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"The beauty of the natural world lies in the details, and most of those details are not the stuff of calendar art," Natalie Angier writes in the introduction to The Beauty of the Beastly. "I have made it a kind of hobby, almost a mission, to write about organisms that many people find repugnant: spiders, scorpions, parasites, worms, rattlesnakes, dung beetles, hyenas.
I have done so out of a perverse preference for subjects that other writers generally have ignored, and because I hope to inspire in readers an appreciation for diversity, for imagination, for the twisted, webbed, infinite possibility of the natural world. Every single story that nature tells is gorgeous."
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She has taken pains to learn her science from the molecule up, finding "the very pulse of the machine" in everything from the supple structure of DNA to the erotic ways of barn swallows, queen bees, and the endangered, otherworldly primate called the aye-aye. Angier knows all that scientists know - and sometimes more - about the power of symmetry in sexual relations, about the brutal courting habits of dolphins, about the grand deceit of orchids, about the impact of female and male preference on evolution.
She knows how scientists go about their work, and she describes their ways, their visions, and their arguments.
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Previews available in: English
Showing 6 featured editions. View all 6 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Beauty of the Beastly
1996, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers
in English
0547524706 9780547524702
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2
Beauty of the Beastly
1996, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Mariner Books
in English
0395791472 9780395791479
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zzzz
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3
The beauty of the beastly: new views on the nature of life
1996, Abacus
in English
0349107696 9780349107691
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4
The beauty of the beastly: new views on the nature of life
1995, Houghton Mifflin
in English
0395718163 9780395718162
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aaaa
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5
The beauty of the beastly: new views on the nature of life
1995, Little, Brown
in English
0316876631 9780316876636
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zzzz
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6
The beauty of the beastly: new views on the nature of life
Publisher unknown
0395718163 9780395718162
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Book Details
Edition Notes
"A Peter Davison book."
Selection of revised pieces which originally appeared in the New York times.
Includes index.
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