This was the book that Kate chose to read for the book club this month. We read two different ones and then swap and read each others'. That is why I read a picture book. Anyway, this was a pretty good biography of the scientific side of Da Vinci's life. It hardly touched on his art at all but it says up front that it's not going to. It was very interesting. One thing that surprised me was the author's treatment of homosexuality in the book. The author makes it pretty clear that most people think that Da Vinci was homosexual and then explains why they think that. I guess it surprised me that in a book geared to 9-12 year olds the subject needed to come up at all. She handled it pretty well. I wasn't really offended but I wondered if Kate knew what homosexuality is. She probably does. I'm pretty sure, however, that when I was a kid, that issue would never have come up in a children's book. This book made me realize that the only things I really knew about Da Vinci were gleaned from Star Trek: Voyager where he was a reappearing holodeck character. Now I know more. Oh yeah, Kate's comment was, "I think it was disgusting that he boiled human eyeballs so he could disect them." There you go.
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