Gr 8 Up-Despite the recent medical and scientific advances of the modern world, infectious diseases are still the number one cause of death among humans, and only limited progress has been achieved at predicting outbreaks. The worldwide health outlook is further complicated by the reemergence of ancient diseases and the evolution of new strains. This comprehensive and well-organized book covers potential threats; the control and prevention of pandemics; and factors that may facilitate the outbreak and transmission of diseases, such as pollution, poverty, overpopulation, and globalization. Teens will appreciate the interesting sidebars, quotations, diagrams, and full-color photos that are integrated throughout the text and will find the annotated lists of organizations and further-reading suggestions useful. An informative and up-to-date choice.-Caroline Geck, Kean University, Union, NJ Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

This series covers some of the newest, critical issues facing the United States and the world today, including other titles such as Biological Warfare, Overweight America, and Students' Rights. The series' purpose is to define, discuss, and organize the most reliable and accurate information on these topics to help teens filter through the enormous amount of data thrown at them by media and technology through television news shows, Internet Web sites, and blogs. It attempts to bring together in a condensed format the best data and balanced overviews for these relevant issues and help students develop critical reading and thinking skills. In the individual books, wonderful full-color photos, graphs, charts, and special highlight pages and quotes make coverage of topics more attractive and interesting to readers. Exceptional features of the series are the discussion questions for each chapter, the organizations to contact section, and nice bibliographies that include multiple formats. In Political Corruption, the definitions and history of American and worldwide corruption is fully detailed and easy to understand. But the examples used for American political corruption are blatantly biased to one political side, making it seem that throughout America's history only one political party used corrupt practices. The uninformed reader would be easily mislead, making this particular title fail to achieve a fair, balanced overview. Excluding this serious problem, the title does a good job with worldwide coverage. Pandemics does a fabulous job of covering the kinds of contagious diseases that threaten human life today as well as giving succinct historical examples of past pandemics. The text is easy to understand even when describing some of the scientific and medical aspects. These two titles and the others in the series are definitely worth purchasing for school and public libraries. Even though geared for upper elementary and middle school reading levels, the series would