If ants give you the heebie-jeebies, you will want to turn away now, for this book review will deal with the ultimate arthropod nightmare: army ants. If, however, insects are your shtick, stick around, because German entomologist Daniel Kronauer has written a phenomenal book on army ant biology that is chock-a-block with jaw-dropping, award-winning photography.
One objection sometimes raised against the search for extraterrestrial life is that our planet is rich with bizarre life forms that we still poorly understand. As a biologist, you are usually so close to the subject that you sometimes forget just how otherwordly our home planet can be. With his beautifully written book Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake shook me out of that daze by offering a truly mind-opening book on fungi. Excitingly, he does so without floating off into speculative or esoteric territory.
We tend to think of forests as static. Trees, after all, do not move. But that is a perspective foisted upon us by our limbed existence. Science reporter Zach St. George unmasks this illusion in plain terms: when trees die or new ones sprout, the forest has moved a bit. “The migration of a forest is just many trees sprouting in the same direction” (p. 2).
There is no shortage of books on trees, but this sounded like such an unusual take on the subject that I was utterly stoked when I learned of The Journeys of Trees. A journalist who delves into the palaeontological record to consider the slow-motion movement of forests over deep time? Get in here!
Some time after I reviewed Angela Saini’s book Superior, I was contacted by medical anthropologist and science writer Alondra Oubré, offering me the opportunity to review her new book. The overall aim of Science in Black and White might be the same—the debunking of the biological arguments used to justify racist thinking—but Oubré shows there is more than one approach to get there.
Whatever mental image you have of our close evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, it is bound to be incomplete. Kindred is an ambitious book that takes in the full sweep of 150 years of scientific discovery and covers virtually every facet of their biology and culture. Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes has drawn on her extensive experience communicating science outside of the narrow confines of academia to write a book that is as accessible as it is informative, and that stands out for its nuance and progressive outlook. Is this a new popular science benchmark?
Flies do not get a lot of love. Their culinary choices, from cow-pats to corpses, do not endear them to us. Add to that that the order Diptera also hosts mosquitoes, called our deadliest predator by some authors, and you can begin to see why. Entomologist Erica McAlister, the senior curator for Diptera at the Natural History Museum, London, is on a mission to change your mind. Chances are you never have been able to admire a fly close-up.
Few people would count flies as their favourite animal, but, luckily for you and me, there are exceptions. Erica McAlister, the senior curator for Diptera at the Natural History Museum, London, has been enamoured with them since childhood and in 2017 wrote the very successful The Secret Life of Flies. In preparation for reviewing her new book The Inside Out of Flies, I (finally) read the book that started it all to see what the buzz was all about.
Saying that the COVID-19 pandemic should not have happened will likely elicit one of two responses. Blaming China for initially trying to cover it up, or saying: “shit happens, this is speaking with the benefit of hindsight”. Appealing as these may sound, they are missing the bigger picture. The awful truth is that we have had this one coming for a long time.
I will come right out and say this: if the subtitle turned you off, give this book a chance. Yes, this is a sceptical take on the subject, but without the typical mockery and ridicule. Natural sees religious scholar Alan Levinovitz critically but thoughtfully examine the appeal to nature fallacy*: the idea that just because something is natural it is good. For a biologist, the “natural goodness” myth is particularly grating as it requires some exceptional cherry-picking to come to this conclusion. As far as logical fallacies go, this is a big personal bug-bear. Why is it so compelling?
Charismatic as big cats might be, their origins and evolutionary history are still not fully understood. In a mind-bogglingly beautiful marriage of art and science, On the Prowl provides a current overview of big cat evolution that will have many a book lover purring with pleasure.
The Inquisitive Biologist