{"id":328,"date":"2009-01-06T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbicmsblog.reedbusiness.com\/elogic_660000266\/2009\/01\/06\/your-favorite-non-fiction-answering-what\/"},"modified":"2009-01-06T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T08:10:00","slug":"your-favorite-non-fiction-answering-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=328","title":{"rendered":"Your Favorite Non-Fiction Answering "WHAT?""},"content":{"rendered":"

This is "Your Favorite Non-Fiction Week" here at ShelfTalker. Yesterday<\/a> I asked you to tell the world what non-fiction books answering the question "WHO?" (i.e. biographies) are on your list of favorites. Today, I’m inviting you to tell the world about your favorite non-fiction books that answer the question "WHAT?" What is this, what is that, what are we made of, what are we doing, what is is all about? Tell me WHAT you are thinking!<\/p>\n

Just to remind you of the themes still remaining this week (in case you’ve forgotten), tomorrow (Wednesday) = WHEN? Thursday = WHERE? Friday = HOW? Saturday = WHATEVER! (A non-fiction free-for-all.) And Sunday is HOLE DAY, when you tell the publishing world (plus the rest of us) what non-fiction holes need filling.<\/p>\n

Now back to today’s topic: "WHAT?" Again, I’ll kick off the discussion with two "WHAT?" favorites of my own:<\/p>\n

Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women<\/a><\/em> by Catherine Thimmesh, illustrated by Melissa Sweet (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
This book straddles both WHO and WHAT and HOW, but it’s the "WHAT" — the inventions — that make this book so interesting. From things as seemingly mundane as chocolate chip cookies and Wite-Out to the "space bumpers" that make NASA’s work a lot safer, we learn how a number of important inventions and the girls and women who created them.<\/p>\n

How Big Is It? A Big Book All About Bigness<\/em><\/a> by Ben Hillman (Scholastic, 2007)
My inarticulate six-word review of this book is this: "This book is so freakin’ cool." Yes, the title contains the word "HOW" but it qualifies for "WHAT" because its photocomposite illustrations allows readers to better conceptualize the idea of size, thereby answering for them the question, "What would X actually look like?" Imagine that X is a tsunami, for example. If I tell you a tsunami can be 1,720 feet high, you might look at me blankly. But if I show you the photo in this book in which a 1,720-foot tsunami towers over a city of tall buildings, you’ll get the idea. And wait’ll you see how easy it would be for a 12-foot-tall polar bear to sink a basket! So cool!<\/p>\n

Okay, those are my "WHAT?" books for today. What are yours?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is “Your Favorite Non-Fiction Week” here at ShelfTalker. Yesterday I asked you to tell the world what non-fiction books answering the question “WHO?” (i.e. biographies) are on your list of favorites. Today, I’m inviting you to tell the world about your favorite non-fiction books that answer the question “WHAT?” What is this, what is that, what are we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}