Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law - Mary Roach

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

By Mary Roach

  • Release Date: 2021-09-14
  • Genre: Science & Nature
Score: 4
4
From 110 Ratings

Description

An Instant New York Times Bestseller
#1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller
#1 Indie Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Join "America’s funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.

What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.

Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.

Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.

Reviews

  • formatting error, great book

    3
    By AndrewmeisterB
    don’t buy this copy, it is formatted incorrectly and not properly aligned - making it a pain to read, I read it on a 2018 macbook pro and bought via iBooks
  • Chapter 6 is missing

    4
    By Robert Yule
    Otherwise it is another humorous edition from the mind of ms Roach.
  • Another fine addition to her body of work.

    5
    By time killler
    An outstanding trip into how humans try to control nature interaction with our cities. Funny and interesting she remains the queen of infotainment. Please enjoy