Cool Stuff You Need to Know

December 1, 2011

Gr 5-7-These two volumes pack a lot of facts into short page-counts but include quite a few problems as well. Much of the information in I Wish I Knew That is too basic or commonly known to entertain or impress, and is so superficial that it doesn't serve to educate. Brevity also breeds understatements, incomplete explanations, and sloppy summarizations. President Kennedy gets five sentences, and the last one is this: "However, on November 22, 1963, he was shot by a man named Lee Harvey Oswald while riding through Dallas, Texas, in an open-topped car." Write...Every Time has the potential for greater usefulness, but errors render it less than reliable. For instance, in the phrase "many people," "many" is mislabeled as an indefinite pronoun. In the sentence "The burglar goes up," the adverb is said to answer how rather than where. Needed examples are absent, and others, such as "My top could be being crumpled up since it's in a suitcase," are poorly written. The risks are many in serving up a lot of material in short order, and here they do not pay off.-Alyson Low, Fayetteville Public Library, AR

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