NewsOnly now we discovered a review of Bee Tiger by Julian Spalding. As it is so interesting to see comments from a non-scientific angle, we decided to print the main section here for you.
‘I have just spent several very enjoyable hours reading your book. It’s beautiful, finely judged and clearly written, with a poetic, at times very playful, light touch yet packed with serious science as well. What is surprising is that it brings vividly and imaginatively to life what you call the ‘near world’ of the moth – and of other creatures. You enter, while you read it, into the insect’s minuscule sensory world – the sights, smells and sounds, perceived by the moth and other creatures – a ‘near world’ that overlaps with ours but of which most of us are totally unaware. At the same time, the book weaves through all these sensations the history of our own, human myth-making about what the Death’s Head Hawk Moth has meant to us over time. This builds into an exceptional mix – of both ours and the insect’s ’near worlds’. I’ve not read anything quite like it – reading isn’t quite the right word (the illustrations are essential – there could be more – the more the merrier in this case, I think – it’s a pity it can’t include a recording of the squeak – perhaps on a QR code to be accessed on the reader’s phone?) -‘ experienced anything quite like it’ would be a better phrase. So, thank you very much for sending it to me.
I don’t, in a way, know what more to say … I’m not widely read in ’natural history’ and certainly not, in anyway, up to date in the science – but I have the feeling that you are breaking new ground. I might be wrong about this, of course. It’s just a feeling I have. But if you are, my hunch is that the title/subtitle needs to make this clear. ‘The Death’s Head Hawk Moth – from myth to the latest science’ – is a banal stab. Your ‘the many facets of the amorphous crystal of reality’ is much better, but perhaps not explicit enough. The science is very important, obviously, including your ‘eureka’ moment. Fascinating! Your summary description, too, of how the science of entomology changed over time – from collecting ranks of ‘crucified’ specimens for identification – to ‘life studies’ – is beautifully put and crucial to the whole book. (Do you know the life’s work of the artist/naturalist David Measures – that fits this bill exactly – but no moths, I fear, ‘warming up by shivering’ – I loved that evocation). Fascination too are your accounts of past phenomena like ‘blood rain’ which vividly brings home all the nature we have lost and are still destroying, without beating an ecological drum. I was always amazed, as a child, by the extrusion of a red globule by butterflies as they emerged from the chrysalis and began to grow their wings. Another illustration needed? You might think this is all getting too expensive – but what you’ve done deserves special treatment.
I didn’t know about the Neanderthal’s larger orbits – for hunting in low light conditions – fascinating, like so much – but I have to say I have a lot of time for the ’swimming ape’ – I prefer to call it the ‘estuary’ theory – explaining our exceptional hair loss, and the effect of a rich sea-food diet on our minds (David Horrobin’s The Madness of Adam and Eve), our dependence on water, etc etc, all evidence of which was totally lost when sea levels rose around the world by 100 meters, a mere 12,000 years ago. I tend to think we didn’t emerge from a (presumably dark) ‘forest environment.’ But this is a marginal detail.
So, for the moment, I’m not sure what else to say… only to thank you very much for sending it to me!