2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th ; Hard Cover, Nonfiction, Picture Book ; Highly Recommended

The Message

I highly recommend this book. I learned stuff I didn’t know. It takes something we’re all so very familiar with and yet most of us really don’t understand, sending a text to the other side of the planet, and explains it. And when I say it explains how it happens, I mean it starts with the microscopic hairs inside your ears that detect a disturbance in the air that your brain interprets as a ringtone that causes you to look at the incoming text you’re about to reply to. It almost draws parallels between the human parts that talk to each other to send messages from eyes to brain to fingers along your nervous system and the hardware parts on the global communications infrastructure to send the message along wires and fiberoptic cables. The whole thing is so complex and yet all happens in a matter of seconds a bazillion times a day, and we all take it for granted without really thinking about it. This book makes you think about it. Even as it explains things really quite clearly (despite great big vocabulary words), it makes the mind boggle at the same time. The illustrations really do a great job of communicating the process and supporting all those great big vocabulary words (like radiating electromagnetic photons). It’s a marvel!