The animal life around us is more interesting than we could ever imagine

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21^st Century Bestiary – Caspar Henderson (2013)

            Bestiaries are bad-ass.  I even like the word itself (a collection of beasts!!!).  For the most recent human history, bestiaries were collections, much like encyclopedias and atlases, that sought to compile the whole breadth of the animal life found in a specific area of the world.  Ancient Greek and Roman scholars would compile these amazing bestiaries, mostly based on word-of-mouth and accounts brought back from intrepid sailors.  Because their sources were never actually verified, many of the entries found in these old bestiaries are either for wholly made up animals, such as chimeras, unicorns, and gryphons, or they were for severely misidentified and poorly described animals, such as the rhinoceros, which was originally thought to have armored plating, and whose horn it was said would spew fire when the creature was angry.  While many of these descriptions sound poetically correct, (you do NOT want a 2 ton rhino angry at you.  You will swear he has fire shooting out its snout as it comes to wreck you up.  Also, its thick, folded skin, does indeed look like armor plating,) they were not up to the veracity needed to function as true scientific categorization.

            Around half a decade ago, author Caspar Henderson started to think about animals, specifically the ones that are surprising to encounter.  These animals are so amazing, so unique in their morphology or their behavior, and so different from the standard animals we humans find ourselves exposed to, that they may as well be mythical.  He began to do the research that led to this book.  Mr. Henderson’s love of nature shines through in his writing.  He has chosen one animal to represent each letter of the alphabet, and in each chapter he manages to not only describe the amazing animal in question, what we know currently about its life, physical properties, and behavior, but he also explores the way humans have discovered these details, how humans used to see these animals historically, and the possibilities inherent for us in studying these magnificent creatures.

            I am a huge nature nut, and I am always in awe of the seemingly inexhaustible variety of form and function that life has taken on our lovely planet Earth.  I was quite familiar with some of the animals in this bestiary, and I was completely ignorant of several of these creatures.  I learned quite a lot about or fellow animals, and was left with a distinct impression that, for all we humans know about life and the universe around us, what remains to be known is so vast, and so completely unpredictable to us, that it shines a harsh light on the selfish way we humans treat our Earth and its fellow inhabitants.  We are all in this together, whether prey or predator, scavenger, or parasite.  The more we know about the world around us, hopefully the less we will take it for granted.  When we destroy nature we are destroying ourselves.

(This book can be purchased here: THE BOOK OF BARELY IMAGINED BEINGS )

[ Review edited per the author's correction. - RXTT ]

A Tour Through the Human Body and the World It Creates For Us

Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form – Michael Sims (2003)

      While I am a huge fanatic of reference books, and of highly detailed and deep dives into very specific topics, there is another type of book I find very entertaining.  Those would be the books that aggregate data from widely ranging fields, but which all serve to shed light on a specific subject.  This book, Adam’s Navel, is a great example.  It explores the visible human form from head to toe, and draws from the obvious sciences, biology, anthropology, anatomy, as well as the humanities.  This helps to paint a much greater picture of the history of how humans have seen their body and how they have used the parts of that body to develop their view of the Universe at large.

      I found out about this book while perusing the bibliography of a different book I recently read.  Luckily the amazing M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston always hooks me up.  The author, Michael Sims, developed the core of this book while he was incapacitated due to a serious medical procedure.  His inability to move left him alone with his thoughts, and he began to write about the various things he associated with the currently not working parts of his body.  Those original thoughts informed this work.

      Starting at the top of the head, Michael Sims describes not only the biological nature of hair, the various types, and the hair of our closest primate relatives, but he discusses several of the rules, myths and legends humanity has created in regards to hair.  From Samson in the bible, whose power came from his uncut locks, to the attitudes of certain christian fundamentalists who believe that they must collect their life’s hair to be “complete” upon the resurrection, to the hairlessness of certain ascetic monk groups worldwide, humans have assigned so much meaning to hair, a substance made from keratin, the same material our fingernails, and certain animal horns are made of.  Every single visible part of the body is explored in this manner.

      This was a very fun book to read, and helped me better understand the way in which our corporeal form is used as a prism by which we analyze the entire Universe around us.  Our ten fingers inspired our decimal system of mathematics.  The size of past ruler’s body parts determined measurements. The eyes, by virtue of their power to see the world around us, have always been treated as gateways to see the inner self.  Even something as simple as the shape of the ear has been conflated by desperate, or deluded, people into providing intimate details about that ear-owner’s personality traits.  We live our lives in these ever changing bodies.  It is understandable that our bodies helped shape our ideas about the world around us.  For anyone who is interested, this is a great resource and a really fun read.

(This book can be purchased here:  ADAM'S NAVEL  )