Buzz

Press the photo of a mosquito on the cover, and there's that annoying whine. Press the bee, hear a buzz. The cricket chirps. Yes, I'd say that "Buzz" is off to a good start. "Buzz" is a hard-covered, oversized, picture-and-text book aimed at 4-to-8 year-olds. It asks the question: "What's all the buzz about these bugs?" And if the field testing in this house is typical, 136 pages of answers are barely enough. Did you know: -- Insects were the first animals to walk on land (400 million years ago). -- If every other living thing died, insects wouldn't blink. But if insects disappeared, no pollinated flowers, no crops --- disaster. -- For every person on the planet: 200 million insects. -- Number of Anthropods ("insects, spiders and other creepy-crawlies") in a square yard of wooded land: 1.5 million. -- Insects must warm up their flight muscles before takeoff. -- Ants can drag 1,700 times their own weight. (Strongest animal in the world: the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift 850 times its weight.) -- Insects, lacking eyelids, rub their eyes to clean them. -- Insects are a good source of vitamins and minerals. In Thailand, fried insects are sold by the bag. The delightful factoids --- at least to this Nature-challenged parent --- are only the start of this book's appeal. That's because it's from DK Publishing, which seems to put out an endless series of uniformly excellent picture-and-text books for kids. "Buzz", published in 2007, may be the pinnacle. Consider this spread: On the left-hand page, in a appealing jungle of large typefaces, are two stunning facts ("90% of all animal species are insects. One-third of these are beetles"), and, on the right, a photograph of dead beetles mounted in an exhibition case, row upon neat row, ten neat rows in all. You get the idea --- dramatically. Kids love cool facts. Ours is surely not unique in wanting to know cool facts a day or two before the other kids. And that's how she's "reading" this book --- a few pages a night, one or two nights a week. She doesn't know yet about the other DK books we've ordered; we're going to put them ever so gradually into the rotation. Otherwise, we might have a kid who knows pretty much everything about everything. And we wouldn't want that.