KINGDOMS OF LIFE

Brilliant illustrations teeming with living creatures light up this quick introduction to the biosphere’s six kingdoms.

To the enduring irritation of tidy-minded taxonomists, living things resist falling into neat categories, but the six-kingdom structure (animals, plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, and archaea) is broadly accepted as a useful working model, and Allen-Fletcher makes a game effort to briefly define and distinguish each—while properly pointing to pesky misfits as she goes. So it is that plants draw energy from sunlight but, she notes, so do green sea slugs; aspen trees, unlike most plants, reproduce by cloning. Still, she leaves younger readers with at least basic ideas of prominent characteristics that most members of each kingdom share and offers glimpses of select examples, both typical and oddball. For more technical-minded audiences, she wraps up by briefly mentioning the subdivisions within kingdoms and noting renowned taxonomists such as Carl Linnaeus and al-Dīnawarī. Allen-Fletcher closes with the scientific names of all 164 species that crowd her vivid montages with numbered, naturalistic images. If it’s not always clear which specimen in the crowd she means when referring to “these” corals or edible mushrooms, life’s astonishing variety of hues, forms, and habitats definitely comes through. Tiny human observers in a racially diverse array put in occasional appearances, too.

A perspicuous first glance, with radiant illustrations.