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MannyRayner

Manny Rayner's book reviews

I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.

Currently reading

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten

Dinosaur Hunt

Dinosaur Hunt - Anonymous Anonymous Two year old Sam, who visited us for dinner this evening, kindly brought his copy of Dinosaur Hunt with him so that we could enjoy it too. It is a fine piece of work, and if I'd had a copy at that age I would also have loved it. Even 50 years late, it's not at all bad.

The clever idea, which I had not seen before, is to present the pictures using an acetate film over a dark background. So you can hardly see the dinosaurs under normal conditions... BUT, when you carefully insert the white "spotlight" cutout between the two layers, they magically become visible. And you don't even need an AA battery! It's terrific.

There are four double pages: on each one, the right-hand side is the Spotlight picture, and the left-hand side is text explaining what the different kinds of dinosaurs are. Sam's favorite is "Swimmers" - he has already learned to say "icthyosaurus". If you also know a young dinosaur enthusiast, you can hardly go wrong with this excellent book.
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Sam's mother tells me that every single kid who's visited their house during the last month has appreciated Dinosaur Hunt. She's going to buy some more copies to give away as presents.