Planet Earth: As You've Never Seen It Before

In this gorgeous coffee-table book, an offshoot of the Discovery Channel/ BBC series of the same name, zoologist and BBC producer Fothergill takes readers on a kaleidoscopic tour of the flora, fauna and natural history of the Earth's poles, forests, plains, deserts, mountains and oceans. The series of jaw-dropping photographs starts with a view of Earth from the moon (and pointing out the obvious but shocking fact that no one has been able to see it live since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission). Other images reveal the astonishing variety of geology and life around the globe, including an emperor penguin eyeing an enormous jade-green iceberg; a grove of ancient monkey puzzle trees on the slopes of the Andes; a wild (and endangered) two-humped Bactrian camel strolling with her calf across the Gobi Desert; a long-furred, red-eyed gelada (a kind of primate) perched on a cliff in the Ethiopian highlands; a cave explorer parachuting into Mexico's 1,100-foot-deep Cave of Swallows; a blimplike nerpa (the only known fresh-water seal) swimming through Siberia's Lake Baikal; and the lacy undulations of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta captured by satellite. The book's only drawback is its large size and heavy weight, which makes for cumbersome reading. (Mar.)