Click a book's link and you'll be connected directly to that book's page at Amazon Books. There you can find out more about the book (including the price) -- and buy it, if you want to. (Their credit-card system is secure, and Amazon is reliable and fast.) -- Jim Heath, author of The fly in your eye Bugs in the SystemIf you just want to buy one book about insects, here's the one I recommend: Bugs in the System: Insects and their impact on human affairs, by May Berenbaum. How insects affect us, like it or not. Not just by biting us (though that's covered in piercing detail), but also their benefits. Plus vivid descriptions about the way insects have been used in warfare (bee-hive missiles, for example). Or have come in appalling swarms and starved everyone. Or sometimes been eaten themselves.Do you know how Alexander the Great was perfectly preserved in his gold coffin, on the long journey back to Macedonia? (Hardly anyone can guess.) Lots of surprising stuff. And lots of fun
The book makes a superior gift for Uncle Leopold -- or any other person who's hard to buy
things for. (I've sent this book to people as a gift, exactly for that reason.)
To put you in the mood for the next one, here's a snippet from Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March : "...looking for him through the mansion one day, I found him standing on a kitchen chair, wrapped in his bathrobe, pumping Flit into a cupboard while hundreds of roaches rushed out practically clutching their heads and falling from the walls. What a moment that was! He wildly raised hell as he worked the spray gun, full of lust, and breathed as loudly as the spray itself while the animals landed as thick as beans or beat it, crazy, like an Oklahoma land rush, in every direction."
The Compleat CockroachHere we have a despised insect that thrives and thrives. One secret is their super-sensitivity to tiny air currents. Open the kitchen door, and they're gone! The book tells about their other sly programming (pretty strange) and guides you through their history on Planet Earth. There are also practical and expert battle strategies on how to keep these fabulous survivors out of your house. The book has good jokes too. The Compleat Cockroach: a comprehensive guide to the most despised (and least understood) creature on earth, by David George Gordon.Here's an on-line story about cockroach breeding that gets out of control: Compound Interest. Confused lawyers fail to keep track of a petty dispute about someone's pest-control bill, and nature takes over.
An inordinate fondness for beetlesThe story is that the great English biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked by a clergyman: "What can be inferred about the Creator from the works of nature?"Pause. Then Haldane suggested: "An inordinate fondness for beetles." Here's a book that celebrates those creations. It's the next best thing to 20 display cases of startling and expensive specimens. These are simply the most beautiful photos of beetles. You might be opening a chest of jewellery from another galaxy -- so uncanny and captivating. An inordinate fondness for beetles, by Arthur Evans, Charles Bellamy, and Lisa Watson. Factual, reliable and clear text. It would be a fine reference, even without the photos.
Beetles of the World (a CD)"The first comprehensive interactive system of identifying all families, most subfamilies and selected tribes and genera of beetles from any part of the world. Anatomical, biogeographical and ecological information is included for each group, as well as images of representative species and lists of published references."Put together by CSIRO Entomology in Australia. (No one is better equipped.) 3200 images and a Beetle Browser. Want to know exactly what beetle just whirred across the kitchen and landed in the marmalade? You can order from the web, using the CSIRO form. Follow their system from here: Beetles of the World (published December, 1999).
To know a flyI used this book as a reference when I was researching The Fly in Your Eye. Lots of insight into what makes flies tick, and what it is that makes them so intriguing to lab scientists. Why flies resemble flying microchips (with low RAM). To know a fly, by Vincent Dethier.
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