Customer Reviews

Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens

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This nonfiction book is about volcanoes. It tells about the events leading to the erruption of Mount St. Helens. It describes, in exciting detail, the actual erruption and the eventual rebirth of the volcano. The photographs are great. They help to tell the story along with the words so that you can get a feel for the total destruction and devastation caused by the erruption. The nice thing about the story is that it also includes the rebirth of the volcano and tells of a life cycle that can never be broken.

When my daughter's daycare class started exploring volcanoes last fall I really wanted to get a good book on volcanoes to help me explain them to her well. This book was one of the most recommended books on the subject that amazon carried so it was a natural choice. That it explores the devastation wrought by Mt. St. Helens' 1980 eruption was all the better since we had just visited the area a couple months before.

Well, instead of the book going to the daycare for sharing it's stayed home as a bedtime book. I typically just sort of narrate the very good images in the book and when she asks a question I refer to the text around that image for more information.

The book has fantastic photos of the area (rivers, lakes, trees standing and just utterly blasted away, as well as plants and animals returning to the area) before and after the eruption. There is no photo capturing any human or animal suffering but the billowing ash and smoke was enough to worry my 5-year-old a bit - she certainly understood what those pictures meant.

The text is, in some ways, even better than the photos because it provides a great deal of introductory terms from geology and other physical sciences without being too boring or too difficult for a parent to supplement on the fly.

"Volcano" is an excellent way to explain what volcanoes are and what they can do as well as how the earth is resilient, continually changing, and perhaps can appear serene and whole when just a few short years ago (even within my daughter's father's lifetime!!) the land looked barren and gray.

This book about Mount St. Helens is really good. It give you alot of information about the silent, still, big and sleepy giant - Mount St. Helens. This sleepy giant was built by many eruptions over thousands of years. The pictures of the mountain are great because they show images before the eruption with green land all over and then after with just molten lava. How the earth spill the hot (magma) rock from inside. A volcano can be very destructitive to the land. The photograph shot from the helicopter shows very little life left like the moon after the explosion from the volcano on the mountain sides. Can you image how beautiful Mount St. Helens was before the eruption and destruction?

If you are interested in volcanoes, this book is a MUST. Could motivate those disengaged readers also. Obscure info about Mt. St. Helens which is pretty cool. Always looking for books to motivate struggling readers. Finding non-fiction text is even better! That is the materials kids continue to enjoy but find much more difficult to understand.

This Newbery Honor book covers the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. The book has a good basic explanation of how volcanoes work, along with illustrations, as well as the specific history of Mt. St. Helens. The eruption process and resulting destruction are chronicled not only in words, but also with many many color photographs.

The suggested age level of 9-12 years (or 3rd to 6th grade) is right on target. I read selected highlights and looked at the photos with my 7-year-old and 5-year-old. Reading the whole text would definitely have been over the younger one's head. However, my 7-year-old was intrigued by the topic and has read the book by himself many times (reads on a 4th-grade level), frequently shares the most interesting facts from the book, and redraws the maps in the book. This book definitely awakened in him an interest in volcanoes specificially, and natural disasters in general.

If you're a child or adult with an especial interest in volcanoes, or in Mt. St. Helens specifically, I would highly recommend this book.

i would always check this book out in elementary school and it's just as good as ever.