The Complete Book of Animals: A World Encyclopedia of Amphibians, Reptiles and Mammals with Over 500 Detailed Illustrations

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Readers learn about many of the creatures who can be dangerous to man, some you might never think of. There are the obvious ones like sharks, bears and other animals who are big and have sharp teeth. But the insects, oh my. The chapters are by types such as mammals, sea creatures, insects and primates. Primates are worst of all, especially the top primates, us. It rarely crosses my mind, but in theory (reality is a different story) I live with a predator with very efficient weapons and methods for killing. 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.

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. this book is good, but just a little superficial.i would love some long stories about these animals and their behavior. it is frequently more like a gossip rag from hell: "and then this animal did this to this person, and that one did that to another person...." I feel like the subtitle on this should be changed to: A Primer for How to Be Killed By An Animal That Normally Wants Nothing to Do With You. (Catchy, right? I'm sure I'll be getting a call to join the publisher's creative team any minute now.) Yong has interviewed all kinds of scientists during his career writing for the Atlantic magazine but sensory biologists are his favourite. 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.

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The titles, however, give only a faint idea of their contents. Incapable of keeping to the point, al-Jahiz's essays wander from anecdote to anecdote, digression to digression, until both he and the reader lose sight of the original subject entirely. Another counter-claim to the existence of god by a creature whose species has existed longer than a biblical account of creation can account for. 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. In Baghdad, al-Jahiz not only fused the Islamic sciences to Greek rationalism, but created Arabic prose literature. He showed that Arabic was flexible enough to handle any subject with ease, and although he was not personally associated with the House of Wisdom, his linguistic achievement paralleled - indeed surpassed - the efforts of the scholars engaged in rendering Greek scientific texts into Arabic. For al-Jahiz never lost sight of his readers, and developed a very personal and characteristic style, which blended anecdote, serious subjects and jokes, in an effort to hold their interest. He described his style himself, saying:

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.There are two messages Gordon Grice wants to imply in his book. First, there are no such harmless animals. Even ordinary or domesticated animals are unpredictable; they can pose danger to us. Second, since animals are not as intelligent as we are, they can be aggressive in humans only based on biological drives. However, they can learn so once we, humans, no longer draw the line. In other words, psychology works on them too.

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." Even more important than the text, however, are the superb miniatures which illuminate it. Illustrated Arabic manuscripts of any sort are extremely rare, and this is the only illustrated copy of a work by al-Jahiz in existence. The 30 miniatures, done in a deliberately archaizing style - perhaps imitated from an earlier illustrated manuscript from al-Jahiz's native Iraq - were done at the high point of Arabic manuscript illumination: 14th-century Mamluk Egypt. A recent exhibition of Mamluk art at the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. (see Aramco World, November-December 1981) has familiarized the American public with the glories of the Islamic decorative arts under the Mamluk dynasty. The style of the miniatures, consciously old-fashioned, succeeds in capturing the mood of al-Jahiz's prose -they are lively, highly colored and gently humorous. One cannot help feeling that al-Jahiz would have liked them, especially in view of his own admiration for the pictorial arts of the Byzantines and the Chinese - which he mentions in the Book of Animals. but horrifying, horrifying stuff. if you have any eye-sensitivity, do not read this book. the number of things that want to go for your eyes, or lay eggs in your eyes so they pop with new life... eeerrrggghhhh. 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.

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. 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. 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.

His works attest the remarkable spread of Greek ideas among ordinary readers. Both in his subject matter and vocabulary, he presumes a familiarity - albeit superficial - with Aristotle and the technical terminology of scholastic theology. He tells many anecdotes of the scholars of the House of Wisdom, many of whom appear to have been his friends. 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. 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: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. but hyenas are the almost as bad. who knew, right? i thought they were mainly scavengers, and they seem to have such small little heads. 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!