Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Περιγραφή εκδότη
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
#1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller
#1 Indie Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Join "America’s funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.
What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Roach (Bonk) sheds light on nature's malefactors in this often funny, always provocative survey of species that "regularly commit acts that put them at odds with humans." Readers will learn that most lethal bear attacks (which are very rare) are committed by what is commonly believed to be the less dangerous black bear, and that the animal responsible for the most damage to civil aircraft in the U.S. is, surprisingly, the white-tailed deer. Along the way, Roach attends a training for wildlife officers on using forensics to identify the culprits of attacks, where shop talk involves such questions as "ever tase an elk?" In Vatican City, papal officials have a scarecrow that uses lasers to scare off birds and keep them from destroying Easter flower displays. Roach hopes that humans can come to embrace coexistence even with creatures seen as pests—as she does the rat living in her own home. Roach's writing is wry, full of heart, and loaded with intriguing facts: "You may be wondering: When you live off your own fat, do you need to use the toilet? If you are a bear, you do not." This eminently entertaining outing is another winner from Roach.