The multitude of survival strategies are impressive & often confounding at first. More than once scientists have been baffled by only finding females of a species to find out that the males have evolved into nothing more than parasitic sacks of sperm. Other times sexuality is fluid as with flat worms where the loser of a lancing contest gets to bear the eggs, although some snails just impregnate each other if they can. If not, they go it alone & impregnate themselves. In the meantime, they're battling the elements, trying not to become dinner for their predators, & find enough nourishment for themselves. It's a tough world out there.
Simon does a great job of describing the environmental niches these animals populate & even gets into island environments & how they can radically alter the ecosystem without bogging down into a lot of science-speak. True, he doesn't delve too deeply into anything, but this is a great overview of some of the oddities sharing the globe with us. My audio edition was very well narrated by a SAG actor, so it was a lot of fun. Highly recommended for teens & up. I think it would be a great introduction into evolution for teens.
Update Simon mentions that millipedes don't have 1000 legs, but at most 750. A Smithsonian Magazine article I read today describes a new find with with over 1000, though. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...
Table of Contents Introduction CHAPTER 1: You Absolutely Must Get Laid Antechinus Anglerfish Flatworm Mustache Toad Toadfish CHAPTER 2: You Can’t Find a Babysitter Ant-Decapitating Fly Glyptapanteles Wasp Asp Caterpillar Ocean Sunfish Lowland Streaked Tenrec Surinam Toad CHAPTER 3: You Need a Place to Crash Pearlfish Tongue-Eating Isopod Pistol Shrimp Sociable Weaver Hero Ant CHAPTER 4: You Live in a Crummy Neighborhood Water Bear Diving Bell Spider Zombie Ant Pink Fairy Armadillo Naked Mole Rat CHAPTER 5: Turns Out Getting Eaten Is Bad for Survival Hagfish Axolotl Cuttlefish Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko Pangolin Crested Rat CHAPTER 6: It Turns Out Not Eating Is Also Bad for Survival Giant African Land Snail Aye-Aye Mantis Shrimp Bone-Eating Worm Tiger Beetle CHAPTER 7: You Can’t Let Them Get Away That Easily, Can You? Bolas Spider Velvet Worm Geography Cone Snail Lamprey Assassin Bug A Few Parting Words...more
A GR friend's review reminded me of this, but I haven't read it in about 50 years. I read it several times since it was one of my escape books. That'sA GR friend's review reminded me of this, but I haven't read it in about 50 years. I read it several times since it was one of my escape books. That's what it's about, a kid escaping the city to live in the wilderness. Sam's courage, tenacity, & inventiveness was inspiring, but I lost my copy when I moved back to MD from CO back in 1972 or 3. My cousins & I loved it, so we used to try out some of the stuff Sam did. Most didn't work out well since it took too long, but it was fun, interesting, & educational. There are a lot of heart-warming scenes. I've always remembered the librarian most fondly & the end is great, if a bit over the top. I still remember it well & fondly.
It's probably best for kids from about 7-10 or 12. It's fairly short, so can be read aloud to younger kids, though. Highly recommended....more
...much of Goulson’s evidence is purely anecdotal — such as fewer bugs splattering on the windshields of European cars now compared to the past — and the few studies of global insect populations he does consider are deeply flawed or mischaracterized in his account.
Perhaps the most problematic study of them all is the one that precipitated the insect apocalypse frenzy — a 2017 study co-authored by Goulson with 11 other scientists that compared insect populations in certain German nature reserves over the last quarter century. Its dramatic finding — that the biomass of flying insects had declined an astonishing 76 percent in 27 years — together with Goulson’s eager goosing of the press — generated the apocalyptic headlines he was clearly seeking....
Experts who raised doubts about the study received little attention, but there was much to criticize. Among other things, the researchers in many cases failed to sample the same sites in comparison years — a fundamental flaw that in itself renders the findings suspect, if not totally meaningless. They also used what are called malaise traps to collect their samples. These only collect insects when they are flying, which is highly influenced by other variables like the weather — insects fly more when it is warmer — making the measurements even less reliable, despite the scientists’ attempt to account for them. And even though the study took place in nature reserves and did not even purport to test possible causes of decline, Goulson was immediately giving interviews to the press blaming agricultural pesticides (a long time hobby-horse of his), in the absence of any evidence in the study to support the claim. --------------------------- Perspective: ‘Silent Earth’ is simply alarmism from an anti-pesticide trustee By Amanda Zaluckyj, The Farmer’s Daughter USA, Published: October 01, 2021 https://www.agdaily.com/insights/pers...
...But it won’t come as any surprise that Goulson isn’t an unbiased and impartial researcher. He’s a trustee for the Pesticide Action Network UK, an activist organization that strives to reduce the use of “hazardous” and “chemical” pest control. Worse, some circles consider Goulson a “scientist for hire.” In other words, his studies elicit the results his clients want.
The good news is that Goulson is wrong. The surveys and studies he’s conducted and relies upon are flawed and incomplete, to say the least. Fortunately, scientist Matthew Moran and his hand-selected team published a comprehensive study in 2020 that challenged Goulson’s conclusions. Moran’s approach took raw data spanning decades for various insects in North America. Guess what? They found no significant change in population... ----------------- Standard Disclaimer Look at what shelves this book is on. This book is on my 'do-not-read' shelf because it was shoved under my nose I thought I might want to read it. I did some research & found that it was crap. If you disagree & want to discuss in the comments, you need to prove that it isn't with solid evidence. That means peer reviewed science, not anecdotes, opinions, or sites that are biased. Read the Debunking Handbook which is available for free here & follow its guidelines for providing proof. I'm willing to look at good evidence. I've been wrong before.
Comments that don't adhere to the above will be deleted. We're not going to change our minds if you just want to troll. If you repeatedly troll, your comment will be flagged & support will spank you. I may block you, too....more
This is a subject I know a little about from our small flock & the hand craft perspective of knitting/crocheting yarn I've spun from fleece. That's juThis is a subject I know a little about from our small flock & the hand craft perspective of knitting/crocheting yarn I've spun from fleece. That's just enough to know how ignorant I am, especially about the commercial processes, so I really looked forward to this teaching me more. It's well narrated by the author, but it was an educational disappointment especially given the high rating it has. The overall journey of her "white bale" from sheep to finished yarn could have been really interesting if she'd actually done some research & used hard numbers. Instead she seemed to think total ignorance was the way to walk into new, complex situations. This was dumbed down because complex processes were often too much for "poor-little-old me" to handle which is ridiculous! She can't be as stupid as she makes out.
She constantly used vague terms like 'eco-friendly', 'organic', & 'natural'. I'm all for being 'eco-friendly' & she missed plenty of opportunities to show how being so is probably less expensive in terms of sewage & waste disposal if nothing else, but she never mentions this or why any of these are actually 'good' or even what the alternatives are. As she constantly points out, the wool industry has just about disappeared in this country & is in trouble around the world. I know this & we're on the same page when it comes to our love of wool, but economics is full of hard numbers that must be met or the business isn't sustainable.
There were no pictures, although she mentions taking them, so I had to search out pictures & further explanations of complicated equipment online. I couldn't even find them on her blog or web site which I'll list at the bottom of this review. Overall, this was a disappointment; a vapid day trip instead of a decent look at the industry.
Table of Contents Introduction: Girl Meets Bale: Interesting. A 676 pound bale of wool sounds like a lot to me since I can take years to spin & knit up a single fleece, but apparently it's an awkward amount; too big for hand & too small for commercial. Her solution is cool - crowd sourcing the financing & processing in 4 batches, but I was left with a lot of questions: Why 4 batches? About how many fleece in a bale? Why is the bale this weight/size?
CHAPTER 1 - Wool Harvest: I had as little to do with our 50 Dorset ewes as possible & Mom sold them off 25 years ago, so I don't know much yet I still found this chapter horribly lacking. She obviously doesn't know a thing about sheep or shearing & didn't bother to do any research before or after. Instead she relied on a single day visit to one farm & wasted space describing her feelings of ignorance & wonder. She barely describes the flock or farm.
She didn't mention that there are 3 basic types of sheep: fiber, meat, & dairy. In all types, half the lambs are male & are usually butchered. She does mention turning some of the lambs into sausage, but she fails to mention what that means in terms of time, labor, feeding, or why they aren't kept for wool in the fiber breed she is 'researching'. Since meat lambs are an Easter specialty, our breeding & thus lambing season varied. Mom set it with extra feed & letting loose the rams. (Sheep don't take well to artificial insemination.) That meant a partial shearing was needed if there was an early lambing. Parkes does mention some of the dangers of not shearing the teat & backside areas.
Parkes didn't describe anything about feeding or caring for the sheep beyond a vague story of their grazing. Nothing about birthing, a relatively short period (maybe a month) of little sleep punctuated by moments of terror when there is trouble. There's constant counting & scanning of the fields for newborns, too. She says nothing about tail docking & neutering or how/why these are done.
She also didn't see the cutest moments in creation when the lambs are nursing with their butts wiggling & tails spinning like a propeller. Or when they're playing "King of the Mountain" with their mother as the mountain. She didn't mention if the number of lambs was bred for in this flock or how many they typically had. Our Dorsets averaged more than 2 & we bred for 3 since that meant more money. Was that a consideration with the Merino flock?
Worst of all, she completely misses conveying the tension & wonder of shearing. In Maryland, we used to get an Australian crew who roamed the world following the shearing seasons to help shear ours. In a few minutes, they used a 3" wide head the clippers to cut the fleece off in a single piece while rolling the ewe around to gain access. Wow! This 2 minute video shows the process fairly well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53KoR... Then we'd have to rush to get the ewe & fleece out while getting another in through temporary gates. It was crowded & there were cut/squished hands, sweat, & cussing. The Merino flock she saw was always sheared the first week of March by a local. End of story. Boring.
Why is keeping the usable fleece in one piece so important? I still don't know & I was hoping to learn. She mentions inadvertently cutting the skin, but not that it's a lot tougher to do with modern shears compared to the grass clipper things that some still use. She didn't mention the clippers or anything about their history. She mentions rooing (plucking fleece) but nothing about the time frames or types/breeds. Nor did she mention how the the ewe is positioned to stretch the skin to avoid this - it's a high skill. I hoped she'd teach me more, but even I could easily add a chapter to her poor coverage.
Belly, leg, & bottom fleece is soon trashed & she does describe both the process & the reasons for that well enough, but she makes bagging the fleece seem easy. Hah! It's a nasty job that leaves everyone covered in greasy, smelly lanolin mixed with manure from the unwashed fleece. We had a metal staircase to hold the 3'x8' burlap bag once we'd filled what we could from the floor. I eventually had to climb down into it & pull the fleeces past me to where I could stomp them tight. When I worked my way to the top, I'd sew it shut & tip it onto the forks of the tractor since it weighed 300 lbs or so. This whole chapter was far too superficial & missed far too many important points. Not a good start.
CHAPTER 2 - Double Bubble Bale and Trouble: The lack of scouring & processing facilities as they close due to offshoring & the entire process was interesting. Again, her lack of prior research & preparation was irritating. I don't understand why she seems to think going in blind is a good thing. She admits to missing too much each time & yet continues to do it.
CHAPTER 3 - Infiltrating Big Wool: I like her idea that the American Sheep Industry Association should pay attention to the little guys, but I wonder if the numbers back her up? We won't learn it with her lack of research & vague wishes. She didn't even mention that the 1995 loss of the wool credit put a lot of smaller operations out of business. Mom sold her flock then because it cost more to shear the sheep than she got for the wool. Even with her shearing as many as she could & most of the income coming from meat sales, the loss was enough to make her operation a financial loss. She found the market glutted with others selling, too.
CHAPTER 4 - Moving Bodies: Shipping sucks, but she knows people who do it & yet she asked none for advice. She's supposed to be a kind of investigative reporter & yet she can't figure out how to find someone in the industry to explain it? I'm not & yet I've managed it a couple of times including getting things crated. Her trials opening the bale just made her seem like an idiot. She finally does say there are 183 fleeces in her bale.
CHAPTER 5 - Ready to Roll: Repacking the wool was simple since she had the talent right there & should have known it. She must have known it & just wrote this to make herself seem stupid. Well, intentional ignorance is stupidity.
CHAPTER 6 - Bartlett Bound: Her description of the business, plant, & machinery were OK, but I really didn't get what a spinning mule was. I googled it & immediately found a good page from the UK. https://www.belpernorthmill.org.uk/co... Why couldn't she provide pictures, illustrations, or even the names of helpful sites to search for?
CHAPTER 7 - The Stradivarius of Salvage: How different methods create different yarns is really interesting, although I don't have her feel for yarn. I feel their pain at keeping old equipment working, but wonder at their economics. Being down for 6 months due to the lack of a part seems ridiculous when new equipment is available. Again no numbers to make sense of it, though. Parkes is more in her comfort zone working with fibers, so there's a little more depth. Still no pictures so I had to search the Internet.
CHAPTER 8 - Journey to the Heart of the Madder: Natural dyes are interesting & I've tried a few in woodworking, but would never use them on wool. Parkes lists a few reasons most don't use them any more, but fails to mention some can cause rashes when sweat leeches them on to skin. I saw a really bad case from a scarf sold at a craft sale where I was selling my bowls. It was fast & furious. 'Natural' doesn't equate with 'healthy' or 'good', it simply means a lot of chemicals that are unknown. 'Organic wool' is a scam.
CHAPTER 9 - Rust Belt Revival: I was really lost in her machine descriptions in this chapter, but the business side was a little better. Interesting family & struggle.
CHAPTER 10 - Tree House Confessions: The best chapter, IMO. I hand dye my own yarn & I've actually tried one technique described here (squishing in multiple dye colors which I thought of on my own) but I didn't know about steaming. I had the problem described with mixing & muddy colors. I'll have to delve more into finishing techniques since I had no idea it could change the yarn so much. This is more like it!
CHAPTER 11 - Saved by the Ball: I had no idea baseballs were covered in wool. It's really scary that a single contract can make or break a company too, but I work for a small manufacturing company & know how easily it can happen. I owned a Navy Pea jacket for years & loved it. Finest kind & it will be a shame if they do away with them.
CHAPTER 12 - Halloween Spooktacular at the Haunted Dyehouse: Interesting commercial dye information, people, & business, but she dismisses a fairly straightforward calculation as too complicated for her. Again, idiocy is not cute.
CHAPTER 13 - Casting Off: Sums up the book fairly well, although the names came at me a bit too fast, so I had to read them in the ebook. It was nice to find out what happened to the people & businesses she'd visited years before in her quest.
I agree we need to tell people about wool, but I think college is too late. Teach kids in school. Bring back the Industrial Arts programs. Kids are curious & eager to learn even from an old curmudgeon like myself. I've taught some woodworking, knitting, & such. Some have 'helped' me fix their parents' spinning wheels, looms, & made their own knitting needles & crochet hooks. Hands on learning early usually beats books later.
If you're interested in fiber, I highly recommend The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook. It's a bit much, but a great reference & worth skimming through before going to any fiber festivals.
I've always wondered at some of the extreme weapons that some animals mounted & this popular science book answered the question admirably. Sexual seleI've always wondered at some of the extreme weapons that some animals mounted & this popular science book answered the question admirably. Sexual selection can be confusing since it doesn't always make sense. Emlen not only explains it well, but sorts out just how it leads to extremes both through ivory tower science & extensive anecdotes of his field research. He then draws parallels to human weapon evolution. As he points out, he's a beetle scientist, not a historian, but his somewhat facile explorations into this area were really good. His simplicity made the point far better than a more detailed narrative would.
Emlen maintains that there are 3 conditions needed to trigger an arms race: 1 - Competition: winning the prize 2 - Economic defensibility: a clear goal such as the exclusive ability to breed & other factors that narrow the focus. 3 - Duels: individual combat between relative equals, not free for alls
He shows how these conditions play out in animal populations from beetles & crabs to elk & human societies. The examples were fascinating & the parallels staggering. Bigger is often better simply because it reduces the need for combat. Weaker opponents fight others in their class & don't bother fighting those that are much better armed. Still, changing circumstances can also doom an entire species as his example of the Irish elk makes clear. Their antlers were too expensive to support when the climate changed. His data on the antlers of elk & the toll they take on the males is fascinating. They rob their own bones of material just when they need them as strong as possible for fights & only have a few weeks to recover before winter descends. This leads to a high mortality rate, but a very few victorious males father all the following year's calves. Something like 90% of the males never mate in their lifetimes.
The last part of the book looks at how we're now at a very dangerous point because of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) which have changed this age old equation. We almost ended life on the planet a couple of times due to nuclear WMDs, but limited our duels with the USSR & never actually came to direct blows. Now the landscape has changed with nuclear proliferation. Too many states have the ability to cause wide spread destruction with WMDs. The weapons are hidden & even a small state can cause unprecedented damage to a much larger one.
I read Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity (My 4 star review.) just before this book & both authors came to the conclusion that genetics is our new greatest threat. Emlen points out just how inexpensive & easy genetic engineering has become; it's literally now the realm of a garage inventor. Both authors show how inevitable it is that we'll start genetically engineering our children & Emlen's ideas on weaponizing this are just scary. It's not just countries creating super soldiers, but parents wanting to give their kids an advantage. Every parent wants the best for their kid & we already weed out some defects at IVF clinics. It's a very small step to fixing single gene diseases such as Huntington's. If we allow that (Can we really argue against it?) another small step takes us to 'fixing' multi-gene complexes which could be intelligence or strength.
Local laws against such practices won't be able to curtail more extreme practices, especially among the rich. They'll just go to another country that does allow it (or doesn't stop it) & we have no way to tell. We're already complaining about the unfair allocation of wealth. What chance do we have of maintaining any sort of 'fair' competition when the 1% can insure their progeny are stronger, faster, more disease resistant, & have higher IQs? Science fiction? Not really. We're not all the way there yet, but we're closing in rapidly. It's a scary new arms race, one where the weapons aren't clearly displayed. Indeed, they're hidden & almost anyone can wield them.
Highly recommended. It was great in audio format, but do find a text copy to see the pictures. One reviewer even mentioned it turning their kid on to more books. I can't think of higher praise....more
Really good, as usual. There was a lot of good information about topics I never would have thought about otherwise & I've dealt with animals all my liReally good, as usual. There was a lot of good information about topics I never would have thought about otherwise & I've dealt with animals all my life. Of course, I haven't lived in India with their monkey or leopards, but I hadn't even considered tracking pests forensically. I know invasive species can be a problem, but the issues New Zealand faces are really difficult. There were a lot of other fun, interesting, & exciting issues all told with her typical good humor.
The holes in our scientific knowledge of animals is incredible & so is science's blindness to some of the best sources. I'm constantly amazed when a study finds out things about animals that I thought everyone knew such as their differences in intelligence & personality, but I grew up with them. They're just different people to me. (In another book I'm reading, Jane Goodall says her first teacher was her dog, Rusty.)
Toward the end, she got pretty lopsided toward animal welfare. I'm all for traps that kill quickly & I'm not a fan of poison or glue traps, but there were some numbers about the number of dogs killed by poison put out for coyotes without balancing numbers such as the number of baits, the number of coyotes estimated to be killed, or if it helped. (I'm pretty sure it didn't.)
She really painted a poor half picture when dealing with genetically changing animals & releasing them into the wild to bring down or eradicate populations of animals that are causing problems. Her mention of mosquitoes was really incomplete & misleading, but I really objected to: “I think the concern is that the technology and the ability of people to experiment with it is moving way too fast, and the only way you’re going to slow it down is to shut it down completely,” is attributed to Jane Goodall through another scientist & Roach seems to agree. Regulate, sure. Shut down completely because you lump many methods under one umbrella of ignorance - absolutely not. It can't be done, anyway.
Overall, I liked the book. It was perfect reading while waiting for doctors since the chapters were fairly short & engaging. I definitely recommend reading it as I do all of her books. ...more
There's a lot of good information about birds & it was an enjoyable audiobook. It was a bit dense at times. For instance, I'm not well versed in the sThere's a lot of good information about birds & it was an enjoyable audiobook. It was a bit dense at times. For instance, I'm not well versed in the scientific names of bird anatomy & Lederer felt that one quick explanation of the parts were enough, so I had to backtrack occasionally. I prefer that to repetition, but I found the ebook was almost required to skim through after listening to sections of the audiobook.
Despite all the information, I was disappointed by the lack of depth at times. I'm not sure how he could have done better without bogging down, though. It's a huge subject, so mostly it's a case of me wanting to follow specific paths that I found fascinating. It's a good thing when an author leaves me wanting a bit more.
He broke up his book into 7 chapters & covered all kinds of birds in each. He picked excellent examples to compare & contrast, too.
Table of Contents Introduction: It’s Tough To Be a Bird BIRDS, BEAKS, AND BELLIES The Whys and Wherefores of Foraging: CAN YOU SEE UV? How Birds Employ Their Sensory Abilities: UPS AND DOWNS The Animals That Conquered the Air: TRAVEL HITHER AND YON Migration and Navigation in an Endless Sky: WEATHER SURVIVAL STRATEGIES Enduring Heat, Cold, Wind, and Rain: BIRD COMMUNITIES How Birds Live Together: HUMAN INFLUENCES What We Do To Birds:
The author has done a lot of documentaries on animals & studied them in their native habitat. She was also a student of Richard Dawkins, so it's not sThe author has done a lot of documentaries on animals & studied them in their native habitat. She was also a student of Richard Dawkins, so it's not surprising that this book was so well done. She did a great job of narrating it, too.
It took me a long time to read this, but it was more what else was going on in life & me reading the text alongside the audiobook. While this flows quickly, there's a lot to think about in each chapter & some great overriding themes. Highly recommended.
The historical to present understanding of animals presented in a fun manner including an English accent by the narrator which makes it even funnier for me. The historical ideas would be hilarious if they weren't so damaging. The early scientists were especially bad relying on the old books & second hand accounts. Old Christian bestiaries have done a lot of harm by creating lies in an attempt to make animals into examples for moral living & many are still repeated today.
1) Eel: I had no idea that we knew so little about these even today. We're still not positive how they mate or know anything about male eels. Both the European & Atlantic North American eels migrate from fresh water streams all the way to the Sargasso Sea in order to mate in its depths. It's thought they evolved there & keep going 'home' even though the continents have drifted so far.
2) Beaver: They believed that beavers chewed off their testicles when hunted & left them behind. Actually, their testicles are internal & the 'ball sac' near their anus is their scent glands from which 'natural' vanilla flavoring & scent comes from. The 'true' stories of yore are incredible lies.
3) Sloth: These poor critters are so misunderstood they even have a deadly sin in their name. In reality, they're quite the survivors & we don't understand a lot about them, but we should. They move so slowly, but are incredibly efficient in most respects. A notable exception seems to be climbing down specific trees once a week to poop, but even that may well double as a message drop.
4) Hyena: One of the very few female led socially organized animals with packs up to 150 individuals with group dynamics that rival that of early humans who were direct competitors. Their testosterone soaked females have sex parts that mimic those of the male which makes their births incredibly low & hazardous. Very weird, but admirable in many ways.
5) Vulture: Majestic in the air, but disgusting the rest of the time. They poop on their legs both to cool down & to sanitize themselves. Yes, their digestive juices are so powerful that their poop actually sanitizes! Often species are mixed up even by experts. They're really important garbage collectors that don't get enough support.
6) Bat: It wasn't until the 1930s that electronics were developed that could hear their screams which are 20db louder than a Black Sabbath concert. Not all echo locate. Some have tri-colored sight better than ours & none are interested in man nor do many carry rabies, but they got a lot of bad press by early Christians as hybrid creatures of the night.
7) Frog: I hadn't realized that the African Clawed frog which was used for pregnancy testing in the 1950s carries a fungus with it. They were released into the wild after a modern pregnancy test was invented & that fungus has wiped out entire native species around the world.
8) Stork: A symbol of fertility all over the Old World except England where the Church decided only God made babies, so they were a sign of adultery. Sigh. Their migratory habits were finally cleared up only 19th century when one was found with an African spear in it. A lot of interesting facts about other migratory birds & what the ancients thought about them. It's entertaining.
9) Hippopotamus: They secrete their own sunscreen that is also an antibiotic & pest repellent. How cool. Now there is a problem with them in Columbia since Pablo Escobar's went native. They're most closely related to whales, not pigs as I was taught in school.
10) Moose: George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was an 18th century naturalist who's Histoire Naturelle was extremely influential & is oft mentioned throughout this book. He was also an incredible liar & came up with the idea that all New World animals were smaller & more decadent than those of the Old World. Thomas Jefferson used a moose to change his mind, although Leclerc never did publish as promised in their bet. A lot of other interesting facts about moose, too. They do seem to get drunk off fallen apples, but there isn't enough alcohol in them, but a more likely explanation is apple acidosis - too much sugar-rich food too suddenly.
11) Panda: Apparently they are completely different in the wild, possibly the oldest species of bear, & Cooke gives a great account of how our idea of their behavior & breeding has been skewed by their captivity. They're a great example of what not to do when conserving a species. They're also one of China's influential diplomatic tools.
12) Penguin: lives only in the Antarctic. Nope. Some live almost at the Equator & their sexual habits vary depending on how long their breeding season is. Emperor penguins will even screw a corpse & others practice a form of prostitution.
13) Chimpanzee: are fantastic for pointing out that humans are just another animal as they blur all our definitions of how we differ & what makes us unique. It's pretty much only a matter of degree. It's incredible what researchers have to go through to really study them. ...more
Prologue: A Vein Is a River - First sightings of the inner world We often mistake parasites for viral or bacterial infections. Since they're also eukaroytes, similar to our body cells, fighting them requires different measures & they've evolved to fool our natural defenses.
1 Nature’s Criminals - How parasites came to be hated by just about everyone The old idea that parasites are somehow lower forms of life, things that have devolved just to be mindless pests, is a hard one for me to shake. Zimmer tells the history of our view of them & why we need to see them in a different light. They're really amazing feats of evolution.
2 Terra Incognita - Swimming through the heart, fighting to the death inside a caterpillar, and other parasitic adventures describes some of the methods parasites use to hide themselves from the body's defenses.
3 The Thirty Years’ War - How parasites provoke, manipulate, and get intimate with our immune system
4 A Precise Horror - How parasites turn their hosts into castrated slaves, drink blood, and manage to change the balance of nature
5 The Great Step Inward - Four billion years in the reign of Parasite Rex
6 Evolution from Within - The peacock’s tail, the origin of species, and other battles against the rules of evolution
7 The Two-Legged Host - How Homo sapiens grew up with creatures inside
8 How to Live in a Parasitic World - A sick planet, and how the most newly arrived parasite can be part of a cure Parasites are a really good barometer of the health of an ecosystem. ...more
A lot of excellent info & a great overriding theme damaged by repetition, especially toward the end. Dunn asserts that our chemical cleanliness is a mA lot of excellent info & a great overriding theme damaged by repetition, especially toward the end. Dunn asserts that our chemical cleanliness is a mirage & exactly the wrong way to live. We can't get rid of all other life forms & don't want to. By a huge margin, most animal life is beneficial or neutral toward us, so we are killing far more of it & breeding those which are better at surviving our cleaning efforts - much of it is harmful.
He describes some experiments & findings that are fascinating both for the results & just how ignorant it shows us to be. It's truly amazing what we don't know that we don't know. Someone should, but they don't & he explains why. He covers some of his life & starts each chapter with some great quotes, often from Darwin.
Highly recommended despite the repetition because the message is great & the information wonderful. We need to work with nature, not against it as we have been. Some more details after each chapter listed below.
Table of Contents Prologue: Homo indoorus - Folks in the US spend 93% of their lives indoors! I didn't believe it, but thought about it & asked around. I think it's true, especially if you consider the car 'indoors' & he makes a good case for that. These semi-controlled environments still teem with life.
1 Wonder - introduces the microscopic world through Antonie van Leeuwenhoek a pioneer in the discovery of microscopic life. Dunn does a great job showing just how cool that world is & how it inspired him to be a scientist. He also made me grind my teeth in frustration when he twice mentions us using same magnification to see the same things & then never mentions what magnification that is. Apparently it's 275x-500x & mine only goes up to 200x. Sigh.
2 The Hot Spring in the Basement - showcases remarkable finds in hot water heaters. He traces the unexpected presence of one family of bacteria & uses it to educate on reading DNA. Very well done & in a perfect place since this is important throughout the book.
3 Seeing in the Dark - describes how his experiment to list all the life in a house came about & the experiment itself. Huge undertaking with incredible results. The diversity of species & where they naturally occur is well shown. I’ll return often in this book to the question of just what happens when we try to get rid of all of the biodiversity in our houses. Boy, does he ever. It's a good lesson, but terribly repetitious.
4 Absence as a Disease - He starts out describing the cholera epidemic in 1850s London (described in tedious detail in The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World) & how it eventually changed our reaction to bacteria - Kill them all! Bad idea & it may well be responsible for the increase in Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, allergies, and even multiple sclerosis today. We're not exposed to enough different bacteria (of any sort, not just pathogens) early enough so our immune systems over react. It's a good hypothesis, but tough to pin down experimentally.
5 Bathing in a Stream of Life - is also discussed in more detail in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, but Dunn does a good enough job in his limited space. He also made me aware of a possible personal issue - mycobacterim of the non-TB type that could be causing me issues.
6 The Problem with Abundance - black mold is a huge problem in houses. Where does it come from? He has a pretty good, if ugly, answer. Even the ISS isn't devoid of fungus & it can't be, but it is an ecosystem out of balance.
7 The Farsighted Ecologist - Ecologists are professionally far sighted; they see species in remote locales more clearly than those closer at hand. Farsightedness sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t when it means missing what is most immediate. In New York City, for example, scientists have taken many samples of animals in the forests surrounding the city, but far fewer in the city itself. Again, we're overlooking the obvious something covered in chapter 3, but with a slightly different angle of attack.
8 What Good Is a Camel Cricket? - I loved his reference to Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs. It's a great book & illustrates how even today citizen scientists can be important. Hubbell's pets have been studied a bit more, but the map was out of whack. Why were they in some basements & not others in that sort of distribution? Oh, they weren't. The crickets were actually a Japanese species we hadn't known were even in the US! Great lesson, but we also found that they have gut bacteria that might be great for cleaning up plastics.
9 The Problem with Cockroaches Is Us - Yes, he's serious & he uses them to illustrate the incredible resilience of life. If we don't kill it all (& we rarely do in the case of pests) we create resistant strains amazingly quickly. These strains usually don't compete well with others in their environmental niche, but we help them since they are good at surviving biocides.
11 Gardening the Bodies of Babies - Bad staph infections that were resistant to antibiotics were often cured by seeding good staph on babies first. This is the crux of his argument for biodiversity. Good staph was well established in the niche the bad staph wanted to inhabit. The bad couldn't get a grip since the good staph fought it off. We're going to have bugs, let's make sure it's good bugs & that was almost the course of medicine back in 1960 or so, but a death & some bad turns ruined it, so we stuck with the chemical nuclear option which hasn't worked out well & is becoming more precarious all the time. A big part of that is our incredible ignorance of what is good. We only seem to study the bad.
12 The Flavor of Biodiversity - When I was a kid, Mom often got 'starters' from various farm wives around. Some wouldn't give theirs up just like they took their recipes to the grave. Others were proud to pass theirs along. I knew they were all different & Dunn describes why through an experiment in sourdough bread. A serious, multinational experiment. Wow! Really interesting. If you read it, you'll likely make your own starter.
All in all, a great read & highly recommended....more
This is softer than I expected, but there was a lot of good information in the book. It would have been better if I could have trusted it more. He gloThis is softer than I expected, but there was a lot of good information in the book. It would have been better if I could have trusted it more. He glossed over some complex issues & cherry-picked the data to make his point. I didn't appreciate the mix of New Age bullshit that he sprinkled throughout & spread heavily toward the end. (See Part 1, Chapter 4 for one example.) He also has a strong 'eco friendly' attitude that too often denigrates humans without showing the full story.
Still, it was a pretty good book & well narrated. I'm on the fence at 3.5 stars, but will give it 4 for the first 2/3 of the book & the good info it had.
Table of Contents Part I: What Birds Tell Us About the Natural World Chapter 1: Birds: The Dinosaurs That Made It: has very light explanations on bird physiology & evolution. If you're interested, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World is good.
Chapter 2: Hummingbirds: The Magic of Flight For all the miles we travel by air, we don't understand it very well & Robbins doesn't help with his simplistic explanations. Here is a better explanation.
Chapter 3: Canaries and Black-Backed Woodpeckers: Birds as Flying Sentinels - gives an excellent overview of how bird populations indicate the health of the ecosystem similar to canaries indicating bad air in a mine. (Until the 1980s!) He discusses eBird, too. It's a great way of crowd sourcing bird populations. I've been participating for some years & highly recommend it. (It helps me notice all the birds & learn the differences between them. Who knew I'd ever be able to figure out & appreciate the differences between sparrow species?!!!)
Chapter 4: A Murmuring of Birds: The Extraordinary Design of the Flock - The way flocks move & react defy easy explanation. The birds are reacting too quickly & precisely, but so do people in groups such as chorus lines. Robbins does bring up boids & swarm intelligence, but he gave too much credence to Rupert Sheldrake, a charlatan who pushes telepathy as the answer. He shouldn't have space in a nonfiction book, but Robbins mentions him several times.
Part II: The Gifts of Birds Chapter 5: The Power of a Feather an interesting explanation of feathers, their use to birds, how they grow, & how unique they are.
Chapter 7: From Egg to Table, Part Two: Wild Birds - interesting & I like that he's a hunter, if a weekend one. His description of why he likes to hunt is great.
Chapter 8: The Miracle of Guano Pretty good, but he missed a great story with the spread of multiflora rose.
Chapter 9: Nature’s Cleanup Crew birds keeping insects & carrion under control is important.
Part III: Discovering Ourselves Through Birds was interesting, but I didn't find this section very convincing. Similarities can be found in all animals, but he stretched the context in many places. He was also redundant, which made me feel that he really didn't have much information & was stretching it. Chapter 10: Bird Brain, Human Brain Chapter 11: The Surprisingly Astute Minds of Ravens and Crows Chapter 12: The Secret Language of Birds Chapter 13: The Bee-eaters: A Modern Family Chapter 14: Extreme Physiologies: Birds, the Ultimate Athletes
Part IV: Birds and the Hope for a Better Future is OK. It is great to work with nature & we should do so whenever feasible, but he ignores the economic & environmental impacts save on the side of being fashionably & superficially 'green'. I doubt he knows how lady bugs are harvested.
Chapter 15: Nature’s Hired Men: Putting Birds to Work I was especially interested in the use of bluebirds in vineyards in place of pesticides, but was surprised at his statement that starlings were their biggest enemy & he specified the use of 1-3/4" holes in their houses. Based on that, I suspected the Western bluebird was bigger, but it's actually a little smaller. I use 1-1/2" holes so starlings won't invade their houses, but sparrows do. (I have about 2 dozen houses on my farm. I've made & dealt with them for several decades now.)
From this point on, there are many interesting facts & ideas, but a lot of crap, too. He's already covered most of the hard science & is into the softer sciences which he cherry-picks to no end.
Chapter 16: The City Bird: From Sidewalk to Sky Chapter 17: The Transformational Power of Birds Chapter 18: Birds as Social Workers: I've read a lot of stories like the ones he relates on how working with animals helps criminals. I'm all for it & putting them to meaningful work. I know how being in Pony Club helped our kids grow into good people.
Chapter 19: Expanding Our Senses
Epilogue: The Future of Birds was repetitious. It was pretty much a rehash of what he covered in the last 4 chapters....more
This was a freebie from Skyboat Media & narrated really well by Stephen Rudnicki. The writing was good, but it was a huge world packed into a short stThis was a freebie from Skyboat Media & narrated really well by Stephen Rudnicki. The writing was good, but it was a huge world packed into a short story. I don't see it as part of a series, but I felt is should be. I think I would have liked it better as that. It just didn't have the legs to stand well on its own, so I'm conflicted. ...more
Overall, a really interesting book & well laid out, but I floundered with all the odd names. A lot of that is my own ignorance & I think I would have Overall, a really interesting book & well laid out, but I floundered with all the odd names. A lot of that is my own ignorance & I think I would have enjoyed this more if I knew the names better. It's obvious that Brusatte lives & breathes this stuff & loves it. The narrator was excellent & conveyed Brusatte's enthusiasm well, but I glazed over from the terminology occasionally.
It was a great trip, though. I learned not just about the evolution of dinosaurs, but about the other critters of the times, ones I'd often confused with them. He describes their rise very well & dispels many of the older ideas that I learned in school. For instance, he made sense of their feathers far better than anything else I've read on the subject which is admittedly little. In doing so, he shows why we didn't realize they had them for so long.
Reconstructing the story of the dinosaurs is tough due to the time involved. Their reign ended 66 million years ago, but it was only about 50 years ago that we nailed down why. Fossils aren't common & many of the best sites were plundered by ignorant, greedy men. He shows how this was both good & bad. The interest in them led to money for expeditions that are expensive, hard, & time consuming, but we have many fossils that aren't properly cataloged or investigated as he shows through several discoveries made by students, including himself. New methods & tools have brought some amazing clarity.
When I first read about Toxoplasma I was horrified & fascinated. This is a well documented parasite that needs to breed by going through both a rat & When I first read about Toxoplasma I was horrified & fascinated. This is a well documented parasite that needs to breed by going through both a rat & cat, so it makes rats go looking for cats. Of course, this behavior isn't good for the rat, but the parasite doesn't care. It's used that vehicle long enough & needs to trade in on a new model. Woah! How weird.
I thought Toxo was unique. No! In fact, there are way more such parasites than I thought possible throughout the animal kingdom & some of them have even more complex life cycles. Simon does a creditable job describing why this sort of behavior may have evolved & explains how it works in a great style. I highly recommend this as an audiobook as the narrator really caught the tone of his writing & made it an absolute joy to listen to.
This is informative & funny. The first chapter: The First Rule of Zombification: You Do Not Want to Be a Zombie Wasps—aka the flying middle fingers of the animal kingdom—prove that evolution is the meanest and most beautiful thing the world has ever known. How elegant & engaging!
The early chapters discuss the zombifiers, their victims, & the life cycles, but as it goes on he describes more about the mechanisms involved & they seem too complicated. How could something like this have evolved? Then he finally gets into the Umwelt, how we perceive & think of the 'real' world, our environment, it becomes clear. It often takes an amazingly small amount of work on the part of the parasite to drive the host into the wildest behavior. Light can become dark & vice versa. Sometimes this is done simply by causing the host's own body to overproduce a chemical or two such as testosterone in males. It often isn't clear how the parasite causes the same effect in a female & sometimes they can't or vice versa. Sometimes they just turn the host into a female, no matter its genetic predilection.
The final chapters mention why this branch is so underdeveloped. A large part of it is our own Umwelt. It took an amazingly long time for scientists to believe that bats could navigate by sounds we couldn't hear or birds could see light that we can't. A large part of this is religion, of course. We believed were the penultimate creation or final stage of evolution (The latter notion is still prevalent today.) when actually we're just one more complicated machine ("badly behaving sacks of chemicals" per Vonnegut) created through evolution. Technology is allowing us to see what birds do now, but we still don't know much about smell, arguably the earliest & most primitive sense. What does the world look like to a tick? Are we even looking in the right places?
The final chapter focuses more on the notion of free will & how it is an illusion. Mentioned & recommended by both Simon & myself is Free Will by Sam Harris which takes an interesting trip down that wormhole, if you're really interested. (I'm going to keep acting as if I had it, but YMMV.)
Table of Contents 1 - The First Rule of Zombification: You Do Not Want to Be a Zombie 2 - Nothing Brings the World Together Like Unsolicited Mind Control 3 - When Life Gets Complicated, Life Gets Zombified 4 - No Creature Lives in a Vacuum, Not Even a Zombie 5 - How to Succeed in Parasitism Without Really Dying 6 - Dawn of the Sexually Undead 7 - The Great Escape from the Umwelt 8 - The Great Hacking of the Umwelt 9 - The Brain-Hacked Mouse That Wore a Funny Hat and Destroyed the Notion of Free Will 10 - You, the Undead 11 - End Times
I'm a dog person. I was pretty much raised from birth until I was 8 by Ulysses, a Doberman who was more like a grumpy older brother. My wife calls my I'm a dog person. I was pretty much raised from birth until I was 8 by Ulysses, a Doberman who was more like a grumpy older brother. My wife calls my English Pointer, Lily, my mistress since she says we spend more quality time together. I like science books, so obviously I went into this with a lot of interest.
I was somewhat nonplussed when the book led off with a fictional tale. I found it interesting & compelling, though. Sykes believes that wolves & man started hunting together long before we had villages for them to scrounge around. It makes sense. We're both social creatures & excel at different parts of the hunt. Wolves can chase the game much better, but tend to get hurt during the kill at the end where men with their spears excelled. Wolves also liked guts & innards more than we do, so the kill was well divided.
Dogs are all descended from wolves. I got that much, but he managed to confuse the hell out of me by skipping around a lot. His explanations of genetics were often confusing, too. He kept trying to dumb them down, going so far as to use 'gene' when he meant 'allele', but then he'd mention gene & chemical names which just made it more complex. He never really gave a basic lesson on genetics, which I believe I have, & sometimes strayed into areas where I was lost. (I just finished reading a book on epigenetics, too.) Anyway, I wasn't impressed with those parts & they were scattered throughout the book.
He did make it clear that DNA testing isn't as clear cut as I thought it was. He describes how some tests are done & did a good job pointing out the difference between using mitochondrial DNA & that of the cell. M-DNA can trace the maternal line while body cells will reflect that of both parents. Surprisingly, he made no mention of tracing the Y gene. Maybe they haven't done that in dogs.
Towards the end, he mentions Belyayev's fox experiment & does a great job giving the background for it. He mentions how oxytocin, the hormone involved in maternal bonding, is high in them. I was surprised he didn't mention the lower level of cortisol & the higher levels of serotonin, though. He seemed to put it all just on oxytocin & there was no mention of checking their DNA to see if there were unexpected changes. That seems a big gap.
The last chapter is discussions with dog owners about how they feel about their dogs. I skipped through it pretty quick. Most seemed pretty obvious & there wasn't much new info.
All in all, it was OK. There was some really good info, but it was scattered about & sometimes confusing because of that. I really want to give it higher marks, but I think there are probably better books out there.
Not the correct edition. Mine has this title, but I didn't see any audio editions for this & saw a couple of similar but different titles. I guess that's UK & US publishing names. This one was very well narrated. I also had the ebook to refer to. I suggest a text copy if you're listening to this....more
Interesting, but he uses a lot of technical jargon without needing to & often uses citations in a way that confused matters for me. His phrasing is ofInteresting, but he uses a lot of technical jargon without needing to & often uses citations in a way that confused matters for me. His phrasing is often awkward & he's trying to fit too much information into this short of a book. His first chapter, "The Search For Genesis" was very thin, but he really shined later when it came to detailing insects - his specialty.
I wondered about his refutation of Hamilton's Rule of kin selection which Richard Dawkins showed works out very well mathematically in a couple of his books. This led me to read that section of this book in text & do some research. I found out that it's an area where Wilson & Dawkins disagree vehemently. Here's a good article about that: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-dis... Here's Dawkin's review of The Social Conquest of Earth in which Wilson more fully explains his theories: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/sci... I'm not a scientist nor do I think myself truly educated in this field so I'll pass on a formal opinion, but I didn't find Wilson's side nearly as convincing.
The worst part of this book was the narration. The narrator's monotone was positively soporific.
I'll give this book 3 stars for the interesting facts about insects, but I won't recommend it. I'd like to read some other books by the author, but only in his area of expertise - insects. ...more
The first paragraph of the book's description perfectly describes it for me. Yong didn't just tell me how important my microbiome is, by the end of boThe first paragraph of the book's description perfectly describes it for me. Yong didn't just tell me how important my microbiome is, by the end of book, I felt it. There he really missed a perfect picture for me - that of Pigpen from the Peanuts strip by Charles Shultz. We aren't discrete beings making our lonely way through the world, but continually changing clouds of bacteria influencing & being influenced by our surroundings plant, animal, & mineral due to our incredible ecologies. That's not an overstatement & Yong gives plenty of examples throughout the book.
We didn't evolve in a vacuum, bacteria have constantly drenched every living organism. Most don't have much to do with us, but many find a home within the newcomers, the more complex hosts, & they act like good house guests. Sometimes they move in to stay & provide services (symbiot). Occasionally they get out of line (disbiosis) & far more rarely they're bad. He gives fascinating examples of all states.
He really shined with his descriptions of how one variety mosquitoes are altered to not carry disease. I've heard about such efforts, but never knew any of the methods. He'd mentioned & had given enough details about the bacterial strain Wolbachia that when he got around to telling how scientists were infecting mosquitoes that carried Dengue fever with it in an attempt to eradicate the disease, it made perfect sense & I'm not a scientist of any sort. IOW, his explanations were all good & accessible.
His discussion of balances within the microbiotic community were especially interesting to me since both my wife & daughter have stomach issues. I had no idea how much or quickly such things could change. A mere change in diet of a day can completely change the balance of our gut bacteria while a course of antibiotics can be catastrophic. Of course, we have to balance the risks of destroying gut bacteria against dying of another infection that the antibiotic is being taken for. Often there isn't a definite or even a good answer, but a guess based on probabilities. It's messy & defies simplification so beware of miracle cures. In a few decades a doctor might be able to tailor a bacterial cocktail for your particular symptoms & biome, but the science is in its infancy.
One of the places it is starting is with Fecal Matter Transfer (FMT). Gross, but it's been routinely carried out for those whose systems are in such distress that they're losing weight & wearing diapers. A colonoscopy that plants a donor's poop up their own intestines often fixes the problem, at least for a time. Now they're refining this to cultures that are contained in a capsule. yes, they give out a poo pill!
Apparently our species' aversion to eating poo isn't exactly the norm in the animal kingdom. Rabbits & rats have to eat their own or else they get a vitamin deficiency. Other species regularly eat other's poo & it's one way beneficial bacteria spread & inoculate them. It can also lead to similar smells among them fostering a sense of community. Who knew? Fascinating!
I was really surprised by the example of Sea World keeping the dolphin's water too clean. Anyone who has had an aquarium knows it takes a while to balance the system & clear up the water. It's not dirt, but the bio-balance, so it's often best to start a new tank by taking water from an existing aquarium. I never changed more than 1/3 of the water per week, a rule of thumb that was told to me early on by seemingly everyone. Ivory tower syndrome?
While this is rather long & sagged a bit about 2/3-3/4 of the way through (at least I wandered a bit) I highly recommend reading it all the way through. The end is great & well worth the journey. My edition was well narrated & easily understood. I did get the ebook to refer to, but didn't have to very often - mostly just for the name & spelling of some terms & names.
This is a short & intriguing book. Each entry was brief, but really illuminating & there was enough humor, but not too much. It was an interesting looThis is a short & intriguing book. Each entry was brief, but really illuminating & there was enough humor, but not too much. It was an interesting look into many species from bugs to fish to people. He even covered some long extinct species with some good guesses. What surprised me the most were the species that didn't fart & why.
If my boys were 10 or so, I'd be reading this with them. As an adult, it was great reading, too. The only complaint I can think of is that it was too short! (From me, that's unheard of.) Highly recommended. ...more
This is a side of the Colonel that isn't seen too often or properly. Yes, he's known for establishing many parks, the Smithsonian Natural History museThis is a side of the Colonel that isn't seen too often or properly. Yes, he's known for establishing many parks, the Smithsonian Natural History museum, & such, but his love of natural history goes back to his childhood. Even better, Lunde, a natural historian himself, explains exactly what the job entails, the sub-types, & how the job has changed in the past couple of centuries. He also makes a good point about how hunters are often good conservationists. Sure, they're shooting the animals, but they know & respect them. A decent hunter isn't going to kill off every animal. That's mostly the domain of commercial hunters & fools. True hunters want to the species to thrive.
The book lagged a bit at times & was a bit repetitive, but overall very good. The biggest complaint that I have is it stopped after his African safari which he paid for by writing a series of articles. Roosevelt killed a couple of hundred animals specifically for natural history museums. He brought along a large team of naturalists who killed thousands, but those were mostly small critters & birds so no one cared. That safari basically set up the Smithsonian's collection.
The book stops, but Roosevelt didn't. He was invited to lecture in Argentina & wound up trying to make a similar journey up the Amazon again with some naturalists in tow. By all accounts, it was a disaster & wound up killing him, but I would have liked to have read about it in this book. This is a pretty good, short article about the "River of Doubt" but it's a bit too short. Still, I don't really want to read The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey which is probably too detailed. It has 25% more pages than this book & covers a much shorter time. Anyway, I'm taking a star off an otherwise excellent book for this lack.
All in all, I was quite pleased at this look at Roosevelt. He was a remarkable man. I really want to read more of his books since this book provided too few examples of his writing, just a few of the more poetic phrases. It looks as if Gutenberg.org has a few dozen of them & I have a few in my collection.
I was also disappointed in the way this author presented The Naval War of 1812. No, it wasn't a big hit when it was published, but a few years later, the Navy put a copy aboard every vessel & it is considered a seminal work in the field. It's still very well regarded & is often required reading. Quite a feat for a 23 year old.
I definitely recommend this to anyone with an interest in natural history or Roosevelt in any format. This was an audio book & very well narrated....more
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