This educational and photographic book is published by the National Geographic Society. It is split into chapters, each by a different 'collaborator' and rain forest expert. The book touches on all the expected themes of today's rain forest including amazing flora and fauna (the primary portions of the book), decimation of the rain forest, mining, poaching, indigenous cultures and how the modern world impinges on them, and more. It's really kind of a coffee-table book or adult primer. While many of the pictures might stun or interest kids, the inclusion of many semi-political and adult topics wean it from being a kid's book. Further, it's not really a scientific treatise. More a cross-section of rain forest topics made real by the world-class pictures. It's too bad the book is not a larger, coffee-table format, because many of the pictures are absolutely stunning. Further, since the book is from the 1980's, it does not benefit from some of the more modern graphic design and informational layouts common today: it wouldn't be worse for inclusion of charts and insets and other ways of conveying information. As it is, the endless prose can't hold its ground vs. the pictures, and taking the prose sentence by sentence becomes sluggish. ( )