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(More customer reviews)This book reminds us we needn't invent science ficiton aliens to horrify and delight the human imagination. Every page of BUZZ provides that "sweet sensation of horror," that "shivery fascination with monsters" that so delights the likes of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, who has made his famous career studying ants. And ants are in here, as well as flies, spiders, beetles, wasps and scores of other impossibly strange, fascinating invertebrates. They are grouped in this book because this "alien" universe is our own. All of these creatures live around, and sometimes right ON us.
For which we should rejoice, as the author, Discover editor Josie Glausiusz, eloquently reminds us. Without many of these insects, our beautiful green world would be impossible for us to inhabit. Insects pollinate our crops, feed everyone from birds to fish (and even us), recycle the bodies of the dead and the excreta of the living. They give us honey, beeswax, silk, and the stunning delights of butterfly wings and cricket song. And they have stirred human imaginations for millennia, the muse inspiring great works in every sort of art, from Biblical passages on mosquitoes and ants to Rimsky-Korsakov's dazzling "The Flight of the Bumblebee."
Bugs are good. Of the estimated 9 million species, we learn, only perhaps 1.5 percent of them cause us any problems. Granted, that small percentage includes some that can be seriously annoying--lice, mosquitoes, bed bugs. They're in here, too--but even they can seem pretty enchanting, when illuminated by Glausiusz's lively, fact-packed prose and the electron miscrope that yields the book's breathtaking photographs.
This is the sort of book you'll often read aloud to anyone else in the room--and if no one is there you'll have to call someone up. "Hey--did you know that the Colorado potato beetle was once the focus of a failed German plot to target Britain with bug-bombs?" Need a recipe for locusts, or presentation ideas for serving Superworm larvae? That's in here, too. On these pages, you'll meet bugs who eat skin flakes (house dust mites), bugs who cure skin ulcers (the maggots of the green blowfly) and bugs who kick footballs, draw chariots and turn carousels (fleas.)
Some of these critters are downright cute. Take the drugstore beetle on page 47, hiding coyly behind a breadcrumb. (Its Latin name, we learn, means "hidden.") The Indian meal moth looks positively pensive in its portrait atop a raisin. Nearly every page features a stunning portrait by Munich-base photogrpaher Volker Steger. But most of them, taken with a scanning electron microscope and computer-colorized to distinguish the insects' features, portray a wierd majesty that outshines even that of the dinosaurs. For unlike those extinct giants, these minaitures live among us daily, a source of deep and thrilling mystery near at hand.
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Falling into that irresistible category of things we probably don't want to know, here is an up-close, personal look at insects as you've never seen them before. Striking a balance between the bizarre and the beautiful, Buzz features eye-popping and considerably larger-than-life electron microscope photographs that take us deep into the world of the buzzing, hopping, and crawling critters who live among us -- from the ants and wasps we thought we knew to dozens of other teeny-tiny creatures that teem beneath our notice. A lively and accessible text by Discover editor Josie Glausiusz explores the fascinating interactions of insects in a man-made world, and profiles of each insect introduce the workaday bugs that pollinate our crops, dispose of our trash, help solve crimes, and get stuck to the windshield. Readers be warned: You'll never look at your food, or your pillow, quite the same way again.
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