The Creator’s “inordinate fondness for beetles” finds full and beautiful play in Steve Jenkins’ latest nature book. As usual, everything in Jenkins’ book is carefully thought out and flawlessly arrayed. The African Goliath beetle is shown life-size–almost as large as a human hand.  A speck inside a circle shows the size of the clown beetle, world’s smallest.  Like a Guinness World records for insect-lovers, The Beetle Book will delight youngsters with descriptions of the world’s longest (Titan) beetle’s ability to snap a pencil in half with its pincers, and of Wallace’s longicorn, the beetle with the longest antennae of any insect. How beetles defend themselves, what they eat, what makes a beetle different from other insects–almost everything one might imagine is covered in these colorful and information-packed pages.  A real treasure for budding naturalists. 

The Beetle Book

by Steve Jenkins

New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2012.  31 pgs. Non-fiction