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The more you find out about penguins, the more they seem to have in common with another oddly endearing flightless biped. Namely, us. --Flipping Brilliant. Think March of the Penguins meets Life's Little Instruction Book by way of National Geographic. Award-winning nature photographer Jonathan Chester captures the essence of the Antarctic's most popular residents to illustrate the similarities between penguins' lives and our own. Patrick Regan's clever narrative offers surprising insights and humorously entertaining life lessons. The appeal of penguins is undeniable and universal. And we can learn a lot from these fat, funny birds. Lessons like: The meek sleep alone; It's better to be smart than cute; You can be too thin. (After all, the book explains, if the Olsen twins ever get locked in a walk-in cooler for days and are forced to live off their own body fat, they're goners. Penguins? They're good for months.) Flipping Brilliant includes helpful environmental information about the penguin habitat and the effects of global warming, including Web sites that show how you can help.

Anyone who's ever been in love knows that this supreme emotion changes everything. When love is real, it sometimes feels like gravity itself doesn't quite apply. In To Love Is to Fly, this magical and powerful journey is told through photographer Jonathan Chester's stunning photography of penguins, along with refreshingly heartfelt prose. To Love Is to Fly is written from a me-to-you perspective, making it a great gift for spouse, partner, or main squeeze. Highlights include an image key denoting the type of penguin, environmental features, location details, online resource links, and facts about the different species in each photo. With their upright stance and bemused expressions, penguins are the most humanlike of birds. Like us, they sacrifice for their families, are mostly monogamous, and must adapt to survive in a rapidly changing world. Also like us, it's impossible for them to fly. But doesn't love make anything possible?

Jonathan Chester and Patrick Regan's My Unflappable Mom is a loving tribute to "the most rare of birds-the incredible, unflappable mom." You know the type. Band-Aids. Car pools. Freshly baked cookies. The 5th grade scale model of Mt. Vesuvius she helped sculpt out of papier-mache-complete with pyrotechnics. Chester's striking and intimate nature photographs of tuxedoed penguins and their young beautifully illustrate Regan's charming verse that honors those incredible, unflappable moms who nurture and instill a spirit of adventure and independence in their young. While it's a mom's job to be ever watchful, fiercely protective, and deeply engaged in her children's lives, it's also a mom's job to let go-to send her young into the big scary world-whether that means walking away without looking back on the first day of kindergarten or nudging them gently out of the nest as young adults. In My Unflappable Mom, Chester and Regan celebrate the relationship between mother and child while praising mom for being the rare bird that she is-and that's definitely something to flap about.