Meat-Eating Plants

-- Exciting topics perfect for the reluctant reader.
-- High-interest science books lavishly illustrated with color photos.
-- Each book contains chapter notes, a further reading list, and an index.

School Library Journal

Gr 3-6These quick trips down two of the natural world's more spectacular byways will leave readers both edified and entertained. Neatly reversing the food chain's usual order, bladderworts, sundews, pitcher plants, and Venus flytraps (as well as certain vines, fungi, and seeds) have developed all sorts of ingenious methods for trapping insects and other small creatures. Aaseng reports, almost with regret, that rumors of carnivorous plants large enough to eat people are exaggerated. Nonetheless, using both common and Latin names, he enticingly describes the amazing variety of structures and strategies that these deceptively unassuming plants have evolved. A healthy sheaf of photographs (some in black and white) mixes close-ups with more distant views of the wetlands, where most of them grow. An appended taxonomic chart precedes a short but useful bibliography. Worldsor at least worldletscollide in Poynter's more theoretical excursion; though the recent violent encounter between Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter was witnessed by scientists, in general our knowledge of similar events on Earth is derived from craters, layers of sediment, sudden changes in fossil distribution, and like circumstantial evidence. Poynter discusses how that evidence is discovered and interpreted, and goes on to lay out proposed strategiessome terrifically impracticalfor heading off a future disaster. She closes with a list of "Near-Earth Objects" that will be hurtling by in the next 10 years. Despite some carelessness with detailsAaseng's "tiny ant" in a Venus flytrap is plainly a fly, and Poynter's partial view of the huge crater under the Yucatan is a meaningless, enhanced color jumblethese titles are worth offering to casual browsers and young scientists alike.John Peters, New York Public Library