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A review by blchandler9000
The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era by William Stout, Byron Preiss
5.0
Perhaps the most beautiful dinosaur book ever published.
This is not a book of facts and information dumps (though there are sections with plenty of them, not to mention fact-delivering captions) but instead a combination of art and prose that carries the reader straight into the Mesozoic. William Stout created hundreds of illustrations of dinosaurs feeding, fighting, mating, resting, itching, pooping, hatching, moving, and sleeping. Stout created quiet moments, as well as violent ones, using all manner of drawing and painting media to create his images. (One of the fun things about the book is that, those familiar with art history and famous illustrators from "The Golden Age" will notice Stout paid homage to artists in various pictures. Here's a Triceratops that evokes Harry Clarke. There is a Longisquama ala Hiroshige, an Arthur Rackham Chasmosaurus, and so on.)
The prose, too, is lovely. The late William Service wrote stories to accompany each illustration. It's easy to focus on Stout's pictures, but the words are lovely, too, and just as evocative. Service's words carry the illustrations beyond moments-in-time into paleontological short stories with characters and emotion. It's nature-writing at its best.
Maybe I'm gushing. This was my favorite book as a child, and I still know almost every page by heart. It was a huge part of my childhood, both in a fueling a young passion for all things prehistoric as well as artistic. Looking at it today, one can see that some of the images are out of date or inaccurate--none of the dinosaurs have feathers, most of them are very boney with their ribs showing, and a couple reconstructions were made with guesswork later proven to be wrong. (I'm sure Stout would admit as much, and his more recent dinosaur books and murals prove he has kept up with paleo-news.) But for this reader, the inaccuracies do not detract from the dynamic and exciting world that Stout and Service created.
This is not a book of facts and information dumps (though there are sections with plenty of them, not to mention fact-delivering captions) but instead a combination of art and prose that carries the reader straight into the Mesozoic. William Stout created hundreds of illustrations of dinosaurs feeding, fighting, mating, resting, itching, pooping, hatching, moving, and sleeping. Stout created quiet moments, as well as violent ones, using all manner of drawing and painting media to create his images. (One of the fun things about the book is that, those familiar with art history and famous illustrators from "The Golden Age" will notice Stout paid homage to artists in various pictures. Here's a Triceratops that evokes Harry Clarke. There is a Longisquama ala Hiroshige, an Arthur Rackham Chasmosaurus, and so on.)
The prose, too, is lovely. The late William Service wrote stories to accompany each illustration. It's easy to focus on Stout's pictures, but the words are lovely, too, and just as evocative. Service's words carry the illustrations beyond moments-in-time into paleontological short stories with characters and emotion. It's nature-writing at its best.
Maybe I'm gushing. This was my favorite book as a child, and I still know almost every page by heart. It was a huge part of my childhood, both in a fueling a young passion for all things prehistoric as well as artistic. Looking at it today, one can see that some of the images are out of date or inaccurate--none of the dinosaurs have feathers, most of them are very boney with their ribs showing, and a couple reconstructions were made with guesswork later proven to be wrong. (I'm sure Stout would admit as much, and his more recent dinosaur books and murals prove he has kept up with paleo-news.) But for this reader, the inaccuracies do not detract from the dynamic and exciting world that Stout and Service created.