Wired XS – Mega eroi della scienza
(Wired XS - Mega Heroes of Science) Book not yet available in English
Summary:
The true stories od extraordinary people and brilliant ideas that changed the world. When we think of science, we imagine brilliant men and women, spending their days in laboratories, among test tubes full of mysterious fluids and complex experiments. But it is not all that. Behind their inventions there are stories to be discovered and surprising adventures waiting to be told! The protagonists of this book are scientists such as Marie Curie, who discovered radioactivity and is the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes so far, or Jane Goodall, an ethologist who became friends with chimpanzees in Kenya to study their behaviour. Inventors such as Galileo Galilei, who designed and built the first telescope to watch the sky, and Archimedes of Syracuse, who more than two thousand years ago developed the lever, an ingenious system for moving very heavy objects. From DNA to the cure for malaria, from supernovas to nuclear energy: the journalists of Wired, Italy’s leading IT magazine, tell young people about the inventions and discoveries that have revolutionised the world, in a new series illustrated by Andrea Cavallini. [Publisher’s website]
Edited by: Centro MeTRa - Università di Bologna (Italy)
Comment:
WIRED XS – Mega-Heroes of Science is a pleasant and engaging book, an excellent read to steer young readers towards science. The biographical profiles are written in a fluent style, focusing on the human aspects of the women and men scientists covered, but avoiding hagiographies. The effort to include women is evident and noteworthy (such as the choice to start and end the book with a female profile), although not completely successful. In fact, out of 38 profiles, only 14 belong to women. However, the book rightly underlines the historical discrimination against women in the scientific field. There are also personalities who are usually not part of primary and secondary school curricula (such as Trotula de Ruggiero, mother of obstetrics). The masculine noun of the title (Mega heroes of science) is amended by a gender-neutral subtitle (Stories and inventions of incredible people) and by the illustration of the cover, with a superhero and a superheroine. Some of the people featured are Jewish or related to Jews, and this ancestry is not only emphasised, but there are also explicit condemnations against the racial policies of Nazism and Fascism. Unfortunately, only one person featured is not originally from Europe or North America: Chinese Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou. With this book, the journalists of Wired, the most important Italian magazine in the field of IT, propose an enjoyable collection of biographies, which can help young readers to become passionate about science and its practical aspects (even if the style is sometimes a bit patronising and didactic).