The Most Beautiful Roof in the World: Exploring the Rainforest Canopy

By Kathryn Lasky

Journey along with Dr. Meg Lowman, a scientist who, with the help of slings, suspended walkways, and mountain-climbing equipment, has managed to ascend into one of our planet’s least accessible and most fascinating ecosystems--the rain-forest canopy. “Fresh in outlook and intriguing in details, this book will strengthen any library collection on the rainforest.”--Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9780544495746

Kathryn Lasky

Kathryn Lasky is a New York Times bestselling author of many children’s and young adult books, which include her Tangled in Time series; her bestselling series Guardians of Ga’Hoole, which was made into the Warner Bros. movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole; and her picture book Sugaring Time, awarded a Newbery Honor. She has twice won the National Jewish Book Award, for her novel The Night Journey and her picture book Marven of the Great North Woods. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband. kathrynlasky.com

Book preview

Pioneer in the Rainforest

A page shows a woman with a safety rope tied to her back and wearing a safety helmet, climbs a steep ladder that rests on a tree in a rainforest. The text on the page reads pioneer in the rainforest.Meg Lowman stands in the rainforest wearing a safety helmet and looks somewhere with a slight smile on her face.

MEG LOWMAN climbs trees. She has climbed trees since she was a little girl in search of insects, leaves, and flowers, and now it is her job. Meg is a rainforest scientist, and her specialty is the very top of the rainforest, the canopy.

During the past ten years Meg has spent at least five days a month in the treetops, which adds up to six hundred days. And this does not include the approximately ten days every month she spends at the base of trees looking up. Meg wants to know about the relationships between plants and insects in the canopy. She is especially interested in herbivory, leaf and plant eating by insects and other animals. She wants to know which insects eat which leaves and how their feeding affects the overall growth of the rainforest. To answer these questions she must spend a great deal of time either up in a tree or back in her laboratory, studying samples. Meg’s lab is at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, a rainforest research center in Sarasota, Florida, where she is director of research and conservation.

A collage of two photos of Meg Lowman.

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Meg cannot remember a single day in her life when she wasn’t either looking at or studying a plant, leaf, flower, or insect—except possibly those days when she went to the hospital to give birth to her two sons, Edward and James. Since Meg was six, she has been fascinated by the natural world. As a child she had a bird’s nest collection, a rock collection, a shell collection, an insect and butterfly collection, and a bud collection. Her bedroom was stuffed with outdoor treasures. Her great love was flowers; in the fifth grade she was the only child in her class to enter the state science fair. She made a wildflower collection and won second prize.

When Meg was ten years old, she was intrigued by two women: Rachel Carson, one of the first environmentalists, who studied and wrote about the delicate relationships in the web of life, and Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad. Threading through the countryside and deep woods on long, frightening nights, Harriet Tubman guided countless African Americans out of slavery to freedom. Meg read that she often navigated by feeling for the moss that grew on the north sides of trees. But it was not

Reviews for The Most Beautiful Roof in the World

[chelsea6273 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a great book that has the ability to fascinate youngsters, as it has truly beautiful photographs of different rain forests and tells the story of a very interesting female scientist, Meg Lowman. The audience is for older elementary children, but I think that even younger elementary children would enjoy listening to it and looking at the photos. I think that it is considered specialized nonfiction because the authors center the focus of the book on the wonders of rainforest canopies. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the rainforest, and anyone who is going on a vacation to a rainforest because it--both interestingly and simply--describes life in the canopy of a rainforest.