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Book Review: The Goose Man
Filed under: That's Entertainment, Books for Kids
Kids will adore the life story of this scientist. Credit: Houghton-Mifflin.
The Goose Man: The Story of Konrad Lorenz by Elaine Greenstein (Clarion Books, $16)
Konrad Lorenz is not a household name. But you don't need to know a stitch about the Austrian zoologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology in order to enjoy Elaine Greenstein's picture book biography of him. The bird-obsessed scientist comes off as such a cuddly, likable eccentric that kids reading about him will probably fall in love with him as some sort of Dream Grandpa.
The book chronicles Lorenz's sweetly over-the-top relationship with birds and animals over the course of his life. As a child, he played mother to a newborn duckling that followed him everywhere. His parents let him keep a pet monkey that constantly stole shiny things from houseguests. Eventually, as an adult, he raised a goose named Martina as part of his family, even allowing it to sleep in his bedroom. The relationship between Lorenz and Martina is adorable: The bird teaches her human papa how to speak Goose, and she even brings home a gander mate -- straight into Lorenz's house. All of this is depicted through Greenstein's childlike illustrations, which have a folk art quality to them that suits the tale well.
Some kids may be wary, assuming a book about a scientist to be boring or complicated, but The Goose Man is far from either. If anything, the book will end up inspiring more than a few junior ornithologists.
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
2-28-2010 @ 7:54PM
linda said...FREE CHILDRENS BOOKS ONLINE AT www.lindavette.com
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