By Seymour Simon
Huge full-page photographs of real erupting volcanoes, with a page of short, calm text beside each one, so a whole class can stare at the glowing rock while somebody explains what it's doing.
It opens with Pele, the Hawaiian goddess said to live inside the fire, and then turns to the real thing. Simon explains what sits under the crust, why Earth's plates shift and crack, and how molten rock forces its way up and out. From there he takes you around the world's actual volcanoes: Mount St. Helens with the whole side of it gone after 1980, the eruptions that built Iceland, Mauna Loa rising over Hawaii, the ones that pushed islands up out of the open ocean. Every second page is a photograph blown up to the full size of the book, and they are huge, glowing orange, hard to look away from. The words beside them stay short and plain and never talk down. He also lays out the different kinds of volcanoes and the different ways they erupt, which is the piece a unit wants settled early.
Simon writes shorter true sentences than almost anyone else doing this, and that carries the whole book. A child who'd stall out on a dense fact book will stay with this one, because the photograph pulls them along and the words only have to explain what they're already looking at. It hands a class the vocabulary the rest of the unit runs on, magma and lava and crust and plates, without ever feeling like a vocabulary drill. A strong reader gets the whole frame in twenty minutes. A struggling one finishes it, because the pictures do most of the teaching and the text is short enough to reach the end of.