Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
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4.1 • 105 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If it feels like the world is out to get us sometimes, that’s because it is. Mary Roach follows up her best-selling pop-science books Gulp and Grunt with this wildly entertaining deep dive into the not-so-neighborly world of our four-legged neighbors. Roach gets up close with investigators who study what happens when animals cause conflict, fight back, or just get in the way (like the unlucky turkey vulture hit by the space shuttle Discovery). With her delicious mix of keen observation and biting wit, Roach draws us into everything from roadkill prevention to bear attack forensics. Every moment of this read is fascinating and, often, hilarious—prepare for chapter titles like “Maul Cops.” If you’ve ever wondered, “So how does the Vatican stop birds from attacking the pope’s annual release of peace doves?”—spoiler alert: LASERS!—this book is for you.
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.
Customer Reviews
Chapter 6 is missing
Otherwise it is another humorous edition from the mind of ms Roach.
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Wonderful, informative and heartbreaking. Leaves us with the question, who will survive?
formatting error, great book
don’t buy this copy, it is formatted incorrectly and not properly aligned - making it a pain to read, I read it on a 2018 macbook pro and bought via iBooks