May 2004 -- Unless you're anxious or have spent little time in the outdoors, you don't need a book about how to camp with children, a fact underlined by the painfully obvious advice most of these books include. But if it will make you feel better, or if gaps in your knowledge exist, here are the best we've found.
Parents' Guide to Hiking & Camping, by Alice Cary (Norton, $19), is a fun, readable book full of photos, boxes, quotations, and tidbits of advice from real parents that make it easy to browse for ideas. The book is durable, with a plastic cover and thick, shiny pages, and has an index. The emphasis is on beginners setting out with small children, and it's somewhat superficial.
Camping and Backpacking with Children, by Steven Boga (Stackpole Books, $20), contains more information and has some value for more experienced backpackers, with its detailed sections on health and safety and on survival. Unfortunately, there is no index, and finding a particular piece of information is difficult. The book is cheaply made, with poor layout and gray photos.
The Kids' Wildlife Book, by Warner Shedd (Williamson Publishing, $13), is an ingenious field guide and activity book that has loads of information in little snippets and doesn't talk down to kids. It's a funny book, with cartoons and line drawings that will occupy many hours. Our children's favorite natural-history books are from the "Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science" series (HarperCollins). These inexpensive paperback picture books take on serious subjects like evolution, the water cycle, or oil spills at a level kids in primary grades can read and understand, without dumbing down the material. We haven't found natural-history books of similar quality for older children.
The National Audubon Society (www.audubon.org) field guide series (Knopf) is an extraordinary collection, with color plates and loads of interesting facts on every species, as well as plenty of help in identification. One volume or another covers just about anything you might be interested in: trees, birds, and wildflowers of the East or West; seashore creatures; rocks and minerals; and even the weather, stars, or fossils. The disadvantage is that they are so heavy that you can't pack more than one or two in your luggage. Also, Audubon's own Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf, $35), with David Sibley's painted plates rather than photos, is easier to use (published in 2000, it was an instant classic). An alternative are regional field guides, which Audubon publishes for the Pacific Northwest, New England, California, and so on. You carry one book on each trip, but they're not as easy to use. Smaller field guides also solve the weight problem but can be frustrating: There's a very good chance that the plant or animal you are looking at isn't in the book.
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