A lavish array of big, bright, close-up photos of lush desert flowers and scaly or many-legged creatures will entice young naturalists to dip into this quick visit to the Sonoran Desert. The text isn’t likely to draw nearly as much notice, though it does have its moments: “We look around and find the lizard’s little black droppings. They crumble as you pick them up—they are made of nothing but the digested remains of dead ants!” The author, a BBC cameraman, opens with one spread on deserts of the world and a second that tallies proper gear for brief outings, then takes young readers out into the scrub for illustrated encounters with a nesting hummingbird, cacti (“Plants that Bite”), a Gila monster, and other wildlife. After side visits to the Grand Canyon and unidentified cliff dwellings, he closes with warnings about environmental threats. Less a specific travelogue than a series of cursory field notes and generalities (“Native Americans are very skilled at using the plants that grow in the desert as medicines”), this companion to Tim Knight’s Journey Into Africa (not reviewed) and Journey Into the Rain Forest (2001) is designed more for armchair travelers than readers with a serious or assignment-driven interest in desert ecosystems. (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-515777-X
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
The Geiserts continue their panoramic documentation of American small town life with this follow-up to Prairie Town (1998). With perspectives that sometimes hover high overhead, and other times just a bit above ground level, this offers sharp- eyed observers four seasons’ worth of events in a hamlet which is never shown in its entirety. Over a set of wooden captions (“Halloween foretells the end of fall and the beginning of winter. It is a time to turn from work to play”), the illustrator creates a series of finely detailed landscapes, into which he introduces tiny changes, but also a disorienting disassociation of scale by zooming in, for example, on children, then zooming back out for scenes of a train wreck or spring flood. Readers may derive some passing pleasure in locating and poring over successive disasters (and determining their chronology: children skate on one part of the river, while a truck falls through rapidly cracking ice; in the illustration opposite that one, a framed picture of that truck going through the ice hangs in the cafe), but the underlying themes—the co-existence of past and present, the deliberate pace of life and of change—are more clearly evoked in the previous book. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-90891-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
PLB 0-688-15542-1 My Day In The Garden ($16.00; PLB $15.93; Apr.; 24 pp.; 0-688-15541-3; PLB 0-688-15542-1): The creative heroines in this gentle story of easy companionship show that rainy days can be full of fun. “Berry-picking with the birds./Lunch with the ladybugs./Under a tree for a nap,” are among the scenes; with the aid of costumes and the girls’ imaginations, the foursome create their own party, dressing up as butterflies, ladybugs, crickets, even worms. They eat, wriggle, sing, and play hide-and-seek. As darkness falls, the girls disband, and one child is seen asleep, with more dreams of the garden dancing in her head. Lobel’s idyllic illustrations are as lovely as a sunny summer afternoon, while the lyrical text demonstrates inventive simplicity. Charming. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-15541-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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