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Community service: Vetting my local library's children's space books

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

12-08-2015 19:31 CDT

Topics: product review, personal stories

Space fans, here is a valuable community service that you can perform in your neighborhood: Vet your school library's space book collections. My kids' elementary school librarian asked me to take a look at the nonfiction space book collection and cull any outdated or just wrong books. It took me an hour and a half to thumb through the six feet or so of shelf space that composed the planetary science section, and I plan to return to go through the astronomy, geology, Earth science, and planetary exploration sections. I wound up eliminating almost a third of the books, for which the librarian was grateful, and I promised to get back to her with a list of some recommended books on subject areas that are now thin. I was glad to have a volunteer task that I could do on my own schedule.

I only eliminated about five books for just being terrible. Age was the major factor in my decisions, but it was a complicated issue: the less actively a world is being explored, the older the books that are still good. The oldest book I found was first published in 1963 and revised in 1984, and I actually left that one on the shelf. Its last page is hopefully still inspiring to young children at the same time that it is heartbreaking to those of us who were children in 1984...or 1963.

This book was an example of an interesting trend: I found that books illustrated with art rather than photos tended to age better. I'm not saying that art necessarily makes for better illustration. I think art-illustrated books age better because illustrations are often used for general concepts that don't change as much over time -- things like orbital diagrams, or phases of the Moon or Venus. Often, concept art illustrates future events that still haven't happened or haven't been observed, like those lunar colonies, surfaces of worlds beyond Mars, or a major impact onto Earth.

The newest book that I eliminated for being out of date was a book on Mercury published in 2007. That was before MESSENGER arrived, and the quality of the Mariner 10 images that are included in children's books is pretty uniformly terrible. The Mars section of the shelf also fared very badly, because for some reason all the books I found there were quite old -- the newest mission mentioned by any of them was Pathfinder, and our understanding of Mars has changed a lot since 1997! Books about the Moon tended to be old, too, but have held up better with time. That being said, nearly all of the newer books about the Moon barely mentioned any of the missions launched since Clementine, and many stopped at Apollo!

As I worked through the shelves, I developed these cutoff dates for planet-specific books. Books older than these should be closely investigated to see if they still hold up. This list of dates would be different (more recent) for middle- and high-school level books, which should cover the topics in more detail so would need to be more up-to-date, particularly for Mars, asteroids, and Saturn. This list only applies to the planetary books in the Science section (Dewey 520s), not the space exploration books in the Engineering section (Dewey 629.4), which I have not gotten to yet.

  • Mercury: 2008 (before the first MESSENGER flyby)
  • Venus: 1993 (sigh. There's not been a lot since Magellan that you'd put into a young child's book)
  • Moon: Depends on the focus of the book.
  • Mars: 2005 (after Mars Exploration Rovers landed, but 2008 would capture Phoenix ice and amazing Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images)
  • Asteroids: 2000 (which gets you Ida, Gaspra, and Eros, as well as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact)
  • Jupiter: 2001 (which gets you most of the Galileo mission as well as better global Cassini images)
  • Saturn: 2005 (to capture the initial results from Cassini)
  • Uranus: 1987 (sigh. Books published after 2005 have the chance to include the news that Uranus is not as boring as it was when Voyager passed by, as witnessed by Earth-based telescopes.)
  • Neptune: 1990 (again, sigh. Books published after 2005 would hopefully include changes observed since Voyager, including the fact that the "dark spot" is not permanent.)
  • Comets: Depends on the focus of the book. Of the five comet books that were on the shelf, only one showed a photo taken by a spacecraft, and that was a Giotto image of Halley. All other pictures were Earth-based photos of pretty comet comas and tails. Books published after 2006 could have featured Stardust and Deep Impact images of comet nuclei, but the two on this particular library shelf didn't.
  • General solar system: Books for this age group after 2000 are usually okay; after 2006 is better because they should have a more detailed picture of the diversity of small bodies in the solar system.

Pluto presented an interesting challenge, because New Horizons will change everything, but those changes haven't propagated to books yet, of course. In the end, I eliminated none of the Pluto books on the shelf; I deferred that for a year. I also didn't eliminate any books just because they called Pluto a planet, because I don't think there's any harm at all in letting kids notice that its status changed over time. It was interesting to see how books published in different years handled Pluto's planetary status. Some from the early 2000s had sidebars talking about differing opinions on its status. More recent ones that included Pluto generally also included Ceres and Eris in solar system diagrams. I think it would be a fun library project for a strong elementary-school reader to take a stack of solar system books off the shelf, learn how to look at the publication date, sort them by date, and then read what each says about Pluto.

When I was done, I had eliminated nearly all of the library's books specifically about Mercury and Mars, and I wasn't particularly happy with the comets section for its lack of spacecraft images. So here is a list of books that I will recommend that the school librarian investigate for purchase, based on my past book reviews. Many of them are actually series of books that cover the entire solar system, so if your library is missing a different subset of planets, you can probably find replacements here.

General solar system books:

Book series:

  • Inside Outer Space (2014) includes 10 titles for very young elementary students. (I haven't reviewed this for the blog yet, but have copies on my to-be-reviewed shelf and I can recommend them.)
  • Astronaut Travel Guides (2012, but seems to have been reprinted in 2014) includes 8 titles for younger elementary students (my review here). I particularly liked their second-person approach -- you are exploring the planets.
  • The Universe Rocks! (2012) includes 4 titles for older elementary students, one of which (To the Planets and Beyond) is a particularly detailed and up-to-date general solar system book (my review here).
  • I really liked the Far-Out Guide to the Solar System series, which includes 12 titles for older elementary students, but it was published in 2010. It's really not out-of-date yet. It should hold up for a long time for everything except Mars, maybe the Moon, and, of course, the Icy Dwarf Planets. (My review here).
  • Based on past experience with the publisher, I predict that the 8-book Secrets of Planets series to be published this year will be very good, but hopefully I'll see review copies soon to verify that.

I have just gone through Amazon to find new nonfiction space series and have sent out a pile of emails requesting review copies of brand-new space books. I usually post my reviews in November; stay tuned!

 
See other posts from August 2015

 

Or read more blog entries about: product review, personal stories

Comments:

Mars or Bust: 08/13/2015 11:49 CDT

Emily, thank you for the reviews on appropriate children's books. I have two young children myself and struggle to find material that is age appropriate. Love the blog posts!

VoyagerFan: 08/13/2015 12:28 CDT

Please, whatever you do, do NOT discard H.A.Rey's "The Stars, A New Way to See Them" (any edition). I first read it in grade school in the late 50's. In the decades since, I never found a better guide to viewing the constellations. (Although not exactly "planetary science", it does lead to interest in space.) Besides, the same author did the Curious George books--and what is a scientist if not curious !

VoyagerFan: 08/13/2015 01:16 CDT

Ps. If the library does not have Rey's "The Stars", you might recommend that they get it.

Emily Lakdawalla: 08/13/2015 04:14 CDT

I haven't culled the astronomy section yet, but if they have that book I would leave it in place! It's on my own kids' bookshelf at home.

VoyagerFan: 08/13/2015 05:51 CDT

Good to hear, Emily. Also, as a relatively recent follower of your blog (and a newly-registered user), let me offer thanks for being the knowledgable, well-connected, enthusiastic planetary evangelist that you are. And, while I'm at it, thanks to Planetary Society as well. You all have done a lot of good work in many areas. It's hard to pick out a favorite, but the advocacy resulting in "Pale Blue Dot" and Carl Sagan's reflections on it will always stand out in my mind no matter how many years pass.

Roger: 08/13/2015 06:26 CDT

When traveling, either for short or long periods, I seldom leave H. A. Rey's, The Stars, behind. It was with me in 1987 off the coast of Belize for Halley's Comet and it's been with me in Guatemala for six years now. Some photostatted pages came with me for a year backpacking in South America in 1993-94, where we saw all the southern constellations not normally available to us Yankees. My copy has been wet and dried several times. It's warped, thoroughly dog-eared, and it's held together on by tape. It is the single ugliest book I own.... and I use it routinely. It will eventually return to the states with me. It won't be out of date until the North Star changes from Polaris to Vega. Don't leave home without it!

VoyagerFan: 08/14/2015 09:17 CDT

Roger, Thanks for your post, really enjoyed your book's adventures. And "It won't be out of date until the North Star changes from Polaris to Vega. Don't leave home without it!" is the best ! My copy will never catch up to yours (like...maybe...New Horizons will never catch Voyager?), but I do hope to get to the southern hemisphere ... some day....

Fred6502: 08/28/2015 12:16 CDT

PhD Astrophysicist and Lead Guitarist from Queen Dr. Brian May is co-author of "Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe - 2006". That book was interesting although I was disturbed to learn in a billion years the sun will be so much brighter it will boil the oceans away and game over for Earth.

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