Faster than a Jet, Bigger than a Whale: An Illustrated Guide to Measuring Our World
by Andrea Minoglio

Have you ever wondered how high the tallest mountain in the world is… if you measure from the seabed instead of from sea level? It’s not Mount Everest! In this book we learn about the highest, the fastest, the biggest, and the smallest things in our world. How far can animals jump? How big can trees get? How far across is the biggest desert? Which city has the biggest population? We learn it all in this book!

I loved the colorful illustrations in this book that show us the scale of the tallest and the shortest, the heaviest, lightest, smallest, longest and the widest. Some of the pictures are actually shown perfectly to scale, so that you can see the exact size of a tiny hummingbird, or how big a giant squid’s eye really is (10 inches across).

At the back of the book is a lengthy index so that you can look up facts about fingernails and Ferris Wheels and the Atlas Mountains. I really appreciated that the information is well-organized, making it easy to understand and find references.

My favorite factoid was about how long it would take to reach each of the planets in our solar system. If you drove to the Moon by car, it would take you 160 days. haha! If you took a plane, it would take you 16 days. But at the speed of light, it would only take 1.28 seconds to reach the Moon. It would take you more than 5,000 years to drive in a car to Neptune. These are the kind of wacky facts that I love to read!

I also really liked seeing the rivers of the world all laid out next to each other, showing that the Nile is the longest river – about 100 miles longer than the Amazon River. And the Tamorasi River in Indonesia is the shortest river at only 65 feet long.

I was disappointed that this book talks about theories of the origin of the universe as if they were scientific facts instead of just theories. The text should have made clear that the timeline of evolution is a theory, and not empirical fact.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher to review.