ISAAC NEWTON
By Kathleen Krull
Illustrated by Boris Kulikov
Viking, 2006
Category: Middle-grade non-fiction (biography)
This is the first book in Viking’s Giants of Science series that I have read, and I can tell you this: I will read the others. Kathleen Krull’s biography of Isaac Newton is well-written, interesting and accessible; if her treatments of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo Da Vinci are half as good then I don’t want to miss them.
Here is an example of the intriguing way Krull approaches biography. In the opening chapter she tells readers that the world during Newton’s time was a dramatic and wild place with kings “coming and going, getting beheaded, being run out of the country.” Newton, Krull assures us, “seemed to float above the fray. Up in his ivory tower at Cambridge University, he lived a quiet life. A life apart.” The reader is given a half-moment to absorb the idea that Isaac Newton may have been both brilliant AND boring before Krull adds: “Except when he was poking sharp objects into his eyes, throwing world-class tantrums, burning fires night and day in his secret laboratory, and making earth-shattering discoveries and refusing to tell anyone.”
ISAAC NEWTON has been nominated for a 2007 CYBIL award. You can check out the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.