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These are big societal problems and they demand big societal solutions,” says Yong. Nevertheless, he shows that much noise and light pollution can be ameliorated by simple, practical tweaks. Swapping LED lights from blue/white hues to red means they are less harmful to bats and insects. Reducing ship speeds by just 12% in the Mediterranean has been shown to halve engine noise in the sea.
An Immense World by Ed Yong is an epic exploration of the unique “umwelt” of other creatures, from tree hoppers to singing frogs, who sense the world in vastly different ways to humans. It is also a plea for greater empathy with other species. Their labours have opened up hidden worlds, revealing how animal senses are not simply superbly adapted to their environments but have sometimes themselves driven evolution. I revere Gordon Grice for his enthusiasm for and dedication to studying or “psychologizing” all kinds of animals although he is not a known scientist. Reading his book gives me the idea of how he is such an animal lover. His greatest service, perhaps, was in popularizing science and the rational method, and in showing that a literary man could concern himself with any subject.It is an absolutely stunning book. Children will be riveted by this book. It is beautifully illustrated and thetext is basically poetry. I can imagine young children sitting listening to that being read to them. This book will get more children interested in science and interested in asking questions about the world around them. Some children do not naturally gravitate towards conventional science books or text books but you would struggle to find a young child who would not be absolutely engrossed in this book." About the author Despite his propensity to meander in prose, al-Jahiz was particularly interested in style and correct expression. "The best style," he says in an essay on schoolteachers, "is the clearest, the style that needs no explication and no notes, that conforms to the subject expressed, neither exceeding it nor falling short." Basra contributed substantially to al-Jahiz's intellectual development. It was there that he first went to school – studying under some of the most eminent scholars of Islam. Even after he migrated to Baghdad -attracted by the greater scope of the capital. he never lost his affection for his home; after some 50 years in Baghdad, he returned to Basra, and it was there that he died. According to legend he was crushed to death by a collapsing pile of books in the year 868. There is a lot to cover here and obviously not every animal can be covered in detail so there is some disappointment when the animal you want to hear about is glossed over (I could have used way more birds and cephalopods.) Some sections are stronger than others and while I don't mind the insertion of Grice's personal experience there were a couple occasions where it felt unnecessary to the topic although I would say that the majority of his transitions are really good. Around the year 815, only two years after the founding of the House of Wisdom, al-Jahiz moved to Baghdad, where he was exposed to a new and important influence: Greek science, particularly Aristotelian thought. Attracted by scholastic theology, for instance, he subsequently used the dialectic method of the theologians in many of his works, often with humorous intent.
The Ambrosiana manuscript is textually very important. It is obviously copied by an educated scribe who has indicated the vowels - not normally written in Arabic - which allow the text to be more accurately understood than heretofore. This is doubly important as few manuscripts of the Book of Animals survive, and the Ambrosiana manuscript is among the earliest of those that do. A celebration of people all shapes and sizes, and of the beauty and mystery of our Earth.-- Booklist It’s obvious that people can do incredibly stupid things and come to grief. You may congratulate yourself for not choosing to push your child towards a buffalo for a photo op. Unfortunately, many people get hurt just going about their normal lives. There but for the grace of God…. Human populations are increasingly encroaching on the territory of wild animals. Predation can happen but it’s more likely that the creatures are stressed for one reason or another. there were so many more quotes i wanted to share. maybe i will float this later with "additional information."
Moments of human intimacy jostle with scenes that inspire cosmic awe, and the broad diversity of Jeffers's candy-colored humans...underscores the twin messages that 'You're never alone on Earth' and that we're all in this together.-- Publisher's Weekly (starred review) face ended below his cheekbones: his nose, palate, upper teeth, tongue, and almost his entire lower jaw were gone. only his eyes and the upper part of his head remained intact and yet he was alive and moderately healthy and had taught himself to swallow food. he had received one bite, just one snap Despite the title, the Book of Animals is by no means conventional zoology, or even a conventional bestiary. It is an enormous collection of lore about animals - including insects - culled from the Koran, the Traditions, pre-Islamic poetry, proverbs, storytellers, sailors, personal observation and Aristotle's Generation of Animals. You might ask why anyone would want to read this book about the many ways a person can find serious trouble in nature. Well, it’s very well written. Gordon Grice is a thorough yet very interesting researcher, journalist, and lover of some mighty creepy critters. Best, he’s very funny. Dry, ironic and sometimes dark. Right up my alley! The book begins with a chapter on wolves and their relatives. Do people still believe in the image of the Big Bad Wolf? Actually, "Man's Best Friend"--the dog--an animal I can't imagine NOT being in my life--is far more dangerous. There are an estimated 4.7 million dog bites each year in the United States alone. The book then covers bears, cats, and other carnivorids. There's a section on aquatic dangers and sharks come to mind first. But the seas are teeming with all kinds of dangers, box jellyfish being among the worst. Then there are the dangers posed by snakes, crocodilians, lizards, and birds.
which is not to say that grice is an alarmist by any means. he takes great pains to illustrate the rarity of death by poisonous or aggressive animal (in certain parts of the world, like where i live, anyway), and in fact is insistent upon implicating willful or ignorant humans in situations that ended badly due to said willfulness or ignorance. the history of nature writing and reporting is fraught with bias, with animals anthropomorphized to meet some human standard of evil- or where the animal is exculpated wrongfully, the aggression dismissed as an aberration despite its abundant presence in the history of that species' interactions with man- both approaches dismissing the essential nature of, well, wild nature, and also discounting the inevitable miscommunication and confusion involved when humans tangle with wild things. our understanding is limited to what we know- what that charging bear knows and perceives as a threat may be totally different. This interest in style was characteristic of a group of Basran scholars, who, during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, sought to preserve the linguistic heritage of the Arabs by recording the poetry and sayings of the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula. This movement had unanticipated results: because of their almost anthropological interest in the language and customs of the Bedouin, and in the social conditions of Arabia during both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, the Basran scholars achieved a deep appreciation of Arabic grammar and pre-Islamic poetry. They went on to compose sophisticated commentaries on the Koran, critical editions of poetry and treatises on grammar, and to compile dictionaries and specialized word-lists. A devout Muslim, al-Jahiz regarded the physical world as the visible sign of God's will. His purpose in writing the Book of Animals was not merely to entertain, but to lead his readers to an appreciation of the wonders of God's creation, which he believed to be as manifest in the most insignificant as in the grandest: My books contain above all unusual anecdotes, wise and beautifully expressed sayings handed down by the Companions of the Prophet, sayings which will lead to the acquisition of good qualities and the performance of good works ... they also contain stories of the conduct of kings and caliphs and their ministers and courtiers, and the most interesting events of their lives. A master of these disciplines, al-Jahiz was one of the first writers of Arabic to work all the diverse preoccupations of the Basran scholarly milieu -grammar, prophetic tradition, rhetoric, lexicography and poetry-into a "literature" - that is, prose compositions to be read by non-specialists for pleasure and instruction.
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i'm not sure what else i have to say about this book. i loved it and i am horrified by it and greg wrote a review of it here
holy shit, right? one bite and he lost half his face to some hyena. there is also a story in here about a woman who passed out during childbirth and came to to find a hyena eating her baby. seriously - hyenas are complete jive. Born about the year 776, some 14 years after the foundation of Baghdad by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, al-Jahiz grew up in Basra, founded early in Islamic times as a garrison city, but now, along with its rival city, Kufa, a major intellectual center. grice is quoting from another source, and i don't feel like being all proper in my citations but anyway so there is this guy who was bitten by a hyena, whose Yong has interviewed all kinds of scientists during his career writing for the Atlantic magazine but sensory biologists are his favourite. Deadly Kingdom is excellent, well-researched, well-written and full of interesting if frightening facts about animals. The author is not sentimental or sensational,he simply records facts and incidents where animals have maimed or killed people by various means and lets the reader draw his own conclusions. Since many of these animals live in Asia, Africa or other faraway places I did feel a small sense of relief--it is not likely I will encounter a tiger or gorilla on my way home. Other animals such as spiders are everywhere and the potential for danger exists.Al-Jahiz began his career as a writer - then, as now, a precarious profession - while still in Basra. He wrote an essay on the institution of the caliphate - which met with approval at the court in Baghdad - and from then on seems to have supported himself entirely by his pen, if we except a single three-day stint as a government clerk. The fact that he never held an official position allowed him an intellectual freedom impossible to someone connected to the court - though he did dedicate a number of his works to viziers and other powerful functionaries, and received 5,000 gold dinars from the official to whom he dedicated his Book of Animals. Al-Jahiz himself was one of those individuals. He lived, furthermore, during one of the most exciting epochs of intellectual history - the period of the transmission of Greek science to the Arabs and the development of Arabic prose literature -and was intimately involved in both. Our greatest sensory gift is our ability to think about the sensory worlds of other animals,” says Yong, a British-American writer who won the Pulitzer prize in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid pandemic.
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