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
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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