WORLD RECORD ANIMALS

A gallery of nature’s fastest, slowest, biggest, strongest, ugliest, most beautiful, most dangerous, longest-lived, and farthest-traveling animal record holders.

The book is inconsistent from the start. The six contestants for “Fastest Animal” are all large ones, from cheetah to Usain Bolt, but “Strongest” pits several insects against the elephant and gorilla. The competition format also becomes muddled. The Masai giraffe (tallest), anteater (longest tongue), and blue wildebeest (“largest herds,” debatably) all share space with a blue whale, among other animals in the seemingly arbitrarily chosen “Largest” category. Even a pretense of comparing measurable dimensions or achievements is eventually abandoned for an array of baby animals. The writing, in the uncredited translation from Czech, measures up to Pernický’s flat, ordinary animal images. It informs readers that pronghorns are “aptly named” because their “horns are shaped like prongs,” that the “job” of a domestic duck is “to provide feathers and eggs,” that two lions that preyed on Kenyan railway passengers were “cannibalistic,” and that as the snail is a hermaphrodite “it’s hard to tell if it’s a boy or a girl.” (Spoiler alert: The answer is “Yes.”) For similar competitions carried off more accurately and entertainingly, start with Carron Brown’s Animal Olympics, illustrated by Katy Tanis (2020), and Martin Jenkins’ Animal Awards, illustrated by Tor Freeman (2019).

Doesn’t get out of the starting gate.