Paul Barrett (4)

National Geographic Dinosaurs by Paul Barret is an encyclopedia of dinosaurs of all sizes and from all ages. The book devotes 68 of its 182 pages to background information; different periods of dinosaurs, discovery of dinosaurs, past misconceptions, and theories of extinction are just some of the topics addressed. The remainder of the book is filled with one or two-page spreads of over 50 dinosaurs. Each dinosaur is placed in time, its diet, habitat, and behavior are described as well as mention of how the dinosaur was discovered. The illustrations are an equal mix of large, detailed color paintings, photographs of fossils, and scientific diagrams and maps. The glossary is short and the terms seem selected at random, and the index is not much bigger than the table of context, which seems wrong.
This is not a book to be read cover to cover, but rather to be used as a reference, and after a thorough perusal and a reading of much of the introductory section, I think this book would be more the reference of a child assigned to a report rather than the dinosaur obsessed youngster. While the balance of illustrations and text is even, making the book approachable, the text itself is small, unimaginatively formatted, and drier than the dust on a paleontologist’s favorite bone cleaning brush. While the neutral, uninspired, glacially informative tone of the text is perhaps not entirely out of place in the sections about the individual dinosaurs, where the overviews are almost like a list of statistics, there is no place for this tone in the large introductory section, in which a more narrative approach would have served the reader better. As it stands, few are going to be drawn into the background third of this book and will more than likely flip around the parts about the individual dinosaurs. That is no horrible literary travesty, and the world will survive, but it seems like a bit of a lost opportunity to not grab the reader, especially if the target is YA, with engaging, lively text at the outset.… (mais)