Jim Arnosky
When my husband saw this book with the same title as my site at the library, he simply had to pick it up for me to review. It turns out, not only is it a great book, my three year old son was also really into it.
A couple of minor quibbles:
The book seems to have some generalizations that seem to miss a few facts here and there-
For example, the book refers to frogs and toads as "similar but different animals" - Perhaps it's a linguistics difference, but the term frog is used to cover the general class of species of amphibians in the Order Anura (see the animal kingdom tree here), so when folks talk about "frogs" it's generally accepted that they are talking about frogs and toads - all toads are frogs, but true toads refers to a specific family in the order Anura.
Another minor generalization "Only male frogs make sounds" is also not true for all species, though indeed, for a large majority of them and for the most common ones this tends to be the case.
That said, with over 36,000 species, for all intents and purposes this book pretty well covers all the basics, and these are merely nits.
Overall though, this was a really great and surprisingly detailed and comprehensive introduction to frogs, with some nice drawings. I even found myself learning some new things, after so many years of running this website!
