Amy Briggs ’96 (Photo: Kathleen Connerton)
New book: Angry Birds Space: A Furious Flight Into the Final Frontier, by Amy Briggs ’96, foreword by Peter Vesterbacka (National Geographic Society)
The author: An editor at the National Geographic Society, Amy Briggs specializes in books on space, animals, and weird facts about the world. An Angry Birds game enthusiast, she has written her first book, which is a companion to the new Angry Birds Space game (angrybirds.com/space) but can be read independently. Briggs also is a former contributor to the humorous Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series, which includes short sections on history, sports, jokes, trivia, and more.
The book: In this book for children, space pigs have stolen the Angry Birds’ eggs. The book takes readers through four levels of space as the birds search for their eggs. Young readers learn about the solar system, planets, the Milky Way, stars, and galaxies. On the colorful pages are “astrofacts” – such as “In 1908, an asteroid blew up in the sky over Tunguska, Siberia, with the force of 185 atomic bombs.”
From the book: “Asteroids and comets that pass near Earth are called near-Earth objects (NEOs). Many miss our planet, but some don’t. Earth may not be as pock-marked as Mercury and the moon, but it has hidden scars, covered up by Earth’s ever changing surface. Researchers have indentified 175 craters and larger impact basins associated with comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. The 110-mile (177 km) Chicxulub crater, found on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in the 1970s, shows the geologic markings of a massive asteroid strike.”
Review: Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing’s Gweek podcast said, “There are great facts in here, such as the sun makes up 99.8 percent of the mass of our entire solar system. And that’s the kind of thing that’s fun to share with kids. … If you’re into little factoids like that about all the planets and about stars and galaxies, this is a really fun book to get.”