Fiery Brown

A Volcano Beneath the Snow: John Brown's War Against Slavery by Albert Marrin
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2014]
244 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

Like many of the history non-fiction books published with the high school audience in mind, this book has an appealing layout with lots of great photos, reproductions, etc.  It makes for a readable history.  I also like that the length of these non-fiction books is long enough for a substantive treatment of the topic, but not so exhaustive as to be daunting.

I read this book because I really wanted to learn more about John Brown and his passionate fight against slavery in the US and his willingness to die for the cause. 

Marrin does a good job describing the life of Brown and the back drop of slavery - especially the way in which slavers decided that they had to expand slavery in the US to keep their power.  He also illuminates the way in which Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry pushed the coming Civil War even closer.  But I think the biggest weakness is that Marrin tries to highlight the radical and "terrorist" nature of John Brown's actions (for example his execution of unarmed prisoners in Kansas) without fully illuminating the absolute horrors and terrorism of the slave labor system.  Having read The Half Has Never Been Told, I am aware that the cotton-slavery system that evolved after 1820 was an even more vicious, brutal and horrid system of torture/slavery that what already existed before 1820.  I think it is a good thing that Marrin wants students to really wrestle with the complexities of when or if illegal, violent action is acceptable.  But to do that you have to really be honest about the system that that action was targeting - and I don't think Marrin succeeded in that.

I would still recommend the book since it is a thorough treatment of Brown's life and conveys a lot of the dynamics of the time.     

Super Tiny, Super Big

Smash! : Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe with the Large Hadron Collider by Sara Latta
Minneapolis : Graphic Universe, [2017]
72 p. : chiefly ill. ; 24 cm.

This little comic book is more of an hors d'oeuvre than an entree, but there's nothing wrong with that.  Weighing in at a mere 72 pages, and managing to convey the amazing science of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) without getting bogged down in its wild complexities, Latta has managed to create a work that should whet the reader's appetite to know more.   It did mine!

Though the story-line is a bit corny (a little youngish for high school) the science is admirable.  In one part of the book, in the space of just a couple pages she manages to cover most of the basics of the standard model: the six "flavors" of quarks,  six kinds of leptons, the four fundamental forces and the bosons associated with them - and, of course, the most famous triumph of the LHC, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

It's nice to have a brief, very accessible book to recommend to a student who is not deep into advanced science, and yet wants to know about particle physics.  If you know such a student, Smash! might be just what they need.

A Short and Wild Adventure

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
New York : A Tom Doherty Associates book, 2015.
90 p. ; 20 cm.

Yes, that is 90 p. as in only ninety pages!  But short can be sweet and this little book is captivating.  It's a wildly imaginative science fiction novella that bridges a non-industrial village tribe with an off planet university where the most brilliant  minds of the galaxy go to study.

It fuses a simple coming of age-journey (albeit to a distant planet!) with a shocking massacre and tense intergalactic diplomacy.

I enjoyed it, and it's brevity was refreshing. My hope is that a short book like this might be inviting to those students intimidated by the heftier science fiction/fantasy books that are so common.  I think once tempted, a reader will want more of the same, and with Okorafor there are many more works to sample.