Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous—(adj.)—present everywhere at once, or seeming to be.

            I have mentioned before how I will sometimes buy a book just because I love the title or the cover.  I bought Ubiquitous because the title intrigued me so much that I had to know what was inside and also because it has received wonderful reviews.  Kirkus Reviews listed Ubiquitous, written by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Beckie Prange, as one of their best children’s books of 2010.  If you want to see the whole list, you can explore it here.  I think that the Kirkus Reviews offer a good, varied source of books that can help you decide what to add to your collection.  As I said, Ubiquitous has been given rave reviews, but I am still unsure how I feel about this book.

            I love the premise of Ubiquitous.  Sidman takes a look at the species that have survived for millions of years and explores how these creatures have made it through to the present time.  She goes in chronological order, from bacteria, which formed 3.8 billion years ago, to humans, which first arrived around 100,000 years ago.  Each species receives a two page spread.  On all the pages, there is a poem about the particular species, such as ants or coyotes, and then a paragraph explaining how these plants, animals, bacteria, humans, etc., have survived for so long.  I think this is great.   After all, how many species were only around for a few thousand years before they were extinct?  Maybe this is a how-to guide to survival for the species!  I also like how this book does not have a book jacket.  Instead, it is a sturdy hardcover with the picture and title on the front of the book.  Who knows?  Perhaps the lack of a book jacket was intended to help make this book survive, just like the species discussed within it.

            Despite how much I love the idea, I do not think this book is very appropriate for elementary-school children and I found myself bored at times.  I even had to reread a couple of sentences because I did not quite get them the first time.  I liked how some of the poems were changed to make more sense for the animal that it was talking about.  For example, the poem about the shark is actually stuck within the letters or shark.  Also, the poem about the squirrel is really only one hurried sentence in an attempt to show the flitting, scattered-nature of squirrel brains.  The poem on diatoms curves into the wave that it is a part of, which is a nice touch.  I just feel that the information on the creatures is dry and difficult for students.  Sharks are fascinating creatures, yet Sidman reduces them to sentences like this: “Their long torpedo-shaped bodies are superbly designed for underwater speed and agility; even their skin is made of tiny streamlined ‘teeth’ that reduce turbulence and allow them to glide through the water, powered by the merest flick of the tail.”  If a student was reading this, there would probably be multiple words in this one sentence that they did not understand.  I simply cannot see one of my students reading this book and enjoying it.

            The pictures in this book are okay, but they do not amaze me.  Beckie Prange is obviously a fantastic illustrator, because she and Joyce Sidman received a Caledecott Honor for their book Song of the Water Boat and Other Pond Poems, but these pictures do not resonate with me.  I cannot see how they extend the text.  They are simply nice depictions of what is written in the text.  The greatest thing about this book, however, is the piece of string that is swirled around the inside of the front and back covers.  This piece of string does a wonderful job of illuminating what goes on in the book.  Each centimeter of string represents one million years, and all the things spoken of in this book are included on this timeline.  Bacteria is near the beginning of the timeline, but then the eye has to go through many swirls and many hundreds of millions years to get to the next animal, the mollusk.  I like how the timeline shows that earth has been formed for billions of years, and that most of the things that have survived have been around for a relatively small time comparatively speaking.  At the very end of the timeline are humans, so it is a good visual representation of the short amount of time humans have been around.

            I know that I have been quite negative about this book, but I do like the concept.  I recommend that you check it out yourself (or borrow it from me!) and let me know if you have some of the same reservations that I do.   I have been thinking about how we have read all these blogs and talked about books that we thought might be appropriate for our students. I think that when I student teach in the spring, I might have a day where I have my students look at a bunch of different books and tell me what they think.  I think it is a good way to get students to think about texts critically, as well as a good way to let me know the kinds of things I should put in my classroom library.  One day we could look at fiction texts.  The students could look through some books and write down their favorite and their least favorite book out of the bunch, and let me know some reasons why.  We could then do the same thing with nonfiction books.  It seems like a win-win situation!