It was an ordinary night in October of 1938 until a news bulletin interrupted the dance music on CBS radio-aliens were invading the United States! Meghan McCarthy's hilarious Aliens Are Coming! tells the true story of the Halloween radio prank that duped much of the country into believing that Martians had invaded. The book uses excerpts from the actual War of the Worlds radio broadcast and includes information about the importance of radios in the 1930s (before the time of televisions and computers) as well as facts about Orson Welles and H. G. Wells, author of the novel on which the broadcast was based.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Extra extra read all about it!:
Aliens Are Coming is about a false radio broadcst about aliens.This book illustrates how a little prank could affect so many people. I thought this book was great and you should too.
Who can you believe?:
This would be a great way to start a unit for upper elementary kids on media and truth in journalism. It's a visual delight, and has lots of details to spark further inquiry. While most kids today think they are pretty media-wise, can they indeed tell the difference between "entertainment" and "infotainment?" A fun visually engaging introduction to the "War of the Worlds" broadcast, might provoke some interesting conversations in the classroom.
They're here. They're aliens. Get used to it.:
Picture book non-fiction. A hard format to write in, or the hardest format to write in? Every year countless libraries get inundated with the same old same old. Your bee books. Your dinosaur books. Your fifteen different biographies of Teddy Roosevelt. So you can imagine my surprise when I picked up a book that looked... different. You don't expect something called, "Aliens Are Coming" to be factual. You especially don't expect it to tell the truth when you flip through the pages and see large... more info
Kid-Friendly Art and Great Information:
One of the most famous - or infamous - hoaxes in American history, an event that terrified hundreds of thousands and sent normal people into panic-driven frenzies, may not be the first thing you'd think of when you consider writing a picture book for young readers, but thank goodness Meghan McCarthy had a vision for this book that presents this very significant snippet of Americana in a way that not only won't scare the bejeezus out of your little alien hunter, it will entertain them with great,... more info
