By Brian Skerry
A National Geographic photographer's shark photographs, close enough that your child stops turning pages, with the real science alongside them.
Brian Skerry has spent thirty years in the water with these animals, and what's in here is what he came back with. A mako in the dark, its eyes lit up by the reflective layer behind them. A tiger shark with a researcher's hand on its flank. Hammerheads from the front, so the eyes make sense for the first time. Blacktip pups in the shallows. A hundred and ninety-two pages of every shark on the planet, dogfish to great white, arranged by what they are and how they live: how they hunt, how they find you, how the babies come, why the water is clear where they're doing well. There are stories in it too, from the times he was there when something happened.
The photographs are the argument. A drawing of a shark is somebody's idea of a shark; these are a shark that was actually there, three feet from a man with a camera, and a child can tell the difference instantly even if they can't say why. That's what makes this the book to reach for when a child's shark interest has been fed entirely on cartoons and showdowns and you want to see whether the real animal holds them. It also treats your child as a serious person. Skerry doesn't simplify the science down to captions, and he keeps pulling the conversation toward what's happening to sharks rather than what sharks might do to us, which is a quiet reversal of everything else your child has absorbed.