The Kingfisher Book of Living Worlds

A natural history book with a difference – much of it is quite unreadable. Not through any fault of the authors, but because the text has been overprinted on photographic backgrounds. You must work very hard to decipher a caption about animal feeding against springbok legs in the Southern African grassland, or try picking out the description of how desert plants store water against the cracked and parched surface of desert rock. Strange juxtapositions of digital artwork and close-up photography result in some baffling imagery, starkly contrasted by silhouetted diagrams in black … and black. We have grown accustomed to such astonishing animal photography through television wildlife documentaries and accompanying books that we start out with high expectations. There are plenty of good examples here but the design just gets in the way of our seeing them. Similarly there is much useful information in the text about habitats and ecosystems struggling to get out.