The Animal Review: The Genius, Mediocrity, and Breathtaking Stupidity That Is Nature by Jacob Lentz, Steve Nash
My rating: 1/5 cats
i have never been more let down by a book in my life.
which is, i suppose, something to be grateful for; some people get on streaks of books that they hate. at least this was only a casual at-home-reading book that didn’t waste too much of my time.
but i still resent the time it did take.
this should have been the perfect companion book to f.u. penguin: another book giving animals the what-for, coasting on their looks and making us gurgle over their “feets” and their oversized manga eyes or the way they do “cute little human things with their hands.” they reduce us, they weaken us with their soft fur and helpless appearance. i sat watching ducks paddle around in a pond last night, laughing over the way they were dodging turtles and eating bread from a kid’s hand and i felt all warm inside. someone could have come up behind me and pushed me in the water and i would have been totally defenseless.
you see what they do to me.
this book was, i thought, a way to once again put those animals in their places; to rate them based on performance, usefulness, intelligence, whatever, to rank the animal kingdom in a way that would discount any emotional bias where they would be judged on a strictly scientific basis. but funny.
and this is why we must always read the author’s credentials before we read our books. a writer for the jimmy kimmel show and an advertising writer. huh.
this man is many things, but funny ain’t one of them.
not only does this book not hit the funny button, it also presents misinformation!
The alpaca is much smaller than the llama, coming in at about 125 pounds and around four feet tall at adulthood, whereas a llama may weigh as much as forty thousand pounds and be well over seven hundred feet tall.
wow. this is when i started hating the book (page 32). that is not even a remotely humorous sentence, and it undermines the fact RIGHT ON THE PRECEDING PAGE that i thought was cool, but now i don’t know if it is even true:
As a defense mechanism, some species of ants explode their own heads in a shower of toxic chemicals.
now i actually have to do RESEARCH to find out if it is true. or read this other book, which i was planning on doing anyway.
i also don’t understand the grading system. why does the hippo get a “d”?? it seems like everything the authors were (hilariously) claiming about the hippo makes it a “better” animal from an evolutionary standpoint, because it is a killer that people forget is a killer. cuteness camouflage. that, to me, makes it a more “successful” animal.
if you need a book to make you feel better about the way animals take us over and think they are sooooooo cute, read f.u. penguin. and that is what i give this book: a big f, followed by a u.
additionally, this is what i wish animals would do to the authors:
(spoilers: michelle, the octopus got an a; montambo, the snail got a d-minus; fonso, the poison dart frog got an a-minus; greg, the pigeon got a b.)
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