Star Wars: Tag & Bink were here
Fun summary of the Star Wars series from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Three stars.
Inside Delta Force: the story of America’s elite counterterrorist unit, Haney (Y)
How Eric Haney got selected and trained to be in one of the founding members of Delta Force: very cool overcoming high odds and how they got trained by the best of the best in a wide variety of fields (including cat burglars!). This is the younger readers version of the book of the same name published in ’02. Fun read. Three stars.
Team Moon: how 400,000 people landed Apollo 11 on the moon, Thimmesh (Y)
This won some awards, but the text is really a bit… overdramatic? Maybe theatrical is the word, but the stories of the huge technical backing for the Apollo project really shine through, and the author makes excellent use of direct quotes and photographs. Three stars.
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! : pageantry and patriotism in Cold-War America / Richard M. Fried.
The rise (and fall) of I am an American Day, Communist takeovers of Mossinee WI, and Armed Forces Day parade. A very interesting look at a very particular sort of political theater in 1950s USA. And it turns out that very little has changed: much of it was in response to low voter turnout! Well, and fear of unions. Three stars.
Animals Aloft: photographs from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum / Allan Janus.
All of the info and photos are from the archives, some with only caption-type information available, and some with only a thin connection to flying. The pictures are really cool though. I really liked the flying cats. Two stars.
Prom Dates from Hell, Clement-Moore (Y)
Maggie Quinn’s second sight (and second smell!) has her detecting an evil force when “accidents” happen to her high-school classmates. Who’s behind the Evil taking out someone’s grudges? Really well structured and fun mystery with supernatural center. Four stars.
Snatched, Hautman and Logue (Y)
One of those books that wasn’t that great for me, but I could recognize its greatness for other readers: middle school readers and teens with a low reading ability. Vocab not too high, very short chapters, not too much character development or setting detail to overwhelm the action that kept moving along, and no swears to upset the teachers. Three stars for being the best it could be.
Life as we knew it, Pfeffer (Y)
So a comet hits the moon, knocks its orbit askew, and global ecological disaster ensues. The survival (barely) of a 16 year old girl’s family is told through her diary. Gripping, yes, and you feel guilty that you can go and get a snack while her family is nearly starving, living off the last of the canned goods. But here’s what detracted from the whole experience: the science seemed fairly shaky (Why exactly would a changed lunar orbit make lots of volcanoes erupt? Why would it cause electrical storms?) and the family seemed terribly naive about survival, even for a suburban family (They run out of yeast. Do none of them know how yeast works? They seem to think they need to boil the snow they melt for water for safety’s sake. Why? It doesn’t occur to them to filter the volcanic-dust filled melted snow, or let the dust settle out, or distill the water. They make no attempt to find wild foods. They make no attempt to eat any of the stockpiled cat food. Or the cat. Any book about actual historical famines is filled with the inventive and desperate measures people who are actually starving will take. This family didn’t try very hard.). So four stars for a hard-to-put-down book, but it loses points on detail.