Point A to Point B: Transportation: How People Get Around by Gail Gibbons

Transportation is what people use to get around. They choose what works best to get from place to place.

From heels to wheels and wings, humans have always been on the move from here to there. But there are probably more ways these days than ever.

Still Gail Gibbons, the queen of concept books, gamely gives her best try to categorize and describe all the many ways people change places.

In her latest, Transportation (Holiday House, 2017), author Gibbons divides her task into a veritable taxonomy of transportation--Cars and Vehicles, Trains, Boats, and Aircraft.

Within each class, artist Gibbons offers clear blackline illustrations of various vehicles, mostly shown in profile for easy identification. Gibbons' straightforward line drawings are both simple and detailed, making distinctions, for example, between automotive vans and SUVs, and even distinguishing between compact cars, coupes, middle-sized sedans, hatchbacks, station wagons, luxury sedans, and stretch limousines.

Riding the rails, Gibbons describes the variety--subway trains, elevated trains, commuter trains, freight trains, passenger trains and high speed bullet trains. As for water transportation, there are canoes and kayaks, sloops and submarines, water taxis, cruise ships, rowboats, ferries, and ocean liners, and her aircraft include single-engine airplanes, freight carriers, passenger airplanes--from puddle-jumpers to transoceanic airliners--and even vehicles that travel to the border of outer space at the International Space Station.

A non-fiction book that provides both clear visuals and vocabulary-building text, this book is a good-sized, go-to compendium for motorhead fans to browse and for those early childhood education class units on transportation.