Lives of the Scientists: Experiments, Explosions (and What the Neighbors Thought), by Kathleen Krull
This is an excellent children’s nonfiction book that shares short info on the lives of a selection of scientists throughout history. It is sort of a picture book, in the sense that it has a picture on nearly every page, but much more words that you’d normally see in a picture book.
The scientists are arranged chronologically, and I especially like that each one’s initial page includes where and when they were born and where and when they died (if they died).
I do wish the dates were included as well in the Table of Contents, so you could see at a glance which scientists would be relevant to the time you are studying, but I guess I can’t have everything. My solution to this, on books I own, is to simply pencil the dates in on the Contents.
This is a book I think I will look for purchase (used) on Amazon, as it will be handy to have on hand, to refer to as we travel to different times in our history lessons. I like to interject scientists of the times into our history lessons, but don’t necessarily need to go into great depth with each one, so this is a great little book to read short (2-4 pages) info on the lives and contributions of a variety of scientists.
I was pleasantly surprised to see women represented as well as men, although not equally. I counted 15 men and 7 women, but frankly it’s often hard to find ANY women represented in this sort of book, so this was a good sampling, I think.



