Silk & Venom

Silk and Venom: Searching for a Dangerous Spider Katheryn Lasky, photographs by Christopher G. Knight

In this Scientists in the Field-esque book, we meet Greta Binford, an arachnologist who studies the brown recluse spider. We get an overview of spiders in general, Binford’s biography, and then follow her and her students on a trip to the Dominican Republic to look for brown recluse spiders. (Binford specifically studies how the brown recluse ended up in North America and how it’s related to the South American species.)

The book does a good job of balancing science with the process of doing science, which is something I always appreciate. I also like that we discover several different types of spiders, not just the brown recluse. Close up photography shows how different they are visually, but we also get a good information on how they act differently. Superhelpful and cool is the “glossary of spiders” at the back, which is basically a photochart of all the spiders we’ve met with the scientific and common names and on which pages they appear.

But... while it's Scientist in the Field-esque, it's not a Scientist in the Field book and lacks that certain something that make that series so awesome.

Book Provided by... my local library

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