Giants of Science

Krull presents another top-notch scientific biography in the outstanding Giants of Science series. As in previous series entries, this offering manages to take a wildly complex subject-atomic physics-and render it comprehensible to the child listener, emphasizing the legacy Curie left behind. Curie's personal life-her unusual (for the times) partnership with her husband, her frustration with the limitations imposed on her because of her sex, her difficulty balancing work and family-receives admiring, but frank consideration. Listeners will emerge from this account with a new appreciation for both the scientific and social advances made by Curie, whose towering achievements justly earn her a place among the "Giants."

Albert Einstein: his name has become a synonym for genius. His wild case of bedhead and playful sense of humor made him a media superstar-the first, maybe only, scientist-celebrity. He wasn't much for lab work-in fact he had a tendency to blow up experiments. What he liked to do was think-not in words, but in "thought experiments." What was the result of all his thinking? Nothing less than the overturning of Newtonian physics. Once again, Kathleen Krull delivers a witty and astute look at one of the true Giants of Science, and the turbulent times in which he lived.

All his life, Charles Darwin hated controversy. Yet he takes his place among the Giants of Science for what remains an immensely controversial subject: the theory of evolution. Darwin began piecing together his explanation for how all living things change or adapt during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. But it took him twenty years to go public, for fear of the backlash his theory would cause. Once again, Kathleen Krull delivers a witty and astute picture of one of history's greatest scientists.

Sure, almost all kids know Benjamin Franklin as one of America's Founding Fathers, a man with a hand in both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. And they may even have some vague idea that he once flew a kite during a lightning storm. What Kathleen Krull sets out to do in this very different biography is show Ben Franklin as the "natural philosopher" (the term for scientists back in the 1700s), whose experiments led to important discoveries about the nature of electricity-including his famous demonstration that electricity and lightning were one and the same. As always, this much-lauded series presents a true Giant of Science in a juicily anecdotal way. This is social history at its best ... who knew that Franklin became such a megastar that Paris shops sold Ben dolls, Ben ashtrays, and even Ben wallpaper?

Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are mind-boggling evidence of a fifteenth-century scientific genius standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his ideas on observation and experimentation. This book will change children's ideas of who Leonardo was and what it means to be a scientist.

Kathleen Krull's biographies for young readers have received accolades from publications such as Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal, and here she profiles Sir Isaac Newton-the father of calculus and the man who pioneered studies of gravity What was Isaac Newton like? Secretive, vindictive, withdrawn, obsessive, and, oh, yes, brilliant. His imagination was so large that, just "by thinking on it," he invented calculus and figured out the scientific explanation of gravity. Yet Newton was so small-minded that he set out to destroy other scientists who dared question his findings. This compelling portrait of Newton, contradictions and all, places him against the backdrop of 17th-century England, a time of plague, the Great Fire of London, and two revolutions. Krull details Newton's lonely childhood, his education, and his sometimes tumultuous relationship with contemporaries in this captivating and concise look at one of history's greatest geniuses.

This book explores the world of Sigmund Freud, who, making it into the author's highly popular series due to his creation of a brand-new branch of medicine called psychoanalysis, introduced the world to such controversial theories as Oedipal complexes, the id, and the ego.