Dieter Braun

My five-star rating is for the artwork, which is beautiful. The text accompanying most (though, annoyingly, not all) of the illustrations is factual rather than lyrical, and I'd have preferred the latter. It is, however, a book to be looked at rather than read so, on that basis, I haven't reduced my rating.

This was a book I saw in its original German publication and which, despite not speaking German, I was sorely tempted to buy due to it being such a gorgeous artefact (I bought instead, show more Mervyn Peake, Oscar Wilde: Extracts from the Poems of Oscar Wilde, to which I'd happily give ten stars out of five), so when I saw it in its English publication, I had no hesitation in buying it as a gift for a young nephew, and only a slight hesitation before deciding he'd like a different book better and that I'd therefore best keep this one for myself! show less

Dieter Braun's "Wild Animals of the South" is a beautiful book that aims to tell us about animals of the southern half of the globe - how and where they live, what they look like and what they eat. However it doesn't quite live up to this promise. Instead of covering the whole of the southern hemisphere, this book only covers Africa, South America, Asia, Australia and Antarctica. New Zealand and the Pacific Islands are excluded with only the South Island of New Zealand appearing, as an show more un-named blob, on the map at the beginning of the book. Thus there are no Orang-utans from Borneo, no Bird of Paradise from New Guinea and no Kokako or Kiwi from New Zealand. Also, while for many animals the text does tell us about how they live, other animals are pictured and named but no further information is given.
However, the pictures are stunningly beautiful works of art in a slightly geometric style. I'm sure many children will spend hours looking at this book, enjoying the pictures of rhinos, lions, toucans, kangaroos and dugong and not caring about what might be missing. Like all good nonfiction books, "Wild Animals of the South' contains an index, but it is of very little use since it simply lists the animals, in the same order they appear in the book, along with a smaller copy of the original picture. show less

This book is GORGEOUS.
However, my kid doesn't really care about it. While the illustrations are super beautiful, I don't think the impressionistic style works for curious, literal minded kids. There's also very minimal information about the animals featured.

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