Joe Flood

This is another graphic novel in the kids’ series “Science Comics”. This one focused on diurnal raptors/birds of prey (owls are also raptors, but they are nocturnal, so are not included in this book). Some things described in the book include their various body parts, what they hunt and how, how they fly, mating, and loss of habitat and human threats (like DDT, which of course, was banned in the early 70s), and probably more I’m forgetting at this moment.

These are so good with so much information. I’ll never remember even half of it probably, but it’s done so well, and the (colour) illustrations are beautiful. Even simple things I probably should have known like what characteristics distinguish a raptor. It was interesting to see the close-up illustrations of the birds, like their beaks and talons to distinguish, as I am never likely to see that in person! I am enjoying this entire series so much.… (mehr)

Lots of very cool pictures of sharks. Lots of cool facts of sharks, which I could not remember for an hour because they were mostly factoids without a framework to make them memorable. My take away was, there are Very Many Kinds of sharks. So many kinds that you can fill up a whole book just listing them. Every time you think there's going to be a story line, suddenly "Here's another kind of sharks, this subclass of sharks has this enormous number of species, here's a lot of pictures of this kind of sharks with a single sentence about each kind." This is like a catalogue of sharks, but it's not as interesting as catalogues from firms like Lee Valley or Lands End: you don't want to go out and engage with every single shark on the list.

Fabulous book for a shark-engaged child with a passion for memorizing shark trivia!… (mehr)