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Rating: 
Summary: Nice to look at...
Review: At over 500 pages, this book would certainly seem to have a lot about the animal kingdom. However, one immediately begins to be wary when the first 100 or so pages are about the environment -- dwelling heavily on Africa's many parks, describing their sizes, briefly discussing the animals, and going into flora, and showing many pictures of nature. Even more daunting is the text -- which may stop mid-sentence before continuing three pages later, thanks to a two-page spread. And the photo captions -- in some cases, the description for the two page spreads are at the end of the SECOND page following it, or in some cases (page 344-5, for example) they have no caption at all.With that being said, most of the photos are excellent: A leopard descending a tree, or how an elephant dwarfs the other wildlife at a watering hole. Some aren't as crisp as you'd expect from a book calling itself "A Visual Celebration", and in some cases there are five of one animal and none of the animal following it. Yet all in all the photos are splendid to look at. A breakdown, out of a four star projection (without the one guaranteed star that all books get):
Photos (out of two stars): 1½ stars. The large majority are a pleasure to look at, though the variance in amount of photos from one animal to another loses a half star.
Text (out of one star): 0 stars. Oftentimes relying on detailed specs in the middle of a sentence describing an animal's size (or a National Park's, for that matter) makes reading cumbersome. Perhaps a spec list at the start of each animal would have made more sense.
Layout (out of one star): 0 stars. How the text appears on the pages, as well as the poor setup of captions and how one animal's photos may continue pages into the description of another animal was bad enough to take a half star from the photos. Thus why I gave it just two stars. Overall, there is a good many better books as a photographic look out there than this one. Not really worth the money. Unless you need to learn how NOT to do a book layout.
Rating:
Summary: Nice to look at...
Review: At over 500 pages, this book would certainly seem to have a lot about the animal kingdom. However, one immediately begins to be wary when the first 100 or so pages are about the environment -- dwelling heavily on Africa's many parks, describing their sizes, briefly discussing the animals, and going into flora, and showing many pictures of nature. Even more daunting is the text -- which may stop mid-sentence before continuing three pages later, thanks to a two-page spread. And the photo captions -- in some cases, the description for the two page spreads are at the end of the SECOND page following it, or in some cases (page 344-5, for example) they have no caption at all. With that being said, most of the photos are excellent: A leopard descending a tree, or how an elephant dwarfs the other wildlife at a watering hole. Some aren't as crisp as you'd expect from a book calling itself "A Visual Celebration", and in some cases there are five of one animal and none of the animal following it. Yet all in all the photos are splendid to look at. A breakdown, out of a four star projection (without the one guaranteed star that all books get):
Photos (out of two stars): 1½ stars. The large majority are a pleasure to look at, though the variance in amount of photos from one animal to another loses a half star.
Text (out of one star): 0 stars. Oftentimes relying on detailed specs in the middle of a sentence describing an animal's size (or a National Park's, for that matter) makes reading cumbersome. Perhaps a spec list at the start of each animal would have made more sense.
Layout (out of one star): 0 stars. How the text appears on the pages, as well as the poor setup of captions and how one animal's photos may continue pages into the description of another animal was bad enough to take a half star from the photos. Thus why I gave it just two stars. Overall, there is a good many better books as a photographic look out there than this one. Not really worth the money. Unless you need to learn how NOT to do a book layout.
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