INCREDIBLE PLANTS

Glossily photographed, highly detailed, three-dimensional models seem to leap out at readers in this entry in the Inside Guide series. The huge models capture the imagination but don't always make the technical, extremely terse text comprehensible. For example, one sequence of models and captions, explaining how plants make food, describes the structure of the chloroplast. The thylakoids, looking like several stacks of vivid green hockey pucks, are nested inside a double-walled, football-shaped membrane—the chloroplast. The food-making process remains a bit of a muddle; many of the specialized terms on that page and others don't appear in the glossary. Still, a sequence of models on the germination of a runner bean seed is of near stand-alone quality, requiring little in the way of captions, and all the models are marvels to pore over, even when they don't make plain the process under discussion. Think of the book as science for the eyes, a companion volume to more competent texts that forge links between what readers are looking at and what they should be seeing. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 8-13)