Photographs by Art Wolfe, Jim Brandenburg, Jeff Foot, Frans Lanting, and others. Flying, crawling, swimming, and walking on this earth are over one million species of animals: birds and reptiles, fish and insects, mammals and more. Aside from the ubiquitous and lowly protozoa, this plenitude of creatures all derives from the classic coincidence of the egg with its necessary counterpart, the spermatozoa. But from this common denominator, life from conception to birth to childhood and beyond is limitlessly varied. Nowhere is this elegant variation so apparent than in the gamut of parent-child relationships, from blood and thunder to tender nurturing, from indifference to obsession. One of our primitive relatives, the Nile crocodile, for example, takes enormous care with her newborn, vigilantly waiting for the first signs of hatching and ferrying the squiggly young to the river’s edge in her mouth, chirping to them as she scuttles back and forth. NAN RICHARDSON is an editor and writer who has worked on over fifty books for Aperture, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, among others. Ms. Richardson has contributed to such publications as Granta, Art News, and Mother Jones. She lives in New York City. Hardcover / $16.95 USD 7.5" x 8.75" / 80 pages Full color photographs Spring 2006 ISBN: 978-1-8841675-15 Website price: $10