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Cartoon drawing of two fish in fishbowls

Big Questions from Little People


Great contemporary thinkers answer scientific, metaphysic, and impossible questions, in a language children can understand.

This is the kind of book that makes us want to have a child, a nephew or a child-friend, so we can give it to them (without erasing the possibility of giving it to ourselves). Gemma Elwin Harris chose the best questions, formulated by thousands of children between the ages of four and twelve years of age, to be answered by experts on each subject. Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds is an enchanting journey into the paths of knowledge, in a simple vocabulary. Some of the questions are:

Do animals have feelings?

Why can’t I tickle myself?

Who is God?

Why do we dream?

Why are we all made of stardust?

Among the distinguished men and women who answer these, and many other questions, we can find Noam Chomsky the linguist, the authors May Roach and Phillip Pullman, Chef Gordon Ramsay, the adventurer Bear Gryllis, and the evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who, by the way, has a similar book, addressing children: The Magic of Reality.

In the book, the British novelist Jeanette Winterson gives this answer to the question “Why do we fall in love?”



PS You have to be brave.

Science, history and imagination come together in these pages. They are the perfect complement for the rigidity of school education, a varied source of knowledge in simple words that everybody can understand. Childhood curiosity, as evidenced in this experiment, can be as transcendental as the most essential philosophical problems.

This is a work similar to The Dangerous Book for Boys by Hal Igguiden and A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich, written in Vienna in 1935 and later prohibited by the Nazi regime for being too pacifist. Or to The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science, by Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe, one of the favourite books of Maria Popova, the creator of Brainpickings.

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