Vicki Constantine Croke - New York Times Book ReviewĮach chapter is packed with the results of detailed investigations. curious and generous engagement with her subjects makes for world-expanding reading.Īn idiosyncratic tour with Roach as the wisecracking, ever-probing guide. My favorite moments, ultimately, weren’t the funny ones, but those that reveal a bit of scientific poetry. powerfully propelled by the force of Roach’s unflinching fascination with the weird, the gross and the downright improbable.

Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat. When it comes to 'problem' wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem-and the solution. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.Ĭombining 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. 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. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and 'danger tree' faller blasters. 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. 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. 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. Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2021

Fuzz the book