Final Lap! Go-Kart Racing (Time Kids Nonfiction)

Gr 3-5--Covering a wide range of high-interest topics in science, history, sports, vocations, and avocations, these small volumes offer tight, busy-looking mixes of color photos, present-tense overview narratives, boxed facts, and captions, supplemented by various combinations of charts, tables, interviews, open-ended questions, and, where applicable, recipes. Each volume is capped by a current, annotated set of multimedia resources. The biographies present highly idealized, inspirational portraits of their subjects. Aside from Healthy, (in which the old food pyramid is replaced with the newer MyPlate recommendations), the Straight Talk titles are not quite "straight." Both Drugs and Smoking fail to deliver enough information for readers to come to their own conclusions about the topics. More balanced alternatives to the entries in both subseries are available elsewhere. Otherwise these titles are acceptable choices for both assignment use and casual browsing.