Maps
By Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski
(Big Picture Press, $35; ages 7-10)
What a great idea! Husband-and-wife illustrators Mizielinska and Mizielinski have hand-drawn a book of 52 maps that act as individual historical and cultural guides. Along with geographical features and pictures, you’ll find amusing depictions of indigenous animals, native dress and characteristic architecture, such as the Great Wall, Forbidden City and fairy-tale Shanghai skyscrapers of China. Between the buildings, food and history, the maps will awaken a wanderlust for unfamiliar and exotic locales. They will also broaden knowledge about countries you thought you knew . . . but will now know a lot better.
Dinosaurology: The Search for a Lost World
(Candlewick, $19.98; ages 8 and up)
Dinosaurology, an engaging combination of fiction and history, follows an imagined 1907 South American expedition to track and study dinosaurs. The book is written in the form of a diary, with all kinds of flaps and attachments that a scientist might stick on a page of his journal. Some of them, like the dino family tree and comparative size chart, are highly enlightening. Part of a series that includes the wildly popular Dragonology, Dinosaurology stretches across time to highlight anachronistic-for-1907 facts that illuminate as they entertain.
Frank Lipsius is a contributing writer to MetroKids.
