Fabric science swatch kit Book

Maybe I am being a bit too harsh and overly condemning with my criticisms regarding Arthur Dorros’ 1987 non-fiction picture book Ant Cities, but I nevertheless do stand by my textual annoyances and frustrations with the latter and for a number of in my opinion quite legitimate reasons.

For one, and first and foremost, although with Ant Cities Arthur Dorros certainly does provide his young readers (and/or listeners) with very much interesting and generally sufficiently engagingly penned basic details and general information about ants (regarding their physiologies, how they live, what they eat and how ant cities, how ant colonies can be both small and also of course gigantically humongous), I have unfortunately also found that Dorros is in my opinion being more than a trifle too vague and wishy-washy regarding in particular ant classification (in other words, I for one certainly rather majorly want and require a bit more specifics in Ant Cities on what actually makes ants insects, such as information on exoskeletons, on the number of legs all insects have and so on and so on). And for two, and much more of a personal issue for me, Arthur Dorros’ accompanying illustrations for Ant Cities, they are just not all that much to my aesthetic tastes, for yes, I am definitely finding Dorros’ pictures absolutely, utterly bland, lifeless and thus equally not really a decent visual mirror to and for his textual descriptions (and that the illustrations for Ant Cities are ALL verbally labelled with a super tiny and minuscule font that is much too small for my ageing eyes is even more frustrating, because even with my reading glasses I actually cannot read ANY of these descriptive labels and which kind of defeats the purpose of Arthur Dorros including labels in the first place).

Therefore, for me, the combination of text and images has really not been all that successfully rendered in Ant Cities. And although Arthur Dorros does indeed and of course present much that is of interest, much narrational information on ants and on their so-called cities, I just cannot and will not consider more than two stars and to recommend Ant Cities only with very major reservations (as I definitely wanted and even expected considerably more textual detail, the illustrations and how they are labelled are seriously lacking, and yes indeed, that in Ant Cities, Arthur Dorros also does not bother with including any bibliographic materials whatsoever, this really does make me intellectually frustrated and also rather massively livid, as there are way way too many non fiction picture books on the market, out there, where bibliographic materials are ignored, are not considered important).