Basically just an update to yesterday’s post. For technical reasons (technically: I’m a softhead), I didn’t link to the book that sparked the blog entry that sparked the post. I’ve got some reading to do over the weekend, and maybe then I’ll post an actual review. (Of course, I’ve been promising a review of Paradise Found for about 10 days now, and where is it? Still in my drafts file…).
So, here is Richard Conniff’s new book, Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff With Animals, just out from W.W. Norton. And, while shopping for it online, I ran across an earlier book that I’m very curious about (and is on its way to me right now: Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World (Henry Holt, 1996).
Ever since I read Sue Hubbell’s 1998 Broadsides from the Other Orders and Stephen L. Buchmann’s 1997 The Forgotten Pollinators, I’ve been on a tear with books about invertebrates. (I’ve even managed to take a few pictures of local members of this class, which I had hitherto almost completely ignored.) These book-length narrative accounts are the perfect companion to the larger reference books or field guides, which tell you what a particular organism might be, but offer very little other information. Pure data, no story.
In addition to the Hubbell and Buchmann titles, I’ve been steadily going through the “trilogy” of E.O Wilson and Bert Hölldobler’s ant books: their Pulitzer-prize winning The Ants (1990) actually still awaits both a reasonable price at a used bookseller and space on my shelves before I can peruse it, but I just finished reading their subsequent, more layman-friendly title, Journey to the Ants (1994) the other night. And then there’s the 2008 Superorganism, which expands on the ideas they presented in the earlier titles, adding bees to the mix as well. I’ve almost finished that one.
If you need suggestions for an excellent all-around reference to insects of (mostly Northeastern, despite the publisher’s pretensions to complete coverage) North America, I highly recommend Stephen A. Marshall’s 2006 Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity. These reference works help me picture what’s actually being discussed in the narrative accounts by people like Hubbell, Conniff, and Wilson, while the narratives “flesh out” the weighty reference tomes with stories that laymen like me can relate to.
So, the upshot is: I’m excited to have a couple of new books to read, and I hope you get a chance to investigate the invertebrate world at some point as well.