By David M. Schwartz
A magician shows a handful of children exactly how big a million is by stacking, counting, and measuring it out — then keeps going to a billion and a trillion.
Marvelosissimo the Mathematical Magician gathers a handful of children and sets out to make a million something they can see instead of just say. Stack a million children on each other's shoulders and they'd rise past the clouds and the airplanes, higher even than the moon. A goldfish bowl big enough for a million goldfish would be big enough to hold a whale. Count to a million out loud, without ever stopping to sleep or eat, and it would take about twenty-three days. Then he does the whole thing again for a billion, and then a trillion, and the pictures have to stretch taller and taller to keep up.
There's no story here, and the magician is really just a way to hand your child one comparison after another, so go in expecting a concept book rather than a plot. What it gives them is the thing a numeral can't: a feel for how big the number is. Kellogg packs every spread with children and goldfish and stars, and half the fun is watching the drawing lose the fight to fit the whole number on the page. The comparisons are meant to give a sense of scale, not to be exact to the last goldfish, and Schwartz says as much in the back, where he shows how he worked each one out. An older child who wants to argue with him can check the math right there.