Fly Guy Presents: Why, Fly Guy? A
BIG Question & Answer Book. By Tedd Arnold. Scholastic. $14.99.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Out
of This World Edition 2018. Scholastic. $16.99.
Although the Internet has
made more information available to more people than ever before, there are a
lot of inconveniences in using it – not the least of which is that the sheer
volume of material can be overwhelming, and the results of searches for facts
do not always produce understandable or age-appropriate responses. Go to Google
and search “why do balloons float,” for instance, and you will get 557,000
results in a fraction of a second – or enter “why do feet smell” and you will
get 4,790,000 results. The material will be accurate, comprehensive,
scientifically literate, and potentially very confusing, especially to younger
Internet users. Besides, it will be presented as words, and in our hyper-visual
age, many people find it easier to absorb information with a visual component.
A touch of entertainment helps, too. The result is that a known and amusing
character such as Tedd Arnold’s Fly Guy can be a very effective spokesperson,
or spokesfly, for a cross-section of material in which many young readers are
likely to be interested. The Fly Guy
Presents series has been using the big-eyed fly this way for some time,
with focuses on topics such as weather, sharks, castles, dinosaurs and,
unsurprisingly, insects. Now Fly Guy and Buzz, the boy who keeps Fly Guy as a
pet, explore a wider variety of concepts in an oversize hardcover book that is
more visually striking and will likely be much more durable than the small-size
paperbacks previously released. Fly Guy
Presents: Why, Fly Guy? A BIG Question & Answer Book actually covers
some of the same material that the smaller books do, but there is plenty new
here as well, and each of the book’s four sections includes a science project
and an end-of-section activity for kids to do. The why-balloons-float question,
for example, gets an explanation both of why helium-filled ones rise in the air
and why ones that you blow into do not. And the why-feet-smell question is
explained by discussing bacteria that feed on human sweat and the way closed
shoes trap the resulting odor. Actually, the bacteria issue is a weakness in
the book, since the word “bacteria” is used properly as a plural (the singular
is bacterium) some of the time – but not all the time, as in a comment that
“bacteria in your stomach breaks [sic]
down food to make gas.” Still, this is a fairly minor matter in a book whose
bright and amusing illustrations and simple but accurate explanations of
everyday phenomena make it fun to dip into to learn a variety of things. The
book’s sections deal with the human body, “bees and other animals,” plants and
nature, and miscellany – ranging from why wheels are round to why stop signs
have eight sides. This last section has a particularly intriguing science
project: make glue from milk. But the whole book contains interesting
information, including some that even parents may find surprising: “No one
knows for sure exactly why people sleep.” Buzz makes comments throughout the
book, and “If Fly Guy Could Talk” panels let Fly Guy take part in the
narration, too. Fly Guy Presents: Why,
Fly Guy? A BIG Question & Answer Book is scarcely comprehensive, but
for the topics it does cover, it is a very enjoyable way to learn a variety of
basic scientific facts. And kids who want to go beyond the book’s material can,
of course, always turn to the Internet.
One thing the Internet does
not do particularly well is allow random searches for items of interest: focused
searches for specific material are its strength. So kids (and adults) who are simply
interested in learning some strange things, without any particular organization
or purpose, can still enjoy the Believe
It or Not books that continue the oddity-gathering traditions of Robert
Ripley (1890-1949). A great deal of the material that Ripley himself collected and
showed in newspaper panels would no longer be allowable today – it would be
considered culturally insensitive and politically incorrect. So the nature of Believe It or Not has changed quite a
bit, and books such as Ripley’s Believe
It or Not! Out of This World Edition 2018 now include many entries focusing
on people and organizations that want
to be considered outré and bizarre. The 2018 book is divided into sections
called “Peculiar Planet,” “Unreal Animals,” “Larger Than Life,” and “Trending
Stories.” The first includes items such as a house decorated with over a
million shells and an Australian tourist attraction that lets visitors get
close to dangerous saltwater crocodiles. The second contains photos of a pet
emu and a pet alpaca, a pink grasshopper, and a cat that likes to ride a
surfboard. The third section has lots of pay-attention-to-me elements, such as
a two-page spread on singer Taylor Swift and a look at a Russian barber who
gives haircuts in extreme locations. The fourth part of the book is also full of
attention-seeking, including an artist who makes portraits from hair and one
who makes them from food, a collector of The
Simpsons memorabilia, and an ice-cream shop that makes black ice cream that
includes activated charcoal. Because of the preponderance of attention-seekers
in the new Believe It or Not
collections, including the 2018 book, these are (+++) volumes that contain much
less of the genuinely unusual and unexpected material than older Believe It or Not books included. The
books have largely become showcases for people with products to sell (such as
California plant breeders who have created grapes that taste like cotton candy)
or ones seeking to advance a cause (such as a Paralympic athlete who was born
without legs). Therefore, these volumes are no longer collections of real
oddities (although the Believe It or Not
building in Niagara Falls, Ontario, is still called the “Odditorium”) but are
largely means for commercial establishments and nonprofit causes to get their
messages out in a venue that goes beyond traditional advertising. There is
nothing particularly wrong with this, but it does make the Believe It or Not books less intriguing – especially at a time when
there is such a surfeit of advertising, clickbait and look-at-me pictures and
videos competing for people’s time online.
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