From School Library Journal
Gr 4-8-An illuminating look at the work of a microscopist. Kunkel works with microscopes to explore science, both on his own and with specialists from related fields. This book contains many of his photos, most taken with electron microscopes. It's fascinating to see the magnified pictures of jellyfish, dust mites, and other creatures, neatly tinted to accentuate body features. Several opening pages, along with the front and back endpapers, are visually dazzling. The heart of the book, though, is what readers learn about how Kunkel produces these images, and to what uses scientists put them. The story of how he worked within the blast zone of Mount St. Helens in 1980 in order to study the effect of volcanic ash on algae is a vivid example of how exciting science can be. The text describes the qualities of several different microscopes, and photographs show the scientist using each tool in his lab. Readers also see samples of the images from each instrument, from the simple view captured with a loupe lens to the neurological details revealed by a transmission electron microscope. Like Kramer's Eye of the Storm (Putnam, 1997), this title offers a wealth of scientific information along with an insightful look at the world of an individual scientist.
Steven Engelfried, Beaverton City Library,
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Scientific American
Kramer provides a wealth of information on how scientists study the world as he takes readers behind the scenes of scientist/photographer Dennis Kunkel's life. But it's Kunkel's astonishing photographs that star here. Using dissecting, compound, scanning electron, and transmission electron microscopes to photograph images-and brilliant color to further define them-Kunkel invites us into a startlingly beautiful world invisible to the naked eye.
Editors of Explorations
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
