Scholastic Year in Sports 2019. Scholastic. $9.99.
Scholastic Book of World Records 2019. By Cynthia O’Brien,
Abigail Mitchell, Michael Bright, and Donald Sommerville. Scholastic. $12.99.
Every year, Scholastic gives young readers
fascinated by sports a chance to relive some of the top moments of the first
eight months of the year during the year to come. This means that Scholastic Year in Sports 2019 actually
covers only events through August 2018 – the same time period covered by each
annual release in the series, because, after all, it takes a while to put a
book together. For kids focused on the specific material covered in the book,
that time span will be just fine. The latest volume, like its predecessors, is
a slam-bang, picture-heavy, statistics-laden celebration of sports events and
sports figures of all kinds. And some of the pictures really are delightful, such
as the one of the U.S. women’s hockey team posing with its gold medals, on
which many of the team members are biting (a traditional method of determining
whether something is real gold). The usual lists of winners, suitably updated,
are all here: all 52 Super Bowls, college football rankings dating back to the
list’s start in 1936, World Series winners going all the way back to 1903, World
Cup winners back to 1930, and many more. There are also plenty of lists and
photos focusing on single-year honors, not only in professional and college
football, professional and college basketball, major league baseball, and other
top sports, but also in NASCAR, the 2018 Winter Olympics, and other fields. The
“Sudden Stars” section features players such as Saints running back Alvin
Kamara, a third-round draft choice who scored 14 touchdowns; Sung Hyun Park,
who won the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open during her first year on the LPGA Tour; and
NHL rookie Mathew Barzal, who had three five-point games for the Islanders –
the first time a first-year player had done that since 1919. The most-followed
sports get most of the pages here, but there is also room at the back of the
book for horse racing, including Justify’s Triple Crown performance; lacrosse;
and even bass fishing. Many young readers will be especially interested in the
choices of the year’s Top 10 Moments in Sports, trying to decide whether or not
they agree with the picks. No. 2 here is given as the upset of Virginia by the
University of Maryland—Baltimore County in the NCAA basketball tournament – the
first time ever that a 16th-seeded team had beaten a top seed. The No.
1 event given here was France’s victory in soccer’s World Cup – the biggest
sporting event in the world, although one that is still not as popular in the
United States as it is just about everywhere else. Scholastic Year in Sports 2019 is neither comprehensive nor
unarguable in what it shows and how it ranks events, but as a once-over-lightly
look at games and players that preoccupy sports fans throughout the year, it is
packed with facts and filled with photos that will help fans relive many
favorite moments.
There are sports elements in Scholastic Book of World Records 2019 as
well, but this book – although it looks very much like the one featuring sports
records, with its strong visual appeal and very short paragraphs of information
– is more of an overview of popular culture. The sports section is the last of
nine, the others being “Music Makers,” “Stage and Screen,” “On the Move,”
“Super Structures,” “High Tech,” “Amazing Animals,” “Incredible Earth,” and
“State Stats.” Some of these are not really tied to the year 2019 (or 2018) at
all: the koala is the world’s sleepiest animal in any year, the smelliest bird
continues to be the hoatzin, the Chihuahua is still the smallest dog, Alaska
still has the most pilots per capita of any state because of its size and the
remoteness of its settlements, Tennessee still makes the most MoonPies (all of
them, in fact), and the Sahara remains the world’s largest hot desert. These
facts, although interesting, are essentially filler items for a book aimed
primarily at young readers eager to find out about the pop-culture world. That
means they will more likely focus on finding out who the top-earning actress
was in 2017 (statistics for 2018 not yet being available): Emma Stone, with income
of $26 million. They may care about the top-grossing animated-film franchise: Despicable Me, whose films have taken in
more than $3.5 billion. They can read about the world’s fastest bumper car,
which can go 100 miles per hour – 20 times as fast as usual – and was created
for the TV show Top Gear. They can
find out that Saturday Night Live won
nine Emmy awards in 2017, the most ever for a TV show. They can find out about
the completion in 2017 of the massive transformation of an inner-city highway
overpass into a public walkway, a project that began in 1970. They can see the
largest sandcastle ever built, constructed in 2017 in Duisburg, Germany. There
is much more like this, some of it occurring as recently as publication
deadlines allow and some of it having been true for a very long time and
continuing to be true in 2018 and 2019. Scholastic
Book of World Records 2019 is, like previous entries in the series, a
hodgepodge of largely unrelated facts, and does not pretend to be anything more
than that. It is an assemblage of mostly trivial information that young readers
can enjoy looking through pretty much at random pretty much anytime. Parts of
the book will likely no longer be accurate by the time the year 2019 actually
comes around, and other records will surely be supplanted during the coming
year. But some of the featured material has stood the test of time for a very
long period indeed and will surely continue to show up in the book’s versions
for 2020 and beyond.
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