Customer Reviews

The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants

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4 star:		(1)
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The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants by Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kessler, and Madeline Harley is almost a spiritual experience to thumb through and read. A fairly short book at 144 pages, The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants still contains an impact that is awe inspiring. I'm not sure how many will actually read the included text but Madeline Harley did a masterful job in creating an engaging story that competes well with the photos.

If you want to engage children of all ages in the beauty of the natural world, then this is the book to let them browse through. We'll create another generation of scientists and environmentalists for sure. I was hooked on astronomy as a hobby because of beautiful photos of Saturn. They changed my life. This volume might work the same majic.

Peace to all.

Amazing photos, with quite illuminating explanatory text. Lots of opportunities to learn obscure botanical terms too, such as anemochory (the strategy of dispersing seeds via the wind). My one peeve is that the labels for all the beautiful microscopic images are pushed to an appendix, so that one has to jump to the back to find out what is depicted. Since over half the pages don't even have page numbers, this task of decryption is extra hard. I wish that the authors would have found a design method for including a modest amount of identifying text on the page with each image. This quibble, notwithstanding, the book is a joy to page through, and repays frequent returns to study the unusual shapes of each surface.

These photos are really stunning. It shows the true beauty of nature. School age children show look through it to get an appreciation for nature.

The photos are exceptional. Really makes these things interesting to anyone, but it makes it really difficult to take that curiosity anywhere when any and all information about the picture is buried in a wall of text at the end of the book. Why couldn't they put ten words the size of a couple postage stamps right next to the images?

This book would appeal to both adults and children, however, I am using the book when I teach Jr. Master Gardener classes to 3rd and 4th graders. The photographs are absolutely incredible and the text is wonderful. Even the adults oooh and aaah over the photographs.

This book is a real feast for the readers eye, be it "just" a coffee table book or a book for the scientifically interested reader. Page by page that hardly known micro world unfolds in breathtaking images showing previously unseen micro structures in amazing detail and precision, thanks to the use of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) used at Kew Gardens Milennium Seed Bank Project. I cannot more than recommend it also as a great gift.

I gave this to my dad as a Christmas present and two months later it is still a book he looks at often.