Dig a Tunnel

""When people saw how animals tunneled through the ground, they must have thought, What a great idea!"" writes Hunter (the pen name for Pamela Greenwood and Elizabeth Macalaster) in the third of Hunter and Miller's engineering-themed books (Into the Sky). What follows is a briskly described and brightly stylized panoply of man-made tunnels. Most of the tunnels have to do with public transportation (""The Chunnel takes you under the English Channel in 19 minutes""), although illicit uses are not overlooked: ""Prisoners dug tunnels to escape. Bank robbers dug tunnels, too."" Like the text, Miller's illustrations, rendered with a strong graphic sensibility, possess a witty crispness. He keeps details to a minimum, yet the precision of every line and the rich saturation of colors give each full-bleed, double-page spread the visual wallop of a poster--the Mont Blanc Car Tunnel, for example, becomes tiny black openings at either end of a boulder-like range of purple mountains. Hard-core junior construction buffs may grouse that there's not enough tunnel-building action, but for children just discovering the appeal of engineering, this snappy, appropriately horizontal volume should be right on target. Ages 3-6. (Mar.)