AS LARGE AS LIFE

A menagerie of wild animals from diverse locales and habitats, drawn to scale within each spread.

Gadding about seemingly arbitrarily from the Galápagos Islands to the Black Forest, ocean deeps to coral reefs, this lap-sized worldwide tour gathers around 250 creatures (or, rarely, plants) from anopheles mosquito to blue whale. They appear, about a dozen or so per spread, with human figures, hands, or footprints visible in each scene for comparison. Prabhat’s painted portraits, stylized but recognizable, share space in their natural settings with pithy comments from Marx—mostly on point, though one claim that “without flies, our planet would be covered in rotting waste!” is more histrionic than strictly accurate, and another that phytoplankton eat krill is exactly backward (possibly due to a typo). Still, all the animals are identified, and the author’s many references to predation, poisons, and poop (“jackrabbits,” readers learn, “are coprophagic”), not to mention memorable details like the “hardened buttocks” of wombats, make it really hard to skip the commentary…even the occasional passages semilegibly printed black on purple. There’s no index, but a foldout poster (not seen) offers a complete group shot, including one of the racially diverse cast of young naturalists who put in appearances throughout.

Browsers will come away with plenty of rousing facts to share plus a better sense of the relative sizes of many animals.