A lively, lucid exploration—everything you ever wanted to know about flies and then some.
All the latest buzz about the tiny, winged critters we love to hate—often unjustly.
“Let’s face it, flies do not win popularity contests.” So writes biologist and ethologist Balcombe, with considerable understatement. Every house has a fly swatter, and for good reason. “One in six humans alive today is infected by an insect-borne illness, and more often than not, the footprint left at the crime scene is that of a fly.” Proving the point, he opens with a stomach-turning scene. Traveling in Africa, he was infected by skin maggots that he was forced to expel with a combination of ointment and brute force, delighting a park ranger who hadn’t recorded their presences that far south in the continent. Geographically, flies are everywhere: Numbering some 160,000 species, they inhabit every continent, and some have even found a way to live in the ocean. As Balcombe writes, almost all of flydom is useful to humankind, performing essential services of pollination, waste disposal, and pest control and feeding countless other species. Diving deeper, he observes some flies do a nice job of controlling unpleasant creatures such as the fire ant. Balcombe provides an entertaining tour of the world of flies, from tiny midges and fruit flies to the large and obnoxious sandflies, all of which, he asserts, experience something like consciousness and have more going on mentally than we may believe. “Flies subjected to peripheral nerve injury by amputation of one of their legs developed long-lasting hypersensitivity to stimuli not perceived as painful by uninjured flies,” he writes, which may give one pause when an intrusive fly invites being smacked by a rolled-up paper. More definitively, he writes at the close of this appreciative natural history, flies help return us to our origins: “We are all bags of nutrients,” one entomologist told him, “and flies recycle those nutrients back to the earth.”
A lively, lucid exploration—everything you ever wanted to know about flies and then some.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313427-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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