David M. Phillips

One of the downsides of the Early Reviewers program is that one often ends up judging books by their titles (and covers), for better or for worse. Consequently, I was originally interested in this book because I like art and architecture. Alas, this book might have been better titled "The High Resolution Photography of the Parts of Insects" or "The Evolutionary Design of Insects" because it really has nothing to do with art or architecture.

However, once I got past this initial disappointment, I was very interested to learn about the design of insects, particularly some of the tradeoffs in design. E.g., many insects have very small, rudimentary eyes, because they gain most of their information about the world through smell or touch. However, houseflies have large compound eyes because they are capable of flight, and so must be able to gather information about their environment more quickly than by smelling it and before they actually touch it. Still, their eyes are not capable of focusing on images that are far away, so their sight is limited to objects that are close to them.

So, even though this book wasn't exactly what I'd expected or hoped for, I still enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to others.… (más)

I received a copy of this book via the Library Thing Early reviewers program.

I cannot tell you how JEALOUS I am of the author! An electron microscope to basically play with for a personal project like this! So envious.

The photographs in the book are spectacular. I really wish there was an electronic version, so I could zoom in and out, although I'm sure unauthorized digital copies would be copied all over.

Having said that--the text of the book seems accurate, but the prose is just not that inspiring. I kept finding that I had skipped over sections. It's not bad writing; it's just not very engaging either. It's a bit like a lecture or list of factoids.… (más)