The Truth about Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife
Lucy Cooke
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Truth about Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife
Lucy Cooke
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
In 13 breezy chapters, each devoted to a misunderstood creature, Cooke collects some of our most crackpot notions (and the equally startling truths) about animals. She nimbly pings between arcane, medieval and modern sources, assembling a cast of characters that includes unhinged aristocrats, ill-fated adventurers, Thomas Jefferson, Julius Caesar, Sigmund Freud, the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and more than a few mad scientists.
Much of the persistent misinformation about animals, she shows, recurs from early writers and medieval bestiaries (collections of descriptions of real and imaginary animals). For example: since a moose has no knees, it sleeps standing up and leaning on a tree; the hippopotamus snorts fire; swallows spend the winter underwater; some birds fly to the moon until spring and others transmute themselves into another animal, according to Aristotle. In fact, truth can be more intriguing than fiction.
Cooke, a zoologist and documentary filmmaker, has a storehouse of such tales of animal adventure. She’s also the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, whose motto is 'Being fast is overrated.' That motto gives a glimpse into her sense of humor, which shines through page after page, and her affinity for misunderstood creatures. Cooke battles the notion that sloths are lazy or stupid just because they’re slow-moving. In her book, she set out to, as she writes, 'create my very own menagerie of the misunderstood.' And quite a menagerie it is.
Each essay in this collection brims with the author's sense of wonder at the quirky but successful ways evolution has equipped certain species to survive.
Cooke covers 13 animals and the wildly creative theories that scientists, from the creators of early bestiaries to modern researchers, have come up with to explain their behavior.
Zoologist and documentarian Cooke...reveals hidden truths and little-known facts about a 'menagerie of the misunderstood' in this peculiar and intriguing volume.
The cognitive and biological toolboxes of the animal kingdom are overstuffed and full of surprises.