Ok, that is an extreme example, and there is only one other similar case mentioned in the book of a slightly younger woman who received twice as many stings and similarly died, but still in theory you could end up being killed by ants! Anyway, although I enjoyed this book, I have to go with three stars because while the research is apparent the accuracy suffers in the efforts to create a conversational (vs. "academic") read.

During his long lifetime - he lived until he was 92 - al-Jahiz composed some 200 works, of varying length, on an extraordinary range of topics. Of these, only 30 or so survive today - enough nevertheless to show the omnivorous curiosity of the author. Al-Jahiz wrote Levity and Seriousness, The Art of Keeping One's Mouth Shut, Misers, Early Arab Food, In Praise of Merchants, Against Civil Servants, The Squaring of the Circle, The Merits of the Turks, and, perhaps the most important, the Book of Animals. The book begins with a chapter on wolves and their relatives. Do people still believe in the image of the Big Bad Wolf? Actually, "Man's Best Friend"--the dog--an animal I can't imagine NOT being in my life--is far more dangerous. There are an estimated 4.7 million dog bites each year in the United States alone. The book then covers bears, cats, and other carnivorids. There's a section on aquatic dangers and sharks come to mind first. But the seas are teeming with all kinds of dangers, box jellyfish being among the worst. Then there are the dangers posed by snakes, crocodilians, lizards, and birds. 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. that being said, while the book is deeply interesting throughout, and thoroughly researched so as to be based in fact, there are certain chapters that read more like outlandish science fiction/horror, and i wish i could remove from my brain with a tweezer tidbits from the chapters on insects and rodents and such. nature in its endless variation is, in a word, terrifying. who knew there were so many painful and hideous ways to die?? or worse, to survive in a condition of endless ill-health and deformity? i shudder to think of meeting a brown recluse, or a single malarial mosquito.... eugh. it's enough to make a person want to live in a bubble.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. 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. Sadly, few works of al-Jahiz have survived the vicissitudes of time, but those that have make us regret all the more the ones that have been lost. Together they present a faithful and lively portrait of Baghdad and Basra during the Golden Age of Islam. He writes of singing girls, vagabonds, scholars, theologians, caliphs and viziers, and a very detailed picture of everyday life in ninth-century Iraq could be extracted from his works. More importantly, he communicates to us the excitement of an intelligent non-specialist confronted with radical scientific, philosophical and theological speculations. Baghdad and Basra were awhirl with ideas, and al-Jahiz is very funny about the pretensions of people who studded their conversation with technical terms like "atom" without in the least understanding what an atom was.

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. 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.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.

there were so many more quotes i wanted to share. maybe i will float this later with "additional information."

Amazing animal records

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.) An Immense World by Ed Yong is an epic exploration of the unique “umwelt” of other creatures, from tree hoppers to singing frogs, who sense the world in vastly different ways to humans. It is also a plea for greater empathy with other species. There is a lot to cover here and obviously not every animal can be covered in detail so there is some disappointment when the animal you want to hear about is glossed over (I could have used way more birds and cephalopods.) Some sections are stronger than others and while I don't mind the insertion of Grice's personal experience there were a couple occasions where it felt unnecessary to the topic although I would say that the majority of his transitions are really good.

In every generation and among every nation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they did not exist, those nations would perish," wrote Abu 'Uthman 'Ami ibn Bakr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri, better known as al-Jahiz - the Goggle-Eyed - in his magnum opus, the Book of Animals.

Keep in touch

It is an absolutely stunning book. Children will be riveted by this book. It is beautifully illustrated and thetext is basically poetry. I can imagine young children sitting listening to that being read to them. This book will get more children interested in science and interested in asking questions about the world around them. Some children do not naturally gravitate towards conventional science books or text books but you would struggle to find a young child who would not be absolutely engrossed in this book." About the author In 2006, a visitor to the Kiev Zoo proclaimed, 'God will save me, if he exists,' and entered the lion enclosure, where a lioness instantly sliced his carotid artery. Al-Jahiz and his parents, for example, were poor themselves; as a young man of 20 he seems to have sold fish along one of the Basran canals. Nevertheless, al-Jahiz learned to read and write at an early age, indicating the opportunities for what today's sociologists would call "upward mobility" in eighth-century Iraq. Al-Jahiz tells the story of how his mother presented him with a tray of paper notebooks, and told him that it would be by means of these that he would earn his living. Why do tapeworms keep showing up in the books I read? Now I can never forget the fact that they can grow to be up to 82 feet long in the human body. I just need to live with that fact now. 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.