Just a Second

Jenkins's trademark cut-paper illustrations portray time in the context of animal (and a few technological and earth-related) movements, such as the number of wing flaps and heartbeats in a second, distances traveled in minutes, and growth over years. The facts are interesting and will reward browsers looking for animal trivia or trying to get a handle on time. Reading list, timeline.

This engaging title offers different and interesting ways to think about units of time, from one second to one minute, hour, day, week, month, and year (plus a spread each for “very quick” and “very long”). Readers will enjoy the plentiful and wide-ranging examples. Some are biology-related: in one minute, for example, “An elephant’s heart beats about 30 times” and “A hamster’s heart beats 450 times.” Others offer statistics (some startling): in one second, “1,500 chickens are killed.” In one minute, “People around the world drink the equivalent of 2,600,000 twelve-ounce soft drinks.” “By the year 2100, it is predicted that sea levels worldwide will have risen about 19 inches (48 centimeters).” Provides perspective, whether comparing specific examples or looking at the book as a whole. The horizontal format is well-suited to the subject matter and a striking design incorporates ruler-like markings along the bottom of pages. Steve Jenkins’s signature illustrations pop from bright-colored backgrounds (each unit of time gets its own shade). Back matter supplies plenty of additional information, including a visual history of the Universe; color-coded graphs of Earth’s human population, by continent, from 1750 to 2050 (estimated); visual time lines of plant and animal life spans; and some important dates relating to the history of time and timekeeping.