I See a Kookaburra! Discovering
Animal Habitats around the World. By Steve Jenkins & Robin Page.
Illustrations by Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Wild
& Wacky Edition 2017. Scholastic. $16.99.
Originally published in 2005
and now available in paperback, Steve Jenkins’ and Robin Page’s I See a Kookaburra! is a kind of
real-life Where’s Waldo? – but with a
distinct educational purpose and some fascinating information packed inside.
The setup is quite simple: the book shows six different parts of the world,
each including eight animals plus one ant (since ants live just about
everywhere). It is the execution of the design that makes the book special:
only parts of the animals are visible, which means that just as it is difficult
to see animals in their natural habitat, so it is difficult to pick all of them
out and identify them here. Finding the ants is by no means easy, either. Each
two-page spread of a habitat is followed by two pages showing the animals
against a plain white background, in the same positions and poses used when
showing them in their habitat – so kids can go back and find any they missed,
and also get an even better sense of where each animal lives in the wild. Three
different tails stick out of the surroundings in a desert in the American
Southwest, for example. It turns out that one belongs to a kangaroo rat, one to
a Gila monster and one to a rattlesnake. And what looks like a fourth tail is
actually a cactus flower. Elsewhere, an African savanna contains a rhinoceros
that is fairly easy to see, a dung beetle that is not, and a giraffe antelope
that is hard to recognize even when it is spotted. In an Australian forest are
a cassowary (only one eye visible), a barely noticeable koala asleep in a tree,
and an almost perfectly camouflaged dingo. And so on for more habitats and more
animals throughout the book. The final five pages show small pictures of each
of the animals and give considerably more information about them in compressed
(one-paragraph) form. Jenkins and Page do an excellent job of making that
information interesting: they explain why the frilled lizard is also called the
bicycle lizard, discuss the unique social environment of the naked mole rat
(the only mammal that lives in ant-like colonies), explain why dung beetles are
so important, and talk about a six-inch-long insect (the rhinoceros beetle).
There is a lot more than a kookaburra to see in I See a Kookaburra! And everything in the book is very much worth
seeing.
The pleasures of seeing the
people and things in Ripley’s Believe It
or Not! Wild & Wacky Edition 2017 are decidedly more mixed. The
successors to Robert Ripley can no longer roam the world looking for naturally
occurring human and animal oddities or “freaks,” as Ripley himself did – that
would be politically incorrect. So more and more of the Ripley legacy depends
on showing readers things that people who want
to draw attention to themselves have done for the explicit purpose of getting
noticed. The result is a sort of still-photo reality television with,
unfortunately, just as great a propensity for catering to celebrity worship
(the new book shows a sculpture of Angelina Jolie made from crayons and one of
Niki Minaj made from toast, for instance). This 2017 compendium of
attention-getters includes a nine-year-old girl who invented a healthful
lollipop; a watermelon-flavored bagel sold in Japan; a man who ran across the
United States to raise money for charity; a race in which competitors ride
ostriches; a playground made from snow and ice in Sweden; a sinkhole in
Guatemala; a man in Japan who takes his 150-pound tortoise on walks into town;
a giraffe with a crooked neck that was broken in a fight; a vending machine
that dispenses live crabs in a part of China where they are considered a
delicacy; and more. A few human beings who would previously have been put on
display still appear in the book, but only in the context of being heroic and
worthy of admiration: a wheelchair-bound man who can do cliff diving; a
professional bass fisherman born without legs or a left arm and only part of a
right arm; a woman who in 2008 became the first armless person to become a licensed
pilot; and so on. Certainly Ripley’s
Believe It or Not! Wild & Wacky Edition 2017 is more humane and
uplifting than long-ago entries featuring exhibits from the old-style Ripley’s
“odditorium” (that was the name of the museum Ripley opened in 1933). But the
new Ripley’s is simply not as interesting or involving as the old Ripley’s used
to be, partly because so many odd things are so visible so often on the
Internet – and partly because Robert Ripley’s successors bend over so far
backwards to avoid potentially upsetting or offending anyone with their
displays. There is enough of interest in this book to give it a (+++) rating,
but it is neither as wild nor as wacky as its title would have readers believe
it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment