Review: The Wonderful Egg, by Dahlov Ipcar

I flipped through this book yesterday at the Flying Eye Books / Nobrow booth at ALA Midwinter. From the appearance of Dahlov Ipcar's delightfully animated dinosaur drawings, it looked like something I might have checked out from the library when I was a child. (It's a re-issue, painstakingly restored, of a book originally published in 1958, so the time period was about right for me to have seen it at a young age, given how long books last in public libraries.) I went back to look at it again today, this time examining it more closely, including the words.

Suddenly it all came back to me. I had read The Wonderful Egg, from the library, many times! "Triceratops was big, too, but not as big as Brontosaurus." BAM! Take that, Proust! So of course I had to buy it. Such beautifully stylized drawings, simple but informative text, and a narrative twist to end it. Plus, at the back, "This is the Way to Say Their Names," which was most probably my introduction on how to pronounce the names of two dozen dinosaur types.

Now I want to read all the rest of the Dahlov Ipcar books that Flying Eye is re-issuing.

With a Winter White Ale from Bell’s Brewery.

The Wonderful Egg

By Dahlov Ipcar

Flying Eye Books, 2014 (Doubleday, 1958)

ISBN-10: 1909263281

ISBN-13: 978-1909263284

48pp., $19.95

Review: My Pet Book, by Bob Staake

Where was My Pet Book when I was young? It's beautiful, it worships the power of books, and there's lots of fun little bits to discover in the backgrounds of the images, especially in the signs of this pet-obsessed town. "Breed Limit 35"! "Central Bark"! "Bowowery"! (There's even evidence of a voyage to "Funky Town"!)

Bob Staake has become a Jack-of-all-trades when it comes to art (from newspaper illustration to posters to iconic New Yorker covers), but it's clear that he has a special affinity for children's books and the importance of reading. With its rhymed text and colorful, highly stylized (and stylish!) illustrations, My Pet Book will engage and charm you on every page. I can't wait to recommend this "frisky red hardcover" to all the young reading-lovers at my library.

Bonus! Be sure to check out this great, in-depth interview with Bob Staake at the Washington City Paper website, conducted by my good friend Mike "ComicsDC" Rhode! 

With a Swallow Wit from Middle Ages Brewing Co.

My Pet Book

by Bob Staake

Random House, 2014

40 pages, $17.99

ISBN-10: 0385373120

ISBN-13: 978-0385373128

Review: Neanderthal Man, by Svante Pääbo

A very personal account of the successful attempt to map the genome of a Neanderthal, humanity's closest evolutionary link. Svante Pääbo, the project's lead researcher, necessarily mixes autobiography with procedural descriptions, with his history as a scientist and as a person informing and guiding his quest for what appears at first an impossible goal.

What the non-scientist reader (i.e., me) takes away from this book is a much clearer understanding of the ins and outs of the scientific method. Occasionally Pääbo comes upon a valuable insight through sudden inspiration, but much more often, insight arrives only through teamwork, and only after much trial and error (with a big emphasis on the error). Success in this massive and complex project came only after years of painstaking group effort, characterized by mysteries to solve, blind alleys to back out of, assumptions to re-consider, and techniques to continually refine or, sometimes, abandon.

While my eyes did glaze over at times when the science got extremely detailed, those occasions were few, and probably not Pääbo's fault - even the hard science here is presented carefully and clearly, and I found myself understanding a lot more of the specifics than I had assumed I might. (I soon learned not to bother checking the endnotes, as they consist almost entirely of journal article title references - essential for readers who wish to track the intricacies of each new research development, but they contain no real discursive content. The meat of the book is in the text itself.)

Pääbo does an admirable job of communicating both the substance and the struggle of science; politics and personalities mix with publishing and perseverance. In Neanderthal Man we learn about both an evolutionary cousin and what it takes to do successful science.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
by Svante Pääbo
Basic Books, 2014
288 pages, $27.99
ISBN-10: 0465020836
ISBN-13: 978-0465020836

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo, with a Blueberry Hill Lager from Samuel Adams.