Ape

The wise and wrinkled face of a Chimp looks out from the dramatic cover of this attractive picture-book guide to the great apes. Illustrator Vicky White spent a number of years working as a zookeeper looking after apes, and her knowledge of the animals is apparent in the way she captures their essence in large-scale pencil and paint portraits. She shows the animals in close up, with expressive faces and fur so detailed you almost feel you could stroke it. Conservationist Martin Jenkins describes the different kinds of great ape, now in dwindling numbers around the world. Four of them – the orang-utan, chimp, bonobo and gorilla – are very rare. The fifth is of course ‘us humans’ who share so many attributes of the apes ‘swinging and stomping, chattering and playing, eating and sleeping’. A final spread shows how limited the numbers are – between 50,000 and 80,000 orang-utans left in South East Asia – compared to the 6 billion of us, but helpfully a selection of website addresses for conservation societies is included. A lovely book for sharing with a class or group of children.