Life on Mars - Hardcover

David Getz is the award-winning author of the middle-grade novels Thin Air and Almost Famous, and the nonfiction books Frozen Man and Frozen Girl. When not writing, Mr. Getz works as an elementary-school principal in New York City.

Peter McCarty is the Caldecott Honor-winning author and illustrator of Hondo and Fabian. He also teamed up with David Getz on Frozen Man, Frozen Girl, and Purple Death. Mr. McCarty lives with his wife and two children in Upstate New York.

Getz (Floating Home, p. 380, etc.) offers eager space pioneers a primer on interplanetary travel and Martian colonization. In a penetrating second-person, you-are-there narration, he parades an amusing array of falsehoods and hysteria perpetrated in the name of Earth's neighbor, such as astronomer Percival Lowell's assumption in 1894 that the lines he saw on Mars's surface were canals, or the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. But it is Getz's deft juggling of scientific facts that is truly engaging. Although the Martian soil is nearly antiseptic and incapable of supporting even the tiniest amino acids, the planet will, at the hands of scientists, get an environmental face lift via terraforming. During the journey to Mars, only vigorous exercise will offset the weakening of muscles and subsequent loss of bone strength in zero gravity; the crew will sleep ``standing up,'' and use a toilet with a seat belt. The numerous black-and-white satellite photos and computer- generated landscapes bring the alien terrain up close and personal; McCarty's charcoal drawings lend a sense of excitement to this lighthearted interstellar adventure. (bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 7-10) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.