An engaging consideration of happy accidents and lucky environmental mistakes.
Human error works for the greater good in this engaging true tale of an old-growth forest getting the last laugh.
How do you misplace something that was never truly lost? To answer that question, consider the case of the Lost Forty. In 1785 the Continental Congress declared that the United States be surveyed as it expanded, so in 1882, Josiah R. King and his crew surveyed three townships in Minnesota. Yet it wasn’t until 1958 that someone figured out that King had made a mistake. On the maps, King had listed a patch of old-growth forest as part of Coddington Lake. By the time the mistake was detected, loggers had avoided the area and the trees were part of the Chippewa National Forest. (The text falsely implies that this means they are “protected forever,” although logging does take place in national forests.) The book takes care to mention that the survey of Minnesota could only occur after “most of the land had been taken from Native people” because “the government of the United States wanted [it].” Bowen’s art alternates between thick, deep hues and light, winsome watercolors, but an aesthetically jarring typeface mars the overall design. Additional information about old-growth forests and where to find them, as well as the details of surveying, rounds out the book.
An engaging consideration of happy accidents and lucky environmental mistakes. (Informational picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9796-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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