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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You'll NEVER look at dinosaurs the same way AGAIN!,
By
This review is from: The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic View of a Lost Era (Paperback)
When I was a young teenager who was really into dinosaurs, I discovered this very curious and mysterious book all about dinosaurs in a local library near my home. It was oh, so lavishly illustrated by the reowned fantasy artist, William Stout and this means it is simply NOT still another scientific book on prehistoric life. Instead, it is a very intimate insight into the lives of each of your most favorite dinosaur which reads just like a very gothic novel-style tale that describes just about EVERYTHING from a dinosaur's shudder at the very first nip of cold to its very last moaning gasp right after it was killed in a battle. And boy, the art is NOTHING like you've ever seen before! In fact, the whole book is so lusciously painted in the gothically fantastic style - that HUGE picture of the great, hulking stegosaurus slowly drawing back to strike back at its toothy foe just about BLEW my socks right off! Too bad it's out of print right now - but if you're a dinosaur fanatic, you'd thank the stars again and again if you could get ahold of this marvelous book!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book changed my life.,
This review is from: The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic View of a Lost Era (Paperback)
I had a staggering number of dinosaur books as a little kid. I'd sit for hours and stare at the illustrations, which always varied wildly in quality. Some were done in this kind of flat, "big dumb lizard" style that made it seem like all the dinosaurs were big dumb beasts just lumbering around and occasionally biting or thrashing one another. Some were clearly photographs of artfully-sculpted models. The best were highly-detailed, semi-realistic, interesting, and fun.This book is entirely different. It frequently shuns realism -- well, visual realism -- in order to convey something deeper about the subject, and so about life. It depicts things I'd never seen before in any other dinosaur book... disease, for instance. Suffering... not merely the braying terror of a random hadrosaur getting pwned by a T. Rex, but real suffering. I think this book's incredibly evocative illustrations were my first youthful encounter with existential angst. In a way, it was my goodbye to dinosaurs. I'd enjoyed the idea of dinosaurs as a sort of cross between dragons and exotic animals. I wanted to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved their staggering variety, their extremes of size and temperament and form, the magic about them. I realized, as I read and re-read this book, that a connoisseur's "love" of dinosaurs is ultimately a bit empty... it's a bit like strolling around a massacre in Darfur admiring the locals' skin tone. I derived my childish pleasure from dinosaurs precisely because I knew nothing about them, how they lived and died, the agonies and simple pleasures of their daily lives. For me they weren't the incomprehensible variety of winning designs that had dominated the earth for millions of years... they were engaging little lizard bundles of pastel trivia. This book, stylized as it is, gave me so much insight into the strange and terrible realities of life. I've been looking for another copy for fifteen years or so, and I'm ecstatic to have finally found it. Highly recommended.
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