Author Catherine Reef offers the reader a well-rounded realistic portrait of the incredible life of Ernest Hemingway.  The text is concisely written and logically organized.  This biography is a great choice for students needing information on this fascinating writer AND it is a great choice for pleasure readers as well.  The black-and-white photos complement the text nicely.  The book includes a “Selected Biography,” a list of “The Major Works of Ernest Hemingway,” and an index.

Young children, especially boys, are fascinating by the large, heavy equipment used in road construction and building.  This book is especially appealing because of the bright, vivid colors and the photography used.  Each page just seems to pop out at you and demand your attention.  This book will be very popular!!

This is a book for those in need of answers to life’s big problems, like “where should I to go to high school”, or  maybe problems like  “how to get my own dog”.  With the help of  a cartooned illustration on each page to lighten the sometimes cumbersome text, Watanabe shows how to break down those seemingly impossible goals into bite sized chunks.  At first we learn about the many attitudes that keep us from our goals, like Sofie Sigh and Chris Critic.  Then the book offers many ways to organize and evaluate, like logic trees, rubrics, charts, and hypothesizing.   This book is not for the browser and may not be as “easy” as the title suggests, but it is a great tool for those with the determination to read through it.

This book is a fascinating play on words that the author dubs “the reverso”.  12 Folk tales inspire the poetry on each illustrated page but if you look further the real magic happens.  Each poem and illustration are split in two, both showing an opposite viewpoint of the same tale, but the poem itself is the same wording, only in reverse with a few punctuation changes. This book is perfect for browsers, as a companion to fairy/folktale studies or poetry units.

This book is a sure fire winner for students and adults alike.  This  well researched title is fully illustrated with engaging and detailed photographs and an engaging text that is packed with scientific information, brought to you in an easy to understand layout.  It chronicles the emergence of the Colony Collapse disorder discovered in 2006 and the importance of bees in our world. Inside you will meet the team of experts and be privy to their research as they try to discover the causes and solutions needed to save our agriculture and protect the hard working bee. Includes references and index

Because our sixth graders learn about Ancient China in their Social Studies book, I thought this book would help link Ancient China to the present.  Based on the title, I was expecting the book to enlighten the reader to the many inventions and practices we still use today.  While this is true, the laundry list of inventions that are named on page 4 pretty much cover this.  The rest of the book repeats these inventions (kites, dominoes, umbrellas, the martial arts, ice cream, matches, gunpowder, and fireworks), with just a few more additions (wheelbarrows, block printing, paper, and planting crops in rows).  Nicely done is a “Then” and “Now” comparison at the bottom of each page, linking the past to the present, but overall, their isn’t enough research provided.  Perhaps this book is simply too meant for a younger audience, leading to my disappointment as a middle school librarian.  It’s use in the middle school would be to offer it to ELL or Special Ed students as a general overview, or to be read aloud at the beginning of the Ancient China unit as an introduction to life in Ancient China.

This 2011 publication  is sure to please young Seattle Seahawks fans.  Brimming with colorful photos, football statistics, and the history of the franchise, readers will learn how difficult the early years are for a new team.  Play-off picks (good and bad), the changeover in coaches and players, and missed opportunities tell the story from 1972 when the construction of the Kingdome began, to 1974 when Pete Rozelle awarded the franchise, to 2006 when the Seahawks went to the Super Bowl, through the 2010 season.  The reader learns that when the team played their first season in 1976, names were put on their helmets to help the players learn each other’s names.  Sidebars with interesting anecdotes, a timeline of important events, Quick Stas, and Quotes all help round-out the quality of the book.

In order to teach young children about how the Pilgrims first lived when coming to this country, this book might be adequate.  However, if you take away the title page, table of contents, map, glossary, and so on, there are 12 pages of colonial homes facts and info and eight pages on Native American homes, the first of which is a tipi, used by western coastal Indians, not the eastern tribes as first seen by the colonists.  Yes, it is difficult to understand how people who were so incapable of taking care of themselves came here in the first place.  However, I would have enjoyed seeing some of the actual houses and communities built by the early pilgrims that are still standing today.  Pretty remarkable endeavor for not knowing what they were doing.  Book does not contain much useful information.

If used to teach about the Pilgrims and Native Americans and introduce the concept of ‘Thanksgiving’, this book will explain it all.  Very elementary and basic, this book covers the time when the Native Americans helped the European settlers learn to fend for themselves.  It’s hard to believe that people would actually come over to a new land and not know how to fish or hunt. I appreciate the fact that no comment was given about the relationship between the colonists and the Native Americans.

This book will work for showing primary age students what pilgrims wore when they first came to the New World.  But in later grades (still in elementary school), students study the American Revolution, and the language and illustrations are too young for such a study.  The limited vocabulary is somewhat redundant because it explains the meaning of the word just after using it in such a way that it is clear what it means.  I think kids will be bored.  Did colonists have clothes that were pink, red, green and blue?  When did the king allow them to make their own cloth?  This book will work for the young and the curious, but not for students who are actually studying that time period.