Amazon.com Review
The creators of the Caldecott Medalist
So You Want to Be President? mirror that successful format in this enthusiastic, fact-filled picture-book tribute to predominately American and European inventors. Kids may be inspired to make history themselves when they learn that Benjamin Franklin was concocting new inventions by age 12. Solid advice such as "If you want to be an inventor, find a need and fill it" or "If you want to be an inventor, be a dreamer" precedes sections on people who did just that. Famous innovations such as Eli Whitney's cotton gin share equal billing with ideas that never really took off, like Andrew Jackson Jr.'s adjustable eyeglasses for chickens or Franz Vester's coffin with escape hatch (in case the person inside was still alive.) The brief anecdotes about each inventor and invention don't offer much historical context, but readers will devour fascinating facts on the origins of Velcro (cockleburs on a Swiss engineer's pants) and the story of where the expression "the real McCoy" came from (the train lubricators of Elijah McCoy). Two female inventors--one who was fed up with dishpan hands and invented the first dishwasher, and actress Hedy Lamarr, who helped invent a system for guiding torpedoes by radio signals in World War II--accompany the otherwise male-heavy cast of characters. One-sentence biographical notes in the back list the inventors in alphabetical order and a bibliography concludes the book. David Small's lively, color-washed illustrations steal the show, zeroing in on comical moments in history and creative gleams of discovery to great effect. (Ages 7 and older)
--Karin Snelson
From Publishers Weekly
With a lighthearted style similar to the collaborators' Caldecott Medal-winning So You Want to Be President?, this volume furnishes brief sketches of inventors and inventions both famous and little-known. As she did in the earlier volume, St. George invites readers into her exclamation point-studded narrative and introduces many of the clever contraptions with snippets of advice: "If you want to be an inventor, be a dreamer" and "Don't worry if people laugh at you." The latter remark leads into mention of "Fulton's Folly," Robert Fulton's widely mocked steamboat: "But the laughter lost steam in 1807 when Robert's Clermont chugged up the Hudson River from New York to Albany with paddle wheels churning and flags waving." Some readers may miss the kinds of details that tantalizingly cluttered the pages in the previous volume (here, Alexander Graham Bell's invention gets one paragraph: "When he grew up, he dreamed of people talking across distances maybe by electric signals. Electric signals it was!", leaving Small with less fodder for his portraits). Still, she includes intriguing tidbits, such as the fact that glamorous actress Hedy Lamarr, who fled Austria before WWII, worked with a friend to invent a system for guiding torpedoes by radio signals ("Her goal? Beat Hitler!"). Humorous touches infuse Small's illustrations (for Franz Vester's invention of a coffin with an escape hatch, the artist shows a hand reaching out of the grave as guests depart the funeral); readers will particularly cotton to his caricatures of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. All ages.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
