I received an electronic ARC from Quarto Publishing Group through NetGalley.
Blanchard presents brief bios of 40 scientists throughout history. She begins with Thales in the 4th century BC and finishes with de Grasse Tyson in current times. Both male and female scientists are included and various disciplines are covered.
Text boxes are used to present information about their life and work as well as other activities taking place while they lived.
This book is designed for elementary level readers. The simple style of presenting small portions of information in separate blocks will draw them in. The illustrations are colorful and help the reader understand about each person.
A great starting place to encourage further reading and research on specific scientists.

Great artwork. Like how there’s 40 people’s pictures on the index page. A fun book to read.

Nathan, age 8

Men, women, and minorities are represented in this volume of historic and present day contributors to science. From Thales to Mary Anning to Neil deGrasse Tyson and too many more to name. Informational text is featured in small digestible chunks and interesting factiods, providing an addictive format that will have transitional readers coming back to this volume again and again. Page sized, cartoon-like illustrations feature each scientist, while small scale versions are also included in the table of contents for a quick look.

This is a children's book that gives a very brief overview of / introduction to 40 important scientists from the past 2,000+ years. Each scientist gets a two page spread that looks roughly like this:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/e98d63e7b18ee6cf14c697049fa63811/tumblr_pmpueszFTv1rw8qd0o1_540.png

It was probably a little bit simplistic for me as an adult reader as I had heard of most [but not all!] of these scientists either from school or from other books like this. I think it would be a fun and visually interesting book to get younger readers interested in science though.

My one complaint would be that there were not a lot of women or people of color featured. I understand that a lot of women in particular have been kept out of or erased from science over the years, and I did like the women she included, but I felt like maybe she could have dug a bit deeper or maybe featured a few more modern women scientists. Also there was a point where she basically said 'there was a large portion of history where major scientific advancements were made by Arab or Indian scientists' and then featured like 2 or 3 of them before going to back to largely white European men. I didn't detract any stars from my rating because of this, but I was hoping that there would maybe be a few more diverse or unknown scientists represented. Although I guess for a children's book the thought might have been to keep it more mainstream.

A very clever. One of a number of book titles in a series to show the who’s who or the world’s best.
Super Scientists is a good place to start and to reflect on the potential of such a series. For each scientist listed chronologically we get a potted history of their life and achievements. This is done with inspiring artwork and cartoon figures to capture the very essence of these people and their claim to fame. They are reduced in the process to sound bites and snippets easy to digest and remember the facts.
Each page could be contracted to a double-sided playing card and we could be playing top trumps with the movers and shakers of scientific nobility.
It is a fun addition to any library and will teach anyone who reads it some basic facts that will stick. The hope would be it that it could lead the curious mind to search further. The book itself does not help in this process; I guess the internet is the now expected jumping off place. However, a resume of biographies or books around their subjects might have helped direct to less able student.
This perhaps classified the book as a work of fun more than a serious scientific guide but either way it it promotes interests and shares rich facts it has begun to serve both purposes.

We really enjoyed this book, I had thought it would only interest my older children 10 & 8 but in fact we all found the information well presented and fun to read so everyone joined in. The illustrations are very funky and clear so my other kids were also keen to hear about these amazing and groundbreaking scientists. I also learnt quite a few things, which means the book gets my thumbs up too.

4★
“Wonder, Question, Discover”

This children’s picture book of scientists begins with Thales from about 600 B.C. in Ancient Greece to Neil deGrasse Tyson today. Each entry is colourful, with a large cartoon of a scientist, surrounded by small illustrations and text boxes of facts and remarks.

It’s a great idea, and the artwork is appealing. The text is broken up into bite-sized chunks that make it easy to read and remember. Perfect for readers with a short attention span.

I gather this has been translated from the French, and my preview copy shows Hervé Guilleminot and Jérôme Masi as author and illustrator. I don’t know where Anne Blanchard fits in.

The translation mostly seems fine, but there are a lot of misspellings and typographical errors. The text boxes in the PDF version I have show texts in varying fonts and styles, sometimes to make things stand out, but sometimes to fit in more text than the box will comfortably contain. In the latter cases, words are running together and hard to read.

If you’ve ever fooled around with fonts on a computer, you will see some “narrow” styles that compress letters and squeeze in more words. This book is designed for children and young readers – people who need all the help they can get to interpret marks on a page and convert them to words and then to thoughts in their minds. Anything that hinders that process needs to be fixed.

As you can see, the titles on each page are very pretty, but it’s a stylised cursive (running) writing rather than straight printing, so the S is just one more hurdle for a very young child or a slow reader.

As I’ve said, mine is a preview copy, and I hope the editors and publishers correct the errors. I have mentioned them here, because the pages I'm sharing below may include some, and you might wonder why I like the book, which I do. . . mostly.

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Thales, c.600 B.C., Ancient Greece and Turkey, The first scientist

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Archimedes, 297-212 B.C., Syracuse (now Italy), The first engineer

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Avicenna, 980-1037, Iran, The good doctor

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642, Italy, The stargazer

My Goodreads review includes an illustration captioned:
Neil deGrasse Tyson, NY USA, The enthusiast!

Here’s the list of the scientists, including some whose names I didn’t know (but probably should), and many who are household names today, like Aristotle, Darwin, and Einstein (who is pictured sticking his tongue out, which he was famous for doing in photos).

1. Thales
2. Pythagoras
3. Aristotle
4. Euclid
5. Archimedes
6. Zhang Heng
7. Hypatia of Alexandria
8. Brahmagupta
9. Avicenna
10. Alhazen
11. Roger Bacon
12. Nicolaus Copernicus
13. Galileo Galilei
14. Johannes Kepler
15. Isaac Newton
16. William Harvey
17. René Descartes
18. Antoine Lavoisier
19. Mary Anning
20. Michael Faraday
21. James Clerk Maxwell
22. Charles Darwin
23. Gregor Mendel
24. Louis Pasteur
25. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev
26. Ada Lovelace
27. David Hilbert
28. Marie Curie
29. Ernest Rutherford
30. Albert Einstein
31. Niels Bohr
32. Alfred Wegener
33. Alan Turing
34. Rosalind Franklin
35. HPG and the Human Genome
36. Vera Rubin
37. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
38. Tim Berners-Lee
39. Stephen Hawking
40. Neil Degrasse Tyson

Thanks, of course, to NetGalley and Quarto Books / Wide Eyed Editions, for the preview copy of what I hope will be a good finished product.
#SuperScientists #NetGalley