Boy, Were We Wrong About the Solar System
Grade 2–3—Rocco's gentle caricatures and visual gags further brighten this wry follow-up to the author'sBoy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs!(Dutton, 2005). Showing how widely held preconceptions about nature are slowly, stumblingly tested by scientific study, Kudlinski traces our view of the universe from flat earth to the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet.Effectively giving readers the big picture first, she places most of the significant specific terms and names in a time line at the end, and in the main narrative focuses on concepts: "A new idea came to an astronomer. He said that the sun was in the center of the [solar] system, not the Earth. That would mean that we were not so important. He had no proof, so most people just laughed…." Though itself a little "wrong" as Pluto and its more distant mates have very recently been RE-reclassified as "Plutoids," this breezy account will be as equally effective in demonstrating how science works as it will be in bringing young readers up to speed on the structure of this and other solar systems.—John Peters, New York Public LibraryCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.