By Jeanne Bendick
A biography of Archimedes for middle readers that teaches the math and physics behind the famous stories as it tells them.
Syracuse, a Greek city on Sicily, in the two hundreds before Christ. Bendick starts by explaining what the world was like, and that turns out to be the most useful thing she does, because once your child sees that Greek numerals made even simple arithmetic a nightmare, everything Archimedes did gets bigger. Then she walks through it. The lever, and why a long enough one really would move the earth. The screw that lifts water uphill. The crown, the bath, the shout, and what he had just figured out about displacement. Pi, pinned between two numbers by drawing polygons inside and outside a circle. A whole book about how many grains of sand would fill the universe, written for a king. Then Rome comes for Syracuse, and Archimedes, who thought his machines were a hobby and his mathematics the real work, spends two years keeping the Roman fleet off the walls with cranes and levers. Bendick drew every diagram herself, and she keeps stopping to make sure you followed.
Most biographies of a scientist hand your child the story and skip the science, on the grounds that the science is the hard part. Bendick does the opposite. She stops in the middle of his life to teach you the lever properly, with a diagram, and she doesn't move on until it's clear. So a child comes out the other end understanding buoyancy and the lever and roughly how you'd pin down pi, which is a real haul from a book they picked up for the story. She writes it as one enthusiast talking, warm and direct and often funny about the Romans, and she never talks down. For the child who cares how something was figured out and not only what the answer came to, this is the one I'd reach for.