Vanishing Treasures
A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF FALL: WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE & MORE • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book” (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world
"Extraordinary...For anyone whose capacity for wonder could use a jumpstart, Rundell's essays are essential reading."—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"In times like these, terror and rage will carry us only so far. We will also need unstinting, unceasing love. For the hard work that lies ahead, Ms. Rundell writes, 'Our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us.' This is a book to help you fall in love." —Margaret Renkl, The New York Times
The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.
Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.
But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.
Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rundell (Impossible Creatures), a fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, presents a poignant survey of animal species whose survival is threatened by humans. She notes that because Greenland sharks take 150 years to reach sexual maturity, the species is likely still rebounding from overfishing in the early 1900s, and that punishing poverty and food scarcity in rural Madagascar have eroded traditional taboos against eating lemurs, exacerbating the harms of deforestation and imperiling the island's 101 lemur species. Many anecdotes unexpectedly focus on endangered animals' more populous cousins. For instance, a chapter on raccoons details the spoiled life of Rebecca, Calvin Coolidge's pet common raccoon, while offering comparatively brief descriptions of the endangered Cozumel and extinct Barbados raccoons. Still, the abundant trivia fascinates (94% of all sexual behavior in giraffes is between males; the pangolin keeps its tongue, which is longer than its torso, in "an interior pouch near its hip"), and Rundell approaches her subjects with reverence, as when she writes that blind, iridescent golden moles "burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly glowing." Animal lovers will cherish this. Illus.
