Africa's Animal Kingdom: A Visual Celebration | 
 enlarge | Author: Kit Coppard
Publisher: PRC Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $2.79
You Save: $22.16 (89%)
New (4) Used (26) from $2.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1378605
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.7
Dimensions (in): 12 x 9.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1856485900
Dewey Decimal Number: 591.960222
EAN: 9781856485906
ASIN: 1856485900
Publication Date: June 30, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Some wear on book from reading, spine creases, wear on binding and pages, we guarantee all purchases and ship all items via USPS mail.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"Beautiful pictures...celebrating the wildlife of Africa. Coppard has moved beyond the savannas in Kenya to travel the deserts of Namibia, the rain forests of the Congo basin, the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and the kopjes of South Africa....cover(s) the basic ecology of Africa...Climate and natural vegetation each receive a chapter, driving home the immense diversity found in a continent...provides a very nice listing of the major national parks, listed country by country. The second, larger section examines Africa's wildlife, divided taxonomically into surveys of the hoofed animals, elephants, carnivores, primates, reptiles, and birds....good basic information and an excellent introduction to Africa and its wildlife...true strength of the book is the collection of stunning photographs chosen to illustrate the text....Introductory text, graced with the author's drawings, sets the scene for each section of images concentrating on one element in the ecosystem....YA...An absolute must for reports; good photos of the rarer creatures."--Booklist.
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| Customer Reviews:
Nice to look at... March 15, 2003
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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): 1 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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