The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore (Paperback)

by Richard Schweid (Author) "IN THE SUMMER OF 1967, I was twenty-one years old and living in New York City..." (more)
Key Phrases: cockroach papers, gel bait, other roaches, New York, United States, Lou Roth (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews
Nature's evolutionary success story, the indestructible cockroach, gets the full treatment in Schweid's (Catfish and the Delta, 1992, etc.) zesty survey of roach fact and fancy. You may not want to dedicate your life to the study of cockroaches, as have an alarming number of researchers interviewed by Schweid, but the cockroach is, biologically speaking, a marvel. Roaches predate dinosaurs by over 150 million years, and they've never had, or needed, a design change. They eat anythingfeces, dead humans, sour beer, their own youngexcept cucumbers, which give them gas. There are over 5000 species. There may well be a like number of the creatures in your night-darkened kitchen, for most are long gone by the time you flick on the light, having detected your presence with anal sensors that vibrated in the air you disturbed entering the room. Schweid has gleaned hundreds of such tidbits for his readers' appalled pleasure, such as why roaches thrive in teeming fellowship: They suffer from positive thigmotaxis, an unquenchable desire to be touched on all sides, by their kin, say, or snugly burrowed in your ear. Introducing the chapters on etymology, physiology, pest control, and the like are autobiographical vignettes, shaped into investigative reports and delivered with the hard-bitten edge of a journalist who has seen too much for his health. Each story allows Schweid a passage over which he can skate to the main topic. But readers who linger will find the stories themselves taut, sharply written treasures, as roaches work their way into a mob-menaced New York City bar, attest to the wicked degradation visited on Ciudad Juarez by American corporations looking for cheap labor, and plague adolescent glue-sniffers in the slums of Managua. Loath cockroaches if you must, grind them underfoot. But it is the time-tested roach, Schweid makes clear, who will have the last laugh. (Photographs, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Description
What has six legs, skulks around late at night, and likes to sniff out the hidden crevices, the dank corners, and the dark recesses? The cockroach, of course.

The cockroach is a bug of great design. Most of its contemporaries from the Carboniferous period - around 300 million B.C. - are extinct, but cockroaches live on reproducing inside our walls and traveling the world as stowaways aboard ships.

In The Cockroach Papers, readers learn more than they ever wanted to know about this nasty little pest. It features a mix of anecdotal material from people who have had memorable (mostly nightmarish) interactions with roaches and facts about the lives of roaches - from where they live and how they mate to their much-awaited dying days.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; illustrated edition edition (November 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581378
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581378
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,063,185 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for reading while eating, March 17, 2000

By	Gabi Ogg (Purdue University, Indiana) - See all my reviews

This was one of the most engaging non-fiction books I've ever read. Cockroaches, at first glance, may seem a rather obscure topic for a book, but this book intersperses various hard-hitting side-excursions (such as lives of stunted glue-sniffing kids in Nicaragua, prostitutes in Mexican border towns), humor (how to smuggle a jar of huge cockroaches through customs), and political commentary (New York urban housing) with a series of topical essays. The chapters are loosely organized around themes such as cockroach anatomy (these critters are truly out of a science-fiction novel!), sex lives (another eye-opening one, with a flip-book "video" inserted to show the details), infestations (a Southern home with 75,000 of them dropping onto cooking pots), and our attempts to erraticate them. It is written for a general non-science reader in the style of magazine articles (but not censored, or for the squeemish). Enjoy it, then look in the dark corners of your home!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, March 23, 2000

By A Customer

There are fascinating random factoids on nearly every page. My coworkers and most friends don't care to hear all my new knowledge, unfortunately. Not exactly cocktail party chitchat. But extremely interesting to learn about. Mating habits, nervous systems, favorite foods, pheromones,molting, it's all here!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent human and natural history of the cockroach , June 6, 2005

By	Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

_The Cockroach Papers_ by Richard Schweid is a book one might not normally think of as enjoyable, one that that focuses on the biology and human history of the cockroach. I however found it very entertaining, even funny at times, and also extremely informative and boasting a wealth of illustrations. The author had an engaging writing style, weaving in stories of his personal life (some only marginally related to cockroaches, though all were quite engrossing).

There are a great variety of roach species in the world, though not all of them are pests. The most famous of course are the pest species, including the most common domestic cockroach in the U.S, the German cockroach, (_Blattella germanica_), and the second most common, the American cockroach (_Periplaneta americana_), both the main subjects of the book. Other pest species in North America include the oriental cockroach, brown-banded roach (noted for colonizing appliances), and the smokey-brown, though there are 64 other species on the continent far from the haunts of man. More than 5,000 species of cockroach are known in the order Blattaria (from the Greek word blattae, for roach). Only about a hundred species worldwide occur around humans at all; most live unseen, generally in hot humid jungles though they are found virtually everywhere on Earth.

Schweid went into a great deal of detail exploring roach anatomy, physiology, pheromones (including not only mating pheromones but interestingly aggregation and dispersal pheromones), daily habits, and mating behavior, much of it fascinating reading. One learns the early warning system for roaches is not their antennae; it is a pair of feelers called the cerci, located on the backside near the anus, covered in hundreds of remarkably fine and sensitive hairs, each only 0.5 millimeters long and 0.005 millimeters wide (this is what lets them scurry away so fast when the lights come on!).

Roaches have had a long history with humanity, traveling with humans to every spot on the globe. They were particularly fond of traveling by ship, and historical records have shown people such as the Sir Francis Drake, Captain Bligh, and others having contended with them. Interesting, the word cockroach itself is a relative newcomer; while they have long been known to humanity (the Romans for instance called them lucifuga, for their habit of avoiding light), the word did not appear until Europeans began traveling the world. "Cockroach" as a term first appeared in the 1500s to describe not long familiar pests but new ones noticed from sojourns in Africa and elsewhere (the first written use in the English language came from Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame in 1624). The two most famous in the U.S. are not natives; the German cockroach is thought native to north Africa, spread by the Phoenicians to Europe and then from there throughout Russia and eventually the Americas, while the American cockroach (sometimes euphemistically called the "water bug") is thought to have come directly from Africa on slave ships.

Along the way Schweid chronicled the numerous ways the cockroach has entered various cultures, ranging from their role as the "Trickster" in Caribbean folktales to the famous song "La Cucaracha" (originating with Pancho Villa's soldiers, about a roach missing its two back legs, a song with many versions), to the writings of Franz Kafka, to the 1997 movie _Mimic_.

The association with roaches has not been a wanted one, as they have been known to be vectors of many diseases, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and even hookworms and tapeworms. They have been known to be more direct threats; people have gone to emergency rooms when roaches became lodged in their ear, and roaches have been known to partially consume human fingernails, toenails, and skin. Also, they sometimes feed on human corpses, causing such damage at times that forensics experts have mistaken damage caused by roaches as wounds sustained by the deceased while alive.

The war against cockroaches has gone on for millennia. Over the centuries there have been numerous ways used to combat them. An Egyptian papyrus was found with a prayer to the ram-headed god Khnum for protection from roaches, and the Greek scholar Diophanes recommended ways to rid homes of roach infestations. Sailors were once given rewards, either bottles of brandy or shore leave, for turning in specified numbers of roach bodies and sometimes kept on board monkeys or lemurs to hunt and eat roaches.

Today fighting roaches is big business; there are estimates that as much as $240 million a year is spent in the U.S. on control of roaches, with the city of New York alone spending half a million dollars a year on insecticides. Schweid chronicled much of the research into controlling them and the debates over whether to use sprays or baits. The war has taken a special significance as studies have shown a very strong linkage between asthma and allergies to cockroaches. As asthma appears to be on the rise - a 60% increase in the last decade, particularly among poor African-American males - this is very important.

Roaches are of course famous survivors and Schweid provided numerous examples of this. The American cockroach for instance can survive 90 days without food, and 40 days without food or water. They eat a tremendous variety of items, with the pest species known to consume glue, hair, paper, leather, banana skins, and feces. There are 14 breaking points on the legs, cerci, and antennae of the German cockroach, which, if grabbed by a predator, they can pull away and leave the enemy with just an appendage, one replaced at the next molt.

As much a pest as some species of roach have been, they have actually served mankind. The American cockroach has long been a favorite laboratory animal thanks to its substantial size, abundance, ease of care, and exemption from any laws governing the use of lab animals. Work on roaches gave birth to the field of neuroendocrinology and was important in early studies of circadian rhythms.