BOOK REVIEW: Wild Animals of the South by Dieter Braun

Shane | 22 August 2017 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: Wild Animals of the South by Dieter Braun

Walker Books
June 2017
Hardcover, $39.99
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar

Illustrated Non-Fiction / Picture Books

10/10

For this simply beautiful book, Dieter Braun has created gorgeously evocative artworks featuring many animals, birds and reptiles of the southern hemisphere, and paired them to some interesting facts, such as the giraffe’s scientific name Camelopardalis being derived from the Greek words for camel and leopard, because they looked like a blend of the two.

“No matter how different all these animals are,” Braun writes in his introduction, “how different their shapes, their colours or their way of life in the highest treetops, the deepest oceans or the starkest deserts, one thing ties them together: their will to live and their freedom.”

Braun captures that wildness, that freedom and will to live in his stylised paintings, incorporating elegance and an element of rounded cubism in a way that evokes each creature’s character and spirit.

A hard cover collection that even features pages with an appropriately tactile texture, Wild Animals Of The South will have a long life on coffee tables, in school libraries, and on the bookshelves of many a happy, inquisitive child.