The Animal Book: A Collection of the Fastest, Fiercest, Toughest, Cleverest, Shyest-and Most Surprising-Animals on Earth

While this might look like yet another animal encyclopedia (albeit handsomer than most), chock-full of "fun facts" and better browsed than read, Jenkins has given us something much more thoughtful and coherent. Beginning with a section defining the word animal and surveying the animal kingdom as a whole (97% invertebrates--who knew?), the book then covers "Family," "Senses," "Predators," and "Defenses, a logical and comprehensive structure to give a shape to such a large topic. A section on "Animal Extremes" does provide the kind of Guinness Book facts kids love to hoard, but even here science, not trivia, is paramount: "Being small can offer real advantages to an animal. It doesn't need as much food as a big animal, and it's easier to hide from predators." The concluding section, "The Story of Life," explores the single fact that underlies the entire book: "All life on earth--past and present--is descended from a microscopic single-celled organism, similar to modern bacteria, that lived more than 3?1/2 billion years ago." The paper-collage art throughout is distilled from Jenkins's many previous books, but this is no clip job: each image--from a red-eyed tree frog jauntily balanced on a vine dog-earing a crisp white page to a full-bleed spread of a Siberian tiger's face--serves the book's purpose. (In that old Dorling Kindersley problem, however, scale is inconsistent.) Charts and graphs throughout are as intriguing as the animals themselves; an index of the featured animals is pretty much brilliant, including not just page numbers but size, habitat, and diet; also appended are a glossary, bibliography, and a wonderfully illustrated and diagrammed outline of how Jenkins makes his art and books. roger sutton