The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Animals: A Visual Who’s Who of the World’s Creatures Reviews

The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Animals: A Visual Who's Who of the World's Creatures

Authoritative and beautiful, written by expert zoologists and illustrated with nearly two thousand original full-color paintings by the world's finest wildlife artists, The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Animals is one of the most extraordinary references ever published. No other guide to the animal world combines such comprehensiveness, consistency of style, and elegance.

This catalogue of the animal world depicts species in detail -- mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish -- illustrating each in color, a stunning guide to the staggering diversity of vertebrate animals. Organized by the taxonomic categories of order, family, genus, and species, the text gives an overview of the characteristics shared by animals within each family. When a family's members are similar, the most typical and most interesting are depicted, with more species included for every dramatic visual variation. Each illustrated animal is described in detail, and every entry includes information on size, breeding patterns, feeding habits, intriguing adaptations and behaviors, common and scientific names, conservation status, geographic range, and habitat.

Written by leading scientists in each field, and incorporating innovative graphics -- cladograms -- in to illustrate the evolution and diversity of each class in the animal kingdom, this remarkable book is an essential reference for every home.Dr. Philip Whitfield, lecturer in Zoology at King's College, London, has compiled this weighty, authoritative, and beautiful volume about the five classes of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. An overview of each class serves as an introduction to its members and includes descriptions of the class's distinguishing features, history, and major families, plus cladograms showing the possible phylogenic relationships within the class. Because most readers are more comfortable with the traditional classifications of kingdom, phylum, order, etc., within the chapters themselves the families are arranged in accordance with that system. The section on each family, in turn, begins with a brief overview of the family, followed by representative examples of family members. Each included species is then described separately. The entry includes a full-color painting of the animal, the animal's common and scientific name, its size, breeding patterns, feeding habits, geographic range, and more. Relevant controversies of classification are also mentioned; for example, Whitfield notes that zoologists have recently decided to move the Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares, and pikas) out of the rodent order and grant them status as an order unto themselves. If you haven't been keeping track of who is related to whom, a detailed index with both common and scientific names alphabetized together can help you find the animals you seek. With its more than 2,000 beautiful illustrations and informative text on everything from Aardvark to Zosterops japonicus (a.k.a. the Japanese White-eye, a small green bird), The Encyclopedia of Animals is an excellent reference tool--and a browser's delight. --C.B. Delaney









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Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Posthumanities)

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. Susan McHugh traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of mediaâ€"including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital gamesâ€"to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms.

McHugh’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional lifeâ€"most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse ridersâ€"showcase distinctly modern and humanâ€"animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.

Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this periodâ€" queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictionsâ€"McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimaciesâ€"the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic scienceâ€"and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.

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