Insectopolis
A Natural History
Readers rate it 4.0 (3 on Hardcover)
258 pages · Released May 13, 2025 · W. W. Norton & Company
Content report card
Insectopolis parent’s guide: what’s inside
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What it offers
A note for parents
Insectopolis is an award-winning graphic nonfiction work that combines stunning visual storytelling with rigorous science and history education. The content is age-appropriate for elementary and middle-grade readers, with only minimal instances of predation (dragonflies hunting) presented in a naturalistic rather than graphic way. The book excels at celebrating real scientists—especially overlooked figures like Charles Henry Turner and Maria Sybilla Merian—and conveys urgent environmental messages about insect decline and biodiversity in an accessible, inspiring manner rather than a doom-focused one.
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From the publisher
Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them. This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their... Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them. This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history. Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence, and Maria Sybilla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology. Galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.
Shelved under
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Insects
- Entomology
- biology
- Natural History
- informative
- slow-paced
- Comics
- Dystopian
- Science
- History
- Nonfiction
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ISBN 9781324035725 · W. W. Norton & Company