their schools? It’s a Scholastic imprint, why not?

I don’t recall exactly why I grabbed Dinosaur Scientist: Careers Digging Up the Past by Tom Holmes from the Library. I had stopped by the new books section on my way out and saw this book, looked at the cover, thought it looked cool, and took it home. It wasn’t until I read the full title, the part about careers, that I said a silent ‘Oh, no!’ I shouldn’t have said it. I was just a page or two into the first chapter before I was hooked. Now that I finished it, I’m giving it strong recommendations.

Dinosaur Scientist is one of the rare and excellent science books describing what scientists do at a level that elementary and middle-schoolers can become engaged with. Holmes approach is to present 6 top paleontologists and describe their careers through short bio pieces, each making up a chapter. Along the way he explains the cool science, adventures and discoveries that each of these scientists has made, and how they solved the problems that they encountered. He shows how multi-faceted they are in their skills and backgrounds and the paths they took to becoming paleontologists.

The author has a personal interest in the subject and, it seems, considerable experience, as well. This shows throughout the book. He isn’t just relating facts and activities, but he exposes the interesting personalities of each scientist and bits about their science that are most engaging, that is, the very things that draw a person into a scientific field.

And there is the career component of this book. Each scientist expresses in their own words how they prepared themselves and what they found most useful to know. In this day and age, it’s common for college students to have no idea what they would like to do with their lives even when they’ve reached their junior and senior years in college. They have no vision and they have no valuable guidance. Books such as Dinosaur Scientist are excellent resources to help our kids choose a career path and begin planning to achieve their dreams.

The author, Thom Holmes, has a web page and a paleo-blog. He has a short bio here. He’s written about 20 books on dinosaurs, evolution and other prehistoric life.

Archie and the Pirates, by Marc Rosenthal, is a very good, very fun book. Kids, from little through first or second grade will love it. When I say this book has just about everything needed to be a sure success with kids, I mean it. That is to say, it’s got a monkey and pirates! I think that  spells instant winner with a lot of kids.

I picked it up and flipped through a few pages and that’s all it took to convince me to take this book home and feed it to my 7-year old. She read Archie and the Pirates  through to the end,and she loved the story. If it’s good, funny, and has great illustrations, she’s all for the book every time.

Yes, Archie is the monkey – a monkey marooned on a tropical island paradise- almost. You see, there’s this tiger roaming about roaring hungrily. And then, there’s these pirates, and they…

Let me back up. As the story begins, without explanation, we find Archie adrift on the ocean, fast asleep in his bed, and dreaming that he is asleep in his bed, adrift on the ocean. He awakens to find that he floated to a desert island somewhere in the tropics. Following the lead of the Swiss Family Robinson, he constructs an elaborate, and ingenious tree house with multi-purpose items, and even running water, all with tools and items he collects from the beach and elsewhere on the island.

Archie soon makes friends with an Ibis, and he whiles away the pleasant hours with her. But there is danger on this island, and later, the pirates come and kidnap one of Archie’s friends. Can Archie mount a rescue?

Pictures are from Marc Rosenthal’s Website.

Marc Rosenthal has written other books, but I’m only familiar with