Too light on detail to serve as one-stop shopping for school assignments, but visually and intellectually stimulating dives...
Tailor-made for the laps of armchair travelers and naturalists, this big but not unwieldy animal atlas offers a huge array of sharp, finely detailed pictures paired to pithy facts and observations.
Grouped by continent and then by habitat type, the selected animals share space on full but not congested spreads with maps, labels and easy-to-retain notes on size, diet, memorable physical features or behavior. Though generally trimmed or cut out, the photos all seem to have been taken in natural settings, and they show each creature at revealing angles or in action poses. Seamlessly interspersed among the multiple photographs on every page are painted images rendered with equal exactitude—mostly more single animal portraits but also composites that extend them, such as a gallery of chimp facial expressions and a visual key to life at different depths along a continental shelf. With little if any duplication of pictures, Wild World: An Encyclopedia of Animals (978-1-4677-1597-3) presents a similarly teeming survey of the animal kingdom—arranged by class rather than range—with an added section for insects and other invertebrates. In both volumes, unusual creatures, from Baikal seals to the ogre-faced spider, mingle with more familiar wildlife. Though there is much flashing of teeth and mention of prey, scenes of predators actually chowing down are rare and nongory.
Too light on detail to serve as one-stop shopping for school assignments, but visually and intellectually stimulating dives into the natural world. (indexes) (Reference. 6-11)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4677-1327-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Millbrook
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere.
This book is buzzing with trivia.
Follow a swarm of bees as they leave a beekeeper’s apiary in search of a new home. As the scout bees traverse the fields, readers are provided with a potpourri of facts and statements about bees. The information is scattered—much like the scout bees—and as a result, both the nominal plot and informational content are tissue-thin. There are some interesting facts throughout the book, but many pieces of trivia are too, well trivial, to prove useful. For example, as the bees travel, readers learn that “onion flowers are round and fluffy” and “fennel is a plant that is used in cooking.” Other facts are oversimplified and as a result are not accurate. For example, monofloral honey is defined as “made by bees who visit just one kind of flower” with no acknowledgment of the fact that bees may range widely, and swarm activity is described as a springtime event, when it can also occur in summer and early fall. The information in the book, such as species identification and measurement units, is directed toward British readers. The flat, thin-lined artwork does little to enhance the story, but an “I spy” game challenging readers to find a specific bee throughout is amusing.
Friends of these pollinators will be best served elsewhere. (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-500-65265-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quick flight but a blast from first to last.
A charged-up roundup of astro-facts.
Having previously explored everything awesome about both dinosaurs (2019) and sharks (2020), Lowery now heads out along a well-traveled route, taking readers from the Big Bang through a planet-by-planet tour of the solar system and then through a selection of space-exploration highlights. The survey isn’t unique, but Lowery does pour on the gosh-wow by filling each hand-lettered, poster-style spread with emphatic colors and graphics. He also goes for the awesome in his selection of facts—so that readers get nothing about Newton’s laws of motion, for instance, but will come away knowing that just 65 years separate the Wright brothers’ flight and the first moon landing. They’ll also learn that space is silent but smells like burned steak (according to astronaut Chris Hadfield), that thanks to microgravity no one snores on the International Space Station, and that Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the moon…to use the bathroom. And, along with a set of forgettable space jokes (OK, one: “Why did the carnivore eat the shooting star?” “Because it was meteor”), the backmatter features drawing instructions for budding space artists and a short but choice reading list. Nods to Katherine Johnson and NASA’s other African American “computers” as well as astronomer Vera Rubin give women a solid presence in the otherwise male and largely White cast of humans. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A quick flight but a blast from first to last. (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-35974-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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