3 March 2019 LOOK UP WITH ME: NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A LIFE AMONG THE STARS by Jennifer Berne and Lorraine Nam, ill., HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books, February 2019, 40p., ISBN: 978-0-06-284494-1

“The moon and a star are coming along.

I told them to follow me.

Once they got lost behind a cloud.

Once they got caught in a tree.

But I told them to follow the highway road

Where the streetlights are easy to see.

The moon and a star are coming along,.

I told them to follow our car.

Over the wires and up in the sky,

Turning the corner up ever so high,

Here we go home again, late at night,

Chased by the moon and a star.

“The Moon and a Star” from The Moon and a Star and Other Poems by

Myra Cohn Livingston, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

“One day, Neil went to New York City’s famous Hayden Planetarium.

As he sat beneath the high arc of the theater, out went the lights and…

Neil’s mind was launched...into outer space!

In a single instant, his world expanded a hundred times, a thousand times, even more.

Projected on the huge dome above his head was the night sky with the countless thousands of stars.

A gigantic, spectacular, beautiful cosmos Neil never knew existed.

And in that moment, his life was changed forever.”

As a kid, I learned how to go out at night and identify some planets and star constellations. I also connected to Myra Cohn Livingston’s moon and star poem. But I missed the boat by hanging out with the dinosaur bones at the American Museum of Natural History, rather than walking next door to the Hayden Planetarium.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has now spent decades as the Director of the Hayden Planetarium, where he’d first been turned on to the cosmos as a child. LOOK UP WITH ME shows how one kid can be inspired, become obsessed, and develop one’s passion into a lifelong quest and career.

One interesting side note: The story shows deGrasse as a child, working his butt off to earn the money to buy a good-quality telescope. Successful in that endeavor, he’d take his prized telescope to the roof of the apartment building at night. White neighbors are then shown calling the cops on him. Stargazing while black! It’s just like all the instances we read about these days of white people calling the cops on black people for driving, shopping, jogging, and engaging in all the normal activities of life. Fortunately for the young deGrasse, he was able to turn the experience into a educational forum for the law enforcement officers who showed up.

LOOKING UP WITH ME is an out-of-this-world picturebook biography.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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