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Roth, Jonathan

Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars

40 pp. | Little/Ottaviano | August, 2024 | Trade ISBN 9780316525541 $18.99
(2) K-3 A small scrap of unbleached muslin (typically used for underwear in the early 1900s) traveled to the moon and back with the Apollo 11 astronauts in the summer of 1969. Sixty-six years before the flight, that swatch was part of a fabric wing that made the most consequential flight in aviation history. Though the Wright brothers' Flyer traveled only 120 feet on the sandy beaches of North Carolina, it changed humankind's relationship with gravity forever. Fifty-two years after the moon landing, 118 years after Kitty Hawk, a smaller piece of fabric from that same scrap took another historic flight, aboard NASA's Ingenuity, the autonomous helicopter that made the first controlled flight from the surface of Mars in 2021. Combining historical photographs and NASA concept art with the author's cartoonish illustrations creates an enjoyable informational picture book that connects the past to the present. Roth's clear and compelling narrative follows the swatch's fascinating journey through the history of flight. An extensive author's note fleshes out the fabric's many "adventures."
Reviewer: Eric Carpenter | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2024

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