Customer Reviews

Alexander Graham Bell

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This book has fairly beautiful black and white illustrations as well as a lot of interesting information about Bell (maybe too much). The author, Leonard Fisher, offers his opinion that Bell was not only a brilliant inventor, but also a compassionate man. Fisher tells the story of all of Bell's inventions and his work with the deaf, touching on his family relationships slightly. However, I think the text is too long and the word choice too specialized to read to most children. If the adult reading the book can slightly simplify it, it will help, and children interested in Bell will probably enjoy the book as is.

The semantics of this book are at an adult reading level, but the plot and thematic elements are at a child's reading level. That's a bad combination. The story is told briefly, but it abounds with references to things or ideas that the average elementary school reader won't be familiar with. Here are some examples:

"Even the powerful Western Union company tried to invent its own telephone." (no context is given as to what Western Union was, or why the reader should care about this fact)
"This effort led to the 'spectraphone', an instrument used to identify the chemical components of some substances, a process that later developed into the modern science called 'photoacoustic spectroscopy'"
"...so immersed was the city in learning that Edinburgh was called the 'Athens of the North.'"


...and the book is just filled with words and phrases that an average elementary student couldn't be expected to know, such as "Aleck's undaunted vision", "...he unknowingly set off faint undulating sounds...", and on and on, every page. Introducing new vocabulary is good, but writing with no consideration of the reading comprehension level of the audience is NOT. We need more kids books that tell good, complex stories communicated in a comprehensible way -- not simplistic stories communicated in complicated language.

It's about the guy who made the telephone. He liked helping the deaf people, and he made lots of ways for them to be able to talk. When he was making the telephone, and he spilled something on him, he said "help!" to his friend, and his friend heard him, because the wire of the telephone was in the other room.
I liked the pictures; they are black, white, and grey. One of the pictures has a picture of the writing he used to help deaf people talk. I like them because they show what he is doing. I like the writing because it tells what he liked to do--he liked to help.