School Library Journal Review

Gr 4-6-This report on the two Voyager probes and their observations of the giant planets features eye-catching, full-color illustrations, playful typography, and arresting titles (Chapter 4: ``Sizing Up the Lord of the Rings'')-but the pictures are more decorative than revealing, and the text is marred by inconsistencies. Burrows is an experienced journalist with a fluid style, clear in describing each of the spacecrafts' scientific instruments, and contagiously enthusiastic about the mission's importance, but capable of being both overly brief (``Hyperion is Saturn's strangely shaped, weird moon.'' Period.) and contradictory. Voyager II either did or did not detect a magnetic field on Uranus, depending on the page, and a photo of Titan's limb apparently (only apparently, because it's artificially colored, but many readers won't realize that) belies the later assertion that Triton is the only blue moon in the solar system. Two pages of type are printed on a pink star field that makes them almost illegible; the other illustrations are either paintings by four distinctly different artists, or composite, false-color NASA photos-unlabeled as such- that in at least two cases form unintelligible montages. Stick with Maury Solomon's Album of Voyager (Watts, 1990) or Necia Apfel's Voyager to the Planets (Clarion, 1991).-John Peters, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.