(++++) ASSORTED AMAZEMENTS

Amazing Animals Around the World. By DGPH Studio. Penguin Workshop. $17.99.

Amazing Insects Around the World. By DGPH Studio. Penguin Workshop. $17.99.

     There are innumerable books for young readers including more-or-less-random collections of critters large and small, and there is a good reason for this: we live on a fascinating planet whose sheer variety of life is, and should be, a source of continued amazement. Kids and adults alike can benefit from developing a sense of wonder – and thus a sense of appreciation – for the variegated creatures that live with, around, adjacent to or distant from us. Books of this sort vary in focus, with some featuring endangered species, some looking at very large or very small creatures, some focusing on specific types of living things (ones that fly, for instance) – the possibilities are virtually endless, and all the books tend to be worthwhile as long as their presentations are consistent and their information accurate.

     Amazing Animals Around the World and Amazing Insects Around the World are much less targeted than most books of this type: the authors/illustrators collectively designated DGPH Studio have simply picked and chosen living things that can be effectively pictured (the illustrations are simple and clear) and readily discussed (the descriptions are brief, correct, and inclusive of various interesting tidbits of information). By casting a very wide net, the books invite young readers to dabble in the material, searching here and there for items of interest without expecting any particular entry to be connected strongly to any other. Take the “flying” notion in Amazing Animals Around the World, for example. There is a single section intriguingly titled “They Fly, but They Are Not Birds,” within which the flying fox (the world’s largest bat), sugar glider, paradise flying snake and common flying dragon (a small lizard) are among the animals shown and discussed. Another section, “Armor and Scales,” has brief discussions of the armadillo and echidna – and a full two pages on the pangolin, which the authors clearly find fascinating, calling it “one of the most amazing creatures on earth” and explaining that it is the only scaled mammal, is named from the Malay word for “roller,” eats 70 million ants every year, and more. The organization of each of the book’s sections varies: “Living Fossils” is one chapter, “Giant vs. Tiny” another, and then there is “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t,” a chapter about camouflage that spends more time on the little-known potoo or ghost bird (a genuinely weird-looking avian that, among other things, lays its single egg out in the open atop a log or broken branch) than on any other animal. Again and again, the chapter focuses are unpredictable, and that is one attraction of Amazing Animals Around the World: young readers may think they already know about, for instance, animals with “Long, Sticky Tongues,” but the specific ones featured in this book may still come as a pleasantly intriguing surprise (numbats, anybody?). Some concluding thoughts on conservation, plus a two-page glossary, complete this engaging tour of Animalia.

     Amazing Insects Around the World is quite similar in layout, appearance and content, even to the same back-of-book material on conservation and this volume’s own concluding glossary. This book has somewhat more introductory material than does the one on animals – chapters explain, among other things, how to define an insect and how insects develop. Once the specific insects begin to be discussed, though, matters proceed as in the book on animals. Kids will likely meander through Amazing Insects Around the World with the thought that the critters here are largely familiar – bees, caterpillars, butterflies, and so on – only to be brought up short by a two-page chapter entirely devoted to the scorpionfly. This “strange combination of fly, butterfly, and scorpion” is little-known but by no means rare, with 400 species found in dense forests throughout the world (but scorpionflies are just an inch long, which helps explain why readers of this book may know nothing about them). Incidentally, although a 400-species insect may sound impressive, that number is nothing compared to the speciation of the largest order of insects, Coleoptera, which has 400 thousand species identified so far (and surely others not yet known). Amazing Insects Around the World scatters details like this throughout its pages. It also provides comparatively in-depth discussions of topics such as insect homes and defense systems, plus two-page explanations of the characteristics of the praying mantis and fire ants – and several pages on spiders, which are not insects (as the book quickly states). The material on spiders does a good job of countering the sometimes negative impression that people have of arachnids, which “are among the most feared creatures on the planet.” The book talks about using spiders to control insect pests in apple farms and rice fields, for example – but does mention spiders that are dangerous to humans, including the black widow and the funnel web spider. Amazing Insects Around the World is scarcely an in-depth look at insects – the material is hit-or-miss, presented in no particularly apparent order – but just like the very similar Amazing Animals Around the World, it is a genuinely interesting foray into real-life information. Although not especially challenging to read, both books are packed with enough intriguing elements to draw young readers in and perhaps encourage them to seek out greater breadth of material elsewhere after sampling the facts in these easy-to-enjoy presentations.