Buzz

by Ben Morgan, Mark Beech, Caroline Bingham, et al.

This vivid book not only teaches the basics about insects and other invertebrates, but brings the amazing world of worms, beetles, snails, millipedes, and spiders into our everyday lives. Includes a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0756629128
• ISBN13: 9780756629120
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 12.0" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

This book buzzed its way into our kid's room --- and stayed

Press the photo of a mosquito on the cover, and there's that annoying whine. Press the bee, hear a buzz. The cricket chirps. Yes, I'd say that "Buzz" is off to a good start. "Buzz" is a hard-covered, oversized, picture-and-text book aimed at 4-to-8 year-olds. It asks the question: "What's all the buzz about these bugs?" And if the field testing in this house is typical, 136 pages of answers are barely enough. Did you know: -- Insects were the first animals to walk on land (400 million years ago). -- If every other living thing died, insects wouldn't blink. But if insects disappeared, no pollinated flowers, no crops --- disaster. -- For every person on the planet: 200 million insects. -- Number of Anthropods ("insects, spiders and other creepy-crawlies") in a square yard of wooded land: 1.5 million. -- Insects must warm up their flight muscles before takeoff. -- Ants can drag 1,700 times their own weight. (Strongest animal in the world: the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift 850 times its weight.) -- Insects, lacking eyelids, rub their eyes to clean them. -- Insects are a good source of vitamins and minerals. In Thailand, fried insects are sold by the bag. The delightful factoids --- at least to this Nature-challenged parent --- are only the start of this book's appeal. That's because it's from DK Publishing, which seems to put out an endless series of uniformly excellent picture-and-text books for kids. "Buzz", published in 2007, may be the pinnacle. Consider this spread: On the left-hand page, in a appealing jungle of large typefaces, are two stunning facts ("90% of all animal species are insects. One-third of these are beetles"), and, on the right, a photograph of dead beetles mounted in an exhibition case, row upon neat row, ten neat rows in all. You get the idea --- dramatically. Kids love cool facts. Ours is surely not unique in wanting to know cool facts a day or two before the other kids. And that's how she's "reading" this book --- a few pages a night, one or two nights a week. She doesn't know yet about the other DK books we've ordered; we're going to put them ever so gradually into the rotation. Otherwise, we might have a kid who knows pretty much everything about everything. And we wouldn't want that.