Customer Reviews

DK Handbooks: Insects

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book has a lot of useful information about insects. It describes basic characteristics, life cycle, and much more. It also includes info on other terrestrial arthropods, such as spiders and centipedes. As a field guide, it focuses on families of insects, not species, which makes more sense because there are so many species that are hard to identify. There are great photographs and descritions as well.

This is really a nicely done guide and almost fits in my coat pocket. The pictures are fabulous and the insects are divided up into their respective families with very clear identifying traits. I'm really impressed, so much easy-to-use information in such a small book. This would be a great precursor to an entomology class. Some of my favorite critters are in the Psuedoscorpion order and are the cheliferids and chernetids, both of which look like tiny ticks with claws. So very cool. I actually found one once in Washington state--in my kitchen! It was very, very tiny. I digress. A book like this is handy if you are always finding insects and wondering what the heck you are looking at. A good value!

Mixed feelings about this handbook. It gives an excellent introduction to an enormous subject, and provides a manageable overview using Linnaean taxonomy (family tree), within its 250 pages. Its illustrations are clear and detailed and in glorious colour. Many of the bugs are absolutely beautiful.

However, it recognises its own limitations by saying "... impossible to include [all 1500 families of terrestrial arthropods] in this book. We have chosen a broad range from around the world, including [those that] are particularly important, common or simply fascinating in some way".

As a result, if you really need something to identify the creatures in the area where you live, then this handbook won't get you very far. For example, the entire world's Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) are dealt with in 20 pages and the Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) in only 5. Compare this with, say, the 84 and 21 pages respectively (out of a total of 320) in Bob Gibbons' "Field Guide to Insects of Britain and Northern Europe", which I found to be of much more practical use, simply because its scope is geographically far less ambitious. That particular book won't help US readers, I know, but the comparison is likely to be true for any good quality local field guide.

The DK production is attractive and eye-catching, and could very well spark a youngster's interest in the subject, but it is probably more suited to the coffee table than to the field and the garden.

The goal of this book by a respected entomologist is to enable the most frequently encountered insects to be very quickly and easily identified. It succeeds admirably in this goal of providing a "quick look-up" of all of the main insect body forms, allowing a rapid answer to the question "what is this critter that I have just found?" Unlike many similar handbooks about insects, this small slim paperback is actually a serious reference work!
This handbook displays excellent photographs of 1-4 representative species of insect within each Family (= "type") of insect, and these photos are well chosen so as to show what you actually do see when you encounter an insect. (other identification guides seem to include line drawings and photos that are not very helpful).
The photographs of representative species for each type (Family) of insect are accompanied by several paragraphs of text that really do tell you the most important facts about that Family (group) of insects. The concise descriptive text accompanying the photographs is very clearly written, and it is easy to understand because it avoids difficult technical jargon. Even better, this descriptive prose avoids the common pitfall of over-simplification.

This volume is a very well-organized and very well-written Reference Handbook by a learned person who has distilled his detailed knowledge in such a way that the general public can easily identify nearly any insect that is encountered. It is beyond the scope of this small handbook to enable the reader to identify insects at the species or genus level, but the book is a remarkable success on its own terms: it takes the reader only a short while to identify what type of insect is encountered and to learn some essential facts about that type of insect.

This book of insects will be helpful to ID my photographs of insects, this book will come in handy,, and it's easy to use,,

This book is very attractively presented with many glossy pictures. However, coming from the Smithsonian, I expected more. I tried to look up a couple of insects based on their caterpillars, but to no avail. I finally found them simply by using Google. I would have probably preferred purchasing a more comprehensive book

I bought this book to gain a better understanding of bugs and insects in the US, first the book is not limited to the US, second there are no maps for quick identification of the insects population areas in the book, and third the coverage is very superficial and does not detail the beneficial and detremintal aspects of the insects identified. I would return the book if it wasn't worth the cost of return.