Clint Twist

Easily one of the best children's books I've ever read. Each interactive, pull-out, colorful page, is loaded with so much aeronautical information, from the cockpit through the fuselage, and all the way back to the tail fin, that I learned as much about airplanes while reading it to my kids as they did! Fun fun fun! And the pages are nice and thick as well, not chintzy and easily tear-apart-able, like so many interactive children's books, which get wrecked the very day you purchase them show more oftentimes, once your ravenously reading, though rough handed, curious kids have their playful way with them.

Kids will learn the answers to fascinating questions such as...how on earth can a huge piece of machinery weighing over 800,000 pounds - nearly half-a-million tons! - ever get airborne? And what does a jet engine block look like from inside the block? Cool stuff!

The book also features a page on the Past and Future of aeronautics, including interesting tidbits on the Airbus A380, which is over 230 feet long, has three levels and can fly 5,000 miles nonstop without refueling - which is like flying from San Francisco to Tokyo without having a stopover in Honolulu! Holy cow!

Planes and how they work is supposed to be for kids, but I think adults (well, maybe only dorky adults like me) will enjoy it as much, if not more so, than their children. Listen, it sure beats the heck out of reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Dick And Jane over and over anyday, trust me. Reading this book is like watching Finding Nemo or Monster House, you can read it multiple times and yet it remains fresh and fun for both children and adults. I wish all children's books were this interesting. show less

PSC REVIEW: If the title doesn’t attract readers the slimy looking slug on the cover will. There’s a lot of slime out there. Of course, the Pacific Northwest’s banana slug is right up there, getting an 8 on the slime-ometer. Others may be familiar to readers like the sea slug. But the book doesn’t stop with the familiar. There are foam-nest frogs and lung fish. Divided into sections by location of the slime –land, water, and other slime --it includes fungus like the lattice show more stinkhorn. Photos really do enhance the text in this book. The big wad of phlegm awaiting the reader in the introductory chapter is so realistic you don’t want to put your hand there. Good choice not to touch it. According to this book, phlegm rates the highest of any slime on the slime-ometer. I wish they had been given more information about the California newt. It says that 1 gram of tetrodotoxin (cyanide) in the slime is enough to kill 2,000 adult humans. I found this alarming because California newts are pets as well. Further reading led to the information that this must be ingested to kill, but even so there has to be more to this California newt story. show less

Out of the dictionaries(bug, endangered animals, etc), this one might be the best. It's 2003, so not a perfect book, but it still holds up well to present. The illustrations are gorgeous, some of the best I've seen, and the snake info is accurate.

Recommending this most out of the dictionary books, because it's still good.

This review published by The Children's Book and Media Review

Many stories are told about Cleopatra and the exciting life she led, but sometimes it is hard to tell fact from fiction. This book is a mix of fictional and nonfictional things about her life. The double spread pages focus on an aspect or event in her life, detailing her birth, childhood, path to becoming a paragraph, falling in love, war, and her final death. Each page also has flaps to include extra details about life in Rome and show more Egypt at the time of Cleopatra. Each page is covered in illustrations, small paragraphs of text, and usually has a fictional journal entry like what Cleopatra might have written.

In the style of the popular “Ology” series, this is part of a series called Historical Notebooks to give an interesting approach to discussing a particular historical figure. For the most part, it is a good introduction to Cleopatra, Egypt, and Rome. The book is well-organized and makes it easy to follow the known events of her life. It would have been improved, however, with leaving the fictional accounts off or making them a bigger part of the book. As they are, it is confusing for just a small part of the page to be fictional and then have the rest of it be nonfiction because it makes the fiction either seem true or the nonfiction less valid. Some of the flaps are interesting and useful, such as discussions of mummification or Egyptian hairstyles, but others are unnecessary. Either one side is just a pattern, or there are illustrations that could be placed elsewhere or left off, making the time it takes to flip over the flag unnecessary. Although it is a good resource to learn about Cleopatra, some of the execution could have been better. show less