Non-Fiction: How do you Burp in Space

My non-fiction book was How do you Burp in Space? by Susan E. Goodman and illustrated by Michael Slack. It is presented as a guide to your future vacation to space and includes information on how to prepare, what the trip there and back are like and what to do while you are there. It incorporates stories and pictures from actual astronauts based on their experiences in space while also making some predictions about what future travel to the moon and beyond would look like.

This book gets an excellent rating in all four areas of evaluation for non-fiction. It has very accurate information and includes details about how and where the author got her information. Her research included interviews with astronauts, visits to NASA, and extensive reading. The book was also well organized, progressing well from preparation and departure to arrival and the return journey. It was easy to follow and read like one would expect a guidebook to with a lot of factual information about space weaved in throughout. It was also well designed with a good combination of real pictures and drawings that are closely related to the text and draw readers of all ages in. Finally it had a very captivating style, with the author encouraging the reader to actively imagine what it would be like to go to space with engaging language and images.

My topic for our critical issue study is representation of women in science, so I was particularly excited to see a good balance of men and women featured in the images of astronauts. In reality, of the 560 people who have been trained to go to space, only 60 have been women showing the authors likely intentionally chose to have equal representation of men and women in the pictures they chose. Additionally, they included several astronauts of color, though this is definitely an area where there is room for improvement for having a better balance.

In the future if I teach an Earth science class again, I would use this book to introduce the idea of space travel and start conversations about the science behind different phenomenon, especially those related to gravity. I would additionally use the large collection of videos from the International Space Station on YouTube to supplement the book and give my students a stronger sense of what it is actually like to live in space.