Science Comics: The Digestive System: A Tour Through Your Guts

Gr 5-8–Greeting young “gastronauts” riding in on a lump of mashed potatoes, E, a genial microbe, conducts a detailed tour of the digestive system’s anatomical and chemical wonders from the “booming microbial metropolis” of the mouth down to the rectal sphincters. Whether explaining what triglycerides, the uvula, or the liver do or nattering on about the causes and mechanisms of vomiting, flatulence, and constipation, E makes a coherent and informative guide…despite turning out to belong to the not-always-so-benign Escherichia coli clan. Ristaino’s cartoon-style mix of fanciful and realistically detailed images offer informative inside views of individual cells, molecules, taste buds, and other tiny locales to go along with all the digestive organs, broad tunnels, and other macrostructures. He also packages fluids like saliva and feces in recognizably shaped squeeze bottles (readers will never look at ketchup the same way again) and by putting faces on the diverse populations of bacteria and archaea that add over four pounds to our weight and outnumber our own cells underscores the fact that we are not individuals but communities. Human figures in rare glimpses of the outside world show some variation in skin color. Like our bodies, this fantastic voyage also has an appendix—with schematic views of the digestive systems of six common animals from cats to cockroaches added on.