Jim and Me by Dan Gutman

In Jim and Me there is a boy named Stosh and he can travel through time using baseball cards. This time when he goes back in time he meets Jim Thorpe, the Native American who won Olympic gold medals for the decathlon. Jim's medals were taken away from him because he was paid to play baseball before he was in the Olympics. Stosh and Bobby Fuller went back in time to the Dodgers field where Jim Thorpe played baseball. John Mcgraw, manager of the Dodgers, uses Thorpe as a pinch hitter. Jim Thorpe wanted to be in the field because he was such a good runner. Mcgraw never gives Thorpe the chance to excel.

You can decide if you want to read this book. I read it twice and I've read other books in the series. Look at Dan Gutman's website for books in this series.

Will G. R.

E.S. Rhodes

Isaac Newton by Kathleen Krull

Many of us have enjoyed Kathleen Krull's Lives of the Presidents, Lives of the Athletes, and so on. Isaac Newton is the second book in the new series, Giants of Science, and a marvelous book it is!

We meet Isaac Newton the man, with all his hatreds, fears, and idiosyncrasies, as we read about his investigations of light, motion, and matter. Fascinated and frustrated with alchemy, Newton was in some ways a Harry Potter. Cambridge University, where Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, was not unlike Hogwarts in atmosphere. Here the similarities end. Seventeenth century England was a place where the temperamental Newton verbally sparred with Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Edmund Halley. It was Newton who bridged the gap from a mysterious natural world to modern science based on observation and hypothesis. His laws of motion form the basis for classical physics. 

Check out other biographies in the series, including the soon to be published biography of Albert Einstein,  who called Newton the greatest genius of all time:

http://www.kathleenkrull.com/science.html