I know, I know, it has been a while since I posted one! But we have been bringing new gems from the library nevertheless! The girls now are the ones reminding me to post about them. I selected, among their favorites, two picture books connected by the fact that they all retell true stories!
Come See the Earth Turn, The Story of Leon Foucault, by Lori Mortensen, illustrations by Raul Allen, 2010 Tricycle Press.The kids remember admiring the Foucault Pendulum when we visited Thomas Aquinas College, and this picture book tells the story of the dedicated scientist! TAC is one of the few places that has one, in their gorgeous Albertus Magnus Science Hall, and Wikipedia has an interesting list of all of the Foucault pendulums in the world.
Calico Dorsey, Mail Dog of the Mining Caps by Susan Lendroth with illustrations by Adam Gustavson , 2010 Tricycle Press.
The illustrations of Dorsey alone are worth the book! What a cute, good dog! Our history studies just covered the California gold rush so this book came to enrich our homework! I am not sure there was ever another official US Mail dog, but if you read this book you too will fall in love with this good dog!
1 comment:
Loved Calico Dorsey!
But there is a problem in the Foucault book that I want to warn folks about, which is slander of the Church. It's on the page right after Leon Foucault figures out how to show that the earth turns on its axis. (I would give a page number, but the book is unpaginated.)
Anyway, here is the problematic text:
"Two centuries earlier, church leaders in Rome had declared that the earth was the unmoving center of the universe. People who challenged the church on this matter were imprisoned, tortured, or killed as heretics.
"By the nineteenth century ...."
Yikes -- so many errors I don't know where to start!
Oddly, the very next page begins, referring to an event in that same 17th century:
"In 1638, a monk and his assistant tried to prove that the earth turned by blasting a cannonball straight up into the sky.
"They never saw the cannonball again."
A monk! Wait, aren't they part of the Church? And I guess somehow, he and his assistant managed to avoid being imprisoned, tortured, and / or killed as heretics.
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