How It Was with Dooms: A True Story from Africa

Natural History, Dec-Jan, 1997 by Jean Craighead George

In the fall of 1990, Stephanie Terry, a teacher in inner-city Baltimore, discovered there was no science curriculum for the first grade. So she turned to children's books -- gathering them from libraries and friends and buying them herself at bookstores. She started with Barbara Bash's Tree of Life: The World of the African Baobab, Eric Carle's A House for Hermit Crab, and Bianca Lavies's Backyard Hunter: The Praying Mantis. "I knew books were a way into the world of science for children," she said.

For further inspiration, Terry brought acorns, chrysalises, lizards, toads, bats, frogs, and rabbits into the classroom. Each morning she read one book to the children, and they responded with a barrage of questions. The questions led to more books, which in turn prompted more questions -- the very essence of science.

"I put books in their hands," Terry said, "and the books lead them on and on."

I have used Terry's theme -- books that lead on -- in choosing my favorite 1997 illustrated science tides for four- to ten-year-olds.

In Saviour Pirotta's Turtle Bay, illustrated by Nilesh Mistry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15), Jiro-san, a "crazy old man" who sweeps the beach free of broken glass and rubbish, arouses the curiosity of two Japanese children. Jiro-san becomes their mentor, explaining about the arrival of beach-nesting loggerhead turtles and unraveling the mysteries of their life cycle. Mistry's superb, dreamlike illustrations may even prompt artistically inclined children to experiment with painting.

The story of Aknik, an Inupiat boy, leads the young reader into the world of the Eskimo as it was before the arrival of Europeans. In Kayuktuk: An Arctic Quest, by Brian Heinz with illustrations by Jon Van Zyle (Chronicle Books, $14.95), Aknik travels from his camp by the Bering Sea out onto the tundra and eventually to the foot of the mountains -- meeting a coming-of-age challenge that will keep young readers turning pages. Van Zyle, an Alaskan artist, captures the bleak beauty of the land and sea, and a glossary provides the pronunciation and definition of a few colorful Inupiat words.

How It Was with Dooms: A True Story from Africa, text and illustrations by Xan Hopcraft and Carol Cawthra Hopcraft (Simon and Schuster, $19.95), is the biography of a pet cheetah as told by Xan, a twelve-year-old boy growing up in Kenya. The combination of Xan's sketches of wildlife, his mother's photographs, and the hand-printed captions and chapter headings gives the appealing look of a family album.

In My Visit to the Zoo, author-artist Aliki (HarperCollins, $14.95), whose many other sparkling nature books include My Visit to de Aquarium and My Visit to the Dinosaurs, takes two children almost literally by the hand on an informative tour of a zoological park. Fascinating tidbits of information turn up in the text and are illustrated in mini-sidebars and boxes. By this means, children may pick up some basic taxonomy ("A gibbon is an ape, because apes have no tail"), natural history ("Koalas are nocturnal"), and environmental consciousness ("The condor was saved from extinction"). The book's major emphasis, like that of most zoos these days, is on conservation.

Rattlesnake Dance: True Tales, Mysteries, and Rattlesnake Ceremonies, written and illustrated by Jennifer Owings Dewey (Boyds Mills Press, $17.95), begins with an account of being bitten by a prairie rattlesnake, which will hook children's interest immediately, as will the description of a battle between two male snakes. Just as arresting are the illustrated fact boxes on each page spread, explaining, for instance, that rattlesnakes "swallow their prey whole and have jaws that can expand because they are double-hinged." A map showing the whereabouts of the seventeen species of rattlesnakes in the United States is included.

One glance at the photographs of sizzling bolts of electricity that illuminate the pages of Seymour Simon's Lightning (Morrow Junior Books, $16) will draw children into wanting to know more. What is lightning? How is it generated? Although some mysteries remain unexplained, Simon provides many informational nuggets, among them that "every second of every day more than a hundred lightning bolts strike the earth" and that sprites, elves, and jets are newly discovered kinds of lightning.

Carolyn Lesser's brief poems and Ted Rand's double-paged images in Storm on the Desert (Harcourt Brace, $15) capture the primal forces of water and sun in an arid southwestern landscape. As a thunderstorm sweeps in, tarantulas, tortoises, coyotes, and other desert creatures scurry for shelter. In the storm's wake -- when rainbows arch across the sky and the sun comes out -- plants and animals enjoy the momentary abundance of water.

Back to the Wild, by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent with photographs by William Munoz (A Guilliver Green Book/ Harcourt Brace, $18), recounts the successful return of many animals to the wild, a process fraught with risk, suspense, and ultimately hope. She tells the stories of the golden lion tamarins in Brazil, and a number of species of lemurs in Madagascar, as well as the red wolves in the American Southeast and the black-footed ferret in the West. As of 1993, 16 of 126 reintroduction projects have resulted in self-sustaining wild populations. "That means," writes the author, that "at least five hundred animals of each kind [are] living wild and free."