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Book review – The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate

8-minute read
keywords: ethology

On account of our good eyesight, humans are said to be a visual species. However, when you stop and think about it, human language (at least English) has a surprisingly large vocabulary for the squawks, grunts, chirps, honks, growls, etc. that other animals make. What, if anything, are they saying? Two recent books delve into this question, The Voices of Nature and Why Animals Talk. A last-minute entry on human language, Talking Heads, turns this into a three-part review. In other words, we need to talk…

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Book review – New World Monkeys: The Evolutionary Odyssey

6-minute read

When I recently reviewed The Real Planet of the Apes, I casually wrote how that book dealt with the evolution of Old Work monkeys and apes, ignoring New World monkeys which went off on their own evolutionary experiment in South America. But that did leave me wondering. Those New World monkeys, what did they get up to then? Here, primatologist Alfred L. Rosenberger provides a comprehensive and incredibly accessible book that showed these monkeys to be far more fascinating than I imagined.

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Book review – Eye of the Shoal: A Fish-Watcher’s Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything

Helen Scales is a marine biologist, diver, and surfer, and is no stranger to writing good books. I have previously read Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality from her hand. The book after that, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells, received critical praise in the press and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology book prize. Here, Scales turns her attention to fish. Is this another page-turner waiting to be recognised?

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