How the World Works: A Hands-On Guide to Our Amazing Planet
Grade 3–5—Limiting its purview to the physical world (alas), this pop-up survey devotes pages or spreads to Earth's history and structure, the origins of life, plate tectonics, the water cycle, weather, ocean currents, the carbon cycle, greenhouse effect, plants, and food chains. In snippets of text tucked into every available nook, Dorion provides commentary ranging from basic information on seasons and other cycles to abbreviated catalogs of cloud types and kinds of boundaries between tectonic plates. Mansfield's special effects are really the strong suit here. In contrast to small, if occasionally lively, painted illustrations and a low-key overall color scheme, the sturdy moving parts offer a stimulating array of movements, from an inset flip booklet showing the continents in motion on one spread and an unusually tall pop-up mountain range rearing up on the next to an array of large pull-out tabs and turn wheels. Far too broadly focused to have much research value, this is nonetheless a worthwhile purchase for its unusual potential in displays and demonstrations.—John Peters, New York Public LibraryCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.