Review: More fiction than fact
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 03 9, 2014
I'm astounded by all the five star reviews for this book. How did that happen? I don't know, but that's not how I would rate this book. It's really not five star calibre. Overall the book is badly written and some of the 'facts' are just plain wrong. Here are a few examples from the book."Bees don't catch other insects to eat or feed to their young and therefore, aren't anything like wasps." Evident nonsense - they're closely related."You might even say that [dragonflies] can do acrobats in the air..."Grasshoppers "can leap some 200 times their own length..." - assuming a grasshopper is a couple of inches long, that would mean it could jump over 30 feet. She's added an extra zero.The book also contains the usual misinformation about differences between moths and butterflies - none of the means she lists is entirely reliable.Spiders eat insects "which helps to keep the number of insects to a minimum". This is so silly it's almost funny."A spider has eight legs, no antennae, and its body is divided into three parts. Insects have six legs, antennae and their body is divided into two parts. Therefore, a spider is not an insect." She's got the numbers of body parts the wrong way round, as she could see for herself if she looked.Wasps "can be very useful creatures. They feed insects that can do serious harm to different garden and food plants to their young." Clumsy writing.At best you could describe much of the book's content as being 'lies to children' - a lot of simplifications that aren't actually entirely true but may help the child make more sense of its world. But why not just give your children the real facts about bugs instead of filling their heads with rubbish like this?