Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday August 23, 2010
|
THREE BOOKS ABOUT DEADLY CREATURES
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Michael Sims
You would not want to pet the creatures that populate three new volumes about dangerous animals, but these spiders and sharks and intestinal parasites are fascinating to read about.
"Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals. By Gordon Grice. (Dial. 324 pp. $27)
Gordon Grice writes about animals with a wit that relies on tone of voice, his ironically exact diction and instinct for analogy. Offhandedly he describes hyenas "dismantling" a wildebeest and refers to "the gelatinous otherness" of cephalopods (squid, octopus and their kin). Vivid language never fails him. As a child, he chased and cornered a cottontail rabbit, to find that "its body pulsated like a heart." He perfectly describes a newly emerged cicada: "Its body was tinged with green like the living subcutaneous layer of a sapling."
With a scholar's precision and a fourth-grader's enthusiasm, Grice emphasizes that nature is red in tooth and claw and hoof and tentacle and proboscis. The author of "The Red Hourglass" has limitless interest in the fierce side of nature. A description of how his son's pet tarantula responded to a goldfish is as horrific as Dracula and has the unfortunate virtue of being real. Even cuddly animals are dangerous. Never mind that rabbits can bite off a finger. In the Unites States alone, we are told, about 50 people each year die from touching or eating a rabbit that was infected with something called tularemia.
"What's Eating You?: People and Parasites" By Eugene H. Kaplan (Princeton Univ. 302 pp. $26.95)
Eugene H. Kaplan has a different approach to writing about animals: He simply conveys a vast amount of information painlessly. An internationally known educator and consultant and author of other books such as "Sensuous Seas," about the mating habits of marine creatures, he even wrote a couple of the Peterson field guides. He has a lively sense of story. For example, Kaplan doesn't passively recite the results of infection. Instead he takes you out to where a sea lion becomes infected with a microorganism, then follows the creature as it, well, exits the animal, has a Pinocchio sort of voyage under water and emerges inside -- you don't want to know this -- tuna. He follows a deadly insect down the wall of an African hut to its sleeping prey's eye. Do not read this book while eating.
"The Animal Review: The Genius, Mediocrity, and Breathtaking Stupidity That Is Nature" By Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash (Bloomsbury. 133 pp. $12)
Last and definitely least: "The Animal Review." I tried to like this silly little book. I failed. Perhaps written for children, it isn't labeled as such. Surely these guys found it exhausting to machine-gun jokes for every animal factoid they found, and then to insert wince-inducing captions for every photo, and then to invent godawful fake translations for each animal's scientific name. This book points out that "jellyfish are not fish, nor are they made of jelly or jam or marmalade" and that circling vultures are "trying to weird out a rival fraternity." It explains that hippos' "closest relatives are the whales and porpoises, though to be honest they hardly keep in touch anymore."
I'm not suggesting that this book ought to be more serious; I'm saying it ought to be more amusing. But readers will encounter tidbits of genuine information amid the knee-slapping. Hippos have notoriously poor hygiene and actually seem to use their bodily wastes to alienate their neighbors. No wonder these jokers like them.
Michael Sims' books include a companion volume for the National Geographic Channel program "In the Womb: Animals" and, most recently, "Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
GOLDEN GATE: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge
Kevin Starr
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978 1 59691 534 3
215 pages
$23
Reviewed by T. Rees-Shapiro
Its towers are bigger, badder and bolder than the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty, and as far as Kevin Starr is concerned, the Golden Gate Bridge is America's premier "triumph of engineering" and a "work of art." In his new book, Starr eloquently retraces this industrial achievement from planning and construction up to the present day with its $6-and-up tolls.
Completed in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge is now crossed by more than 40 million vehicles and 10 million pedestrians a year. The single-span suspension bridge extends 4,200 feet (the second longest, by a mere 60 feet, in the United States behind the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in New York); its towers climb 746 feet in the air (taller than two Lady Libertys); and its cables are wound with more than 80,000 miles of wire capable of enduring gale-force winds and even earthquakes.
But this book is about more than just statistics. He tells the story behind each of the bridge's masterminds -- the bankers, builders, egos and engineers -- and also devotes a whole chapter to a tragic side of the bridge's history as a frequent site of Bay area suicides.
Starr writes adoringly about the bridge and all its wonderment, including the distinctive paint scheme. "International Orange" started out as the tint of the anti-corroding primer that covered the steel to shield it from the salty Pacific breeze during construction; but the color was so compatible with the golden gate motif that it was retained and is now an indispensable part of the bridge's look.
T. Rees-Shapiro can be reached at shapirot(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 THE SUGAR KING OF HAVANA: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
THREE SISTERS
THREE BOOKS ABOUT MONSTERS
THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
