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Description
"(An) irresistible account of a child's imaginary 8,000-mile journey through the earth to discover what's inside. Facts about the composition of the earth are conveyed painlessly and memorably".--"School Library Journal". Three-color illustrations. "School Library Journal" Best Books of 1979.
McNulty begins abruptly--""Find a soft place. Take a shovel and start to dig a hole""--and soon has you working your way through 4000 miles of rocks, crust, magma, mantle, and core. . . to the center of the earth where ""every direction is up"" and ""you will weigh nothing."" When you hit solid rock you exchange your shovel for a drill, and as you get deeper and hotter you switch first to an asbestos space suit and then to a super-cooled, fireproof submarine with a drill on the end of its nose. Working on through, you will come at last to the Indian Ocean--""It will be delightfully cool, but full of sharks""--and from there you can sail or paddle home. With the colors turning from red to orange to yellow as you penetrate the mantle, with a diagram of your ship and a stand-back view of your progress, this is as heady a trip--and as involving a geology lesson--as ever a curious kid stumbled into.
Faith McNulty was born in New York City. She attended private schools, and left college after two years to work for The New York Daily News. Because she has a deep interest in animals and their behavior, she wrote about animals for The New Yorker for twenty years. Many of her experiences as an animal writer are the basis for her current writings for children. Faith also worked as a children's book reviewer for The New Yorker magazine from 1979 to 1991. Currently she lives at her farm in Rhode Island and writes children's books. Steven Kellogg has illustrated more than a hundred books, including IS YOUR MAMA A LLAMA? and THE DAY JIMMY'S BOA ATE THE WASH. He has also retold and illustrated the adventures of tall-tale heroes such as Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, and Johnny Appleseed. He lives in Essex, New York.