Smithsonian Handbook of Interesting Insects

Curators from the Natural History Museum in London present a fascinating gallery of insects in this richly photographed work. While Broad is the museum’s principal curator of insects, other contributors hail from different fields: Blanca Huertas, Ashley H. Kirk-Spriggs, and Dmitry Telnov respectively specialize in lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), diptera (flies), and coleoptera (beetles and weevils). The species they’ve selected, drawn from the museum’s entomological collections, are intended to show a “diverse array of colour, patterns and forms.” It is rewarding just to peer at the handsome photographs and to discover, for instance, that the Goliath beetle resembles an Art Nouveau brooch, or that the leaf beetle is downright cute. The text accompanying each photograph is rarely longer than five sentences and offers facts about, among other topics, distribution (the ubiquitous stink bug is “almost cosmopolitan” in its dispersion around the world) and size (the Atlas moth sports a 10-inch to 12-inch wingspan), as well as humor (lantern bugs are “supposed to taste like bacon, ” according to aficionados in Madagascar). The only caveat is that the insects are not presented in alphabetical or any other kind of readily apparent order. Nonetheless, this book of little creatures will be a welcome arrival for amateur entomologists. (Apr.)