Book reviews - Two books for kids about science

September 11, 2025

It was Aristotle (not St Ignatius Loyola) who first said "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man", and this applies to children learning about science. Science is the greatest intellectual achievement of humanity and its job is to show us what is true. Having kids learn about science and what it does goes a long way towards inoculating them from falling into superstition and nonsense. And there's a lot of both things about. Just spend ten minutes on Facebook and someone will tell you that the world is flat, that the Earth is 6,000 years old (actually it's about 4.5 billion), that the radiation from mobile phones can cause cancer, that horse worming paste can cure COVID, that nobody has ever been to the Moon, that no planes crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001 (look at the date that this is being published) and any number of other things that have no basis in reality. Teaching children how to evaluate these claims can give them good protection against being deceived. And inquiring minds are the best sort of minds to have.

"Am I Made of Stardust?" by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock
This review was originally published here in March 2025. As the second book below addresses the same issues the reviews have been combined.

We are made of star-stuff. Carl Sagan

It looks like the great Carl Sagan answered the question in the title, but this book answers many more questions than that. In fact it answers 111 questions of the type that kids ask every day.

The place to start with this book is to look at the Contents page to see the range of questions being addressed, and these are just questions about space - there are countless other scientific questions, but you have to start somewhere.

None of the answers talk down to the audience, even when the subject is somewhat technical, and the explanations and answers are in plain, understandable language. You don't have to read this book from the first page onwards - the idea is to jump in anywhere to find the answer you are looking for.

The book was the winner of the 2023 Royal Society Young People's Book Prize, shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards and chosen in 2024 for the Blue Peter Book Club.

Oberon Library has a copy.

About the Author

From the web site of Imperial College, London: "Space scientist. Science communicator. Business founder and BBC presenter. Dame Margaret (Maggie) Aderin-Pocock is reaching for the stars - literally and metaphorically. She is widely recognised as a leader in her field and for her extensive efforts to engage the public with science." You can see a lot more here.

"100 Things to Know About Science" by Alex Frith, Minna Lacey, Jerome Martin and Jonathon Melmoth

Obviously there's a lot more than 100 things to know, but you have to start somewhere. There's no table of contents in the book, just a hundred pages with each explaining something. Randomly opening the book a few times gave "11 The moon doesn't shine, it reflects light from the sun", "41 Everything you can see is made up of billions upon billions of atoms", "66 Whales have finger bones even though they don't have fingers" and "19 The Earth's surface is mostly water". You might think that these sorts of facts are common knowledge, but as mentioned above a brief immersion in social media will soon reveal that like "common sense", common knowledge isn't that common.

The explanations offered on each page are clear and illustrated with pictures to make the points clearer. At the back of the book there's a very useful glossary of the words and terms used in the book, and there's no shying away from using the correct scientific name for anything (the biggest moth in the world is Attacus atlas - page 20).

The four authors mentioned on the title page have taken the trouble to acknowledge how much it takes to produce a work like this.

An excellent book to teach kids about how the world really works.

There's lots more about the book at the publisher's web site, and going there is very useful.

The review copy was a loan from Kyla Ries, but you will be able to get a copy by interlibrary loan. You can even buy a copy of the book here.

Oh, and if you think that science might be a little too much for young minds, one of the top environmental prizes at the 2024 Young Scientist Awards conducted by the Science Teachers' Association of NSW went to eight-year-old Annabelle Gervaise Woo, and in 1998 nine-year-old Emily Rosa became the youngest author to ever be published in a major scientific journal with her paper "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch" in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (Sadly, the form of medical quackery that Emily demolished in that paper is still with us, serving no purpose except to transfer money into the pockets of charlatans.)