Animals Like Us

ARKive, the back flap tells us, is the on-line ‘Noah’s Ark, bringing together the world’s most important nature films, photographs and sound recordings… to build vivid and fact-backed portraits of Earth’s endangered animals and plants.’ So this book is a by-product, and, at first glance, a very handsome one. But, when you’ve got past the ambiguity of the title and the well-meaning foreword from Sir David Attenborough, the crap-detector begins to hum a bit. For some lamentable reason the editorial team (of the usual DK proportions) has chosen for each of the 30 featured creatures to address the reader ‘in its own words’. So the baby Orangutan tells us ‘the rainforest is my home’, the Verreaux’s Sifaka says ‘I sometimes eat soil, too – it sounds horrible to you’ and the infant Bactrian camel tells us that its ‘Mum’s’ milk is ‘far more nutritious and lower in fat than cow’s milk’ – a fact of which I’m sure all baby camels are only too aware as being what makes them glad they’re camels and not calves.

On the plus side, though, valuable information is given about habitat and the reasons for endangerment for each species, there are lots of useful www.s, many of the photographs are excellent, and the captions are liberally sprinkled with gems from DK’s ‘snappy headlines’ thesaurus. But the overall style of the text (if such it can be called) respects neither subject nor reader. But, then, if it drives the reader to seek shelter in ARKive itself, it’s probably done its job. At the same time, when the African elephant says ‘No wonder my nickname is Jumbo’ the author herself qualifies for the ‘endangered’ list.