This is the final part in a four part series: Part I covered Summer of 2012; Part II covered Fall of 2012; and Part III covered Winter of 2013.
This is the final installment of this week’s retrospective of last year’s most popular book-reviews. If you enjoyed this tour down memory-lane, let me know in the comments, OK? This part covers the most popular reviews of Spring 2103:
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős — great kids’ book: A beautifully written, beautifully illustrated kids’ biography of Paul Erdős, the fantastically prolific itinerant mathematician who published more papers than any other mathematician in history.[Buy it]
Monsters and Legends: kids’ monster book now in the USA!: a fascinating reference work for kids 7 and up about the curious origins of the monsters of the popular imagination. The book recounts the odd history of stories of mermaids, chupacabras, cyclopses, dragons, the Loch Ness Monster, and other cryptozoology favorites. It’s a great balance between fascination with monsters and lore and a skeptical inquiry into how widespread beliefs can be overturned by evidence and rational inquiry.[Buy it]
Trial of the Clone: great choose-your-own-adventure from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creator: Not only is it witty and often laugh-aloud funny — it’s also got a novel and well-thought-through game mechanic that introduces an element of tabletop RPG-playing to the system (instead of rolling dice, you flip randomly through the book and get your roll-value from the number at the bottom corner of the page).[Buy it]
Welcome to your Awesome Robot: instructional robot-making comic now out in the US: A charming series of instructional comics showing a little girl and her mom converting a cardboard box into an awesome robot — basically a robot suit that the kid can wear. It builds in complexity, adding dials, gears, internal chutes and storage, brightly colored warning labels and instructional sheets for attachment to the robot’s chassis.[Buy it]
New, cheap edition of Taschen’s stupendous “Magic 1400s-1950” book: extremely delectable new Taschen book, Magic, 1400s-1950s. It’s gargantuan, classy, profusely illustrated — was $300, now $42.22.[Buy it]
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction: Scatter’s premise is that the human race will face extinction-grade crises in the future, and that we can learn how to survive them by examining the strategies of species that successfully weathered previous extinction events, and cultures and tribes of humans that have managed to survive their own near-annihilation.[Buy it]
Mousetronaut: kids’ picture book about mouse in space, written by a Shuttle pilot: The story of Meteor, an experimental NASA mouse who saves a shuttle mission by scurrying into a tight control-panel seam and retrieving a critical lost key.[Buy it]
China Mieville’s turn-it-to-11 high weirdness reboot of “Dial H”: The reboot of “Dial H for Hero” is called simply “Dial H,” and is written by none other than New Weird chieftain China Mieville, whose prodigious imagination and wicked sense of humor are on fine display in the first collection.[Buy it]
Shambling Guide to New York City: The first volume in a new series of books about Zoe Norris, a book editor who stumbles into a job editing a line of travel guides for monsters, demons, golem-makers, sprites, death-gods and other supernatural members of the coterie, a hidden-in-plain-sight secret society of the supernatural.[Buy it]
