"Animals are the source of some of our most imaginative and persistent fantasies, and these fantasies are the only way most of us ever get to escape from our urbanized and domesticated lives into a larger world," writes Richard Conniff in the introduction to
Every Creeping Thing. But Conniff, author of
Spineless Wonders, has some rather strange ideas of the kinds of animals we might want to daydream about. Take the little brown bat ... please: "When their mouths are open and their insect-gnashing teeth exposed, they look like the sort of particularly unpleasant lap dog that a Barbie doll would have in her spiteful and neglected old age."
Conniff lovingly describes the habits of grizzlies, mice, cormorants, weasels, sharks, porcupines, moles, snapping turtles, and other underappreciated critters, including the scientists and fanciers who pay attention to these animals. In deadpan prose, Conniff describes the decorative nature of bloodhound slobber ("It hangs down in ropes from the upper lips, or flews, and sometimes gets festooned between the lip and the end of either ear.") and the distinctive mating call of the porcupine ("It is like a baby whimpering from a dream that is bad and getting worse... "). Every Creeping Thing is a delightful, yet far too short, tour of our love-hate relationship with some "faintly repulsive wildlife." --Therese Littleton
Conniff, a science journalist whose previous book (Spineless Wonders) took on invertebrates, offers another funny, informed examination of the natural world. The author is no softie. He trusts his "gut feeling that fear of nature is normal?more normal, certainly, than a love of it." But readers shouldn't be fooled by the slightly curmudgeonly posture: Conniff pays the kind of close attention to nature that only someone who loves it can. (The book's title, far from being an epithet, comes from Genesis.) Conniff presents a rogue's gallery of beasts that includes the sloth, the grizzly, the bat and the snapping turtle, among other oft-maligned and misunderstood creatures. His defense of the sloth is priceless: "masters of digestion, champions of sleep, gurus of the pendulous, loafing life." While cormorants are demonized by naturalists for dining on trout, Conniff defends their honor, averring they would much rather chow down on alewives and other unwanted fishy predators than on grade-A fingerlings. The text offers a procession of odd facts: the mole can tunnel 60 feet or more in a day; sandtiger sharks eat their weaker siblings in the mother's womb. Coniff's 17 wonderful essays on some of the animal kingdom's "weird, unsuspected minutiae" make, in addition to great entertainment, a strong argument for the importance of biodiversity. Illustrations by Sally J. Bensusen.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Much faintly repulsive wildlife, Conniff tells us in his sequel to Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World, happens to be vertebrates--" some of the least huggable members of the animal world." In support of his thesis, he discusses snapping turtles, moles, two-toed sloths (motionless blobs of fur), bats, porcupines (with exotic sexual behavior bordering on debauchery), bloodhounds (with drooping skin), grizzly bears, mice (bickering homebodies), cormorants, weasels, and sharks. He relates some of their strange behavior--not all sexual--that he observed in such diverse places as the English countryside, the Mississippi Delta, Bermuda, New England, Ecuador, and Yellowstone National Park. Conniff writes in a humorous style, and his actual admiration of these animals and of the natural world comes through on every page. Sally Bensusen's charming line drawings complement the text. George Cohen
From Kirkus Reviews
A savory collection of natural history entertainments from Conniff (Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World, 1996), who shares much with one of his subjects, the weaselboth being ``very curious, investigative creatures.'' Here is a pleasurable miscellany of essays on animals often near but rarely dear: the bat, the cormorant, the house mouse, the porcupine. Much of what Conniff has to report may seem odd, but its really only Nature steaming along on a normal day: for instance, the grizzly bear, taking August off to dine solely on moths. Or the cahow, a bird thought to be extinct for 350 years, that spends most of its life airborne at sea, returning to land only to nest in burrows under cedar woods. Or the serious scenting talents of the bloodhound (now to be found coursing the English countryside not for that ancient quarry, the fox, but for joggers who volunteer as bait), which more than compensate for all the slobber it produces. Consider the lordly moles tramping their estates, knotting and secreting earthworms against a stormy day. There is the pathological ill will that has been visited upon the cormorant, and there is the bum rap laid on that evolutionarily suicidal ``mad dog of tunnel warfare,'' the stoat. Conniff has also sought out darker engagements, with sharks and snapping turtles, to underscore that ``mix of wonder and dread, attraction and repulsion'' that characterize so much of our dealings with wild creatures (and a response that Conniff finds healthy evidence that we are still in touch with our ``Pleistocene memories,'' those instincts that were once elemental in human survival). After all is said and done, it is a relief that Conniff doesn't stir the ashes of his experiences afield for deep truths. The creatures themselves are truth, and reason, enough. (line drawings) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Has enough clarity and good humor to charm an entomophobe."--The Washington Post Book World
"Conniff's wit and wonderfully clean prose are an added bonus. The facts alone are fascinating."--Elmore Leonard
"With rare grace, author Richard Conniff reveals mysterious worlds of complex beauty and wonder."--National Magazine Awards citation
About the Author
Richard Conniff has written about natural history and American life for such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Time, winning the 1997 National Magazine Award for "Special Interests." He is the author of Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales form the Invertebrate World and is a television writer and producer of nature programs for the National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. He lives in Connecticut.
