From School Library Journal
Gr 3-5--These books serve as perfect examples of a recent publishing trend: taking a broad topic and whittling it down into individual titles and selling it as a series. Here, the authors pad out a page or two of dinosaur facts with unrelated material, e.g., in the middle of Gallimimus, there are two unrelated pages on robot dinosaurs. In all of the titles, both text and illustration ascribe human feelings to these creatures. Describing a fight between two male Ceratosaurus, Brown explains that ``the female they were fighting over waited nervously in the distance.'' Did she bite her nails, too? Anthropomorphism of dinos may work in a comic book, but not in nonfiction. The illustrations are neither artistic nor scientific. Also, the inclusion of children to show scale confuses rather than clarifies the context. A boy is shown playing with a dinosaur and a radio controlled jet--but on the blank of the page it's not clear that the plane is a toy, or that the boy is of millions of years hence. Turn to better reference books like Michael Benton's Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Animal Factfinder (Kingfisher, 1992), or David Lambert's The Ultimate Dinosaur Book (Dorling Kindersley, 1993) for facts on these dinosaurs and many more.
Cathryn A. Camper, Minneapolis Public Library
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
