Insects inhabit an often unexamined microcosmos, pursuing lives that are often strange beyond our wildest imaginings. From the dawn of humanity, our six-legged fellow Earthlings have repelled and enthralled us. Humans have exterminated, eaten, domesticated, and even excommunicated insects. We collect them, we curse them, and we have penned a surprising body of literature about them.
Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World offers an entertaining and informative survey of the human fascination, dreadful and otherwise, with insects diabolical and divine, from accounts in the Bible and Aristotle to the writings of Charles Darwin and the great nineteenth-century naturalists sending home accounts from the rain forest. Highlighted here are observations from E. O. Wilson, Jean-Henri Fabré, David Quammen, May Berenbaum, Roger Swain, William Wordsworth, A. S. Byatt, Gary Larson and more than sixty other writers who tell of the mystery and romance of that other, hidden world beneath our feet and beyond our rolled-up newspapers.
A Wonderful Journey into the Insect World through Literature, Science, Art, and Popular Culture Aristotle on metamorphosis
- Alfred Russel Wallace on the rare butterflies of the Malay Archipelago
- Jean-Henri Fabre on the art of the dung beetle
- Dave Barry on naming the U.S. Official National Insect
- Charles Darwin on seagoing insects
- William Beebe on an army ant invasion
- Kevin Kelly on bee?and human?swarming
- Jonathan Schell on postnuclear insect survival
- Gary Larson on when insects take over
- May Berenbaum on maggots and murderers
- Henry David Thoreau on race wars among the ants
- Thomas Eisner on stealth bugs
- David George Gordon on appreciating the lowly cockroach
- Maurice Maeterlinck on the queen-bee?s wedding
- Edward O. Wilson on insect societies
?plus many other essays, illustrations, cartoons, screenplays, poems, recipes, tales, and observations on insect life.
