Book cover of It Takes Guts

Book description


Winner of the 2023 AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books

An illustrated book about the digestive system and microbiome for young readers, from famous (and funny) scientist Dr. Jennifer Gardy.

Everybody eats, and everybody poops. Pretty ordinary stuff, right?

But what happens in between is far from ordinary! That's…

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Why read it?

1 author picked It Takes Guts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This wild ride of a book guides readers as a bite of food makes its way from a mouth on a long journey to…the other end of the digestive system.

Every stop along the way gets a chapter full of interesting facts in kid-friendly language and gives kids enough weird facts to keep the pages turning. I recommend this to older kids and tweens who want to understand what’s happening inside their bodies but don’t want to ask. (Conveniently, it also works the same way for adults.)

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Unfathomable by Mary Boone,

Did you know you can survive being swallowed by a whale? Or that octopus wrestling used to be an actual sport? Or, that once a town in Oregon didn't know what to do with a whale carcass that washed up on their beaches, so they...BLEW IT UP?

As strange as…

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