This book is pretty much a wreck from start to finish. The illustrations are ugly. The text is riddled with typos and missing spaces. It also has a number of outright errors. I don't even know who wrote this thing! The front cover credits Anne Blanchard and Tino, but the first page lists Hervé Guilleminot and Jérôme Masi (they wrote and illustrated another book in the series, so maybe that's yet another error). Seriously... this is one of the sloppiest non-fiction books for kids I've ever read.

Let's look at some of my notes:

Oh, yes. The text states that Alexander the Great brought things back from his travels to his friend Aristotle. Apparently, Alexander the Great made it to the Americas at some point, because the illustration shows him gifting a saguaro cactus!

Zhang Heng is credited with being the first person to realize that the moon reflects light from the sun. Except--oops!--the book already credited Thales with that.

Eggs don't have "yokes". I shouldn't have to explain this one.

The page on Descartes is just confusing. He's supposedly all about "reason"... but then he's also apparently convinced that there's an "evil demon" running around affecting our perceptions. Sounds... reasonable?

Right. The locations. If anyone was born in England (no matter when), the book listed the location as Great Britain. But if they were born in Scotland, the location was... Scotland. (Yeah, I don't get it, either. Since when is Scotland not part of Great Britain?) And then the book goes on to make mention of someone being born in the Czech Republic... in 1884. Pick a convention and stick to it: either use the location names as they were at the time, or use all current location names. Don't mix and match.

The Pasteur page is disgusting, ignoring his ethical issues and continuing to help him steal credit for other people's work. He was not the first to come up with the idea of washing hands to prevent disease. Credit for that should go to Ignaz Semmelweis... but he's not even mentioned. (The poor guy never got any credit in his own lifetime, either, and was laughed out of medicine for daring to suggest that maybe doctors should wash their hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies.) Pasteur also practiced medicine on children without a medical licence. But I guess including that would've made him look like kind of a dick.

The book is also heavily skewed toward males. There are seven women in this book, and thirty-three men... which is bad enough. It gets even worse when we get to Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover the structure of DNA. Her page has ten little blurbs of information... but only six are actually about her. The other four are about the men who stole the credit for her work and (rather ironically) about how women are overlooked in science in general!

The information that is included in the text is also kind of weak. Sometimes it's so vague that it doesn't even seem to apply to the person that's being talked about. When I read a book like this, I want information about the people... not vague, random tidbits about tangentially related stuff.

This book was apparently published in French first, but that's no excuse for the absolutely shoddy translation. I mean, the translation itself isn't terrible, but the resulting text is so full of typos that I question whether it was actually done by a human.

Faraday also discovered that an element called red benzene, transformed chlorine gas into a liquid, created optical glasses, light and wrote chemistry textbooks!

Well, that's clear as mud.

Aside from sentences that don't make any sense, at least one just sort of ends in mid thought:

Darwin went further still when he claimed that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor which.

Which... what? Don't leave me hanging!

I expect a lot more from non-fiction, especially in books aimed at children. There's no way I'd give this one to a child, no matter how interested they are in science. There are other, better books out there, ones that have better editing and don't relegate women to the shadows of history (while simultaneously complaining about doing that very thing).

Not recommended.

2500 anni di storia della scienza ripercorsi tramite quaranta figure fondamentali e le loro scoperte: dall'antica Grecia a chi ancora oggi studia e divulga, quaranta tavole riassumono i passi in avanti fatti in ogni disciplina, dalla medicina alla matematica all'astronomia alle geologia, con note brevi ma interessanti sull'ambiente e la vita privata degli scienziati citati.

Un'unica cosa dispiace - ma è un vecchio dolore: vedere quante poche donne (e quanto di recente, con pochissime eccezioni) si siano fatte largo in questi campi.

Consigliatissimo per esplorare insieme ai più piccoli idee e scoperte, e approfondire man mano a seconda delle loro inclinazioni.

Thank you netgalley for the copy in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book after conversation with my 5 year old about science and maths. So glad I did; the illustrations are fantastic, the explanations of each scientist is really geared towards interested youngsters, and there were a number of people (I'm ashamed to say) that I didn't know of! Its an interesting read for children interested in science, maths, philosophy as it encompasses all these disciplines. I'm really looking forward to sharing this with my daughter, I think she's going to love it too!

I received an electronic ARC from Quarto Publishing Group through NetGalley.
Blanchard presents brief bios of 40 scientists throughout history. She begins with Thales in the 4th century BC and finishes with de Grasse Tyson in current times. Both male and female scientists are included and various disciplines are covered.
Text boxes are used to present information about their life and work as well as other activities taking place while they lived.
This book is designed for elementary level readers. The simple style of presenting small portions of information in separate blocks will draw them in. The illustrations are colorful and help the reader understand about each person.
A great starting place to encourage further reading and research on specific scientists.

Great artwork. Like how there’s 40 people’s pictures on the index page. A fun book to read.

Nathan, age 8

Men, women, and minorities are represented in this volume of historic and present day contributors to science. From Thales to Mary Anning to Neil deGrasse Tyson and too many more to name. Informational text is featured in small digestible chunks and interesting factiods, providing an addictive format that will have transitional readers coming back to this volume again and again. Page sized, cartoon-like illustrations feature each scientist, while small scale versions are also included in the table of contents for a quick look.

This is a children's book that gives a very brief overview of / introduction to 40 important scientists from the past 2,000+ years. Each scientist gets a two page spread that looks roughly like this:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/e98d63e7b18ee6cf14c697049fa63811/tumblr_pmpueszFTv1rw8qd0o1_540.png

It was probably a little bit simplistic for me as an adult reader as I had heard of most [but not all!] of these scientists either from school or from other books like this. I think it would be a fun and visually interesting book to get younger readers interested in science though.

My one complaint would be that there were not a lot of women or people of color featured. I understand that a lot of women in particular have been kept out of or erased from science over the years, and I did like the women she included, but I felt like maybe she could have dug a bit deeper or maybe featured a few more modern women scientists. Also there was a point where she basically said 'there was a large portion of history where major scientific advancements were made by Arab or Indian scientists' and then featured like 2 or 3 of them before going to back to largely white European men. I didn't detract any stars from my rating because of this, but I was hoping that there would maybe be a few more diverse or unknown scientists represented. Although I guess for a children's book the thought might have been to keep it more mainstream.

A very clever. One of a number of book titles in a series to show the who’s who or the world’s best.
Super Scientists is a good place to start and to reflect on the potential of such a series. For each scientist listed chronologically we get a potted history of their life and achievements. This is done with inspiring artwork and cartoon figures to capture the very essence of these people and their claim to fame. They are reduced in the process to sound bites and snippets easy to digest and remember the facts.
Each page could be contracted to a double-sided playing card and we could be playing top trumps with the movers and shakers of scientific nobility.
It is a fun addition to any library and will teach anyone who reads it some basic facts that will stick. The hope would be it that it could lead the curious mind to search further. The book itself does not help in this process; I guess the internet is the now expected jumping off place. However, a resume of biographies or books around their subjects might have helped direct to less able student.
This perhaps classified the book as a work of fun more than a serious scientific guide but either way it it promotes interests and shares rich facts it has begun to serve both purposes.

We really enjoyed this book, I had thought it would only interest my older children 10 & 8 but in fact we all found the information well presented and fun to read so everyone joined in. The illustrations are very funky and clear so my other kids were also keen to hear about these amazing and groundbreaking scientists. I also learnt quite a few things, which means the book gets my thumbs up too.

4★
“Wonder, Question, Discover”

This children’s picture book of scientists begins with Thales from about 600 B.C. in Ancient Greece to Neil deGrasse Tyson today. Each entry is colourful, with a large cartoon of a scientist, surrounded by small illustrations and text boxes of facts and remarks.

It’s a great idea, and the artwork is appealing. The text is broken up into bite-sized chunks that make it easy to read and remember. Perfect for readers with a short attention span.

I gather this has been translated from the French, and my preview copy shows Hervé Guilleminot and Jérôme Masi as author and illustrator. I don’t know where Anne Blanchard fits in.

The translation mostly seems fine, but there are a lot of misspellings and typographical errors. The text boxes in the PDF version I have show texts in varying fonts and styles, sometimes to make things stand out, but sometimes to fit in more text than the box will comfortably contain. In the latter cases, words are running together and hard to read.

If you’ve ever fooled around with fonts on a computer, you will see some “narrow” styles that compress letters and squeeze in more words. This book is designed for children and young readers – people who need all the help they can get to interpret marks on a page and convert them to words and then to thoughts in their minds. Anything that hinders that process needs to be fixed.

As you can see, the titles on each page are very pretty, but it’s a stylised cursive (running) writing rather than straight printing, so the S is just one more hurdle for a very young child or a slow reader.

As I’ve said, mine is a preview copy, and I hope the editors and publishers correct the errors. I have mentioned them here, because the pages I'm sharing below may include some, and you might wonder why I like the book, which I do. . . mostly.

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Thales, c.600 B.C., Ancient Greece and Turkey, The first scientist

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Archimedes, 297-212 B.C., Syracuse (now Italy), The first engineer

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Avicenna, 980-1037, Iran, The good doctor

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642, Italy, The stargazer

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Neil deGrasse Tyson, NY USA, The enthusiast!

Here’s the list of the scientists, including some whose names I didn’t know (but probably should), and many who are household names today, like Aristotle, Darwin, and Einstein (who is pictured sticking his tongue out, which he was famous for doing in photos).

1. Thales
2. Pythagoras
3. Aristotle
4. Euclid
5. Archimedes
6. Zhang Heng
7. Hypatia of Alexandria
8. Brahmagupta
9. Avicenna
10. Alhazen
11. Roger Bacon
12. Nicolaus Copernicus
13. Galileo Galilei
14. Johannes Kepler
15. Isaac Newton
16. William Harvey
17. René Descartes
18. Antoine Lavoisier
19. Mary Anning
20. Michael Faraday
21. James Clerk Maxwell
22. Charles Darwin
23. Gregor Mendel
24. Louis Pasteur
25. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev
26. Ada Lovelace
27. David Hilbert
28. Marie Curie
29. Ernest Rutherford
30. Albert Einstein
31. Niels Bohr
32. Alfred Wegener
33. Alan Turing
34. Rosalind Franklin
35. HPG and the Human Genome
36. Vera Rubin
37. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
38. Tim Berners-Lee
39. Stephen Hawking
40. Neil Degrasse Tyson

Thanks, of course, to NetGalley and Quarto Books / Wide Eyed Editions, for the preview copy of what I hope will be a good finished product.
#SuperScientists #NetGalley

This was a very confusing book because Net Galley has it listed as "by Anne Blanchard," as does the cover (with illustrations by "Tito") but the book itself internally lists it as "by Hervé Guilleminot & Jérôme Masi." Those latter two have written at least one book in this series, and I wonder if their names somehow got in there by mistake? It's very confused and one of many problems I ran into.

This initially seemed to me to be a neat and useful book giving brief details about well-known (at least to me!) and some lesser-known scientists, but the more I read of it, the less enamored I became. I was pleased by the inclusion of several female scientists, less pleased by the lack of scientists of color. I think that the problem is that the book focuses more on scientists of yesteryear, and less on more modern scientists. Carl Sagan is excluded, but Neil deGrasse Tyson is included, and I got the impression this was done solely to include a lone African-American scientist in the list (Brahmagupta is included and is a person of color, note, but he's Indian).

There were also multiple problems of errors in spellings or grammar in the text on the pages covering Darwin, Mendeleev,
Hawking, Tyson, and some others. On the Tyson page, for example, the text mentions gravity, but that refers to a movie title, so it should have an initial capital: Gravity. Strictly speaking, Einstein did not invent E=mc2, BTW, nor did he discover it. In fact he never used it in any of the papers which made him famous! He only made the formula famous by association.

To my knowledge it was first used by JJ Thomson around 1881, when he derived it inaccurately as E = 4/3mc2. Olinto De Pretto, an Italian, also derived it independently and equally inaccurately, but used 'v' instead of 'c' for the speed of light. It was used (although again with an error in it) by Friedrich Hasenöhrl before Einstein, and these people derived their work from earlier discoveries by such as Max Abraham, Oliver Heaviside, and Henri Poincaré.

There are confusing errors too, such as having Thales be the first to determine that the Moon merely reflected the sun's light, and then five or so pages later, having a different scientist, Zhang Heng, be credited with this primacy. This book definitely needs a serious effort at editing and correction. Some of the wording, such as that on Darwin's page is nonsensical. This may be because of translation errors or may be just sloppiness. Either way there is no excuse for it.

It brings together a brief assessment of the progress of science and the scientists who enabled it over the years:

Thales
Pythagoras
Aristotle
Euclid
Archimedes
Zhang Heng
Hypatia
Brahmagupta
Avicenna
Alhayzen
Roger Bacon
Nicolas Copernicus
Galileo Galilei
Johannes Kepler
Isaac Newton
William Harvey
Rene Descartes
Antoine Lavoisier
Mary Anning
Michael Faraday
James Clerk Maxwell
Charles Darwin
Gregor Mendel
Louis Pasteur
Dmitri Mendeleev
Ada Lovelace
David Hilbert
Marie Curie
Ernest Rutherford
Albert Einstein
Neils Bohr
Alfred Wegener
Alan Turing
Rosalind Franklin
Vera Rubin
Franchise Barre-sinuossi
Tim Berners-Lee
Stephen Hawking
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I confess I am not sure what order the list is in exactly! Yes, it's chronological, but Tim Berners-Lee, who codified the World Wide Web, was born over decade after theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, yet he precedes him in the text, so maybe some chronology other than birth order is employed. That's a minor issue. You will notice that there is only 39 names in the list. This is because the fortieth is, inexplicably, the human genome project!<\p>

The single name most closely associated with that is Craig Venter, but evidently because he was running a private genome scan in competition with the public one, he gets no credit here. There are a lot of scientists who do not, including many of color who have made major contributions to science. Women are represented, but could be more so. Emmy Noether gets a mention, but not a page to herself, and Lise Meitner gets no mention at all, for example.

While as of this writing, no black scientist has won a Nobel prize (although many people of color have won one for endeavors outside of science) there are women and people of color who could have been mentioned for their contributions such as Samia Al-Amoudi, Alice Ball, Benjamin Banneker, Satyendra Nath Bose, George Washington Carver, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Charles Drew, Joycelyn Elders, Ernest Everett, Sunetra Gupta, Indira Hinduja, Manahel Thabet, and so on.

I think this book could have done a lot better in its selection, and it certainly could have been a lot better edited. Given it is what it is, I cannot commend it as a worthy read.