Exploring the Titanic ¦ The Mutiny on the Bounty

The secret of Robert D Ballard's book is not that it's on a fascinating subject. It is that Ballard the writer is Ballard the insider, the explorer and experiencer of everything (sinking apart) that he recounts. He led the French-American expedition which discovered the Titanic in 1985, and round that story are woven others: his original interest in the Titanic, his exploration of the ship in 1986, and the sinking itself.

The whole book is compellingly written. His descriptions of descents to the wreck are dramatic, and his account of the sinking is done with a telling realism which has much to do with relying on survivors' anecdotes and details of radio messages - seven iceberg warnings in that one day. Ballard has a feel for atmosphere and character, and a novelist's respect for minutiae. We are given the flavour of the actual, odd fragments of revealing evidence like the third-class passengers playing with bits of ice that had fallen from the iceberg onto the deck.

Carefully chosen photographs and contemporary drawings of the ship help the young reader imagine exactly what he's talking about. Look at the photograph of a team of twenty horses pulling an anchor, or the two spreads' length of drawing showing the length of the ship in cut-away, which gives a remarkable impression of its size and organisational complexity. The visuals in general are informative and revealing, and beautifully integrated with the text, though some photographs of parts of the wreck are smaller than they might be.

Ballard, in short, is that relative rarity among writers of non-fiction for children, a narrator of first-hand experience who is deeply enthusiastic and effortlessly knowledgeable. The only problem with this book might be that the children will want to read it right through and not stop to get on with their Titanic topic.

David Anderson and Margarette Lincoln, in their Mutiny on the Bounty, also believe that information books are to be read for pleasure and not just used. They evidently equate writing history for children with telling them a gripping story about something that actually happened. Here again there are several strands: the preparations and journey out, the time in Tahiti, the mutiny itself, Bligh's month-long journey to landfall in Northern Australia, the lives of the mutineers on Tahiti and the amazing goings-on on Pitcairn.

This steady narrative blows the book along briskly enough for any young reader, albeit there isn't quite the same kind of transfixing detail as in Ballard's book - it has a lower 'Cor' index generally. The misty and distant does creep in at times to confound our curiosity - we wonder why John Fryer wouldn't sign the Bounty's accounts and why it was Mat Quintal who set fire to the Bounty and how the death of John Williams' wife 'sparked off a whole series of bloody feuds' on Pitcairn. That's the trouble with an interesting book, you want to know more.

Nonetheless, with two or three pauses for an expansive mini-topic, the spreads read continuously like chapters in fiction; they join up to the next without grinding leaps. The book is also visually appealing. Artists' reconstructions are the staple backdrop to text, but there are interesting etchings, drawings and paintings, and clean diagrams and maps. And it's nice to have biographical details of the crew at the beginning and information about their fates at the end.