Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?

January 4, 1993
This raffish primer on the meaning of ``big'' delivers a healthy, age-appropriate jolt to common assumptions about proportion and numbers. Beginning with a blue whale's flukes (``the `flipper' parts of the tail, all by themselves bigger than most of Earth's creatures''), Wells projects the relative sizes of Mount Everest (20 giant jars filled with 100 blue whales each), the earth, the un, the Milky Way, right out to the universe itself. Child-friendly watercolors show a bag of 100 planet earths dwarfed by the sun, and a crate of 100 ``sun-sized oranges'' inconsequential atop Antares, ``a red supergiant star.'' Somewhat understandably, Wells's pictures and analogies wither as he tackles the magnitude of galaxies and the universe. To prevent readers from choking on these perceptual mouthfuls, valuable introductory and final notes suggest a relatively concrete scale: for instance, counting to a thousand takes about 12 minutes, counting to a million takes 3 weeks at 10 hours per day, but counting to a billion takes a lifetime. Ages 6-11.

December 15, 1993
Ages 4-8. In a picture book designed to expand children's horizons, Wells begins by comparing the hugeness of the blue whale with the relative smallness of an elephant. Next, he shows that even a tall tower of giant jars full of blue whales would be quite small compared with the size of Mount Everest. Even a tower of Mount Everests "would be a mere WHISKER on the face of the Earth," and so on, as he goes on to compare the size of the earth with that of the sun, and the sun with the red supergiant star Antares, which in turn is much smaller than our galaxy, which is tiny compared with the universe. What "How Much Is a Million" did for big numbers, this picture book does for big sizes, making the inconceivable more imaginable through original, concrete images: the earth as one of a packet of marbles dwarfed by the sun, or the sun as one orange in a crate that looks insignificant beside Antares. Lively ink-and-watercolor illustrations brighten the pages of this accessible concept book. The title and cover will draw a large audience of small children fascinated by big things. ((Reviewed Dec. 15, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)