Hand this to a bored ten-year-old and time how long it takes before they start reading bits of it out loud to you.
Australia declared war on emus and lost. In 1958 China declared war on sparrows and starved itself doing it. A street sweeper in Detroit caught a falling baby, and a year later caught another one.
Amazing Stories for Smart Kids is nearly 400 true stories like that, none longer than a paragraph or two, every one of them strange enough to be worth interrupting you for. There is no order you have to follow and nothing to finish. You open it, you find something, you tell somebody.
Twenty-one chapters, and not a dull one
- The Universe, Space, Ocean - rogue planets with no sun, the deep-sea twilight zone, a volcano on Mars three times the height of Everest
- History and Lost Civilizations - Pompeii with the bread still in the ovens, Gobekli Tepe older than Stonehenge, the Moai that were walked into place
- Historical Weird Decisions - the warship Vasa that sank after 1,300 metres, an Olympic marathon won on rat poison, Caligula and his consul horse
- Weird and Strange Laws - a tax on beards, no reincarnation without a permit, and a Swiss rule that a guinea pig may never live alone
- Animal Tactics and Botanic - the pistol shrimp that stuns prey with a shockwave, the mimic octopus, a water lily strong enough to hold a child
- The Power of Coincidence and Unsolved Mysteries - the novel that sank the Titanic fourteen years early, the Voynich Manuscript, the Mary Celeste
- Plus Inventions, Maths, Weather, Bizarre Mythology, Wonders of the Human Body, Brain, Eccentric Geniuses, Underdog Triumphs and Bizarre Natural Phenomena
Built to be picked up and put down
6 x 9 inches, 160 pages, and 21 full-page black and white illustrations, one opening every chapter. Every fact in this edition has been checked; the ones that did not survive were replaced with better ones.
Perfect for
- A gift for a curious 8 to 12 year old, boy or girl, that will not be abandoned by Tuesday
- Classroom libraries and silent-reading shelves, grades 3 to 6
- Road trips, flights, campsites and rainy holiday afternoons
- Grandparents who want to hand over something better than another toy
- Children who would honestly rather have facts than a story
Get ready to be amazed.
