I visited Teach Mentor Texts this morning and found they were participating in non-fiction picture book Wednesday, a meme hosted by Kid Lit Frenzy and The Nonfiction Detectives. I'm not sure I'll always have a non-fiction book to review, but I just finished a wonderful one and wanted to share with everyone. Please visit Kid Lit Frenzy and The Nonfiction Detectives to see what non-fiction others have to share, too.
I’ve long wished to
travel to Venice, a most romantic-sounding city, but I wouldn’t have wanted to
go there in the 1700’s. Sarah Albee,
writer of Poop Happened! A History of The World From The Bottom Up tells
us that Venice’s concert halls, where the
music of Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Mozart are being played, there were no
bathroom facilities at all. People
simply relieved themselves wherever they wanted. She also asks the reader
to Imagine what the concert hall must have
smelled like after a three-hour performance.
This book is almost 200 pages of pure, interesting information,
yet unfortunately it tells a woeful tale of polluted waterways, homes, rivers,
and air—past and present. And it takes hundreds of years and many pages to get
to the life-saving discoveries of microbes begun by the work of a Dr. John
Snow, carried further by Louis Pasteur, and concluded with the isolation of the
cholera microbe by a German Scientist, all this in the late 1800’s.