Saturday, April 7, 2018

PICTURE BOOK - Newton's Rainbow: The Revolutionary Discoveries of a Young Scientist by Kathryn Lasky

Illustrated byKevin Hawkes
2017, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York
HC $17.99
Bosler J 530.092
44 pgs.
Goodreads rating:3.66 - 53 ratings
My rating:4 (or maybe even more)
Endpapers:  Ocean blue
Illustrations:  I love Kevin Hawkes (a Mainer) illustrations.
1st line/s:  ""On Christmas Day over three hundred years ago, in a village in England, a baby was born too early.  The midwives who helped deliver him had never seen such a tiny baby, so little that one said he could fit into a quart pot."

My comments:  Yes, this is a particularly text-heavy picture book.  It's perfect for the 4th or 5th grader who has to read a biography and has a tough time plowing through a chapter-book length piece of nonfiction.  (That would have been me and many of the students that I've taught over the years.)  It's beautifully written and illustrated, gives all sorts of really interesting information, allowing the reader to get a real feel for the brilliant, eccentric person that Isaac Newton was and the times in which he lived.  I learned a lot!

Goodreads:  Famed for his supposed encounter with a falling apple that inspired his theory of gravity, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) grew from a quiet and curious boy into one of the most influential scientists of all time. Newton's Rainbow tells the story of young Isaac--always reading, questioning, observing, and inventing--and how he eventually made his way to Cambridge University, where he studied the work of earlier scientists and began building on their accomplishments. This colorful picture book biography celebrates Newton's discoveries that illuminated the mysteries of gravity, motion, and even rainbows, discoveries that gave mankind a new understanding of the natural world, discoveries that changed science forever.

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