53 books like Now & Ben

“Every day brought a challenge for young Lonnie Johnson—the challenge of finding space for his stuff.” This beginning (along with Don Tate’s kid-friendly illustrations) drew me in, but the young inventor has more serious challenges on the way, including racism and other roadblocks. My favorite moment in this true story is when Lonnie takes a test that tells him he lacks the aptitude to be an engineer, even though he’s already built his own working robot—in the 1960s! I hope kids who love to tinker will get the message not to let anyone else decide for them what they are smart enough to do.

If you’ve read my book, you know that I’m all about characters navigating their emotions. This picture book focuses on something every kid—and adult—can relate to: you have a magnificent idea, but when you try to make it happen, it comes out all wrong. Despite her frustration turning into anger, this regular girl, with the help of her canine assistant, keeps on trying again and again and again to make her magnificent thing. Readers will hold their breath, wondering what comes next after she exclaims, “I QUIT.” 

Galimoto is the story of a boy in Malawi who wants to make his own toy from scraps of wire. The story captivated me from the first lines, which perfectly capture a child’s feelings (“Kondi opened an old shoebox and looked inside. These were his things. They belonged to him.”). When Kondi’s older brother laughs and says he is too young to make a galimoto and doesn’t have enough wire, he says he will get it—and he does, with resourcefulness and perseverance. Anyone who reads this book will definitely want to make a galimoto of their own.

Marvelous Mattie is the true story of the woman who invented a machine to make flat-bottomed paper shopping bags, the same kind we still use in supermarkets. But her story is so much more than that. I quickly warmed to this talented and determined girl whose homemade kites and sleds were the envy of all the boys. When she was only twelve, she had to leave school and go to work in the mills, where an accident led to her first major invention, a lifesaving guard to keep pieces from flying off machines. I love McCully’s illustration style—it reminds me of The Borrowers—and her account of Mattie’s patent battle against a man who stole her work had me holding my breath until the very satisfying happy ending.

What really attracted to me about this book was Jenny Uglow’s ability to bring the eighteenth century alive in her biographies of five men – Josiah Wedgwood, Mathew Boulton, James Watt, Eramus Darwin, and Joseph Priestley – who met every month near Birmingham when the moon was full (so that they could see their way home).

These men genuinely transformed the world with their discoveries that created and powered the first factories and revolutionized our understanding of the natural and chemical worlds. For some reason I always remember Uglow’s description of Wedgwood, who invented the process for mass producing china, being so scientifically curious that he insisted on sitting up to watch his own leg being amputated.

This book is a wonderful, personal introduction to the English Enlightenment.

The Wizard of Menlo Park is written with a deep appreciation for the genius of Thomas Edison, following him from his youthful enterprises to his ground-breaking inventions. Edison was a fascinating character, brilliantly described in this full biography. If anyone had a full slate of aha! moments, it was Thomas Edison. 

I was like Rosie growing up. I loved to build with my brother’s Lincoln Logs, Legos, and blocks. I even tried my hand at building a tree “fort” once, quite unsuccessfully.

But unlike Rosie, I was creating for fun with no one around. Rosie, however, was showing her inventions to her uncle and aunt, and they loved them. She had a great imagination. I loved the book’s illustrations of Rosie’s gizmos and gadgets created out of treasures found in the recycling bins.

Even though her inventions often failed, her great, great aunt would exclaim it was a brilliant first flop…a perfect failure. But Rosie never quit. As a teacher I often select this book for a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) read-aloud, since it’s a great example for girls.

A fun-filled account of, well, mistakes that worked. I didn’t know, for example, that sandwiches came about when an English earl was too busy gambling to eat his meal and needed to keep one hand free. That potato chips happened when a chef was furious when a customer complained that his fried potatoes weren’t thin enough.

Encouraging for those of us prone to our share of oops!

An orphan with no home or money of her own, Katharine is her aunt’s pawn, sent to do all her dirty work. As the story opens in 1852, it’s to undertake the unthinkable—have her child-like Uncle Tulman committed to an asylum. While this novel doesn’t employ ‘magic’, I love Victorian-era stories and this one had numerous intriguing threads: Katharine’s innocent, genius uncle created fantastical mechanical inventions, many characters to root for who didn’t quite ‘fit’ the society’s norms, and a maze of a house with mysterious, suspicious happenings. I could see no way for poor Katharine to save her uncle and his protective community, so the story twists thrilled me.

We operate in networked collectives—social groups to which we subscribe our identities, like families, teams, congregations, etc.

And these groups operate the way they do not only because of the cultural operating system that governs expectations of the group and its members but also because of how the group is structured.

Social Physics unpacks how the dynamics of these networks dictate the way in which information is disseminated, ideas are adopted, and people decide what they accept and what they reject.

This book helped make the abstract nature of social networks tangible and provided concrete language to help make this idea applicable.