The Man Who Made Time Travel - Hardcover

Kathryn Lasky’s honors and awards include the Washington Post Children’s Book Award for her contribution to nonfiction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kevin Hawkes has illustrated many award-winning picture books, including The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, also by Kathryn Lasky, a School Library Journal Best Book. He lives in Gorham, Maine.

*Starred Review* Gr. 3-5. Executed in an oversize format, which allows plenty of space for Hawkes' dramatic pictures, this tells the story of John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clock maker who solved the problem of tracking longitude in shipboard navigation. The book begins with a shipwreck, dramatizing the fact that the longitude puzzle was not just a matter of academic or economic importance but a life-and-death question for those who sailed the seas. After introducing some of the more absurd solutions proposed for tracking longitude, the discussion turns to young John Harrison, who was 21 when the Longitude Prize was offered by the British Parliament. Lasky shows how, over the next half-century, Harrison worked to design and perfect a timepiece that would earn the prize. Not every child will understand the technical challenge discussed; however, the text makes absorbing reading both for its sidelights on history and for the personal drama portrayed. Harrison emerges as an admirable, if idiosyncratic, individual whose story is well worth telling. Atmospherically lit and richly colored, Hawkes' large-scale paintings are often striking in their overall effects and intriguing in their details. Unexpected elements of humor in both the historical narrative and the illustrations lighten what could have been a dry, weighty treatment in other hands. Teachers looking for books for units on inventors will find this a memorable choice for reading aloud. Carolyn Phelan
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