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from the publisher:
Insects inhabit an often unexamined microcosmos, pursuing lives that are often strange beyond our wildest imaginings. From the dawn of humanity, our six-legged fellow Earthlings have repelled and enthralled us. Humans have exterminated, eaten, domesticated, and even excommunicated insects. We collect them, we curse them, and we have penned a surprising body of literature about them.
Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World offers an entertaining and informative survey of the human fascination, dreadful and otherwise, with insects diabolical and divine, from accounts in the Bible and Aristotle to the writings of Charles Darwin and the great nineteenth-century naturalists sending home accounts from the rain forest. Highlighted here are observations from E. O. Wilson, Jean-Henri Fabré, David Quammen, May Berenbaum, Roger Swain, William Wordsworth, A. S. Byatt, Gary Larson and more than sixty other writers who tell of the mystery and romance of that other, hidden world beneath our feet and beyond our rolled-up newspapers.
Eric Hoyt and Ted Schultz share their magnificent obsession in Insect Lives. In a tour de force of popularization, they bring us the finest entomological writing of the past couple of millennia...An excellent, illuminating compendium whose breadth serves as praise both for the diversity and frequent weirdness of its subject and for the scholarship and dedication of its authors. --New ScientistAlien creatures have overrun planet Earth. They wear skeletons on the outside, bite sideways, smell with antennae, taste with their feet, and breathe through holes in the sides of their bodies...They are the insects...Taken altogether, this collection delivers what Hoyt and Schultz promise in their introduction--'a sweeping tour of the human fascination with insects.' The result is mighty good reading. --Scientific American
Human perspectives on insects lurch between fear and fascination. This collection displays the full spectrum of views, in writings by Aristotle, Darwin, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and many more. Most of the authors excerpted here are bug enthusiasts, and they portray the marvels of the insect world with evident joy. --Science News
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