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Friday 14 October 2011

Review: Discover the Extreme World Encyclopedia


I count myself as lucky that I have an 8 year old boy who likes to read, extra lucky that he loves to read all types of material.  When I saw the new encyclopedia from the Discovery Channel and Miles Kelly was up for review, I just knew that JJ would adore it but actually my expectations were smashed, this is a really fantastic book for people of all ages, not just kids. In fact the other night dh sat there and looked through it for a good hour and deemed that it would be useful to him in his capacity as a Cub Leader.

The book is just slightly larger than A4 in size, is hard-backed and has good quality glossy pages.  It has been built to last. 

It is absolutely packed with snippets of information.  There are six distinct sections to the book - Active Earth, Awesome Animals, Incredible Science, Ultimate Machines, Super Humans and History Revealed. Each of these six reference areas are then broken into smaller chunks with an easy to find index.  For example within the Active Earth section you could choose to learn about space, deep-sea, freaky weather, volcano's and much more - there is a great diversity to the book.

Each double page spread focuses on a different area and the photos and graphics are phenomenal, the information is presented in a fun way with different text types, slants and all in a snippet format, so there is no great long lengths of reading necessary.  I am pretty sure JJ will view this book as fun reading rather than educational when I give it to him as part of his Christmas presents.  Win:win for me a s parent, something he wants to read but that actually teaches him something as well.


Some snippets from inside the book -
  • At its top speed, the F22 Raptor could fly from New York City to Miami in less than 40 minutes.
  • In 2010, a quake in Chile was so powerful that it literally moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 ft to the west.
  • The Suzuki Hayabusa can go from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.7 seconds.
  • One medieval remedy for the plague was to drink a glass of your own urine twice a day.
  • Ants can lift up to 50 times more than their own body weight.
  • In parts of the Antarctic, the Sun remains below the horizon for 105 days during winter, leaving the land in near total darkness.
  • The language of Silbo, from the Canary Islands, uses penetrating whistles that can be heard over long distances.
  • Arica in the Chilean Atacama Desert experienced less than 0.03 in of rain during one 59-year period.
  • Kingda Ka rollercoaster’s 418 ft drop is the biggest in the world.
  • Greedy Romans sometimes made themselves sick in order to be able to eat more.
Discover the Extreme World retails for £17.99 and is available in all good book shops such as WH Smiths and Waterstones but actually I found a super bargain on Amazon with it selling new copies for £9.17, including free postage.  How can you possibly go wrong at that price? I would highly recommend this as a Christmas gift for your Key stage 2 child.






Disclosure:  This is a review post, I received the book free of charge for the purposes of this review. I have not been instructed what to write and I remain honest.

1 comment:

  1. I got one of these the other day, no paperwork, nothing, no idea who from or what for...wonder if it was for review, certainly a beautiful book

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comment, I will respond real soon. Mich x