Popular Science Children's Review - Shocking Electricity

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Review - Shocking Electricity - Nick Arnold

Like most of the Horrible Science range, and particularly appropriately here, you could describe the style as sparky! It's lively and enthusiastic and all those good things that we expect from a children's science book. We learn about the basic electrical discoveries, including a few fun pocket biographies of the likes of Volta and Faraday, about static electricity and current, about lightning and batteries. Not to mention magnetism, electric motors (though not so much on generators) and electronics.

Okay, there were a few small niggles. As always we hate the upside-down answers to quizzes (the printers obviously got fed up too, as one of them is the right way up, and much better as a result). As in several other books, the otherwise excellent illustrations by Tony de Saulles suggest the confusing old "solar system" model of the atom. There is a distinctly misleading statement about electron speed - a miniaturised person in a wire comments "luckily them electrons wasn't too fast or I'd have been killed" and we're then told electrons in a current move at only around 0.1mm per second. While this is true of the drift velocity - the movement of the electrons due to the electrical potential - it is also rather misleading as the electrons are actually moving randomly pretty quickly with their own thermal motion (around 1 million metres per second), so liable to give the mini-man quite a bump if they hit him. And it's also bound to confuse readers, as it isn't clearly explained, into thinking that electrical energy moves at this sort of speed down the wire, where actually it goes about 2/3 the speed of light.

A final niggle is over a little quiz (for your teacher) on Faraday. It asks how he got his job with Davy, without seeming to realize that the "correct" answer applies to the second time he worked for Davy, and his first job was close to one of the "incorrect" answers. Plus it says that Davy was "jealous that Faraday's motor worked and his didn't", so Davy said that Faraday stole the idea from Davy. In fact there is no real evidence that Davy was jealous of Faraday - he did much to further his career - and Davy thought quite genuinely that Faraday had stolen the idea from William Wollaston, not from Davy himself.

But, even though they go on a bit, these are just niggles, and I had every intention of giving this book four stars. It's enjoyable, covers plenty of ground and mostly does the job very well. But then I realized, when I got the end, it hadn't really explained what the basics of everyday electricity were about. Although it refers to power (and watts), the book never tells you anything much about what it is. Or voltage, or current or resistance. It's so busy trying to trash "traditional" science teaching - and Arnold has a point, I hate the way much of school science makes it boring - that it throws out some of the babies with the bathwater. So three stars, but it really wouldn't take much to push it up a level (any chance of a second edition?)

Only in paperback. Not available in the US, but can be shipped from the UK for a few dollars more.

Reviewed by Jo Reed

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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