Human Body Theater
A Non-Fiction Revue
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to the Human Body Theater, where your master of ceremonies is going to lead you through a theatrical revue of each and every biological system of the human body! Starting out as a skeleton, the MC puts on a new layer of her costume (her body) with each "act." By turns goofy and intensely informative, the Human Body Theater is always accessible and always entertaining.
Maris Wicks is a biology nerd, and by the time you've read this book, you will be too! Harnessing her passion for science (and her background as a science educator for elementary and middle-school students), she has created a comics-format introduction to the human body that will make an expert of any reader -- young or old!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sheer volume of information Wicks (Primates) packs into this theatrical tour of the human body is mind-boggling. A cheery skeleton presides over the presentation of anatomical facts, hamming it up with corny jokes ("This may be the endocrine system, but it sure ain't the end-o-this show!"). The skeleton's sidekicks a finger who serves as a demonstration model, a friendly water molecule, and dozens of other biological entities prance on and off the stage on tiny legs. Early sections are somewhat slow going ("Golgi bodies package proteins into vesicles"), and the glossary, puzzlingly, tends to define familiar terms and omit the more technical ones. But Wicks's clearly drawn diagrams are easy to follow, and once readers beat their way through the alveoli and fibrinogen, they are free to consider elimination (with a guest appearance by some talking poop), reproduction (with low-key, inoffensive schematic drawings), and descriptions of the senses. The payoff comes at the very end, when the skeleton dons all the systems it has described and is revealed as the author. Brilliant adjunct reading for biology students and the terminally curious. Ages 10 14.
