Kristen Lippincott

This book, part of the DK Eyewitness series, provides an overview of the study of outer space, starting with ancient astronomy and moving to the present day, even including a few expected events to look for (such as the collection of more knowledge about Pluto when a spacecraft sent there three years ago returns in 2015). Each spread contains a topic heading, a brief narrative describing that topic, and then a number of color illustrations (including photographs and artists’ renderings) with detailed captions. The book concludes with some fast facts, ways to find out more information (including places to visit, such as science museums and planetariums), a glossary, and an index. This all sounds great, but I ended up giving the book such a low rating because I found it to be so unreadable. For starters, I found the spreads distracting, with far too much information competing for my attention. I couldn’t figure out what to read next in terms of the captions because sometimes there seemed to be a logical order and other times there did not seemed to be any order. Also, the content sometimes seemed very technical for a survey text intended for children. For instance, the book mentions volume, mass, and density many times in the beginning half of the book before finally explaining these concepts on page 45 (and for the record, no, these terms are not included in the glossary). Also, the captions include such information as Pierre Simon Laplace’s work Traite de mechanique celeste and Urbain Le Verrier’s job at the Ecole Polytechnique without bothering to translate these words into English. For someone like me, who has at least a basic understanding of French, this is not a problem, but does the author really expect a broad audience of English-speaking children to understand? Overall, I was disappointed in this work and wouldn’t recommend it for any but the most devoted to science.… (more)