Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean by Kate Baker, Zanna Davidson and Page Tsou
| Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean by Kate Baker, Zanna Davidson and Page Tsou | |
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| Category: Children's Non-Fiction | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: An artistically styled collection of trivia regarding superlatives, that will make for a book regularly taken off school library shelves, but perhaps go no further. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 40 | Date: October 2016 |
| Publisher: Templar Publishing | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781783704842 | |
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The greatest thing a good library can do is lie in wait, holding the weight of the entire world on its shelves. Let alone all the imaginative fiction it can take guardianship of, it can also store a huge gamut of facts, opinions and true tales, transporting a reader when they choose to take a book down and read it wherever they want to go. This book is one of those that can take you places, too – 3.6 metres down into the earth, where a Nile crocodile might have dug itself to lay out a drought, its heart beating twice a minute; or to the hottest or driest, or most rained-on place. It can take you back to prehistory and size you up against the biggest raptors and other dinosaurs, or to the centre of the very earth itself. There the pressure is akin to having the entire Empire State Building sat on your forehead – now that's weight indeed…
No, this volume certainly doesn't contain many opinions or true tales, but the facts are here. It's an imaginatively presented and artfully displayed selection of trivia regarding superlatives – visual indications of the world's worst storms, selections of some animals, be they mighty or long-lived, or neither. The design is fine, to my eye – taking a little of an old gazetteer page to discuss the moon and space-flight landmarks, and having what I can only assume is an accuracy when it comes to the largest butterflies. But there are issues with it, and with the book itself.
The selection of famous and/or tall mountains the book has picked is presented as a dollop of woodcut upon dollop of woodcut, and while the peaks look accurate I missed the scientific representation here, as elsewhere. The said butterflies have a kind of subdued, pastelly colouring, which bears across all the pages – nowhere here is the gaudy colour of a photograph of real life. And that's crucial when you consider that there are books – such as the Russell Ash Top Ten ones, and many more – that do this kind of thing with scientific verity in image as well as fact. The fact that the artist alone here is given the front cover credit proves the visuals went before the data, and if you disapprove of the style I guess you could take against this book.
Still, I am prepared to give it a nudge on to the school library shelf, although I don't imagine it in too many household settings. I like list books – and while not everything here is 'the top ten of this or that' we also get a smidgen of context and background information here and there to add to the raw data. And the benefit of having someone with such a strong illustrative eye to do everything is that while, whether under the water or up in space, and however different the subjects are, everything looks similar and connected. So the young browser may be forming links between the pages, and seeing in fact more of the world than if it were presented with randomly chosen photos, and design by committee and budget. This collection, then, takes on board the weight of one whole library shelf, and gives it a homogeneity that might just light a few more investigative sparks.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Top 10 For Boys 2014 by Paul Terry is the kind of list book I used to wallow in while still a child. Before that, the likes of My Encyclopedia of Very Important Things by DK would have appealed. Actual Size by Steve Jenkins also conveys the scale of the world for the very young.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean by Kate Baker, Zanna Davidson and Page Tsou at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean by Kate Baker, Zanna Davidson and Page Tsou at Amazon.com.
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